An exploration of the rich fabric of stories the Greeks told about their gods, their universe, and their past. Through readings in Homer, Greek tragedy, Ovid, and other texts, this course focuses on Greek myths from perspectives including history, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and gender relations. Students also look at modern reworkings of ancient myths in literature, drama, and the fine arts. All readings are in English. Counts toward all three specializations.
No Sections
COMP LIT 413-0
( Elective ) Comparative Studies in Theme: Literature and Religion
Throughout the ages, religion has been a source of inspiration and subject matter for may of the greatest poets, playwrights, novelists, and essayists, among them Dante Alighieri, St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila, Calderon de la Barca, Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, John Milton, Gerald Manley Hopkins, George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, Paul Claudel, T.S. Eliot, Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Lezama Lima, C.S. Lewis, and R.R. Tolkien. This course will study chronologically a few of these authors in order to examine their explorations of such issues as the nature of love, evil, spirituality and the supernatural, grace, rebirth, and redemption. All works will be read and discussed in English, although in the case of poems in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish an effort will be made to provide accompanying texts in the original for students capable of reading a foreign language. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 410-0
( Core Course ) Introduction to Graduate Study
This class will introduce students to some of the techniques, resources, and theoretical approaches for the study of literature at the graduate level. The particular field we will examine is European and American writing from the so-called "Age of Discovery." Columbus' voyages to the Americas from 1492 on did not take place in an intellectual vacuum. They only added another layer to existing assumptions and beliefs about what lay across the Atlantic, which had long been populated in the European imagination with monsters, paradises, and kingdoms. In the two centuries that followed, travel and colonization went hand in hand with imaginary projections based on these earlier beliefs. The dialectic of what its European explorers intended and the cultures and material conditions they encountered make this topic an unusually fruitful one for a variety of methodological approaches. We will seek to explore these European assumptions and reactions through extended practice in documentary and social history, poststructural, gender, and postcolonial theory, and old-fashioned close reading. Required of all students within the first year of study.
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ENGLISH 410-0
( Core Course ) Introduction to Graduate Study
This seminar will survey the range of critical methodologies which produced and which have followed the so-called "linguistic turn" heralded by deconstruction. One of the seminar's goals is to examine the theoretical developments which led to that pivotal movement, with an end to clarifying its political, intellectual, and institutional stakes as well as its present-day fall-out. Another goal of the seminar is to assess the state of literary methodology in the academy today. What kinds of claims do we make for literary texts, and what kinds of warrants do we find for those claims? The seminar aims to read both closely and broadly, with the all-important goal of enhancing your own critical assurance, refining your own interpretive and literary-historical acumen, and developing your own engagements in the ongoing redefinition of what literary critics do. Methodologies covered in the seminar may include: psychoanalysis; Marxism; structuralism; post-structuralism; new historicism; feminist theory; queer theory; cultural studies; and cognitive theory. Required of all MALit students within the first year of study.
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ENGLISH 411-0
( Elective ) Studies in Poetry: Ancient Epic Poetry
In this class we will read the major works of ancient epic poetry, including the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Vergil's Aeneid, setting each work in its historical context and identifying the timeless themes that define epic as a genre: the boundaries between humans, animals, and gods, the heroic journey and the quest for immortality, and the forging of culture and civilization, including the idea of the epic poem itself as both individual achievement and national monument. We will also consider other kinds of artistic expression in which epic themes can appear, as in the sculptural narrative of the "Column of Trajan" in Rome and in the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 412-0
( Elective ) Studies in Drama: Liberty and Authority in Western Drama
Whether the idea of liberty is a universal constant or something conditioned by historical circumstances and whether or not it can arise in the context of traditionally authoritarian political structures is an important issue in the history of ideas. Are human beings at all times and places capable of conceiving the idea of liberty, or is this idea possible only in particular circumstances and not an intrinsic part of human nature? And if humans after all are capable of conceiving the idea of liberty at all times and places, how are the expression of this idea, its consequences and preconditions affected by changing historical, social, and political circumstances that may favor or even demand authority rather than liberty? What role does religion play in all these issues? And how can even tentative answers to these questions be of help in understanding our present day situation, in the kind of historical "location" where we now exist? As in the case of other issues, literary works can illuminate directly and indirectly important philosophical and political questions. The open-ended quality of literary works offers the opportunity to explore philosophical and political issues in less precise but also less restricted ways than philosophical and political treatises because literature by its very nature is more open to the interpretive imagination and can be related to many more aspects of human existence; and also because the study of artistic form can illuminate these issues, since form and content are not separable in the best literary works. Since drama is a particularly "social" form of literature, this colloquium will examine a number of dramatic works from different times and places in order to throw light on the questions of liberty and authority from a comparative literary and historical viewpoint. Among the plays read will be Sophocles' Antigone, Everyman, Shakespeare's Richard II, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream, and Addison's Cato. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 413-0
( Elective ) Studies in the Novel: 19th Century Gothic Novel
This course examines the uncanny and unstable relationships between bodies and space, the home and the public sphere, sex and politics, as these oppositions constitute the peculiar genre of the gothic novel. It examines six novels in which the protagonist's identity is "constructed"--literally, as in Frankenstein, or figuratively, as in Tess of the D'Urbervilles --and asks how such constructions shift over the course of the century. A number of theoretical and critical texts are read in conjunction with each novel, and students are expected to present reports on these texts.
No Sections
ENGLISH 413-0
( Elective ) Studies in the Novel: 20th-C East European and American Fiction
On the basis of selected East European and American works this course will examine significant transformations of traditional fiction into innovative narrative forms. We will place these narratives within their historical context and examine the ways in which their authors use imaginative distortions of reality, create imaginary worlds, and play with the form of the novel in order to comment obliquely on social and political conditions, address philosophical questions, and engage the reader in a dialogue on the narrative process. The reading list includes a novel in the form of a narrative poem with critical commentary (Nabokov), a novel masquerading as a lexicon (Pavic), and a collection of reviews of imaginary novels (Lem). We will also consider the challenges of reading and interpreting a literary work in translation. Beginning with fiction from the first decades of the twentieth century (Schulz, Bulgakov), we will move on to the "postmodernist" writers of the 1960's to 1980's, with Nabokov as the bridge between East Europeans and Americans. Readings include: Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (1934); Michail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-1940, publ. 1966)--in the Burgin/O'Connor translation (1995); Danilo Kis, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983); Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars (1983)--either male or female edition; Stanislaw Lem, A Perfect Vacuum (1971); Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); and Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato (1978). Counts toward the American Literature and Comparative & World Literature specializations.
No Sections
ENGLISH 413-0
( Elective ) Studies in the Novel: Crime and Criminality in American Narrative
In this course, we will read a wide range of narratives from the late 19th through the 20th century, in order to interrogate depictions of criminality and transgression, both as represented in the fictive worlds of the narrative and in the world of literary criticism and values. What constitutes a crime? What divides the law-abiding from the criminal, and what unites them? Who wields power, and why? Does transgression define the norm, or vice versa? What aesthetic and/or ideological features distinguish "popular" and "serious" texts in our cultural conversation about crime and criminality? What makes a novel canonical or non-canonical in relation to what we might think of as literary laws? We will pay special attention to how the label of "criminal" functions as an identity, a subject position in an array of potential constructed American identities. Our texts will likely include works by Chopin, Twain, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Thompson, Mosely, Algren, Scott, and Tarantino, as well as theory from Foucault to Rabinowitz.
No Sections
ENGLISH 413-0
( Elective ) Studies in the Novel: Literature and Liberty
What is the relationship between literature and human liberty? Perhaps the most significant political and social phenomenon of the 20th century has been the rise of the state as an all-encompassing entity, a phenomenon that in its most extreme forms resulted in various kinds of totalitarian structures. In turn, this development has led to a curtailment of liberty for the individual and other small social units, at times accompanied by and masked with deceptive increases in certain "freedoms." Some writers have examined this phenomenon in works of fiction that number among the most incisive, prescient, and readable analyses of contemporary life. This graduate seminar will examine these and related issues during the reading of a few novels, chosen from such as works George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and J. Joaquin Fraxedas' The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera. Historical, political, social, and philosophical selections taken from such writers as Tocqueville, Nisbet, Ortega y Gasett and others will provide a real-life context to the reading of the fictional works.
No Sections
ENGLISH 422-0
( Elective ) Studies in Medieval Literature: Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur: The Once and Future Arthur
Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is the primary source of the Arthurian legends as they are generally known in the English-speaking tradition. An English knight, who like his characters seemed not to be the ideal image of the chivalry that he portrayed in his writing, wrote the text around CE 1470. Fortunately, Malory's time in prison gave him access to a rich collection of Arthurian narratives and the time to re-imagine these tales in the context of fifteenth-century England. Malory's collection presents the essential standards of the Arthurian tradition: the legend of Merlin; the rape of Igraine and the conception of Arthur; the incestuous conception of Mordred; the legend of the enchantment of Britain; Arthur's defeat of the giant of Mount St. Michel; Arthur's conquest of Rome; the love story Tristam and Iseult; Galahad and the quest for the Holy Grail; the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere; and the cataclysmic destruction of King Arthur and his fellowship. In this course, we will use Malory's texts to discover the "once and future" King Arthur: the sources of Malory's tales and how these tales have established modern understanding of the legends. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
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ENGLISH 434-0
( Elective ) Studies in Shakespeare
This seminar looks closely at seven Shakespearean plays as a window into the "anthropology" of early modern Europe. It begins with A Midsummer Night's Dream, the first play in which Shakespeare is, so to speak, all there, and ends with The Tempest, when he says farewell to his art. In between it looks at Julius Caesar and Henry IV, Part One as his sustained meditations on history, Twelfth Night as the most deeply reflective of his comedies, and Hamlet and King Lear as two large-scale explorations of tragedy. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
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ENGLISH 434-0
( Elective ) Studies in Shakespeare: Minding the Play
"Will I dream?" In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive computer named Hal asks this question when he learns that he will be abandoned in space to die. Hal and his question echo Shakespeare's Hamlet, who also asks, "What dreams may come," when "we have shuffl'd off this mortal coil." Such questions are the focus of a new movement in literary studies toward theorizing consciousness in the wake of a now-reigning interest in the material conditions of early modern life. How do we speak of a "text" as having a "consciousness"? How do the material conditions of early modern play-making--e.g., the structure and workings of the stage, the body of the boy actor, the collaborative nature of authorship--illuminate the altered mental states of and in Shakespeare's plays (Puck's dreams and Ophelia's madness)? How do these material qualities make unthinkable categories--such as immortality, infinity and eternity--thinkable? Can we trace the practices of Early Modern reading and the technologies of print in the meditative nature of theatricality? In this seminar, we will investigate how Shakespeare's plays have become a catalyst for this new critical focus. This work will also entail revisiting key categories of critical theory in the last twenty years, including the "self" (New Historicism), "intention" (speech-act theory) "meaning" (Deconstruction), the "text and the hors-texte" (cultural materialism). Readings will include: The Winter's Tale; Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Sonnets; Contextual materials will include Early Modern manuals on the craft of print-making; William Camden's Britannia. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 435-0
( Elective ) Studies in 17th-Century Literature: Milton and the Material World
This course will examine recent critical trends toward understanding how the production, dissemination, and observation of material objects in Early Modern England--from telescopes to the human heart to books and pamphlets--takes shape in the culture of the period. How does the materiality of books and book-making intersect with the ideas "in" them? What is the relationship between thinking ideas and making things? How does the "new science" reshape such basic literary categories such as "narrative," "the author," and "character?" A combined theory and methods course, this seminar will also explore questions as how to incorporate archival texts into a thesis project, how to read Early Modern handwriting, and how to conduct archival research. We will place a special emphasis on works by and recent criticism of John Milton. But we may also consider works by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and William Harvey. Critical and theoretical readings may include works by Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier, Adrian Johns, and John Rogers. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 441-0
( Elective ) Studies in 18th-Century Literature:Mobility and Character in 18th-Century Fiction
In this class, we will explore the genealogy of a familiar and perhaps even an obvious literary term: "character." We will read a series of eighteenth-century novels' widely varying claims for what character is and how it works: is character bodily or mental, stable or malleable, manifest in our features or impossible to read? As we proceed, we will consider why the literary constitution of character was under so much pressure during this period in history. Specifically, how do our texts' representations of character imaginatively experiment with historically unprecedented forms of personal mobility-mobility of social, financial, and spiritual status, of global geography, of romantic desire? By placing these texts at the junction of literary and social history, we will strive to appreciate how the fantastic and alarming prospect of personal mobility in early modern England compelled fictional plots, drove up sales of a new form called the novel, and indelibly changed the constitution of character itself. An important goal of the class, then, will be to affirm both the familiarity and the unfamiliarity of early modern literary character to us, its twenty-first century audience. We will ponder our own historical situation as mobile subjects and sympathetic readers by recognizing-and failing to recognize-ourselves in the early modern medium of character. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
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ENGLISH 451-0
( Elective ) Studies in Romantic Literature: English Romanticism: Roots and Rebels
The literary movement known as "Romanticism" can be understood in various ways; every effort to summarize and explain its ideological and aesthetic character seems to be a partial one. Was it an anti-intellectual reaction to Enlightenment reason? A forerunner of contemporary individualist and liberal bourgeois values? A validation of nature, authenticity, and sentiment over against social decorum and convention? A utopian sexual and political revolutionary movement that died when its principal poets died or became Tories? These and other possibilities will be taken up as we range between early influences on the Romantics, going back to the mid-18th century (for instance Macpherson's "Ossian" as well as the more familiar French writers including Rousseau), to writers generally granted inclusion in the Romantic canon more by virtue of chronology than temperament, such as the novelists Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Readings also of works by principal Romantic figures: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys, Byron, Hunt, and Keats. One short paper; one long paper; one oral presentation.
No Sections
ENGLISH 455-0
( Elective ) Studies in Victorian Literature: Victorian Literature and Social Problems
How did Victorian literature and art represent social problems such as prostitution, miscegenation, redundant women, disease, polygamy and poverty? This course looks at a range of texts including but not limited to: novels, court proceedings, medical reports, poems, paintings and photographs that engage with these topics and more. We will read critical/theoretical texts in conjunction with primary sources by figures such as Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Braddon, Augustus Egg, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, H.G. Wells and George Bernhard Shaw among others. Students will present weekly seminar reports and write a final original research paper. Counts toward the British literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 455-0
( Elective ) Studies in Victorian Literature: The Multiplot Novel
In this course we will consider three of the greatest nineteenth-century multiplot novels, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens' Bleak House, and Eliot's Middlemarch. The multiplot novel became important in the Victorian period as a way of representing, and helping readers comprehend, their rapidly changing society. These lengthy novels complex, interlaced storylines follow the fortunes of a large number of characters from a range of social classes, and their serial form of publication extended the reading process over many months, enhancing the illusion of lived experience. This large canvas enabled authors to address a wide array of social issues, including class mobility, political reform, scientific progress, religious faith, and the role of women. As these novels unfold, Thackeray, Dickens, and Eliot explore such far-reaching questions as how character is formed and can change and how ideals can be broken or strengthened by the pressure of limiting circumstances. We will be reading these novels both to analyze what they reveal about their time and to investigate what they suggest about how to live meaningfully in a culture undergoing widespread change. We will read excerpts from critical and historical works, and students will give presentations, prepare questions for discussion, and write a short paper and a final research-based essay.
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ENGLISH 455-0
( Elective ) Studies in Victorian Literature: Victorian Aesthetics
In this course we will study writers and painters whose works defy stereotypical notions of Victorian aesthetic taste (or lack thereof). The work of such writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and Walter Pater display sophisticated, even breathtaking, formal innovations in poetry and prose. William Morris, Dante Rossetti, and the other artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites deliberately incorporated progressive political agendas into their goals to create a new aesthetic in painting and poetry. In addition to studying these writers and painters, we will also study the iconography and cultural history of Queen Victoria, arguably the sources of modern stereotypical notions about Victorian aesthetic values.
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ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Studies in Comtemporary Literature: European Bestsellers As Transnational Literature
In many European novels published from the mid-1980s to the present, there are definite indicators of a shared transnational sensibility and identity. This course will examine recent bestselling European novels of literary merit in an effort to explore the altered cultural landscape of Europe. No longer is the audience for these works confined to a single nation. Most have been translated within a year or two of their appearance into several languages and highlight new directions for the European novel. This course will consider bestsellers of the Eighties, Nineties, and the new millennium with respect to the themes of historical memory, post-colonial legacies, cultural change, the role of Eastern Europe, and the influence of multiculturalism. Critical works by some of the novelists will also be integrated into our discussions. Texts will include works by Barnes, Chamoiseau, Jaeggy, Kundera, Mulisch, Samarago, and Sebald. All readings in English. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Studies in Contemporary Literature: Lost in Transition: the Edwardian Novel
Between the so-called "Victorian" and "modern" periods we find a substantial slice of literary life roughly correlating with the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910), and it is fair to say that the novels of the twentieth century's first decade do not always comfortably fit either Victorian or modern labels. Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy are often cited as the "Big Three," but other writers must also be considered, including Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901), Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, 1902; The Secret Agent, 1907) E. M. Forster (Howards End, 1910), and Max Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson, 1911). Suffragette writing of the period is especially intense, as consciousness of the New Woman and the violent tactics of the Pankhursts take hold in the popular imagination. As George Dangerfield so eloquently argued in his 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, the period was marked by upheaval, including labor and Irish unrest as well as feminist fury trying to stir a complacent Liberal administration to reform. If we still associate the Edwardian period with high tea on the grand estate, or a pleasure-loving king beautifully memorialized on cigar boxes, then we do well to acquaint ourselves with Edwardian writing. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Studies in Contemporary Literature: Reading Ulysses: Poetics and Politics of the Everyday
An encyclopedic epic tracing three Dubliners' intersecting lives on 16 June 1904, James Joyce's Ulysses depicts a cross-section of everyday life in a wealth of analytic (in his word, vivisective) detail. Proposing that to learn to read Ulysses is also to learn a lot about how to read the plenitude of our own everyday world, we'll explore the book's eighteen chapters through a selection of historical and analytic perspectives, among them: Ireland's long colonial history and struggles for political autonomy; Joyce's comment on women's emancipation as "the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is--that between men and women"; psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and what Freud called "the psychopathology of everyday life"; feminist and gender theory on relations among bodies, representation, and social power; sexual arrangements such as the marriage system and prostitution as keys to sociopolitical authority; scapegoat psychology in theory and everyday practice; performance (both studied and unconscious) and theatricality; the powers and/or seductive appeal of various modes of language within the play of Joycean styles, e.g., dialogue, news, advertising, jokes, song and music, letters, catechism, interior monologue; and so on. Books will include: James Joyce, Ulysses (Modern Library edition); Homer, The Odyssey (recommended translation: Robert Fitzgerald); Gifford and Seidman, Ulysses Annotated; Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses; recommended: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce; optional: Christine Froula, Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce. Supplementary films, essays, and other materials on library reserve and e-reserve and our Blackboard site.
No Sections
ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Studies in Contemporary Literature: The Beats: Conformity and Aesthetics
In this course, we will be examining the process by which art grapples with political, moral, and sexual conformity. Amid the unparalleled material wealth of the immediate post-World War II era, America seemed locked into conflict with an implacable foe. The very definition of what it meant to be American was contested, and "UnAmerican" activities denounced, UnAmerican people blacklisted or worse. Yet artists and writers like William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others refused to conform, and produced art which interrogated and resisted the culture. We will read both seminal and less-famous works by Beat Generation authors in the context of Cold War ideology and literary aesthetics, with special concentration on the politics and processes of identity formation and subject position. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Studies in Contemporary Literature: Woolf and Bloomsbury
In the early decades of the 20th century, Bloomsbury, wrote E. M. Forster, was "the only genuine movement in English civilization." In this course students read and analyze Virginia Woolf's major novels and essays in light of various aspects of Bloomsbury history, art, and politics: the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition and its impact on Bloomsbury artists, World War I and the Versailles Peace Conference, the rise of fascisms across Europe, the women's movement and the suffrage campaign, the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, and the early years of World War II. The reading list tentatively includes Woolf's The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, The Waves,Three Guineas, and Between the Acts. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 461-0
( Elective ) Twentieth-Century British and American Literature: Empire, War, Worldliness
What's modern about modern literature? How did new forms and experimental styles emerge from early twentieth-century conditions and events during this "lethal century" of rapid technological development, more violent than any previous era? The literature of this period confronts that violence in many forms and on many fronts, from racialized economic and cultural violence of European empires in Ireland, Africa, and India to rising totalitarianism, antisemitism, genocide, and war, from decolonization and its vicissitudes to the "clash" between a declining "west" and various rising "non-wests." In this seminar we'll grapple with the exhilarating intellectual challenges and the fierce, compelling new beauty of several key works from this extraordinary period. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness bears witness to brutal racialized European imperialism. W. B. Yeats and James Joyce envision Ireland's future after a long struggle for freedom from centuries of English rule in utterly different ways. World War I, in which British war poets fought, wrote, and in some cases died, casts its shadow over T. S. Eliot's Waste Land. Women's struggles for freedom of body and mind--citizenship, suffrage, economic independence, public speech--reverberate in the art and thought of Bloomsbury, including essays and novels by Virginia Woolf published by her Hogarth Press. Seeing new challenges for European languages in a rapidly shrinking world, Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound experimented with translating classical Chinese poetry into the radically different grammar of English. E. M. Forster faces off western and eastern modes of thought in Dr. Aziz's trial in A Passage to India. "Postcolonial" writers grapple with violence in the aftermath of empire. We'll think about the often remarked "difficulty" of modern literature and art, and about aesthetic and ethical dimensions of their resistance to (fictions of) transparency as we approach these works in the spirit of what Edward Said calls a "worldly" recognition of the historical moments that inspired their creators and still illuminate them for us. Counts toward the American Literature and British Literature specializations.
No Sections
ENGLISH 465-0
( Elective ) Studies in Postcolonial Literature: Borges: The Art of Heterodoxy
"A mode of truth, not of truth coherent and central, but angular and splintered." Thomas de Quincey's dictum, used by Borges as introduction to his first book of prose, Evaristo Carriego (1930), summarizes well the oblique and heterodox mode of vision which distinguishes the works of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Using the ideas of heterodoxy and ex-centricity as guiding threads, this course will explore the cardinal points of Borges' unique and thought-provoking body of work. Through close reading of his fiction, essays and poetry, we will explore Borges' major themes and writing strategies, among them, the labyrinth, the mirror, the orillas, the double; the productive marginality of Argentine and Latin American culture within the Western tradition; theories of reading and writing; the question of originality and translation; modernity and postmodernism. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 465-0
( Elective ) Sudies in Postcolonial Literature: Magical Realism and Narratives of the Strange
This course explores three major trends of 20th-century Latin American fiction through close analysis of narrative and theoretical texts. Latin American literary theories and practices are studied in their specific cultural contexts and in relation to the concepts of modernity, modernism, and postmodernism. Questions of originality and autochthony, cultural translation within the Western tradition, and the politics and aesthetics of the "new" versus the "magic"/"fantastic"/"strange" are among the main topics of study and discussion. Readings by Gabriel GarcĚa Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Josč Bianco, Silvina Ocampo, Felisberto Hernandez, Juan Josč Arreola, Miguel Angel Asturias.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Lit: Modern American Poetry
This course sketches the history of American poetry, beginning with the Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor and ending with the modernists of the early- to mid-20th century. Readings focus on the poems of eminent figures--Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Eliot, Williams, and Hughes--juxtaposed with those of their less celebrated contemporaries. Among the questions worth addressing: At what point does American poetry become distinct from British poetry, and what stylistic traits signal the distinction? How might we chart its continuities and discontinuities over 3 1/2 half centuries? How distinct are its historical periods? What is the relationship between the New England tradition, which has loomed disproportionately large in the canon, and other strains of American poetry? Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Lit: The School of Hawthorne
This course explores the continuities of the 19th-century and early 20th-century American fiction through analysis of the works of Hawthorne, James, and Wharton. It addresses questions of literary influence, the formation of a cultural cannon, the distinction between romance and novel (first posited by Hawthorne), and the movement toward social and psychological realism in American letters. The class examines different permutations of the "international theme" employed by all three authors. Attention is paid to the increasingly important role of women as protagonists, consumers, and purveyors of literature and to the general literary culture of the time. Readings include Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; James, The Bostonians; Wharton, The House of Mirth, and selected short stories by the three authors.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Literature: Early African-American Literature
This course is designed as a survey of African American literature of the late eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. We will investigate the variety of strategies (rhetorical and linguistic) employed by African American writers for the purpose of resisting slavery and white supremacy and for bringing about social, political and moral reform. We will discuss the evolution of the terms of the debates surrounding slavery from the latter part of the 18th century to the late 19th century, including some attention to the philosophical discourse of "natural rights" and its dissemination. Comparisons with the emergent gender discourses of the period will be taken up as well. The course encourages students to think broadly about the interconnections between early African American texts and other early American literary production.Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Literature: The Artist in the City: Chicago Voices and Visions
In this course we will examine the situation of what might be called the Urban Intellectual: the person attempting, through poetry or prose or images, to make sense of both the urban landscape and his or her place in the city. Chicago, with its unprecedented industrial growth and unparalleled literary tradition, has been especially fertile ground for such attempts, from the poets of the Chicago Renaissance to contemporary writers, artists, and filmakers. We will read several theorists of urban life (Tuan, Jacobs, Rotella, Kuntsler) as well as writers spanning the 20th and 21st Centuries (Brooks, Sandburg, Farrell, Wright, Algren, Bellow, Dybek, Cisneros, Fitzpatrick) to examine how the city shapes the artist and the intellectual, and how they in turn shape our understanding of the city. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Literature: The Harlem Renaissance
The end of World War I ushered in an era where many artists and intelligencia were attempting to emancipate and destroy the ideologies of Victorianism and view their society with the stark and brutal truth. While the United States was attempting to liberate itself from the dominance of European culture during the 1920s, African Americans were also attempting to culturally define themselves. The failure of the Reconstruction coupled with the guise of limitless Northern opportunity and equality, sparked the movement known as the Great Migration--where hundreds of thousands of Southern African Americans relocated to the major cities of the North. In fact, much of New York's cultural dominance in the 1920s was directly linked to Harlem being the chief mecca to the multitudes of emigrating Southern African Americans. Harlem did not become the "Harlem" that we currently recognize it to be until the 1920s when it became the African American metropolis. This seminar will be an intensive study of the literature, music and visual art produced during the Harlem Renaissance. We will explore the philosophical and cultural critiques offered by the African American intelligencia of the period as well. This course will introduce all of the major male figures of the Harlem Renaissance; DuBois, Locke, Johnson, Garvey, Hughes, Cullen, McKay, Toomer, Schuyler, Fisher and others. However, an equal part of the seminar will focus on the rich tradition of artistic production left by the women of the Harlem Renaissance; Hurston, Larsen, Fauset, and other lesser known, obscure female writers, poets and artists. The main objective of this course will be to provide a clear understanding of how these artists established a personal and collective identity based on the explorations and expressions of their cultural lineage. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Literature: The Literary Culture of 19th-C. America
This seminar will explore the literary climate of the United States in the mid- and late-19th century, by focusing on the concerns, themes, and techniques of representative fiction writers. We will examine works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James, and Mark Twain, setting them in their literary and cultural contexts, including a discussion of Hawthorne's influence on James and the role of literary tradition in the making of a writer. We will also consider works by such immensely popular women writers as Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis) and Harriet Beecher Stowe in connection with the growing importance of women as consumers and producers of literature. Class participants wishing to explore other 19th-century writers will be able to do so in class presentations and written work. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
ENGLISH 471-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Literature: Young America's Last Decade
As the 1840s drew to a close, American nationalism flourished. With conquests of Mexican territory, the United States spanned the continent and fulfilled its "manifest destiny." Gold was discovered in California, and settlers rushed westward; in the east, industrialization and railroad construction picked up speed. A movement known as "Young America," closely associated with Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, celebrated all these forms of apparent "progress" - but ignored the enduring hypocrisy of American democracy. As the 1850s proceeded, boosters of "Young America" confronted the prospect that the country might not continue to grow but rather fracture over the enslavement of African-Americans. Even as U.S. politics plunged from triumphal illusions toward an "impending crisis," American writers produced the astonishing array of literary works that have led this period to be called the "American Renaissance"; some of the most revered books in the American canon, from Moby-Dick to The Scarlet Letter to Leaves of Grass, were published within a few years. How do we understand this tumultuous decade's cultural blossoming alongside its political spiral toward civil war? In this course, we will study major literary texts of the 1850s, paying particular attention to the ways they represent national identity, modernization, and the paradoxes of democracy in a slave society. We will ask what role literature plays in a culture's "growing up," and we will scrutinize the relationship between art and politics leading up to the harrowing war after which few would call America "young." Counts toward the American Literature specialization, and the American Studies specialization for MALS students.
No Sections
ENGLISH 481-0
( Elective ) Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism: Otherness in America
What does it mean to be "other"? This course will examine rhetorical and representational efforts to mobilize and resist purported categories of "otherness"--racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and economic. Reading literary and filmic texts alongside their critics, this course will provide students with literary critical tools to explore how different types of identity are invoked, contested, and/or suppressed in texts, and to what ends. Issues of authenticity, literacy, language, becoming, and border crossing will be approached in relation to questions of literary and filmic form. We will pay particularly attention to the various discursive and non-discursive means through which otherness is conveyed--mood, tone, resonance, and affect. Authors will include Lorraine Hansberry, Sylvia Plath, J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Saphhire, Christina Garcia, Tony Kushner and others. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
FRENCH 465-0
( Elective ) Topics in Francophone Colonial and Postcolonial Studies: Indochine in Film and Fiction
This course explores representations of Southeast Asia by 20th-century French, American, and Vietnamese artists. Students view films and read novels drawn from the early-century era of French colonial rule, the midcentury era of the Franco-Vietnamese "conflict" and the American/Vietnam war, and the fin de sičcle work of writers and filmmakers of the French and U. S. Vietnamese diasporas. Main concerns include orientalism, the process of "othering," the conjuncture of exoticism and eroticism, the social function of mass-disseminated representations, their potential individual and collective psychic efficacy, and the more and lesss uccessful means deployed to resist or subvert them. This course is taught in English. Readings include: Linh Dinh, Night, Again; Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Duong Thu Huong, Novel Without a Name; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; and Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Journey Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
FRENCH 492-0
( Elective ) Topics in Culture and Society: 20th-Century French Literature: Memory, Transgression and Engagement
This course will explore the different ways in which literature has laid claim to cultural authority over the course of the twentieth century as it passed from the "high modernism" of the early part of the century to the dissolution of modernism after the Second World War. Particular emphasis will be placed on the interplay and tension between three ways of imagining the role played by literature within modern and postmodern culture: literature as a site of individual and collective memory; literature as a practice of transgressive knowledge; and literature as a means of political engagement. Texts read will include works of fiction by Gide, Proust, Breton, Bataille, Leiris, Sartre, Genet and Djebar, as well as critical readings. Readings and discussion will be in English. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
GERMAN 441-0
( Elective ) Studies in Culture: Between Assimilation and Destruction--Jewish-German Culture
Few peoples have had their destinies as intertwined as Germans and Jews. To call this a "love-hate" relationship sounds trivial but it is not inaccurate; they have become history's inseparable but impossible couple. For nearly 1000 years--and still to this day--Jews have lived in German-speaking lands, shaping each other's culture and society. This course will explore this troubled relationship primarily through culture, with an emphasis on 20th century literary works by German-Jewish authors. While the Holocaust necessarily is at the center of any discussion of Jewish-German culture, our questions will go beyond this historical moment to explore broader issues of minority/majority cultures, nation and race, language and identity, destruction, memory, and rebirth, and what the Jewish-German experience might tell us about other multicultural societies today, including our own. All readings will be in English. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature: Writing the Revolution
This course will examine American Revolutionary writing as a rhetorical battlefield in which a multiplicity of voices and a plurality of forms--history, letters, notes, autobiography, novel, epic, lyric, play, pamphlet, and journalistic piece--struggled for cultural authority in writing and naming America. We shall pay particular attention to the grammar of Revolution--the language, images, metaphors, myths, and forms through which the American Revolution and the American republic were constituted in and through writing. We shall focus in particular on sites of contest, contradiction, resistance, and taboo in revolutionary writing: the representation of "citizens" and "others"; conflicts between virtue and commerce, liberty and slavery, civilization and the Indians; anxieties about the body, sexuality, women, and madness; fear of democracy, mob violence, and political faction; and debates about the excesses of language, print, and representation. We shall consider various past and recent contests about the meanings of the American Revolution and recent debates about the differences between a radical, liberal and a republican reading of the revolution, the self, citizenship, public culture, and the state. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature: Chasing Ghosts Through the Theater of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
The ghost was a familiar figure on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Hamlet's father, whose spectral appearances set both the plot and his more pensive son in motion, is only the most famous. In other plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ghosts materialize to give warnings, to reveal secrets, or to redirect the emotions of living characters. The revenant from beyond the grave was such a fixture in the plays of this time that some writers and actors began to make fun of it, suggesting that to evoke the supernatural in such a manner was simply weak theater or childish superstition. But in their parodies of ghostly agents, players and playwrights also conjured up phantoms of the plays that had preceded theirs, recalling their plots, gestures, and words and replaying them in memory. Shakespeare's fellow playwright Ben Jonson sneered at one such company devoted to exhuming mouldy plays from their deserved graves, "they say, the umbrć, or Ghosts of some three or four Plays, departed a dozen years since, have been seen walking on your Stage here." Such memory-or ghosting of past performance-could be productive as well, when it allowed a play to draw on the memories of its spectators. Shakespeare's theater was multiply haunted. In this course we will look at several early modern plays that represent ghosts and ghosting, including Kyd's Spanish Tragedy; Marston's Antonio's Revenge; Tourneur's Revengers Tragedy; and Shakespeare's Richard III, Macbeth, and in particular Hamlet; selections from plays by Ben Jonson and dialogues by Henry Chettle; and secondary materials by Marvin Carlson, Margreta de Grazia, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Greenblatt, and Alice Raynor; and we will study several performances of Hamlet to see what ghosts from earlier productions remain in play. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature: Imagining the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, whose repercussions we still live with, involved new ways of imagining the world. Many of the great scientists (or "natural philosophers") of the time, including Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes, were also gifted creative artists. But other writers and artists collaborated with them in fashioning fresh images of the universe, of nature and human beings. This course will explore relations of "the new philosophy" to the imagined worlds of writers such as Ariosto, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. And it also hopes to throw light on reasons why the worlds of art and science have gradually drifted apart.
Winter 2010
EV
Th
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
1/7/10 - 3/11/10
Instructor:
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature: tba
TBA. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
Spring 2010
EV
Days: TBA
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
3/30/10 - 6/1/10
Instructor:
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature: The Theban Plays of Sophocles
Athens in the fifth century BCE was engaged in unprecedented democratic practice and frequent warfare, and dominated ancient Greek trade, political power, and especially intellectual and artistic life. The tragic poet Sophocles drew on the ancient myth of the generations of the family of Oedipus when writing three of his tragic dramas: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. The first and third of these are among the most remarkable, famous and influential plays in western literature, and they still retain great theatrical, emotional and intellectual power. We will study aspects of each play and also of the three plays as a larger narrative--including mythology, dramatic and narrative structure, characters and ideas, the poetics of ancient Greek tragedy, and the ceremonial, religious and political dimensions of tragedy in ancient Greece. We will also consider attitudes toward and ideas about these tragedies in subsequent eras, and how the plays are used in new contexts in a few dramatic and film versions and adaptations. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 405-0
( Elective ) Topics in Literature:Victorian Decadence: British Literature of the 1890s
Many readers associate British literature of the 1890s with moral and aesthetic decadence, and the major literary output of the period confirms why. The most famous literary magazine of the period, The Yellow Book, set the tone with its devotion to naughty playfulness and rebellion. A great deal of the period's writing exhibits a not very subtle streak of transgressive writing and rejection of social and religious conformity, and it is fair to say that this attitude, glimpsed in a wide cross-section of poetry, novels, and plays, gives the whole period its glamor and frisson. Thomas Hardy, the last of the great Victorian novelists, ceased writing novels after critics lambasted Jude the Obscure (1895) as sexually immoral. William Butler Yeats began his career in the company of the Rhymers' Club, a group of aesthetes most of whose members are better remembered for their drug habits than their poetic output. Bram Stoker wrote his influential masterpiece, Dracula (1897), a melodramatic horror story that is equally paranoid about foreigners and that updated version of the succubus, the New Woman. Other writers, including George Gissing and George Bernard Shaw, dealt with the social unrest caused by the New Woman's challenge to reigning domestic hierarchies; Gissing's The Odd Women and Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession both appeared in 1893. And the man who towers over the decade like none other was of course Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the autobiographical De Profundis (written 1897; published 1905). Wilde's writings and life in many ways sum up a decade fraught with social and sexual upheaval; tried, found guilty, and imprisoned on charges of "gross indecency," Wilde was the man who ushered in a new age of truth-telling when he referred to "the love that dare not speak its name." Assignments for the course consist of one oral presentation; a prospectus and annotated bibliography; one long paper. Counts toward the British Literature specialization.
Fall 2009
CH
W
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
Wieboldt Hall 409
9/23/09 - 12/2/09
Instructor:
LIT 410-0
( Core Course ) Introduction to Graduate Study
This course offers a broad, accessible introduction to several schools of critical thought, giving students access to some of the approaches and techniques for the study of literature on a graduate level. We will examine a number of literary texts through the prism of formalism, post-structuralism, gender, postcolonial and reader-response theories, as well as new historicism and cultural studies. These texts are chosen from representative European and American works of realism, modernism, and postmodernism in order to review the basic trajectory of Western fiction. Examples of self-conscious narratives that stress the act of writing and play with readerly expectations will allow us to address questions of literary production and consumption. Required of all MALit students within the first year of study.
Fall 2009
EV
Tu
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
University Hall 318
9/22/09 - 11/24/09
Instructor:
LIT 480-0
( Elective ) Topics in Comparative Literature: Borges, Eliot, and Ortega on Freedom and Responsibility
These three writers had in common vast intellectual interests and a commitment to the Western intellectual tradition and its values. Eliot and Ortega published magazines in England and Spain at about the same time and the two thinkers worked, in Eliot's words, towards the same goals (the two magazines actually collaborated). This course will address such questions as: What were the views of Borges, Eliot and Ortega on Freedom, Responsibility, Individuality and other such preoccupations associated with Western thought? How do their writings reflect these preoccupations? How relevant are their ideas to the issues of our own time? Readings will include selected poetry of Borges and Eliot, several essays and interviews by Borges, Eliot's Towards a Definition of Culture and the Idea of a Christian Society, selections from Ortega's The Revolt of the Masses, Man and People, History as a System and Idea of the University. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
Spring 2010
EV
M
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
3/29/10 - 6/7/10
Instructor:
LIT 480-0
( Elective ) Topics in Comparative Literature: Cervantes and the Rise of the Novel
According to Dostoievsky, Cervantes' Don Quixote was the greatest novel ever written. Cervantes' formidable presence can be found in many other European, U.S. American, and Latin American writers, from Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert and Mark Twain to Jorge Luis Borges. The figure of Don Quixote has become one of the enduring myths of Western civilization, and it has had an impact on other forms of human creativity, from painting to ballet, to tone poems to plays to musicals to film. This class will focus on Don Quixote and its position in the development of the novel as a genre, paying attention to its historical context and its thematic richness. Some preceding and subsequent narratives will also be read. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 480-0
( Elective ) Topics in Comparative Literature: Fictions of the City -- Paris, New York, Los Angeles
This course will examine the central role played by the city in inventing the forms for representing modern life, beginning with Paris (sometimes called the "capital of the 19th century" because of its central place in the elaboration of the new narrative and cultural forms of industrial civilization) and then focusing on New York and Los Angeles as privileged spaces where a "culture industry" then becomes both the producer and the subject matter of literature and film. Students examine the tensions between realist and mythic representations of the modern city in such writers as Balzac and Baudelaire, as well as the city as a site for the invention of "modern myths" expressing the utopian and dystopian aspects of modern life in the work of surrealists such as Aragon. Students will also explore how these approaches are taken up by classic Hollywood cinema in the 1930s (notably in such popular genres as the musical and the gangster film) and how these same problems are ultimately reinvented, in the second half of the 20th century, in a postmodern culture dominated by media images and global cultural flows, which will give rise to new social spaces and new utopias but will consequently also give rise to new forms of mythic and realist narrative. Authors read will include such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Louis Aragon, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. We will also discuss films by such directors as Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon, Busby Berkeley, Jean-Luc Godard, Ridley Scott, Jim Jarmusch, and Michael Haneke. Counts toward the American Literature and the Comparative & World Literature specializations.
No Sections
LIT 480-0
( Elective ) Topics in Comparative Literature: Science, Industry, and the Novel in the 19th Century
In this course we are trying to understand the commonalities between three of the most salient developments of the 19th century: the industrial revolution and its use of small and vast machinery, the emergence of a science of 'energy' and 'evolution', and the rise of the realist novel. Our focus will be on new conceptions of 'work' developed at the time to convert and compare human, animal, and mechanical labor, and on the attempts of artists and writers to either participate in or to distance themselves from this conversion. By reading a few key novels of the epoch--by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Henry James--we will try to understand how the ideal of the novel changed from autonomous work (of art) to a text that itself 'works'. Counts toward the Comparative & World Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 480-0
( Elective ) Topics in Comparative Literature: U.S. Orientalisms
For centuries the Arab world and Iran have been represented in Western literature and the arts in ways that have been subject to considerable discussion and debate. With the rise to global power, American writers and filmmakers continued this tradition, though with notable differences in their approaches to understanding the region. Whether or not American literature represented Middle Eastern realities accurately or participated in political projects of (neo-) colonialism and (neo-) imperialism, the depictions of peoples and places in the region have made their way back to the region itself. There they have been both critiqued and recast in literature and film made by Middle Eastern writers and creative artists. In the 20th century, especially in the postcolonial period, literature and cinema from the region has provided a complex and aesthetically rich set of counter-representations. Writers and filmmakers from Iran, the Arab Middle East, and North Africa have produced a diverse body of literature and film that depicts and thinks through experiences of a period that has seen rapid and massive transformation.
This course introduces a variety of literature and film from both the United States and the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a set of theoretical and historical approaches to understand the fraught relationship of culture and geopolitics. As a starting point, we stage a dialogue between Edward Said and Jala Al-i Ahmad. Edward Said's monumental study Orientalism (1978), along with subsequent critical works, offers a powerful argument about the relationship of representation of North Africa and the Middle East and political domination. The Iranian intellectual Jala Al-i Ahmad's Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, published secretly in Iran during the early 1960s, lamented the influence of Western culture on Iranian society. This dialogue sets the stage for a critical tactic that will be employed throughout the course: focusing less on a binaristic sense of West versus East, and more on the question of circulation and dialogue. Throughout the course, we interrogate the ways in which texts represent "reality" and attempt to work through competing representations in a comparative frame. Readings in literature are complemented by articles or chapters from literature criticism, history, and cultural anthropology. Counts toward the American Lit. and the Comparative & World Lit. specializations.
Textbooks available at: Comix Revolution, 606 Davis, Evanston.
Winter 2010
EV
Tu
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
1/5/10 - 3/9/10
Instructor:
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Black in the USSR: African Americans and the Soviet Union, 1922-1963
What is the Soviet archive of Black America? This course will examine the role the USSR has played in twentieth-century American debates about race. Exploring how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union to explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases, we will focus on the work of four key figures-Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson-with briefer discussions of work by Shirley Graham, Angela Davis, and Yelena Khanga. In addition, our course will analyze works that have been largely unavailable, including Comintern files, articles from Soviet periodicals, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts, and mistranslations of major texts. We will explore the influence of the USSR on the work of these writers and artists, and ask how their Soviet encounters force us to rethink their better-known work. Examining how an understanding of racial difference and masculinity within an alternate national space enabled these figures to reformulate their relationship to the exclusionary practices of citizenship they encountered in the U.S., we will explore how these American intellectuals influenced Soviet ideas not only about race, but also about the gendering of black masculinity. Focusing on the importance of the Soviet Union to the formation of a black internationalism, our course will seek to reclaim both the transnational routings of black modernism and black modernism's Russian intellectual heritage.
No Sections
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Crime and the Criminal in American Narrative
In this course, we will read a wide range of narratives from the late 19th through the 20th century, in order to interrogate depictions of criminality and transgression, both as represented in the fictive worlds of the narrative and in the world of literary criticism and values. What constitutes a crime? What divides the law-abiding from the criminal, and what unites them? Who wields power, and why? Does transgression define the norm, or vice versa? What aesthetic and/or ideological features distinguish "popular" and "serious" texts in our cultural conversation about crime and criminality? What makes a novel canonical or non-canonical in relation to what we might think of as literary laws? We will pay special attention to how the label of "criminal" functions as an identity, a subject position in an array of potential constructed American identities. Our texts will likely include works by Twain, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Thompson, Mosely, Algren, Scott, and Tarantino, as well as theory from Foucault to Rabinowitz. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Emerson and Whitman: Writing and Reception
This course has three goals: to provide an opportunity for intensive close analysis of a wide sampling of the writings of Emerson and Whitman, including many of the "major" works, as well as some writings that have been under-canonized or under-utilized (including Whitman's early fiction and newspaper writings, and Emerson's journals); to gain perspective on the (literary) relationship between these two "major" figures as it has been variously projected since the nineteenth century; and, finally, to use the occasion of these writings to examine the concept of literary history itself-including, for example, the word "major" in this course description. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
Winter 2010
EV
W
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
1/6/10 - 3/10/10
Instructor:
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Poetry of the Present
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns-Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?" In this course we will read deeply in the strong work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Allen Grossman, Susan Howe; all of them in pursuit of answers to two difficult questions: First, Can there be a poetry of the present? How can poetry represent the individual and social urgencies of our moment without either refusing the present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or overleaping the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that we are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind? Counts toward the American Literature and Comparative & World Literature specializations.
Fall 2009
CH
M
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
Wieboldt Hall 509
9/28/09 - 11/30/09
Instructor:
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Post-World War II American Novel and the Theological Imagination
American novels between World War II and the end of the twentieth century demonstrate the rich ferment of theological thinking that swirled through American culture during that period, including the death-of-God movement, liberation theology, feminist theology, negative theology, Holocaust studies, and various poststructuralist theories of religion including the thought of Derrida, Girard, and Bataille. One of the profound paradoxes of this period is that the movement in American culture toward secularization made theological questions seem more rather than less pressing. This course engages a variety of American novels and short stories appearing from the 1950s onward, works that grapple with a range of questions including but not limited to the existence and nature of God, the meaning of sacrifice, the problem of evil, and the exploration of gender within the theological imagination. Readings include Walker Percy, The Moviegoer; John Updike, Couples; Toni Morrison, Paradise; and Don DeLillo, White Noise. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
No Sections
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Proust
This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries.
Summer 2010
EV
Tu
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
6/22/10 - 8/17/10
Instructor:
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: The Jazz Age -- Love and Art in the 1920s
In this course, students will read a selection of poetry, criticism, comics, film and fiction dealing with a central concern for American writers of the 1920s: the nature of art. The focusing lens will be depictions of parallels between artistic creation and romantic love/sexual procreation (as the term "jazz" refers to both, the musical art form and sex), and how these depictions grapple with the sense of cultural crisis that informs so much of modernism. Our texts will include Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and several short stories; Kay Boyle's short fiction; Dos Passos', Manhattan Transfer; poetry by Pound, Cummings, Stein, Eliot, and others; as well as pop-culture texts like Harriman's Krazy Kat and Disney's Mickey Mouse. We will pay special attention to how various sorts of subject position (including, but not limited to, race, class, and gender) influence how writers portray their own creative projects. Counts toward the American Literature specialization.
Spring 2010
CH
W
7:00 - 9:30 PM
Sec. 50
3/31/10 - 6/2/10
Instructor:
LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Twentieth-Century Literature: Modern Poetry and Poetics
"Make It New": Ezra Pound freely translated this famous modernist slogan from a Chinese legend: "As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new." What, then, is "it"? This question opens broad and fascinating reaches on the vast river of poetic traditions and materials that twentieth-century English-language poets navigated as they created new works in dialogue with poetry past and contemporary-poems in old, middle, and new English, old and new poems in other languages, poems in translation, poetic forms, lines, personae, and figures inherited, invented, transported across state lines. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot writes about the historical sense, the deep knowledge of the literature of past ages, by which poets endow their works with depth and resonance. Our aim in this course will be to deepen our own historical sense as readers of modern poetry--our attunement to its resonances, our grasp of how literary tradition works--by learning about the myriad ways poems "talk" to each other. Along the way, we'll develop and hone the historical and analytic vocabulary and technique that enable us not just to think and talk about these works but to feel and appreciate their beauty. We'll place selected works of modern poets-Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, others--at the center of our study and work together to reconstruct the cultural situations, literary traditions, historical contexts, and poetic resources from which they draw inspiration, including passages and poems by other poets, from Homer and Dante to "Anon," Chaucer, and Whitman to Villon and Li Po. We'll study the dynamics of literary history, translation, and creation and the resources of poetic language, such as rhetoric, figurative language, and versification. Counts toward the American Literature and British Literature specializations.
No Sections
THEATRE 448-0
( Elective ) Studies in American Theatre: American Political Drama of the 20th Century
This seminar examines the major topical and formal innovations in American political theater since the end of World War I. Through both textual exegesis and examination of production history, it explores the rise of the American political playwright; the emergence of the theater collective; America's first experiment in forming a national theater, the Federal Theatre Project; and the relationship of performance to progressive political movements in the post-World War II period. Plays include Trifles (Glaspell), Mullato (Langston Hughes), Waiting for Lefty (Odett), The Cradle Will Rock (Blitzstein), Angels in America (Kushner), The Crucible (Miller), and others.
