| | 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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| | Description: | James Bond, in Casino Royale, introduces us to Africa with a group of men betting on a fight between a mongoose and a snake; Hotel Rwanda creates an Africa of beautiful landscapes marred by the violence of genocide; Casablanca positions Africa as the site of wartime fantasy, intrigue and romance. These imaginary Africas, however, obscure the continent's irreducible complexity. As many as 3,000 languages are spoken across Africa's 54 countries, each defined by a unique blend of urban and rural cultures. The people of the Central African country of Chad belong to more than 100 ethnic groups. From their regional affiliations to their sociocultural perspectives, Africa's writers are no less diverse, its literary traditions no less dynamic. By examining texts from various genres and regions, we will trace the development of African literature by considering its roots in the oral traditions and colonial history of the continent, its role in the articulation of African subjectivity on the road to independence, its response to the challenges of the post-independence era, and its present-day stronghold within the global literary marketplace. Readings will include works by Ferdinand Oyono, Nadine Gordimer, Ousmane Sembène, Assia Djebar, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Dinaw Mengestu, among others. No prior knowledge of the literature of Africa is required. |
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| | Description: | Students enrolled in this course engage in close and sustained reading of a set of texts that are indispensable for an understanding of the European literary tradition, texts that continue to offer invaluable insights into humanity and the world around us. Homer's Iliad is the foundation of our class. We then go on to trace ways in which later poets and dramatists engage the work of predecessors who inspire and challenge them. Readings move from translations of Greek, Latin, and Italian, to poetry and drama composed in English. In addition to Homer, we will read works of Sappho, a Greek tragedian, Plato, Vergil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare. Preference given to Text and Tradition and IPH students. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Seigle / 305 | Henke | No final | 0 | 15 | 0 | | Desc: | SPECIAL INFORMATION FOR SECTION 01: Students must enroll in both L93 201C-01 and L93 203C-01 with Profs. Brown and Henke. Class will meet four times per week with two faculty members to study an integrated list of chronologically ordered texts culled from "Classical to Renaissance Literature" and "Early Political Thought." The unified list will allow the group to develop a sharper understanding of how contemporaneous political and literary discourses can both complement and contradict one another as they address overlapping and intersecting concerns. |
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| 02 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:30P | Seigle / 205 | Stamatopoulou | No final | 20 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | SPECIAL INFORMATION FOR SECTION 02: This course is part of the Ampersand program "The Age of Pericles" (Classics). Students participating in the Ampersand program are required to enroll in Greek or Latin at the appropriate level. |
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| | Description: | "World Literature" examines and draws connections between literary texts originally produced in various parts of the world (Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America) from the early 20th century to the contemporary period. Throughout the semester, we will move across different Western and Eastern cultures, experiences of modernity, and literary genres (mostly fiction and poetry, but also drama, movie adaptations and graphic novels). A particular sub-theme connecting the various works that we will read in this course examines how the development of World Literature reflects the global expansion of Western colonialism during the 20th century. Some of the texts that we will read include: Chekhov's UNCLE VANYA; Lorca's POET IN NEW YORK; Akutagawa's "Rashomon" and "In a grove," Cortázar's BLOW-UP; Borges' "THE ALEPH," Lispector's THE HOUR OF THE STAR; Tutuola's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts;" Yang's AMERICAN BORN CHINESE; Gyasi's HOMEGOING; Nolan's MEMENTO; Laroui 's CURIOUS CASE; and Satrapi's PERSEPOLIS. "World Literature" provides an introduction to the concept and practice of comparative literature for undergraduates majoring and minoring in Comparative Literature, Comparative Arts, IPH, or with related interests in literature and global culture. No prerequisites; freshmen are welcome. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Cupples II / L009 | Infante | No final | 26 | 26 | 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---- | 12:00P-1:00P | Seigle / L006 | McClelland | Dec 19 2018 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 74 | 63 | 0 | | |
| A | ----F-- | 12:00P-1:00P | Seigle / 305 | McClelland | Default - none | 20 | 17 | 0 | | |
| B | ----F-- | 12:00P-1:00P | Seigle / 205 | McClelland | Default - none | 20 | 20 | 0 | | |
| C | ----F-- | 12:00P-1:00P | Seigle / 210 | McClelland | Default - none | 20 | 17 | 0 | | |
| D | ----F-- | 12:00P-1:00P | Seigle / 104 | McClelland | Default - none | 13 | 9 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Rum! Fun! Beaches! Sun! This is the image of the Caribbean in America today. This course will survey literature and culture from these islands, looking both at and beyond this tourists' paradise. It will aim to introduce students to the region's unmistakably vibrant tradition of multicultural mixture, while keeping an eye on the long history of slavery and rebellion out of which the islands' contemporary situation formed. Along the way we will encounter a wide variety of texts, from the earliest writing focused on life in urban slums, to the first novel ever to have a Rastafarian as its hero, to more contemporary considerations of the region's uncertain place in a U.S.-dominated world. Toward the end of the course, we will also look at important films like The Harder They Come as well as discussing the most globally famous cultural product of the contemporary Caribbean: reggae music. The course will involve readings from multiple genres, and will cover authors such as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. |
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| | Description: | Intro to Comparative Arts is an interdisciplinary, multimedia course designed to introduce students to the study not of the literatures of various languages, cultures, and historical periods, but rather of the relationship among the arts in a given period. In Fall 2018, we will address art connections in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as in the 19th and 20th centuries, examining how one form illuminates another or perhaps changes its message. We will often make comparative studies of the arts through the lens of music: how composers can offer renditions (vocal or instrumental) of a subject that was first treated in text or painting. In addition, we will read literary works featuring other art forms (a painting or performance within a text); consider theories of representation and expression; and learn about the rise of cultural institutions such as the library, the museum, and the public concert hall and their relationship to the public.
In their written work, students will venture beyond the course material, alternately assuming the roles of artist, critic, and consumer. Students will be required to attend performances and exhibits. Among the authors, composers, and artists studied are: the trouvères, Petrarch, Goethe, Heine, Mallarmé, Huysman, Wilde, Pamuk, Schubert, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Kaulbach, and Moreau.
Ability to read music is not required.
Cross-listed with Music.
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| | Description: | This course will approach the history, culture and literature of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust by focusing on one particular aspect of the period-the experience of children. Children as a whole were drastically affected by the policies of the Nazi regime and the war it conducted in Europe, yet different groups of children experienced the period in radically different ways, depending on who they were and where they lived. By reading key texts written for and about children, we will first take a look at how the Nazis made children-both those they considered "Aryan" and those they designated "enemies" of the German people, such as Jewish children-an important focus of their politics. We will then examine literary texts and films that depict different aspects of the experience of European children during this period: daily life in the Nazi state, the trials of war and bombardment in Germany and the experience of expulsion from the East and defeat, the increasingly restrictive sphere in which Jewish children were allowed to live, the particular difficulties children faced in the Holocaust, and the experience of children in the immediate postwar period. Readings include texts by Ruth Klüger, Harry Mulisch, Imre Kertész, Miriam Katin, David Grossman and others. Course conducted entirely in English. OPEN TO FRESHMEN. STUDENTS MUST ENROLL IN BOTH MAIN SECTION AND ONE DISCUSSION SECTION. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 12:00P-1:00P | Brown / 118 | McGlothlin | Dec 19 2018 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 90 | 63 | 0 | | Desc: | Discussion section registration is required for this course. |
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| B | ----F-- | 12:00P-1:00P | Eads / 215 | Bauder | No final | 20 | 13 | 0 | | |
| E | ----F-- | 11:00A-12:00P | Eads / 215 | Bauder | No final | 20 | 7 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | When the first Chinese sojourners arrived in America during the California Gold Rush in 1848, the locals regarded them as inscrutable and inassimilable. Today, Chinese Americans are the American society's most productive and responsible citizens. From coolie to Fu Manchu, from Charlie Chan to the model minority, from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan, from Kung Fu Panda to Yo-Yo Ma, this series of images tells some of the stories of the dynamics between immigrants and the local residents and the Chinese Americans' journey of assimilation. In this course, we will trace this historical trajectory by way of writers' and filmmakers' imagination and representation of the experiences of those Chinese who left their homeland in search for means to build a better life for their children back in the home country or here in the adopted land. We will explore questions such as: How do the Chinese diaspora long for their cultural origin "China" in their various lengths of living abroad? Does diaspora have an expiration date? Through works by writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Gish Jen and Ha Jin, and filmmakers such as Wayne Wang and Ang Lee, we will also examine issues of community building, the politics of hyphenation (Asian-American, inter-national, pan-Asian, etc.), and the role of gender in identity construction. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-1:00P | Somers Family / 251 | Chen | 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: | This course examines the idea of connectivity in the arts. Via novels, paintings,photography, and film, we will explore questions of interpretation related to the themes of love and betrayal; bequests and legacy; and innocence and responsibility. A series of paintings by Vermeer and other Dutch masters depicting elegant women (and their dogs) in the company of their suitors will engage us in elaborate courtship rituals played out using letters, music, and wine. We will also consider how, during the reigns of Francis I and Louis XIV, the French monarchy integrated Dutch art into its collections in order to assert the king's influence and authority. Students will discuss portraits that emerge from complex tableaux in Laclos's masterful novel of seduction, LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES; in 19th-century paintings; and in contemporary photographs. The class will read Doeer's ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE and de Waal's HARE WITH THE AMBER EYES, stories that link history with art, the past with the present, and gifts with thefts and bereavements. We will study Daoud's MEURSAULT INVESTIGATION in relation to the work that inspired it: Camus's OUTSIDER [L'ETRANGER]. Adaptation will likewise inform our readings of Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, Barnes's SENSE OF AN ENDING, and the pair of films based on these novels.The class will assess aspects of the original story that are lost on screen as well as the added resonances that the novels acquire in the film versions. Class taught in English. |
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| | 02 | M-W-F-- | 11:00A-12:00P | Eads / 216 | Stone | No final | 20 | 16 | 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 explore the diversity of women´s writing in the Middle Ages: from religious lyrics to love poems, romance to autobiography, mystical treatise to history, letters to literary criticism. We will consider the methods women used to gain authority as writers, the way they participated in and transformed traditionally male genres, and the way specific cultural conditions inhibited or allowed female literary expression. We will also explore the kinds of religious instruction and advice literature that were directed at female audiences, and which often became popular among lay readers more generally. Both the usefulness and the problems of conceiving a category of "women´s writing" will be explored throughout the course. Authors will likely include Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, women troubadours, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan. Satisfies the Medieval requirement. |
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| | Description: | The course will present basic data modeling concepts and will focus on their application to data clean-up and organization (text markup, Excel, and SQL). Aiming to give humanities students the tools they will need to assemble and manage large data sets relevant to their research, the course will teach fundamental skills in programming relevant to data management (using Python); it will also teach database design and querying (SQL).
The course will cover a number of "basics": the difference between word processing files, plain text files, and structured XML; best practices for version control and software "hygiene"; methods for cleaning up data; regular expressions (and similar tools built into most word processors). It will proceed to data modeling: lists (Excel, Python); identifiers/keys and values (Excel, Python, SQL); tables/relations (SQL and/or data frames); joins (problem in Excel, solution in SQL, or data frames); hierarchies (problem in SQL/databases, solution in XML); and network graph structures (nodes and edges in CSV). It will entail basic scripting in Python, concentrating on using scripts to get data from the web, and the mastery of string handling. |
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| | 01 | -T----- | 2:30P-3:30P | Eads / 13 | Knox | Dec 19 2018 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 20 | 20 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W-F-- | 10:00A-11:00A | Cupples II / 200 | Williams | No final | 20 | 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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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-4:00P | Seigle / 210 | Ake, Ward | Paper/Project/TakeHome | 0 | 19 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course is an introduction to the multiple methodologies of the vigorous and innovative field of narrative theory. Students will explore core texts of classical and contemporary narratology with an eye not only toward understanding the diversity of narrative theoretical approaches, but also toward using narrative theory as a tool of textual analysis in their own work. The course will focus broadly on the practices and formal dynamics of storytelling, examine key concepts and terminology (i.e. story/discourse, focalization, unreliable narration, diegesis, etc.), consider the application of narrative theory across a wide range of genres and media, and investigate recent cultural approaches to narrative, including feminist narratology, cognitive narratology, unnatural narratology, rhetorical narratology and affect studies. Readings include texts by Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Phelan, Monika Fludernik, Sue Lanser, Brian Richardson, David Herman, Marie-Laure Ryan, Lisa Zunshine, H. Porter Abbott, Suzanne Keen and others. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students; undergraduate enrollment only with express permission of instructor. Readings and discussions in English. |
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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. |
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| | Description: | A study of Elizabeth's greatest national mthyologist, the greatest English myth-maker before Blake. He was not only a creator of poems: his poetic fictions together impose a larger fiction -- the idealized career of "the English poet." Study of Spenser's actual and fictionalized careers centers on his epic allegory, The Fairie Queene. Issues: the problematics of allegorical narrative, Protestant poetics, the politics of nostalgia, the poetics of vision, the psychologization of epic, literary nationalism, male feminism in the Renaissance, the clash of neo-feudal chivalry and "absolutizing" royalism. (As Milton called Spenser his "great original," the course could be taken as a preparation for a course in Milton; some attention will be given to their shared tactics and concerns.) Students interested in participating in work on the forthcoming Oxford edition of Spenser's collected works should enroll instead in E Lit 498W, the 4-credit Spenser Lab, which will meet concurrently with E Lit 498 and for an additional hour as well. Satisfies the Early Modern requirement. |
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