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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Chaucer's work includes dream-visions, romances, epic, satire, and comedies that continue to astonish readers with virtuosic verse and deft character portraits. Chaucer tests the boundaries of chivalry and medieval romance, reinvents the Classical world, and raises questions about gender and sexuality that do not lose their force even today. Other writers of the time, including William Langland and the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, offer similar probing explorations of Ricardian society, morality, and notions of reality. We will read a range of works from the period, considering carefully the social conditions that produced them and the generic conventions that informed their composition. Most readings will be in Middle English, so we will read slowly and carefully, with attention to the language.
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1.00 Credits
The novel as we know it was first written in 18th-century England. The real questions are, How and why? Were novels first written by white men, expressing the attitudes and capitalizing on the reading practices of an emergent middle class? Or did they evolve from a somewhat less respectable tradition of romance writing by and for women? Did novelistic prose draw on scientific and economic discourses as it naively sought to present a realistic picture of the world? Or was the genre playfully self-aware, from its very origins, of the difficult relationship between reality and language? This course will explore some of the complexities of the "rise of the novel," one of the most important and oft-told tales of literary history. As we read fictions full of criminals, love-letters, scandals, and satirical self-referentiality, we will think about the differences between early novels and the not-quite novels that preceded them. We will focus on how novels work through plot, character, and realistic prose, but we will also consider how critical narratives like the "rise of the novel" work. How do these narratives help us, as novel readers today, understand our relationship to the period and to the novel as a form?
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1.00 Credits
This course introduces students to the fundamentals of writing poetry and to some of the major issues in contemporary poetics. Emphasis will fall on reading and discussing contemporary poetry, writing in both open and closed forms, working with structural elements beyond traditional poetic forms, and developing a methodology for critical discussion.
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1.00 Credits
Probably the first literature we fall in love with, children's literature shapes individuals and cultures in profound ways, investing us with important mythologies and guiding our identities and behaviors. This course will examine fairy tales, some works from the "golden age" of children's stories, and some contemporary works. We will enrich our reading of the fiction with some of the central theorists of this genre, including Bruno Bettelheim, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar.
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1.00 Credits
Students will explore, both in the readings and their own work, forms of writing that don't fit neatly into traditional genres such as fiction, essay, or criticism. Readings will include Maxine Hong Kingston's THE WOMAN WARRIOR (which combines fiction and personal essay), Eduardo Galeano's MEMORY OF FIRE: GENESIS (historical writing combined with fiction), and selected short works by Donald Barthelme, Rebecca Brown, Wayne Koestenbaum, and others (all playing with genre in various ways).
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1.00 Credits
This course will examine some of the foundational texts of literary theory, beginning with Greek and Roman writers and ending early in the 18th century. These foundational texts ask such questions as: What is the work of art? What is its relationship to the state? Is the poet divinely inspired or a peddler of illusion? What makes a work of art "great"? Is it "originality" or a mastery of the classical themes and genres? We will discuss these questions and more in the works of such writers as Plato, Horace, Longinus, Dante, Sidney, and Pope.
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1.00 Credits
This course examines American modernist writings with special attention to ways in which representations of time and space relate to notions of race during the 20th century. In addition to studying modernist manifestos calling upon artists to "make it new," we will examine how writers engage with this proposition by pushing the boundaries of genre to represent the diversity of America and Americans in formally innovative ways. We will also investigate works that query the contradictions inherent in American conceptions of modernity and progress without necessarily engaging American modernist impulses as such. The central question guiding the course will be how literary forms enable and limit writers' attempts to capture unequal, racialized experiences of American time and space. Toward the end of the semester we will take a brief look at how contemporary writers revisit modernist forms in ways that show the enduring influence of American modernism on contemporary culture and society.
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1.00 Credits
The American South has long been set aside in the national imagination as a particular--and, in many ways, peculiar--segment of the country. But why is this so? What makes the South necessarily different--if we assent to this difference at all? This course will examine a diverse series of representations of the American South, and will chart its development (and the concurrent development of its literature) over the past century. In the first section of the course, we will explore a set of competing, and often conflicting, images of what the South is and what it means; we will consider how widely the experience of the South varies with sex, race, and socioeconomic class. The second section of the course will take up the complex and colorful tradition of the Southern family, in all its (sometimes dysfunctional) glory. In the third and final section, we will examine images of Southern "expatriates"--characters who have abandoned their sub-Mason-Dixon roots and relocated elsewhere.
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1.00 Credits
What exactly is American about American poetry? In this course, we will discuss the work of many contemporary poets in the context of their relation to literary tradition, innovation, and American culture. Primary consideration will be given to the relation between written and spoken texts, form and content, lyricism and politics. We will also look at foundational poems by 19th-century and early 20th-century poets.
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1.00 Credits
Practice in writing several forms of literary or journalistic nonfiction--critical pieces, nonfiction narrative, profile, review, commentary, travel essay, family sketch, or personal essay, for example. The readings serve as models for these exercises.
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