|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
This course will investigate the relationship between literary works and their cultural and historical context, focusing specifically on how the expansion (and, eventually, disintegration) of the British Empire influenced literary production. By looking at how the literary text reflects or transforms the ideas behind it, we will work toward an understanding of how and why literature becomes and remains culturally significant.
-
3.00 Credits
An examination of how the words "poetry" and "prayer" are connected.
-
3.00 Credits
This course will explore novel combinations of image and text in various genres and from various periods and parts of the world. The purpose of this wide-ranging analysis will be to fuel creative projects of our own. Potential genres under study will include poster art, collage, photo-essays, performance notation, cartography, hypertext, illumination, artist's books, and, of course, the graphic novel. Course work will include brief homework responses, creative projects exploring the genres and media under study, presentations on works from the University Special Collections and on-line archives, and a final project requiring you to draw on course examples to develop a hybrid format of your own.
-
3.00 Credits
Augustine invented the term "soliloquy" and used it as a title for one of his early dialogues, in which a fictional Augustine debates with an allegorical Reason about the nature of the soul. Thus, at its very inception, the term combines the philosophical and the literary, describing a constructed narrative that unfolds through a volley of competing ideas. This course will investigate the pre-Shakespearian history of the soliloquy and the inward narrative. It will begin with Augustine's Confessions, and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and then consider how the same dialectical pattern informs works in the vernacular tradition, such as the Pearl poem, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, The Mirror of Simple Souls, and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love. We will consider the literary construction of the "I", its relation to the narrator, and the competing forces within the "I", that both fragment and constitute its identity. We will examine the role of memory, reason and imagination for each writer, and consider how the interplay of these forces informs the literary, philosophical and meditative dimensions of their work.
-
3.00 Credits
With the work of six poets and several theories of poetry from the Renaissance to now as our guides, we will take up the large question of how poetry figures, or might figure, in liberal education. Some of the more specific but abiding questions we will consider are these: Does poetry offer ways of knowing as well as ways of saying? Does learning to understand poetry affect moral as well as intellectual development? Does it deepen our awareness of other kinds of language? Why has poetry often been seen paradoxically as both more sensuous and more abstract than other kinds of expression? Does the physicality rhythm of poetry illuminate Thoreau's puzzling claim that we "think as well through our legs and arms as our brain"? Is metaphor the realm in which we find our best meanings? We will focus on poems by Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, John Keats, P.B. Shelley, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Adrienne Rich. Essays on poetry will range from Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poetry" (1595) to reflections by several 20th-century poets and philosophers and some recent work in cognitive psychology on the processing of figurative and rhythmic language.
-
3.00 Credits
This course will survey various kinds of late medieval English writing, from the chivalric romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the dream vision, Piers Plowman, to the spiritual autobiography of Margery Kempe. We will focus on the language of the period, reading several of these texts in Middle English or in facing-page translations, as well as relevant aspects of medieval culture, its modes of representation, its literary genres, its social and political conflicts.
-
3.00 Credits
Images of terrible, horrifying mothers have long abounded in literature and have dominated media portrayals of motherhood for decades. Consider the mothers in Matilda or Coraline, or real-life examples like Nadya Suleman (the infamous Octomom) or Michelle Duggar: not only do a multitude of examples of "bad" mothering exist, but women's attempts to mother are also scrutinized in excruciating detail. In this course, we will read a selection of texts (novels, plays, poems), ranging from Greek tragedies and Beowulf to 20th-century poetry and novels to interrogate the literary use of maternal motifs. What purpose is served by making a fictional mother monstrous? What literary effect is created? We will examine contemporary American culture (magazines, blogs, movies) to theorize possible impacts on the role of the modern mother, as well as the implications for American masculinity. What does it say about society that these images are so popular? And what is the connection between a woman's reproductive power and the urge to label her "monstrous?"
-
3.00 Credits
This course analyzes a seminal transition in Western society as it moves from an agrarian world centered around the rural estate to an urban culture built on industry and commerce. Literary texts emphasize the physical, psychological, and moral consequences to the individual of the decline of the estate, the rise of capitalism, the nontraditional nature of life and work in the city, various challenges to the established order (socialism, anarchism), and changing notions of gender. Texts include Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"; Eugene Sue, The Mysteries Of Paris (excerpts); Leo Tolstoy, Childhood; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick; Emile Zola, Germinal; and Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House. Nonliterary texts used to support the literary depiction of the era include John Locke, "Of Property," Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations (excerpts); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto; and Henry Mayhew, London Labour and The London Poor (excerpts).
-
3.00 Credits
This course examines psychoanalytic approaches to literature, with a focus on the Freudian tradition. We will begin by reading selections from Freud's writings on dreams, sexuality, creativity, and art, in connection with literary works, such as Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which have inspired controversial psychoanalytic readings. Drama (e.g. Hamlet), and poetry (e.g. T.S. Eliot) will also be explored. In addition we will read selections from later psychoanalysts, such as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Adam Phillips, and literary theorists such as Slavoj Zizek, who have brought psychoanalysis and literature together in exciting new ways. At the end of the course we will turn our attention to psychoanalysis and film, focusing on Alfred Hitchcock's movies.
-
3.00 Credits
This course has as its essential context the crisis of authority of discourse in the modern period subsequent to literature gaining independence from Christianity. It focuses specifically on the three main postures literature strikes vis-à-vis confessional forms of Christianity no longer thought to have cultural capital. 1) The antithetical posture. Here Christianity is viewed in exclusively negative terms as repressive, authoritarian, and obscurantist, the very opposite of a true humanism that is literature's vocation. Readings include Voltaire and French existentialism. 2) The retrievalist posture. This posture is fundamentally nostalgic. The loss of Christianity's cultural authority is mourned, and literature is seen as an illegitimate substitute. Readings will include Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O'Connor. 3) The parasitic posture. Here Christianity is criticized but not totally dismissed. Portions of it are savable, especially select elements of the New Testament that emphasize human being's creative capacities. Readings include Coleridge, Shelley, and Emerson.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|