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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
When Lionel reflects, in Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792), "I found that if I would really satisfy myself with a certain view of Geraldine, I must seek some spot, where, from its elevation, I could, by means of a small pocket telescope, have an uninterrupted view of these windows," and the eponymous heroine of Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) observes "I shall, I suspect, be impelled by an irresistible impulse to seek you. Though you have condemned my affection, my friendship will still follow you," they represent an extreme unrequited devotion that is part of the period's preoccupation with passion. The novel of the 1790s teems with rapists, stalkers, abusive employers, weeping men and fighting women who confront prison, madness, murder, jealousy and suicidal melancholy. This course aims to explore the significance of passion for understanding developments in the representation of femininity, masculinity, social virtue and humanitarian reform at the end of the eighteenth century.
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3.00 Credits
The British Victorians witnessed unprecedented urbanization, internal migration, and globalization. This course will survey how Victorians understood their relationship to place, how they changed their understanding of what even counted as place, and how literature mediated those understandings.
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3.00 Credits
A close reading of selected 19th-century British novels.
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3.00 Credits
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!" (William Wordsworth). One of the most exciting things about the Romantic period in Britain is its engagement with ideas and themes that attract the young: human rights, democracy, travel, satire, love, melancholy and horror. We will sail with Coleridge's ancient mariner, walk the Lake District with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, peer into Percy Shelley's soul and luxuriate with Keats. We will discover what it means to see poetry as "indeed something divine" and poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." We will learn the language of sensibility and understand how Marianne Dashwood's "effusions of sorrow," in Austen's Sense and Sensibility, fit into a cult of writing on the expressive body. Why is John Clare so interested in birds' nests? Why are mountains "sublime" and ruins "picturesque"? Who is the "Man of Feeling"? Central themes will include Romantic historicism, revolutionary politics, the dissenting tradition, human rights, picturesque and sublime aesthetics, feminism, sensibility, experimentalism, gothic literature, and travel writing. Key authors will include Jane Austen, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Keats, Robert Southey, John Clare and William Hazlitt.
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3.00 Credits
A study of the romantic theme in Irish literature from Edgeworth and Moore to the young Yeats and Joyce. This course will include poetry, fiction, drama and aesthetics.
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3.00 Credits
This double-author course showcases what most readers would see as an "odd couple" among Victorian authors. Charles Dickens (1812-70) was the Shakespeare of his time, a prolific creator of memorable characters and incidents, at once comic and tragic. But post-Victorian critics often see him as a prime exponent of Victorian earnestness, sentimentality and even hypocrisy. And Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was, well, the Wilde of Victorian Britain: he was so dazzling that even those who wished to hate him often had to give up and laugh with him. But his life took a classically tragic form after his public humiliation and imprisonment for homosexual offenses. Our principal texts by Dickens will probably be Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend. Our readings in Wilde will cover the gamut of his efforts but emphasize his society comedies and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Graded coursework includes three papers and a final exam, along with reading quizzes and participation.
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3.00 Credits
The aims of this course are both methodological and historical. The methodological part will consist of an introduction to hermeneutics (in a broad sense) as theorized and/or practiced in certain areas of modern continental philosophy. After a brief look at the crucial innovations of Husserl, we shall study carefully chosen extracts (in English translation) of Heidegger: Being and Time and What is Called Thinking, Gadamer: Truth and Method, and Derrida: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination in order to illuminate the different (even opposing) ways in which the idea of "hermeneutics" can develop. This general discussion will be combined with specific consideration of the themes of allegory and negativity. The historical part of the course will concentrate on late ancient, patristic, and early medieval readings (Origen: On First Principles, Augustine: On Christian Teaching, Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus). Here, we shall attempt to advance our comprehension of ancient literature by 1. looking for parallels with modern hermeneutic techniques, 2. applying the modern techniques in test cases. The course is intended to be relatively open-ended, i.e., students will be expected to think about the way in which these discussions are internally coherent and also relate to their own areas of interest (which may be elsewhere in philosophy, theology, or literature (Latin or vernacular)). Requirement: one final essay of ca. 20 pp.
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3.00 Credits
A close analysis of the fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction written during the 1930s.
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3.00 Credits
Depictions of India by British writers in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on four highly important and innovative, though still often underrated, poets: Velimir Khlebnikov, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Miron Biaoszewski.
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