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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
It is tempting to pretend that nonfiction prose is simply a formalized version of the speaking voice. But it has deep antecedents in literary history, often more expansive in form, emotional content, and the power of the sentence than that which exists today. This course cuts across generic boundaries and historical periods-from the essay outward and from Elizabethan England forward-in search of useful literary examples of nonfiction prose. This is a practical seminar, intended to amplify and extend the imaginative tools and the grammar a student already possesses.
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4.00 Credits
ICS The first few decades of the 20th century saw an effort by the Abbey Theatre's founders to nourish a specifically Irish imagination. The revival exploited three sources: the mythical Ireland of Celtic legend; western Ireland's poetry and story; and a political history of invasion, oppression, faction, and heroic gestures accompanied by a mood of tragic failure. The course begins with a brief history of Ireland, concentrating on the late 17th century and the battles of Boyne and Aughrim, the abortive rising of 1798, and the 1890s spirit of nationalistic renewal. Next is a consideration of the Abbey Theatre and its reconstruction of legends and use of western Ireland's idioms and characters, chiefly in the dramas of Yeats and Synge. These themes were further developed in the literature associated with the "troubles" of 1916-22 and in later writingthat continue or challenge the themes of the Renaissance. The list of authors studied includes Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, FrankO'Connor, Flann O'Brien, and Brendan Behan.
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4.00 Credits
The plays analyzed in this course are considered milestones in the history of theater for their innovative use of language, form, thematic treatment, and the insight they provide into the human soul. The course begins in the classical period, with Sophocles' Antigone and Euripedes' The Trojan Women, and moves on to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment with Shakespeare's Hamlet and Goethe' s Faust. Continuing along the axis of a pan-European modernism, students read Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Ibsen's A Doll's House , and Strindberg' The Dance of Death, and then examine more radical currents in Brecht's Mother Courage, Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights, Jewish Studies This course is based on reading and discussing short fiction and novels by such major writers as Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, W. G. Sebald, Aleksandar Ti?sma, and Danilo Kis. Also included is work by Nobel laureates Isaac Bashevis Singer and Imre Kertész. The Holocaust is considered in comparison with other 20th-century genocides, such as those that occurred in the Gulag, communist China, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Students debate questions about the boundaries of art and the literature of extreme situations. Students also examine post-Holocaust reality, the trivialization of tragedy in fashionable simplistic melodramas of the current mass media culture, and political-ideological manipulation (especially in former socialist countries in Eastern Europe).
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4.00 Credits
Jewish Studies The course surveys the contribution of European and North American Jewish writing to 20thcentury literature. Students examine questions of Jewish identity, stereotypes, mythology, folk wisdom, humor, history, culture, relation to language, and literary modernism. Authors studied include Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley.
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4.00 Credits
Medieval Studies Major works of the early Middle Ages are studied, with an emphasis on those written in what are today France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia. The course considers societyshaping historical events, such as the Viking invasions, rise of feudalism, and spread of Christianity, and the literary works that developed in the context of these events. Emphasis is on works now identified with the epic, such as French chansons de geste and Norse sagas. Other genres that set the epic in relief are also examined. Texts include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and the plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim.
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4.00 Credits
This course consists of a close reading of selected plays, poems, and short stories by contemporary authors from Africa, Egypt, India, and China. The works are analyzed for their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray the social conditions and political problems in the respective countries. The class examines the extent to which a variety of writers have drawn on native traditions or been affected by extraneous artistic trends and by belief systems such as Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and democratic socialism. Authors include Assia Djebar, Sembène Ousmane, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nawal Saadawi, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, R. K. Narayan, Mahasveta Devi, and Salman Rushdie.
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4.00 Credits
Medieval Studies Students are introduced to the facts about the evolution of our language during the last 1,000 years or so and the ways in which linguistic changes can be discovered, described, explained, assessed, and grouped.
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4.00 Credits
American Studies, GSS, SRE This course examines the "rebirth" of AfricanAmerican artistic expression that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Students focus primarily on the literature (poetry, prose fiction) and nonfiction essays that responded to and influenced the literature. Literary works are considered in their sociocultural context and relationship to the music and visual art of the period. The course has two goals: to chronicle the birth of a national consciousness that spawned the larger New Negro Movement and to note the specific role Harlem played in the artistic renaissance. Authors studied include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown. Students draw on the critical voices of David Levering Lewis, Gloria Hull, and Houston Baker, in order to explore the meaning of race and gender during the period.
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4.00 Credits
The useful, Schiller wrote in The Aesthetic Education ofMan, is the great idol of our age. It divorces leisure from labor and turns life into a series of utilitarian dead ends. Conversely, the impulse to play, to engage in gratuitous moments of being or in seemingly evanescent conversations, might be the only chance to convert specialized knowledge into self-knowledge. Yet conversation has often been condemned as dangerous for its proximity to the decadent and the idle. This course examines these issues on rhetorical and thematic levels. Readings include critiques of "pure" work (Aristotle, Schiller, Marx, andNietzsche); texts that expose the vanity of conversation (Pascal's Pensée s,Mol ière'sMisanthrope novels that explore the tensions between work and conversation (James's The Europeans, Updike's Rabbit, Run); and texts that offer aesthetic theories of conversation (Proust's Swann'sWay and Against Sainte-Beuve). Other readings include Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Paul Lafargue's In Praise of Idleness; and Laziness, a recent French best seller by Corinne Maier.
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