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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Written a century apart, the poems of Seamus Heaney and Thomas Hardy create an urgent call and response between earth and under-earth. The poets share metrical virtuosity, compressed lyric forms, the unfolding of personal history within public crisis and transformation, and the recognition that the acuity of sentience - the daily practice of exquisitely precise perceptual acts - is the ethical center of our brief stay above ground.
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4.00 Credits
In the wake of the American and French Revolutions and amidst growing calls for social and legal change, British writers began exploring political questions with new urgency. In this course, we read a range of texts published between 1780 and 1820, examining the ways that they both participated in and were shaped by debates about freedom, equality, justice, authority, toleration, cruelty, and pain. Likely authors include Burke, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, More, Barbauld, Edgeworth, Godwin, Austen, Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley. Secondary readings by historians, philosophers, and literary critics including Gary Kelly, Thomas Haskell, Lynn Hunt, and Martha Nussbaum.
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4.00 Credits
This transnational course explores the emergence of modern life in the west, reflected by the canonical texts published (or translated into English) from 1850 to 1861. Points of focus include the aesthetics of freedom and bondage; the rise of realism and liberalism; the intersection between consciousness and material conditions; conceptions of progress, history, and desire. Authors include Marx, Darwin, Mill, Lincoln and Douglas; Tennyzon, Whitman, Dickenson; Douglass, Jacobs, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson; Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dickens, Eliot.
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4.00 Credits
Introduces the Plot-Bead technique for analyzing and/or constructing artistic forms that are performance events. Several artworks, most of them plays, but some poems and one musical composition, are studied in detail in the light of depth action analysis and codification of the artifact's time-form in a plot-bead diagram. The roots of these analytical techniques (which have practical utility for artists) are Aristotelian, but are reflected in 21st-century practice.
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4.00 Credits
An in-depth look at the four most influential British playwrights of the late twentieth century. Readings include generous selections of each author's plays, as well as novels, screenplays, journalism, and essays. Emphasis is on recurring themes that haunt these authors' works, and the innovative techniques they develop to convey them.
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4.00 Credits
This course attends to the work of several American poets whose careers span much of the second half of the 20th century. Poets include Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, A. R. Ammons, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and others.
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4.00 Credits
Studies systematically the arc of Samuel Beckett's literary career, with particular emphasis on Beckett's stage and video plays. The course proposes the idea of a "stable habitation for the Self" as one way of understanding both Beckett's thematic matiere and his astonishing aesthetic innovations in three media: stage, page, and video screen. Video resources supplement reading and discussion of texts, and local productions of the plays are studied when available.
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4.00 Credits
From courtly love poetry to saints' lives, from scientific treatises to The Canterbury Tales, the imaginative writings of the Middle Ages are full of gender identities that surprise in their strangeness but are closely linked to today's sexual norms and fantasies. Course readings include medieval chivalric, religious, scientific, and literary writings and reflect how sexuality and subjectivity are shaped in tandem as well as how sexuality can disrupt and transform stable selves.
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4.00 Credits
Two notoriously difficult, yet hugely influential writers who have pushed the limits of the novel form. This course will be organized around theoretical contexts that both writers address, often in divergent but resonant ways. Such contexts include temporality and perception; speech and silence; passivity and aggression. We will read four novels by each writer and some secondary material.
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4.00 Credits
In addition to being the most successful novelists of their day, Eliot and Howells were also the most influential critics. This course focuses on their championing of literary realism and on their experiments in narration and novelistic form, as well as their respective involvements in suffrage campaigns and the Haymarket Affair. Novels to include Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes.
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