| | Description: | This class approaches literature from many angles: the creative to the scholarly, the personal to the ethical, the edifying to the entertaining. At the heart of our study will be a survey of literary "values" such as invention, emotion, style, subversion, beauty, humor-those fundamental reasons readers come to literature in the first place. Through readings and discussion, we will consider the great variety of ways literature expresses these values, and will explore them ourselves via creative assignments. Along the way, we will learn about literary life today through discussions with nationally renowned writers who will visit the class, and through units on literary scholarship, book reviewing, and magazine and book publishing. In the midst of it all, you will write and workshop your own stories, poems, and non-fiction works. |
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| | 01 | M------ | 4:00P-5:00P | Cupples II / 230 | Riker | No final | 36 | 25 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This freshman seminar will address the ways in which politics--radical and conservative, revolutionary and reactionary--inhabit literature and in which literature gives cover and dignity to partisan programs, cultural agendas, ideological arguments. We'll read a variety of texts: plays and poems, satires and novels-literature of the early modern world (Shakespeare and Milton); Augustan satire (Dryden and Swift), high canonical modernists (Eliot and Yeats); and modern fiction (Nadine Gordimer and John Coetzee). We shall ask of all these texts how political force seems to be at work in literature that we often regard as elevated loftily above partisanship, and how literature has been and continues to be used to justify-to dignify-programs and regimes and cultural agendas that can seem to deny values we might hold close. Readings will include, among other texts, Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" Milton's "Areopagitica," Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," Yeats's " Second Coming," Eliot's "Wasteland," Nadine Gordimer's "The Pick-Up," and John Coetzee's "Disgrace" and "Elizabeth Costello." NOTE: This course is open only to freshmen. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Eads / 205 | Zwicker | No final | 15 | 10 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | "Friendship," said Christopher Robin, "is a very comforting thing to have." But is friendship a possession we can "have," or is it something we do, make, or otherwise work toward? This course explores the literary history of friendship from Montaigne to Milne and beyond. What does it mean to call someone a friend? What is the relationship between friendship and kinship, friendship and desire, friendship and community? And what might happen if we, like Foucault, begin to imagine the socio-political possibilities of friendship "as a way of life"? As we read a wide range of literary and theoretical writings about friendship, we will experience the transformation in composition, peer review, and revision when we ask ourselves to think about these practices as intellectual work undertaken by--and for--friends, rather than acquaintances, competitors, or strangers. Primary texts may include fiction by André Aciman, Junot Díaz, Sheila Heti, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. NOTE: This course is open only to freshmen. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-1:00P | Cupples II / L011 | Micir | No final | 15 | 9 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Prize-winning novels and novelists form the entire reading list for this class, which is interested in how writers from multiple perspectives (Christian, Jewish, pluralist, atheist, and others) have viewed the function of religion and the meaning of spirituality. This course is designed for non-English majors as well as potential English majors. As we read some of the best, most influential, and most controversial writers of the last hundred years, we'll discuss not just the competing claims about religion and spirituality, but also the functions, forms, and multiple ways of interpreting literature. Studying the topic of religion and spirituality, this class will thus also serve as introduction to the discipline of English and literary studies. All are welcome: no religious background of any kind is necessary. NOTE: This course is open only to freshmen. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | Sever / 300 | Van Engen | No final | 15 | 10 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course provides beginning students of English with a chronological outline of early literature in English from the middle ages to the late eighteenth century. It introduces them to the central themes, genres, and forces that have shaped the early history of literature as well as the tools, vocabularies, and critical practices of literary studies. We will organize our semester around four themes: inventing a nation; the sacred and the secular; centers and margins; private and public. We will study, among others, at least four of the following key texts and authors: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and one of Defoe's novels. NOTE: Satisfies one of the two 200-level requirements for the English Major. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:30P | Duncker / 3 | Gurnis | No final | 20 | 20 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| 02 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:30P | Seigle / 111 | Basu | No final | 18 | 14 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Wrighton / 260 | Sherry | No final | 15 | 11 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| 02 | M-W---- | 2:30P-4:00P | Cupples II / L011 | McKelvy | No final | 15 | 12 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The course examines the various facets of modernity in major works of European, Eurasian, and, sometimes, American literature from the early Seventeenth Century to the 1920s, starting with Don Quixote. We will explore, among other things, the eruption of the novel, the secularization of autobiography, the literary discovery of the city, the rise of literary and aesthetic criticism that takes literature and art seriously as political and social institutions. In addition to literary works, the course will engage with two or three important models of critical practice e.g. Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, Marx's German Ideology, Freud's, The Interpretation of Dreams, T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, or perhaps that great work of fictionalized literary criticism, Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." |
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| | Description: | This course examines the concept, history, and culture of American exceptionalism -- the idea that America has been specially chosen, or has a special mission to the world. First, we examine the Puritan sermon that politicians quote when they describe America as a "city on a hill." This sermon has been called the "ur-text" of American literature, the foundational document of American culture. Learning and drawing from multiple literary methodologies, we will re-investigate what that sermon means and how it came to tell a story about the Puritan origins of American culture -- a thesis our class will reassess with the help of modern critics. In the second part of this class, we broaden our discussion to consider the wider (and newer) meanings of American exceptionalism, theorizing the concept while looking at the way it has been revitalized, redefined and redeployed in recent years. Finally, the course ends with a careful study of American exceptionalism in modern political rhetoric, starting with JFK and proceeding through Reagan to the current day. Our last days will be spent discussing the rhetoric and legacy of American exceptionalism in the speeches of Obama and Trump. In the end, students will gain a firm grasp of the long history and continuing significance of this concept in American culture.
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| | Description: | Starting with Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," a book that helped re-ignite the Culture Wars, this course will consider the debates and problems that pervaded American culture during the 1990s. From the end of the Cold War to the sexual scandals that rocked Bill Clinton's presidency, from the emergence of the Internet to the rise of grunge and rap, the 1990s were a time of vast change in American culture. It was period when we, as a nation, reconsidered the legacy of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, and the end of the Cold War, a time of economic expansion and cultural tension. In our consideration of this period, we will take a multidisciplinary approach when tackling a variety of materials-ranging from literary fiction (Philip Roth's "The Human Stain," Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections") and popular films (Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and The Cohen brothers' "The Big Lebowski") to personal memoir and the music of Nirvana and Public Enemy-in an attempt to come to a better understanding of our recent history. Throughout the semester, we will pursue the vexed cultural, political, and historical questions that Americans faced in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and consider how literary texts imagined this period of American history. Other possible texts include David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," Joan Didion's "Political Fictions," Toni Morrison's "Paradise," John Updike's "Rabbit at Rest," and Elizabeth Wurtzel's "Prozac Nation." Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-4:00P | Ridgley / 107 | Shipe | No final | 15 | 18 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The stories surrounding King Arthur, Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the Holy Grail have been told and retold for nearly a millennium. In this course we will trace the development of the Arthurian legend from its medieval origins through the literature of our own time, in genres ranging from the novel to poetry to romance to film. We will examine the development of ideas about heroism and chivalry, sexuality and feminine power, social order, and the sacred. Readings will range from the twelfth-century origins of Arthurian legend to the Victorian revival of Arthuriana and beyond. Along the way we will encounter well-known literature such as "Gawain and the Green Knight," Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur," and Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," but we will also take time to explore works outside the academic mainstream, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Mists of Avalon" and modern film portrayals of the Arthurian legends, including the musical "Camelot" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Satisfies the medieval requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Cupples II / 200 | Reynolds | No final | 25 | 18 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This course explores what happens when the expressive energy of black-authored genres of American popular music--ragtime, blues, jazz, rock, and rap--spills over into modern and contemporary American literature. Why did ragtime come to symbolize interracial and international mixture in the early 20th-century American novel, and how did jazz--and the slogan of the "Jazz Age"--grow to signify the national distinctiveness of American modernism? How did rock help to steer the postmodern turn, and why is rap now canonizing itself as an academic poetry through thick anthologies and footnote-heavy artist memoirs? How has American writing's long-running commentary on popular music affected that music's history and mythology--and vice versa? Writers (and writer-musicians) to be studied include James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Gwendolyn Bennett, Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, Frank O'Hara, Rita Dove, Bob Dylan, Don DeLillo, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and Jay-Z. Musical or musicological experience is welcome, but truly not required. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Lopata Hall / 302 | Maxwell | No final | 25 | 18 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Little Goody Two Shoes taught morality and the alphabet to the poor children of her village and eventually rode in a coach and six; Nancy Drew drove a blue roadster (later a convertible and still later a hybrid) while solving crimes and bringing justice to the town of River Heights. Between these two landmark characters lie the two and a half centuries of rich and diverse fiction for girls that will be at the center of this writing-intensive course. After grounding our studies by reading selected works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will concentrate on twentieth-century productions, beginning with the surprisingly progressive serial fiction produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and others in the early 1900s. (Titles such as The Motor Girls, The Moving Picture Girls, and The Outdoor Girls advertise the series´ departure from domestic settings.) Throughout our study of both popular and classic texts, we will investigate the social, political and familial roles for girls that the texts imagine. Major genres will include mysteries, frontier fiction, career fiction, domestic fiction, school stories, and fantasy. Authors will include Newbery, Alcott, Montgomery, Wilder, Lindgren, and "Carolyn Keene." Writing Intensive. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:30P | Rudolph / 282 | Pawl | No final | 14 | 15 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| 02 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:30P | Cupples II / L011 | Pawl | No final | 14 | 15 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | "Twitter stands for everything I oppose," novelist Jonathan Franzen once said. Yet whether contemporary writers love it or hate it, "new media" such as blogs, wikis, video games, and social media networks have become a central part of contemporary society and the subject of much contemporary fiction, including Franzen's. This course will explore how 21st-century American writers represent and incorporate forms of new media, mostly focusing on the novel but also considering works that experiment with new media platforms and expand our sense of what literature is and can be. How does new media influence the way individuals relate to each other, themselves, the nation, and the world? What kinds of communities, social movements, and political coalitions are made possible? What threats to privacy, democracy, or truth do they pose? From canonical postwar writers to new emerging voices, from the novel to Twitter fiction, we will explore the widening landscapes and evolving shape of contemporary American fiction in the social media age. Potential authors include Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Ruth Ozeki, Tao Lin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ben Lerner, and Teju Cole. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and Later requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:30P | Duncker / 3 | Walsh | No final | 25 | 6 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The Stonewall Riots of 1969 are often understood as marking the beginning of a coherent queer culture in the United States. However, long before 1969, U.S. writers such as James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, and Walt Whitman depicted queer sexuality in their work. In this course, through our readings of fiction, poetry, and drama, we will survey queer literary production before the liberatory moment of Stonewall. During the semester, we will also screen several films, such as the award-winning Capote and the experimental documentary Looking for Langston. Throughout, we will consider a number of questions. What, if anything, is unique about queerness in America? How do American writers represent nonnormative sexualities, in either explicit or coded ways? In what ways did the pre-Stonewall U.S. enable lesbian and gay sexualities, and in what ways did it render those identities unsustainable? How do racial, class, and gender identities intersect with sexual identities? What is queer about the literary forms and styles these writers deployed? Satisfies the Twentieth Century and Later requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:30P | Seigle / 205 | Windle | No final | 25 | 6 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Emerging in American films most forcefully during the 1940s, film noir is a cycle of films associated with a distinctive visual style and a cynical worldview. In this course, we will explore the sexual politics of film noir as a distinctive vision of American sexual relations every bit as identifiable as the form's stylized lighting and circuitous storytelling. We will explore how and why sexual paranoia and perversion seem to animate this genre and why these movies continue to influence "neo-noir" filmmaking into the 21st century, even as film noir's representation of gender and sexuality is inseparable from its literary antecedents, most notably, the so-called "hard-boiled" school of writing. We will read examples from this literature by Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich, and discuss these novels and short stories in the context of other artistic and cultural influences on gendered power relations and film noir. We will also explore the relationship of these films to censorship and to changing post-World War II cultural values. Films to be screened in complete prints or in excerpts will likely include many of the following: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Murder My Sweet, Phantom Lady, Strangers on a Train, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The High Wall, Sudden Fear, The Big Combo, Laura, The Glass Key, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, The Crimson Kimono, Touch of Evil, Alphaville, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Bad Lieutenant, and Memento. Required Screenings: Mondays @ 4 pm. |
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| | Description: | At its zenith, the British Empire encompassed almost a quarter of the globe, allowing the diminutive island nation unprecedented economic, military, and political influence upon the rest of the world. This course will introduce some of the foundational responses to this dominance, both literary and theoretical, by the colonized and their descendants. We will examine literary works that engage with postcolonial critique by authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Raja Rao, George Lamming, Doris Lessing, and N'gugi wa Thiong'o, as well as important critiques of colonialism by a variety of influential thinkers. Overall, the course will investigate how literature might have helped consolidate Empire, as well as ways in which it saw itself as a key mode of rebellion against imperial power, and we will end by considering how the urgent issues of postcolonial literature - race, gender, language, nationalism, identity - continue to haunt today's global literature. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-1:00P | January Hall / 10A | Brown | No final | 25 | 13 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Mallinckrodt / 305 | Zafar | No final | 25 | 8 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | What if you had made a different choice, taken the other of Frost's "two roads diverged in a yellow wood," and your life had been completely different? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? What if Hitler had never been born? And why are twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists so interested in the exploration of counterfactuality? Building on the critical contributions of Catherine Gallagher and Andrew Miller, this course traces the various methods by which writers like Kingsley Amis, Kate Atkinson, Octavia Butler, Michael Chabon, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Philip Roth, and Virginia Woolf imagine the lives we might have led (but didn't) and the alternate worlds we might have inhabited (but haven't). What's so interesting about what never happened? Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Umrath / 140 | Micir | No final | 25 | 22 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This course will trace the development of a new literary genre that emerged in the nineteenth century, Science Fiction. Major discoveries in biological, geological, and astronomical science spurred writers to imagine entirely new worlds and social orders. But writers were divided about the future. Some were utopians, imagining science as the gateway to greater leisure and prosperity; others were dystopians, imagining a world of destructive behavior driven by out of control scientific discoveries. The course will include major works by Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and William Morris. Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | Cupples II / 200 | Wihl | No final | 25 | 13 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The black athlete is a central figure in American entertainment, and has been since Frederick Douglass decried Christmastime slave games in his Narrative. This course will examine literary depictions of black athletes-in novels, memoirs, essays, and poems-in order to better understand the cultural significance of sportsmen and women in the African American struggle for equality, from abolitionism to the "Black Lives Matter" movement. We will read works by Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, and examine the lives and athletic pursuits of prominent athletes such as Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Wilma Rudolph, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James. Popular perceptions of gender and sexuality, in addition to race and racism, will factor into our readings, especially as students incorporate secondary sources into their own research. |
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| | 02 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | Simon / 022 | Walker | Dec 18 2017 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 0 | 17 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-4:00P | Cupples II / L007 | Bailin | No final | 20 | 9 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| 02 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:30A | Rudolph / 282 | Milder | No final | 15 | 11 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Let's take as our theme dwelling in possibility and Emily Dickinson will set the pace. Why did she compare poetry to a fairer house than prose and do all poets believe that poetry is fundamentally different from prose? Did Dickinson, in fact, believe that? These and other questions can guide us as we move from Walt Whitman's radically innovative "Leaves of Grass," composed in the shadow of the impending American Civil War, into the contemporary era. In addition to Whitman (1855-1892) and Dickinson (1830-1886), major stops along the way will include Robert Frost (1874-1963), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), and Langston Hughes (1902-1967). Although these are diverse creative voices, we will be reflecting on their common writerly concerns. The course, then, will study poetry in its biographical and cultural context from the American Renaissance of the 1850s to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and beyond. Whenever possible, we will listen to recordings of our poets reading from their work. Frost, for example, who loved to perform in public, developed an elaborate theory of "the sound of sense." What did he mean by it and what other sounds did this theory exclude? |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-1:00P | Duncker / 3 | Pollak | No final | 15 | 7 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-4:00P | Eads / 102 | Lawton | No final | 25 | 25 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This is an introductory course on Shakespeare. We will read seven or eight plays and, perhaps, some non-dramatic poems, studying the abiding concerns of his career, considering the social and cultural functions of his theater, and examining his interventions in dramatic traditions, political thinking, sexual politics, and literary history. Some short written exercises, two or three papers of moderate length, and a final exam will be required. Satisfies the Early Modern requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-4:00P | Cupples II / L009 | Gurnis | Dec 20 2017 3:30PM - 5:30PM | 30 | 14 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | --W---- | 4:00P-6:30P | Duncker / 210 | Batten | No final | 25 | 8 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | ---R--- | 4:00P-6:30P | Eads / 205 | Rosenfeld | No final | 15 | 8 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | The philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers uses the phrase "poetic listening" to characterize what she calls "natural processes" - "open processes of production and invention, in an open, productive, and inventive world" - as well as scientific knowledge conceived as a form of "'poetic listening' to nature." To these natural and scientific aspects we can add two more, for poetic listening also characterizes innovative work in science studies like Stengers's own writing and of course functions in ambitious contemporary poetry as well. We will examine how such listening operates on all four levels, and draw relevant conclusions, by focusing on the investigations of Stengers and her frequent collaborator, Bruno Latour, and on several extraordinary poets who in recent decades have demonstrated an especially strong interest in science: A. R. Ammons, Lyn Hejinian, and Jay Wright. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Rudolph / 282 | Meyer | No final | 15 | 6 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | This course builds on the new interest in whiteness studies, which assumes that whiteness and masculinity are social constructions rather than "natural" identities. Moving from about 1830 to 1925, we will explore the development of a deeply contested discourse of "national manhood" in the United States, as it emerges in historically specific circumstances. How does whiteness intersect with related discourses of gender, sexuality, and social class? Beginning with the apocalyptic poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe, we will examine terrorized whiteness as an identifying feature of normative masculinity in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Do these authors claim the power to resist threats to their individual autonomy? To what extent do they experience masculine self-reliance as a myth? How do they imagine meaningful communities? Addressing these social issues and related aesthetic questions, we will venture, as Whitman says, "in paths untrodden." Students will write three papers of increasing complexity and there will be shorter writing assignments as well. Class attendance and active participation are required, naturally! Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-4:00P | Duncker / 3 | Pollak | No final | 15 | 13 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | As the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein approaches, this class will study both the novel's origins and its powerful and abiding influence on our culture across a wide range of disciplines. The text itself is complex and layered, responding to its literary precursors, Enlightenment science, radical politics, aesthetic theory, feminism, Romantic idealism, Gothic horror, and more. In order to understand these influences, we will examine texts read by Mary Shelley (and her characters), including letters, essays, poems, and scientific reports. Our study of the novel's afterlives will begin with R. B. Peake's 1823 play, Presumption, which shaped much of the popular understanding of the Frankenstein myth during the 19th century. Our investigation of 20th- and 21st-century manifestations of Frankenstein will focus on its appearance in film, racial discourse, scientific ethics, popular culture, and advertising. This portion of the course will include a viewing of the iconic 1931 Boris Karloff film, which established indelible versions of the mad scientist and his "monster." Students in this seminar will be supported in developing individual final projects of their own design. (This course is the same as L93 450, but without the Writing Intensive designation.) |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | Seigle / 111 | Pawl, Treitel | No final | 20 | 19 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | When Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) moved in 1904 from the "rich red gloom" of their patriarchal home to the "light and air" of a flat in the Bloomsbury section of London, they were symbolically cutting themselves loose from oppressive Victorianism and embarking not only upon artistic careers (one as a writer, the other as a painter) but upon a life of intensified consciousness and sexual freedom with complications neither could have foreseen. The development of Bloomsbury was a rich cultural phenomenon recorded in autobiographies, journals, letters, essays, and memoirs as well as in fiction, and involving a fascinating group of personalities: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, writers Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and Vita Sackville-West, economist John Maynard Keynes, and others. The course will include writings in several genres, along with Hermione Lee's superb biography of Woolf and Alex Zwerdling's "Virginia Woolf and the Real World."
Its focus will not be on literary modernism so much as on the challenging process of "becoming modern." Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | Description: | This course will examine pre-Shakespearean theatre in England and its antecedents in European drama between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. It will look at rhetoric, and genres such as debate and disputation; at medieval courtly interludes and popular mummings; at the drama of the medieval Church, including plays about saints´ lives (miracles) and the great gild cycles of the fifteenth century (mysteries); and at the morality drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which is sometimes religious and sometimes popular (Everyman,Mankind). It will also look at drama in Latin and French, such as the work of Hildegard of Bingen, dramas written in a mixture of Latin and Provencal, and the farces of Arras. We will read Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) as a way of framing, and directing, our inquiry. Modern performances of key works will be shown (or in the case of the great music dramas, listened to) in whole or part. Satisfies the Medieval requirement. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Cupples II / L007 | Lawton | No final | 15 | 13 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | Students in this research lab undertake research and experiment with the writing of an entry for a Handbook of Twenty-First Feminist Theory. The goal of the Handbook is to review the recent history of feminist theory's major concepts (body, gender, intersectionality, writing, etc), in order to discuss where feminist theory is going next. The concept we will focus on is "affect." The research lab will explore feminist theory's rewriting of the equation of woman with the body in the grip of its passions, its critique of the reason/emotion antinomy, and its advocacy of various modes of knowing through emotion (Jaggar). We will consider projects as diverse as the critique of happiness (Ahmed), love (Kipnis) or optimism (Berlant); the re-valuing of anger (hooks) or grief (Butler); or the recuperation of envy (Ngai). We will trace the imbrication of emotion and capitalism (Hochschilds); the relation between affective labor and "women's work" in post-Fordism (Weeks), the racialization of emotion (Ahmed) and its globalization through the care industry (Sassen). The main assignment for the course will be to write a 6,000 words essay titled "Affect in Feminist Theory." Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:30A | Eads / 209 | Parvulescu | No final | 10 | 8 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:30A | Cupples II / L007 | Arch | No final | 15 | 9 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | Description: | The Great War of 1914-1918 is one of the most momentous events in history. We can approach its broad European import by reading its literatures comparatively. Far wider than the concerns of any one national ideology, the literature of record represents a profound crisis in the European cultural imaginary. A number of critical and interpretive issues will be in play in our readings, which will move through three major phases. We begin with the powerful immediacy of trench poetry (1914-1919), develop into the constructed narratives of the great postwar novels and memoirs (1920-1931), and then turn toward the retrospect of the 1930s, which is also the prospect on the next, now inevitable, war. The authors featured include combatant and civilian writers, names well-known and not so famous: Mann, Apollinaire, Owen, Pound, Cocteau, H.D., Woolf, Maurois, West, Celine, Joyce, Musil, Eliot, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves, Hardy, Trakl, Stramm, Lichtenstein, Péguy, Barbusse, Manning, Jünger, Zweig, Brittain, and Kroner. All readings for class will be in English translation. Our secondary literature will provide approaches to specific texts and models of literary and cultural history that represent the longer-range importance of the war. |
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| | Description: | American literary study has not shouted from the rooftops about authoritarianism. In the U.S. context, largely resistant to the fascist temptation of the 1930s, Orwellian and other anti-totalitarian allegories have been for high schoolers; Hitler, Mussolini, and company enter as distant topics only in discussions of the Pound Era, the Frankfurt School, and some Foucauldian biopolitics; and the assumed enemy of most varieties of radical interpretation has been the naive liberal rather than the Stalinist apparatchik or Nazi collaborator. Despite the relative indifference of academic criticism, however, a significant vein of 20th- and 21st-century American writing indeed grapples with authoritarianism's causes and consequences and imagines what might unfold if it found a foothold here. This seminar aims to introduce students to three main lines in this vein: historical narratives from Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964) to Nancy Isenberg's Trumpsplaining book "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" (2016); theoretical accounts from Hannah Arendt's first American publication, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), to Vaughn Rasberry's "Race and the Totalitarian Century" (2016); and creative dystopian fictions from Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here" (1935)--the inspiration for the class title--to Gary Shteyngart's tragically hilarious "Super Sad True Love Story" (2010). These readings will help us tackle a number of pressing questions about responsible literary study, not to mention informed citizenship, after November 2016. What will become of canons and syllabi of American exceptionalism--of the left as well as of the right--amid an international wave of reactionary neo-nationalism? What does the unexpected emergence of an influential, explicitly anti-intellectual alt-right in the U.S. mean for the willfully progressive projects of feminist criticism, disability studies, critical race studies, and queer theory? Should "paranoid reading" now mount a principled comeback? |
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| | Description: | A seminar on the small objects, the ornaments and accessories, of Early Modern personhood -- watches, seals, spectacles, smelling boxes, gloves, passports, purses, handkerchiefs, "jewels," and portrait miniatures; we will especially aim to situate within this miscellany such special apparatuses as writing tablets, small-format books, loose papers. We will examine the symbolic freight of these objects and will consider their relation to such timely or emergent genres as the adage, the essay, the emblem, the sonnet, and the object narrative. We will ask how an understanding of these often elaborately superficial Things might contribute to -- or directly challenge -- the historiography of inwardness. Authors to be examined include Erasmus, Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Donne, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Jonson, and Nashe. |
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| | Description: | Have we ever been modern? In this survey of the intellectual history of the German-speaking world from early nineteenth century to the present, we will read works by some of the most influential figures in the German tradition, including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Habermas, Arendt, and Hartmut Rosa. Our discussions will address a range of topics but will focus on the ways in which these thinkers conceive of "modernity" -- its promise and its perils, its origins and its others. We will consider the arguments of these thinkers both on their own terms and against the backdrop of the historical contexts in which they were written. |
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