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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Romantic poetry "emphasizes the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the spontaneous, and the transcendental." Or does it? Since John Ashbery's study Other Traditions, scholars have come to recognize that Romantic poetry is not only about whatWordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling."During the Romantic era, noncanonical authors such as Thomas Beddoes, John Clare, Mary Robinson, and many others were writing poetry that challenged normative assumptions about what a poem should be, topically, formally, and expressively. This course examines the "other tradition" of Romantic poetry in the context of current "experimental" poetry and poetics,including Charles Bernstein's A Poetics, Lyn Hejinian's Happily, Barrett Watten' s 1-10 , andJack Spicer's Vancouver lectures.
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4.00 Credits
The first American modernists (Pound, Eliot, and H. D.) were driven by cultural anxiety-the longing for a tradition they didn't have-toinvent a new kind of poetry. Others went in different directions: Gertrude Stein, by radically severing her language from syntactical and narrative meaning; Wallace Stevens, by writing poems of linguistic event and philosophical meditation; Marianne Moore, by depersonalizing the lyric subject in syllabic prose poems. Last but not least, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams-one a traditionalist, the other a modernist-found new ways of speaking in a "homemade"American voice. In this course, students identify what is distinctive about each of these poets, taking into account the traditions from which their work derives (English Romanticism, French symbolism, Japanese haiku, etc.), while also acknowledging the lasting influence of Emerson's call for intellectual independence in American letters. Some attention is also given to lesser voices, such as Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, and e. e. cummings.
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4.00 Credits
All tragedies see the human condition as doomed. In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist's fate is externalized as something beyond human control; in more recent tragedy, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw in the protagonist's character. Today's protagonist isincreasingly seen as a victim of circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is sometimes externalized as history, war, or society and sometimes internalized; in either case, the protagonist is so reduced in stature that 20th-century tragedy is merely ironic. The complex history of tragedy is viewed in the light of major theories of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others. Study includes the disappearance and revival of the chorus, as well as works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Buchner, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller.
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4.00 Credits
GSS As Virginia Woolf observed, "'The proper stuffof fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss." This course examines Anglo-American modernist narrative as it was fashioned by writers who fractured realist conventions of narration and championed formal innovation in the representation of human consciousness. Works under consideration include James's The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, Forster's Howard's End , Joyce? ? Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, selected short stories by Mansfield, Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!
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4.00 Credits
ICS Participants in this seminar pool their ideas about the novel's text and context. Recent Joyce criticism is emphasized. Prerequisite: prior knowledge of Joyce and his early writings, notably Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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4.00 Credits
William Blake was one of the most remarkable artists in the Western tradition: an exquisite lyricist, composer of fantastically difficult philosophical poems, recoverer of the tradition of illuminated manuscript, superb engraver, visionary painter, technical innovator, political radical, subject of hallucinatory-mystical experiences, and utter commercial failure. This course considers his life and work as a whole, and as played out in relation to the Enlightenment, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and rise of capitalism.
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4.00 Credits
French Studies,GSS, Human Rights The representation of private life in the 19thcentury French novel coincided with the advent of realism and culminated in naturalism. Novelists started to describe the institutions and dramas that shaped private life. Those dramas included the plight of the child (Sand's Fran?ois le Champi), torments of family life (Balzac's Eugénie Grandet), ambiguities of marriage (Flaubert's Madame Bovary), despair of domesticity (de Maupassant's A Woman's Life), nature of obsession (Zola's Thérèse Raquin) , and the thematization of decadence(Huysmans's ? ?Rebours) . Using influentialwritings on everyday life, students examine topics previously considered too private or too personal to be viewed as literature. In order to situate texts within a tradition that rethinks the self, the class discusses works by Locke, Descartes, Shaftesbury, Kant, Marx, Hegel, and Foucault. Students read excerpts from the recent anthology History of Private Life, an invaluable research tool that helps connect literature, philosophy, social history, and anthropology.
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4.00 Credits
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life. At the age of 18, he was expelled from Oxford for distributing his pamphlet, "The Necessity of Atheism." Soon after, he published Queen Mab, a long poem that identified institutionalized religion as the root of all evil and prophesied the emergence of a postmoral utopia. The following year, Shelley (though already married) fell in love and eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The rest of Shelley's dramatically brief life was spent mostly in Italy, almost entirely without an audience. Under these unlikely circumstances, Shelley produced some of the most stunningly crafted and ideologically complex literature ever written in English. In this seminar, students read all of Shelley's major poetry and prose. In order to situate these texts in their historical and intellectual context, students also read works by Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt, as well as Milton's Paradise Lost. In addition, students explore British empirical philosophy, Platonic idealism, the skeptical tradition of David Hume, and foundational and cutting-edge works of Shelley scholarship.
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4.00 Credits
"I tried time and again to write prose, / but each time a poem appeared on its own, and / whatever I tried to say was poetry." So Ovid describes himself as a natural poet. Topics in this course, which covers all of Ovid, include poetic genres; Greco- Roman mythology; the characteristic Roman practice of "competitive imitation"; the equallyRoman and surprisingly modern ideal of witty or figured speech; and the very human experience, captured especially by Ovid's last works, of loneliness, alienation, and the fear of being forgotten in death. All readings are in English; optional concurrent tutorial on select passages in the original Latin. Prerequisites: moderated junior or senior standing and consultation with instructor.
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4.00 Credits
The 19th-century English novel takes as its grand preoccupation and theme the shaping power of history. In this seminar, students read three major figures who defined the novel- both in form and content-as deeply indebted to the historical imagination. What privileged access does the novelist enjoy when representing historical forces and changes in fictional form? How is history the sign under which the novel announces its own manifesto for realism? Texts under consideration include Walter Scott's Waverley, Old Mortality, and Heart of Midlothian; George Eliot's Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda; Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved. Readings in historiography complement investigations of historical narrative.
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