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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
As modernity became conscious of itself, writers and other artists took up the challenge of describing and defending new forms. This course looks at some of the writings that characterized the "new" position of artists, writers, and poetsin relation to the concept of "modern." Authorsinclude Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kasimir Malevich, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Students consider how these various figures thought about art forms in relation to events and locale, and how such formal ideas as abstraction, fragmentation, and estrangement contributed to the work of modernism.
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4.00 Credits
It could be argued that World War II set in play the demise of certain aspects of modernism, while simultaneously preparing the ground for postmodernity, and that the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s instantiated this historical motion. This course explores the ways in which a utopian desire to accommodate the present and invent the future, by finding new aesthetic forms, began to fray, as writers and artists responded to challenges brought on by postwar politics and the new media age. Readings include poetry and poetics; cultural, literary, and art criticism; and prose fiction and narrative. Authors may include Celan, Jabès, Auden, Oppen, Hughes, Ginsberg, Riding, Rich, Burroughs, Mailer, Baldwin, Beckett, Bowles, Nabokov, Borges, Adorno, Arendt, Debord, Barthes, Deleuze, Trilling, and Sontag.
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4.00 Credits
In the first half of the course, students read four Faulkner novels? ?he Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!- together with some of his short fiction and a range of essays, interviews, and critical studies. In the second half, they read Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, The Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Secondary materials include Playing in the Dark, Morrison's monograph on American literature. Topics include race, violence, prophecy, motherhood, ancestry, ecstasy, privacy, the effort to speak the unspeakable, and the pleasures of words.
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4.00 Credits
This course considers the essay form, as well as its style, with a particular focus on voice, viewpoint, and rhetorical technique. Intensive study is devoted to word choice, cadence, and punctuation, in the belief that even the most minute aspects of writing affect the impact of the whole. The goal is to equip students with a strong but supple command of their instrument, a prerequisite for personal expression. Students complete weekly writing and reading (from Macauley to Didion) assignments and participate in exercises and class discussions.
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4.00 Credits
Students read pertinent excerpts from critical studies such as James Lowry Clifford's Biography as an Art, Georges Gusdorf's "Conditions andLimits of Autobiography," and Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Students also read excerpts from, for example, Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus, Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Ana?s Nin's diaries, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Jean Cocteau's Opium, and Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography. Each week, students write a chapter of an autobiography and discuss problems of memory, choice, spontaneity, and the postmodern skepticism about self and identity.
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4.00 Credits
Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE In this examination of the "peculiar institution,"students explore the role the slave narrative has played in American letters through the firsthand accounts of former slaves. Readings begin with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through the works of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, and Booker T. Washington. In addition to reading these famous accounts, students also explore lesserknown voices, such as those recorded by the Federal Writers' Project.
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4.00 Credits
Medieval Studies The continuation of Italian 215, this course examines in greater depth topics such as the Greek influences on the specifically "Italian"achievements of Italian humanism (Pletho, Bessarion); the impact on and response from humanists abroad (Erasmus, Thomas More, Daniele Barbaro); the evolution of the "author"after the first 100 years of printing; the phenomenon of bibliophilia; the impact of Counter-Reformation reform on knowledge; the rise of scientific knowledge in Protestant culture; and the conflation of esotericism and science. Prerequisite: one successfully completed college-level course in classical philosophy, history, history of science, Renaissance literature, or art history. Taught in English.
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4.00 Credits
ICS Nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets such as James Mangan, Samuel Ferguson,W. B. Yeats, and Austin Clarke recreated images of a Celtic past that served the cause of Irish nationalism. The class studies that poetry, as well as militant songs and ballads from the late 18th century to the present (some anonymous, some by prominent patriots like Thomas Davis and Pádraic Pearse). Students examine problem poems (by Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney) that deal with contemporaneous events and issues. Some attention is paid to diaries and memoirs that illuminate specific moments in Irish history from 1798 to the present.
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4.00 Credits
During a mountain picnic in the summer of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville struck up a private conversation. That champagne-fueled talk issued into an intense, maddening, and relatively brief friendship that was mediated by writing, given expression in writing, and is approachable only by way of writing. What was it like? After acquainting themselves with the two writers' careers before 1850, students read everything Hawthorne and Melville wrote between the summer of 1850 and the fall of 1852, the period of their intimacy: The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Moby-Dick, Pierre, letters, journals, marginalia, a children's book, and a campaign biography. Early in the semester, students visit Melville's house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
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4.00 Credits
Victorian Studies In this seminar, students examine four realist novels dedicated to forcing upon the consciousness of Victorian middle-class readers certain consequences of their naively triumphal account of a uniquely British "world order." Exemplarytrials in über-realism, these "total novels?spired to embody the social organism as a whole. From W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend to George Eliot's Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope' s TheWay We Live Now, students consider how attempts to anatomize and criticize contemporary manners, morals, society, and politics led directly to experimentation in the form of sprawling multiplot narratives. Students also examine how British cultural formation in this period borrowed from the literary imagination of 19th-century novels.
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