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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
During the Renaissance, England experienced a flowering of the arts and sciences greatly inspired by the discovery of new lands and peoples, on the one hand, and the rediscovery of Classical texts in literature, history and philosophy, on the other. In this survey of Renaissance poetry, we will consider the ways in which poets of the period variously negotiate the creative challenge of reconciling the old with the new. Pre 1800 course
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3.00 Credits
Prereqs: 060.107 Introduction to Literary Study A survey of works by major modern playwrights. Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet, Brecht, Pinter, Albee, Wilson and others.
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3.00 Credits
An international newspaper report in 1965 on writers from an African nation reads thus: “A year ago, one playwright was acquitted of holding up a radio station. A month ago, one poet was principal actor in a gun-running melodrama.” This course examines the phenomenon of writers in politics. It explores the concept of engagement or commitment in literature as developed by Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly in postcolonial African literature. We will discuss the traditional notions of art and activism, imagination and ideology. The questions that are crucial to our concerns in this course include: why is writing in Africa a very hazardous career? How do writers respond to the threat and actual experience of metaphoric, physical, and spiritual confinement and harm? What does the precarious situation of the African writer reveal about the nature of postcolonial societies? Texts include selections from theoretical essays and autobiographical narratives such as: Nelson Mandela, "No Easy Walk to Freedom"; Wole Soyinka, "The Man Died"; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary"; Jack Mapanje, "The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison"; Denis Brutus, "Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison"; Ken Saro-Wiwa, "A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary"; and Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish".
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3.00 Credits
One could do worse than to define the literary Renaissance by a newfound complexity, variety, and urgency in its attitudes to time. The Renaissance, it’s been argued, saw in its own preoccupation with temporal experience the mark of its difference from other times; and it’s of some importance (for both the history of literature and of time) that this event was far more decisive in literature than in formal philosophy. In this course, we will read some classic texts in Renaissance epic, lyric, drama, and prose that place specifically temporal problems and categories-eternity, immortality, memory, growth, the event, historical loss, prediction, duration, aging-at their center. Our investigations will center on three salient features of the Renaissance imagination of time: the “discovery” of a temporality of persistence and loss specific to the cultural past, often prompting a reworking of classical texts as if they were themselves “about” time; the alignment of literary creation and biological procreation as means of “defeating” (or inhabiting) time; and the tensions and negotiations between traditional eschatology-life and history lived in relation to a final end- and the notion of time as infinite, successive extension. Throughout the course, special emphasis will be placed on how the texts modify and extend philosophical questions by relating them to the temporal aspects of literary form, such as the regularity of meter or the unity of action. Pre 1800 course.
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3.00 Credits
Turning to the early to mid-twentieth century, this course will turn to novelists who defied literary and social expectation and wrote novels with protagonists and secondary characters whose racial identity differed from the authors’. We will focus our attention on white writers who took up the subject of black life and African American writers who wrote white-life novels. Some of the questions we will consider include those around authenticity, political motivation, cross class/racial alliances, minstrelsy, psychoanalysis, and citizenship. Not only will we become more familiar with the mid-twentieth century literary terrain and how writers creatively grappled with volatile and sometimes taboo political matter, we will question and engage how America’s racial landscape always impacted the literary process.
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3.00 Credits
Was Shakespeare socially conservative or radical? This course approaches this question by exploring how Shakespeare represents “the people” and “popular culture,” keeping in mind that the sphere below the aristocracy in the early modern period was complex. We will begin by considering early modern theatre as a form of popular culture and by investigating Shakespeare’s own representation of theatre, its audience, and its participants in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream". From here, we will move on to consider topics such as how “the people” and their actions, including group action and rebellion, are figured; the role of comedy, inversion, and genre in such representations; and images of “the people” as participants and actors within the commonwealth. By the conclusion of the course, students will have gained knowledge of a range of critical, as well as imaginative, approaches to the issue of “the people” in Shakespeare and to the nature of Shakespeare’s political engagements. Readings will include "Richard II", "King Lear", "Coriolanus", and "The Tempest". Pre 1800 course.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar investigates one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century fiction: social and economic class. Why did raising oneself from humble beginnings and falling into poverty, become such familiar stories? And why are they still so familiar today? We will look at how a number of writers approached the topic of class mobility, each with a unique blend of excitement and anxiety. Authors will likely include Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac (in translation), Charles Dickens, and William Dean Howells. In order to understand our topic better, we will also look at a selection of theoretical work on the nature of class.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar introduces students to a select group of “classic” postcolonial novels written between 1960 and the present. Over the course of the semester we will explore the history of such writing, how it developed and how it departs in significant ways from the colonial novels written during the height of British Imperialism. Through an exploration of the recurrent themes and images in these postcolonial novels, and with the help of secondary sources, we will clarify and deepen our understanding of the postcolonial condition. Authors include: Edward Said, Leela Gandhi, Elleke Boehmer, Achebe, Coetzee, Naipaul, Rushdie, Roy, Rhys, Kureishi.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar will focus on two or three novels by Thomas Pynchon, with emphasis on the way his work revises the history of the novel, as well as on the political and historical questions that shape his work.
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3.00 Credits
In a recent edition of Harper’s, Mark Slouka fears the vanishing role of the humanities in the university: “By downsizing ... the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.” Slouka questions the role of a liberal arts education in today’s world. How are the humanities and the sciences meant to relate to one another? What kind of individuals are we producing from a liberal arts education? How have capitalism and globalization changed the nature of education, and what role should education play in nation-building? This course traces the origins of our present-day educational debates in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. We will read poetry by Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge, novels by Dickens, Bronte, Hardy, and Lawrence, and a variety of historical and philosophical texts. As a writing-intensive course, students will develop their own opinions in weekly one-page response papers, as well as in two longer essays. Dean’s Teaching Fellowship Course
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