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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Asian Studies This course introduces conceptions of self, society, and the universe, as they were formulated in Asia, through an intensive engagement with canonical literary, philosophical, and religious texts such as the Analects, Bhagavad Gita, Lotus Sutra, Ramayana, Tale of Genji, and Tao Te Ching. In addition to reading these works in translation, students are introduced to the characteristics of the different classical Asian languages that enabled the works' distinctive forms of rhetoric and thought.
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4.00 Credits
Students examine the varieties of modern narrative and the aesthetic questions that shape the reader's attention and involvement. How does a narrative reflect its own telling and give signs as to where to find-or lose-the author? Howdoes it create sympathy with a self-absorbed teller? Does confusion or hostility sometimes foster narrative involvement? How does literary narrative differ from film narrative? Works read include Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Samuel Beckett' s Molloy, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Film adaptations of Great Expectations and The Big Sleep are screened.
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4.00 Credits
Victorian Studies This course constitutes an investigation of the realist tradition in English fiction, beginning with Victorian multiplot construction and working toward the formal innovation of the modernist novel. Central texts include Emily Bront?'s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bront?'s Jane Eyre, Dickens's Bleak House, Eliot'sMiddlemarch , Hardy' Tess of the D'Urbervilles, James' s The Ambassadors, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lawrence'sWome n inLove, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Readings in narrative theory and the history of the novel are used to supplement textual studies.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies, Human Rights, SRE By the time D'Arcy McNickle, the first major American Indian novelist, began publishing his work, Indians had been stock literary figures for more than 300 years. In works ranging from Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative to the novels of Willa Cather, white American writers had generated a fixed and ungrounded notion of "Indianness." Students in the course examine thetradition of fiction through works about and by Indians. In addition to McNickle, Rowlandson, and Cather, authors include Charles Brockden Brown, James FenimoreCooper,HermanMelville, HelenHunt Jackson, Black Elk,N. ScottMomaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie.
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4.00 Credits
How do we make sense of a poem? What systems and characteristic features are put in place to get its work done? In this course, designed to develop close reading and reasoning skills, students pay attention to the sound system of prosody, grammar, rhetoric, and the uses of figurative language. Presentations and assignments orient students toward interpreting poems by analyzing the poetic line via detailed scansions, discussion of the relationship between meaning and metrical structure, analysis of line openings and endings, and the work of metaphor and other figurative language. In addition to readings in rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics, authors studied include Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins, Pound, Auden, Oppen, Niedecker, Hejinian, and Ashbery.
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4.00 Credits
Throughout history, written language has been used to create masterpieces, pump out propaganda, delight and delude, and reveal and obscure the truth. But unless we read closely-word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence-it can be hard to distinguish among these uses. In this class, students read the short stories of great writers (James, Cheever, Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, O'Connor, Beckett, Bowles, etc.) as well as current issues of the New Yorker and New York Times, looking at the ways in which words are used to convey information and insight, transmit truth and beauty, and form and transform our vision of the world.
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4.00 Credits
Students in this course research and make class presentations on Mark Twain's major works, including Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, "TheMysterious Stranger," and Letters from the Earth. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor and one U.S. literature sequence course or a course in either American studies or American history.
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4.00 Credits
Theater This introductory course traces the emergence of distinctively "modern" forms of theater in late19th- and 20-century Europe. Students engage closely with a number of major dramatic texts whose importance in this process is widely recognized. Attention is paid to the fact that theater is not a textual genre, but an embodied "practice" played out in "real time" and in a concrespace. How does a playwright such asWilde, Brecht, or Beckett exploit this fundamental fact? To what problems or concerns do their formal strategies respond? Why do the performance practices of avant-garde movements, such as Futurism or Dada, seek to break down the boundaries between theater and other art forms? Readings include plays by Büchner, Jarry, Strindberg, Pirandello, Handke, and Müller.
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4.00 Credits
In his groundbreaking work The Gift, anthropologist Marcel Mauss called the exchange of gifts a "total social phenomenon," an archaic modeof economic intercourse found universally in human cultures. In recent years, the theory of the gift has been approached from philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and poststruc- turalist perspectives that have embraced the gift as an alternative model to the prevailing economics of scarcity and self-interest. This course draws on contemporary discussions of the gift to construct a theoretical model for analyzing literary representations of financial, moral, aesthetic, and libidinal exchange. Readings include theoretical texts by Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Sahlins, Benveniste, Bourdieu, and Derrida, alongside literary works by Defoe, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Eliot, and James.
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4.00 Credits
Classical Studies This three-semester sequence examines literature from the time of its emergence and first developments in the West. Each course may be taken independently. The first semester explores the interactions of two crucial terms: "text" and"reader." What sorts of texts were there in antiquity,what sorts of readers, and how did they relate to each other? Course readings, all in English translation, include whole texts and excerpts from authors writing originally in Greek (Sappho, Plato, the gospels); Latin (Cicero, Virgil, Augustine); and Biblical Hebrew (Genesis, Song of Songs, Job). The second semester explores two currents of Enlightenment thought and how their competing visions of human nature inform representative literary texts of the period. The first current considers the individual to be governed primarily by self-interest. The second argues against the reduction of human nature to self-interest by drawing attention to benevolent passions such as sympathy, generosity, and good will. Readings include works by La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Pope, Congreve, Addison and Steele, Molière, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Mendelssohn, Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe. The third semester examines the peculiar and perplexing European literary transformation from Romanticism to modernity. Careful reading of selected texts emphasizes the relationship between the self and others, as it occurs in language. What is it to meet others in words? Authors studied include Apollinaire, Balzac, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Gogol, Hoffmann, Hofmannsthal, James, Kafka, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Novalis,Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde, and Woolf.
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