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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
How the Romantic movement in literature presaged and influenced civic rights on the micro and macro scales.
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3.00 Credits
A seminar focusing on the great body of poetry in English of the last two centuries in which "nature" takes center stage, rather than functioning as scenery, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between humankind, nature, and ecology.
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3.00 Credits
Readings in poetry and poetics, with a particular emphasis on cognitive, educational, and truth claims for poetry from the Renaissance to the present.
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3.00 Credits
We still have to ask how a little island nation managed to dominate, in one sense or another, a large proportion of the civilized world, embracing Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, and India/South Asia. This seminar will address that big question and challenge some of our preconceptions about this great British power. But we will do so mainly through literary works that reveal how compelling the little stories were, as well. How, and for whom, was the empire a career? A calamity? A maker and breaker of families and friendships? By reading the literature of the British empire, we can begin to gain a nuanced, textured sense of these issues and these lives. Students will choose from a great array of research projects drawing from various critical methodologies and interests: the empire showcases problems of law, politics, gender relations, racial and interracial relations, and much more. We will strive to gain a global picture of the British empire, but our emphasis will go to works concerning British India. Literary readings include Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, several works by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster's Passage to India, and George Orwell's Burmese Days. We will encounter lesser-known but important writers (such as Sara Jeanette Duncan and Flora Annie Steel). We will also study at least one Indian film, Lagaan, which shows how modern-day Indian cinema represents the British empire from a century earlier (and teaches us how the game Cricket works!). Assignments include a short paper a longer research paper with preliminary exercises.
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3.00 Credits
Readers of the novel report taking pleasure in identifying with characters, assuming their points of view, and feeling their emotions along with them. This course is designed to explore the strange process through which readers come to feel they share traits with entirely imaginary beings. We will base our investigation on both the philosophy of identification (David Hume and Adam Smith), the psychology of identification (Sigmund Freud), novels featuring beloved literary characters (Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", and Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations") and novels that respond to or even recapitulate those same characters (Bharati Mukherjee's "Jasmine" and Lloyd Jones's "Mister Pip"). Through a series of short response papers, students will form a research question touching on this topic which they will then develop into a seminar-length paper through research, rough drafts and revision.
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3.00 Credits
By engaging a wide variety of modern writers ranging from D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Larsen, Fauset, Barnes, Rhys, Woolf, Langston Hughes, and West; to Lewis, Joyce, and Beckett, the changing contours of literary modernism in the larger context of the philosophical, social, and political cultures of modernity.
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3.00 Credits
A multifaceted analysis of modes of "belief" in postmodern British poetry, with a particular emphasis on how the operations of ancient Hebraic and Christian texts come back into practice for these writers, and why those earlier frameworks for conceptualizing language and "saying God," or failing to say it, seem newly hospitable in the face of deconstructive postmodern theories about "the word."
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3.00 Credits
An intensive study of feminine or women's modernism: modernist aesthetics read in relation to questions of race and gender; the formation of literary modernism's often tense relation to mass culture; the development of political and literary avant-garde cultures (with specific emphasis on those marked by gender and race such as the suffrage movement and the Harlem Renaissance); the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the intimate and complex relationship between modernism and race; and the special attention given to women's experiences of modernity, especially in relation to those aspects of culture typically excluded from definitions of the modern (shopping, maternity, consuming popular, sentimental fictions, etc.).
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3.00 Credits
A study of questions relating to modernism as a literary period and historical concept.
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3.00 Credits
The modernist feminist writer Virginia Woolf lived and worked with a loose collective of writers, painters, and social thinkers that we now call the Bloomsbury Group (though many members of the group disliked the phrase). We will look at the novels, essays, art, interior design, and political writings of some of the members of Bloomsbury - including works by Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Clive Bell - to explore the complex moments of cross-fertilization, critique, and revision that define their encounters. In addition, we will attend to a few areas that have dominated discussions of Bloomsbury modernism: ideas of nation, civilization, and critiques of Empire; the formation of literary modernism's often tense relation to mass culture; the development of modern discourses of sexuality; the relationship between literature and the modern metropolis; and explorations of women's experience of modernity. Because members of the Bloomsbury Group worked in a number of fields beyond the literary - painting, economics, social thought, publishing, and interior design to name a few - students often find that they can easily develop projects that engage more than one area of interest and that combine skills developed in a second major with those that belong to literary criticism. Requirements include one seminar paper (written in stages in consultation with me) of at least 20 pages, participation in one group presentation.
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