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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
The novel in nineteenth-century Britain was a hugely popular cultural form, much like the serial television drama today. It was also a form of cultural expression that began to compete with the claims and consolations of some of the most influential intellectual and moral discourses of the time, including social science and religion. In this course we will read many of the most popular and accomplished novels of the era, with a view to examining specific artistic forms and styles in relation to both thematic concerns and social, historical, and literary contexts. Authors will include Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine radical politics and its relationship to popular print culture and the English novel from the late eighteenth century through the early Victorian period. Students will consider widespread fears of radical rebellion, the position of the English working class, and controversies over political reform. Readings will include the novels Caleb Williams, A Tale of Two Cities and North And South and political writings by Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke and George Eliot, among others.
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys the formal and thematic developments of the American novel from 1945 to the present. Against the backdrop of American post-war triumphalism, we consider how contemporary writers, struggling with issues of identity, race and authenticity, express different and deeply troubled accounts of the American dream. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between fiction and history; the tension between individual and collective identity; the changing role of literature in American culture, and the gradual emergence of postmodernism as a significant force in American literary life. Possible authors include: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, John Barth, Saul Bellow, Maxine Hong Kingston.
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3.00 Credits
Designed for juniors and seniors with experience in using analysis to make clear and persuasive arguments, but open to any students who have taken Expository Writing (060.113/114), this course focuses on the advanced skills of argument. Students learn to draw inferences from the evidence, use sources in a variety of ways to develop their thinking, and structure complex arguments.
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3.00 Credits
What is obscene? What is indecency? Where is the line between public and private? How have the answers to these questions changed over the past century? This course will examine artworks and performances from a variety of media which have been publicly accused of indecency or obscenity. Wilde, Joyce, Nabokov, Ginsberg, Bruce, Carlin, Kubrick, Serrano, Lyne, Prince, and Eminem among others will provide the materials for our inquiry.
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3.00 Credits
The course will provide a portrait of modern American culture through representative works of literature by leading authors arranged in pairs that focus on key issues seen from contrasting perspectives and/or from very different moments in history. Lectures and discussions will explore the popular reception of the works in their own day as well as their claim to lasting importance as imaginative literature. The following writers and works will be included. Sexual conventions: Edith Wharton, “Summer”, and Philip Roth, “Portnoy’s Complaint”; ethnicity and the clash of traditions: Henry Roth, “Call It Sleep”, and Leslie Marmon Silko, “Ceremony”; race and self-discovery: William Faulkner, “Light in August”, and Ralph Ellison, “Invisible Man”; social satire: Nathanael West, “The Day of the Locust”, and Don DeLillo, “White Noise”; narratives of war and trauma, John Hersey, “Hiroshima”, and Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl”. Mid-term and final exam; two short papers.
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3.00 Credits
This course serves as an introduction to African-American literature, from its beginnings until the outbreak of WWI. In it, we will consider various genres of African-American literary production, such as the slave narrative, novel, the poem, and the essay. Through critical readings, we will explore recurrent themes in early African-American literature in its cultural and historical contexts, as well as the question of what constitutes the African-American literary tradition as such.
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3.00 Credits
This course investigates the female novel of development in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reading novels by George Eliot, Henry James, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf, as well as short historical texts of the period, and literary criticism about the Novel. We will consider how writers use the novel to engage with contemporary questions about women’s social roles, marriage, suffrage, and the expansion of women’s education.
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3.00 Credits
Forms like travel writing, erotic fiction, the sentimental story, and the gothic make up the early novel; each of these crowd-pleasing subgenres was dominated by female authors. We will read examples of these experimental--and often strange--varieties of the proto-novel, by Behn, Haywood, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore modern poetry, primarily in the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on poets' own ideas of what makes their poetry distinctively modern; Our reading will also address some of Modernism important forerunners and inheritors, along with related movements such as Imagism, war poetry, and the Harlem Renaissance. We will pay particular attention to poetry's place in the broader history of modern art and literature, and to central themes including nature and the city; love and sexuality; violence and myth. Authors will include W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop.
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