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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, and Napoleonic wars. Throughout the course, students question the assumptions built into the problematic term traditionally used to categorize this literature, "Romantic." Students also explorethe extent to which key conflicts in British culture during the period (the founding of the United States, independence movements in the Americas, the development of free trade ideology, and the debates over slavery and colonialism) are still at issue today. Strong emphasis is placed on the historical and social contexts of the works and specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape the formal features of literary texts. Readings include the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.
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4.00 Credits
This course constitutes an in-depth study of the difference between the short story (built on figurative techniques that are closely allied to those employed in poetry and that allow the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning) and the novella (which demands the economy and exactness of a short work yet allows a fuller concentration and development of character and plot). Students explore the artistic accomplishments of such masters as Voltaire, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Chekhov, Aleichem, Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, and Borges.
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4.00 Credits
Wallace Stevens famously argued that the poet "is in rapport with the painter." This course considersekphrastic works (for example, howAuden, Williams, and Stevens described paintings) and how ideas about poetry and painting influenced each other in the first few decades of the 20th century. Students examine cubism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism, symbolism, and surrealism and consider their literary counterparts. They also study spaces that inspired discussions, essays, and poems about the relationship between poetry and painting (e.g., Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291, the 135th Street Library). Writers and painters studied include Gwendolyn Bennett, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, H. D., Aaron Douglas, T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg,WyndhamLewis, StéphaneMallarmé,John Marin, F. T. Marinetti, Marianne Moore, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ezra Pound,Man Ray, Gertrude Stein,Wallace Stevens, Stieglitz, Paul Valéry, and William Carlos Williams.
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4.00 Credits
RES This course examines the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the time of the Revolution to the Brezhnev period. Students look at the imaginative liberation in writers such as Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Mikhail Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the terror of the 1930s in the works of Yuri Olesha, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pilnyak, Lidia Chukovskaya, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Varlam Shalamov, and Yuri Tynyanov; and the hesitant thaw as reflected in Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Readings conclude with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line. Readings are supplemented with an examination of political and historical documents that provide a sense of context.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights The genre of horror, often called "the gothic,"encompasses texts as wide-ranging as the 18thcentury novel The Castle of Otranto and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This seminar focuses on the gothic genre as a response to such historical developments as the slave trade, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Cold War, and imperialism. Students explore such figures as the oriental tyrant, the corrupt priest, the savage, the vampire, the monster, and the madman-in order to ascertain why such figures emerge at the precise moments when Western culture seems so confidently to assert its orderliness, rationality, and humanitarianism. Readings include Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis's The Monk, Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Peacock's Nightmare Alley, Stoker's Dracula, and Le Fanu's Carmilla, as well as critical works by Marx, Freud, Foucault, Huyssen, and Jameson. Screenings include Nosferatu, Island of Lost Souls, Shock Corridor, and episodes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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4.00 Credits
Students examine the ways in which modern African literature identifies and responds to the alienation it experienced as a consequence of European colonialism. The course takes a historical and biographical approach, in order to show differing emphases and themes in 20th-century African fiction. Was there a political, social, and spiritual center to Africa before the coming of Europeans and, if so, can this center be identified, retrieved, or created anew? Are African writers translating their personal experiences of alienation and disorientation into their work? How does literature present social, political, and spiritual problems in terms of language, character, metaphor, and structure? Authors include Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe), Bessie Head (South Africa / Botswana), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria), Helon Habila (Nigeria), and Moses Isegawa (Uganda).
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4.00 Credits
RES Fiction in which the main character is a writer, or in which the narrator refers to the process of writing, often takes on a self-referential function. What does it mean to write about writing? What can a fictional text whose subject is fictional texts tell us about the potential of language as a selfshaping tool, or about the role of art in a given cultural context? This course employs such metatextual questions in its study of fiction by major Russian authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. The class explores literary theories on genre, irony, aesthetics, and the reader-writer-character triangle in the linkage of construction of self to construction of text, particularly in fiction that experiments with forms such as the fictional diary or the complex frame narrative. Authors studied include Bulgakov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, and Nabokov.
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4.00 Credits
This course consists of studies in the "not-quitesaid"of fiction, poetry, drama, and theory. Students learn to distinguish the contexts and purposes of different kinds of innuendo by the analysis of speech acts, poetic statements, philosophical claims, and social prohibitions. Readings are drawn from Ferdinand de Saussure and other linguists, J. L. Austin, Deborah Tannen, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Miss Manners, Proust, Chekhov, Wilde, Beckett, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Students are required to complete critical and creative writing assignments.
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4.00 Credits
Theology Students explore narratives of spiritual crisis in the Christian (especially Catholic) traditions. What is the relationship between spiritual crisis and the development of the modern self? What role has "God" played in the construction of theself as we know it? How do the authors of these narratives conceive of God, and what do they mean when they refer to "believing" in him? Is itpossible to find meaning in these narratives if one is not a Christian or a religious believer? Authors studied include St. Paul, Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John Donne, George Herbert, Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, Thérèse de Lisieux,Georges Bernanos, and Simone Weil.
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4.00 Credits
An intensive introduction to recent theories of literature and culture, set against the background of questions about identity and difference in the Western tradition.What links the recurrent theoretical preoccupation with language to questions about the ethicopolitical stakes of literature? Students examine a range of answers to the questions of how meaning is produced or ascribed, why it happens, and who or what decides on it. Attention is also paid to emerging debates about democracy, publicity, justice, and global cultural exchanges. Readings include Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes, Austin, Derrida, de Man, Lacan, Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Haraway, Ronell, Spivak, Foucault, ?Zi?zek, Virilio, Benjamin, Heidegger,Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.
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