Ph.D. In Literature
Course Descriptions

Fall 2005

 

Students can take a minimum of three courses and a maximum of four, not including language acquisition courses. (Language classes do not count toward the 9 credit.) Every effort should be made to acquire language proficiency as early as possible. Please bear in mind, the language exams will be rigorous and must be satisfied by the end of the third semester of residence.

Students are required to consult with the Program Director/and or Director of Graduate Studies prior to enrolling in any course. Students should select their courses from the listings described in this booklet. However, in special circumstances and with prior authorization from the Program's Director and/or Director of Graduate Studies, graduate level courses not listed here can be taken for credit.

Students are reminded of the Program's requirements in Core, Primary and Related Fields. With the advice of the Director/ Director of Graduate Studies, and/or advisors in their field students, will, at the appropriate time, be expected to demonstrate what constitutes Primary and Related fields of study.

World Literature
Required class for all first-year students

LIT 73905 Metamorphosis
Margaret Doody
1:30–4:15 PM W

The subject of the World Literature course in 2005 will be Metamorphosis; we explore the concept taking Ovid's great poetic work Metamorphoses as a focal text. We examine the concept in relation to the arts (painting, sculpture, film) as well as to written works, and consider the concept of metamorphosis in its constant challenge to concepts of identity (psychological, spiritual, ethnic, geographical, etc.). The course covers diverse genres in different periods, including classical, Arabic medieval, Western medieval and Early Modern and Chinese classical and modern literatures and cultures. Literary texts range from conversion narratives (such as Deliverance from Error, the autobiography of Al-Ghazali) to fairy-tales like "Sleeping Beauty" ("La Belle au Bois Dormant"); from satiric and brilliantly poetic accounts of negative transformations (Pope's Dunciad) to lyric explorations of change—or resistance to change. ("Love is not love/which alters when it alteration finds/or bends with the remover to remove..."). But Eros is also a transformer, valued and dreaded because of its power to make its sufferer change nature and direction, as in Dante's Vita Nuova.

Book List:

Homer, Odyssey , trans. Richmond Lattimore. Perennial Classics
ISBN 0060931957

Ovid, Metamorphoses trans. Allen Mandelbaum Harvest/HBJ
ISBN 0156001268

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans Peter Walsh . Oxford World=s Classics
ISBN 0192838881

The Arabian Nights, trans Husain Haddawy New York: W.W. Norton,.
ISBN 0-393-95906-6

Al-Ghazali The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali, trans W. Montgomery Watt
Oxford; OneWorld p.b.
ISBN 1-85168-062-4 p.b.

Charles Perrault The Fairy Tales in Verse and Prose/Les contes en vers et en prose . Ed Stanley Appelbaum. Dual Language. Dover
SBN 0486424766

Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope . Ed. Andrew Crozier. Wordsworth Poetry Library, Contemporary Publishing Company.
ISBN 1853264318

Kafka Die Verwandlung The Metamorphosis, ed. Stanley Corngold, Norton
ISBN 0393967972

Carlo Collidi The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Translated with an introduction by Nicholas J. Perella.. Berkeley and London: University of California Press
ISBN 0-520-07782-2

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Bantam Classics,
ISBN 0553214322

Wen-hisng Wang, Family Catastrophe: A Modernist Novel, U of Hawaii Press
ISBN 0824816188
[THIS IS EXPENSIVE--GET USED IF POSSIBLE]

Su Tong, Rice, trans H. Goldblatt, Harper Collins Perennial
ISBN 0060596325

CLASSICS

Greek
CLGR 60001 01 Beginning Greek
CLGR 60003 01 Intermediate Greek
CLGR 60011 01 Homer
CLGR 60034 01 Plato

Latin
CLLA 60001 01 Beginning Latin
CLLA 60001 02 Beginning Latin
CLLA 60001 03 Beginning Latin
CLLA 60003 01 Intermediate Latin
CLLA 60003 02 Intermediate Latin
CLLA 60003 03 Intermediate Latin
CLLA 60011 01 Virgil
CLLA 60016 01 Intro to Christian Latin
CLLA 60044 01 The Roman Novel

Arabic
MEAR 60002 01 First Year Arabic II
MEAR 60002 02 First Year Arabic II
MEAR 60002 03 First Year Arabic II
MEAR 60002 04 First Year Arabic II
MEAR 60004 01 Second Year Arabic II
MEAR 60004 02 Second Year Arabic II
MEAR 60006 01 Third Year Arabic II

In English
CLAS 60365 01 Art & Literature of Metamorphosis Bloomer
MELC 60030 01 Love, Death, Exile in Arabic Literature Guo
MELC 60050 01 Canon and Literature of Islam Afsaruddin

FRENCH

LIT 73706 Love Poetry of The Renaissance: Maurice Scève
and The École Lyonnaise
J. DellaNeva
3:00–5:30 W
This course will focus on the love poetry of three French Renaissance lyricists: Maurice Scève's Délie, the Rymes of Pernette Du Guillet and the Oeuvres poétiques of Louise Labé. In order to study these works within the context of Renaissance lyric traditions, a selection of the poems of the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch will be read in a bilingual version. Special attention will be given to the crucial problem of imitation and originality in the Renaissance; hence various methods of intertextual analysis will be introduced. Other topics for discussion include: the image of the love-object (male/female) as portrayed in these texts, manifestations of erotic desire and neoplatonic love, the use of mythology, the varying poetic genres (dizain, sonnet, elegy), the identification of literary topoi or commonplaces, feminist literary criticism and the role of rhetoric. Throughout this course, a close reading and analysis of the texts will be emphasized. A strong reading knowledge of French is essential.

LIT 737691 Flaubert
A. Toumayan
3:00–4:15 MW
This course will focus on the development of the genre of short narrative during the nineteenth century in France. Representative works of Balzac, Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Flaubert, Gautier, Mérimée, Maupassant, Nodier and Villiers de l'Isle Adam will be considered. We will examine distinctive features of the various aesthetics of Romanticism, Realism and Symbolism as well as generic considerations relating to the conte fantastique. Course requirements: one oral presentation, two papers of moderate length and a final exam.

ROFR 63731 Proust: A World Lost & Regained
C. Perry
3:30–6:00 T
Considered by many to be the greatest French novelist of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust remains vastly influential to this day. Not only did he recover a world through his creative exploration of memory, but he also established a new type of novel in which poetic prose alternates with the criticism of art, history, society, politics, and psychology. The semester will be dedicated to reading four volumes from Proust's monumental work, A la recherche du temps perdu, along with some of the most important critical texts written on Proust and la Recherche. Assiduous preparation for class and active participation in discussions are essential to the success of this course. Students will give two oral presentations: 1) a textual interpretation; 2) a report on a critical work. Students will also write a 15–20 page analytical paper—while the final product will be due at the end of the semester, evidence of research and planning will be expected by mid-semester, following October break. Classes conducted in French.

IRISH

LIT 73810 Colonial Fictions, 1880-1930
Seamus Deane
TR 6:00-9:00
Meets from 8/23-10/14/2005
The aim of this course is to read several Irish and English novels of canonical stature from this period in the light of the questions they raise about the nature and experience of colonialism and of its linkages to modernity. Among these questions are: the connections between literary form and authority; fiction's analytic power in relation to the socio-political realm; the issue of obscurity or of the esoteric in modernist fiction. The authors will be read in pairings – Joyce and Conrad, Woolf and Bowen, Forster and Ford.

 

ITALIAN

ROIT 63050 Italian Graduate Reading
Staff
2:00–4:30 F
This one semester, intensive study of Italian grammar and syntax is intended for graduate students working in the humanities or sciences, who are interested in acquiring reading proficiency in Italian.

ROIT 63115 Dante I
P. Boitani
11:45–1:00 MW
Dante I normally covers the Inferno and Dante's minor works, but this fall, taught by Distinguished Visiting Professor Piero Boitani, it will be slightly different. After a general introduction to Dante’s works and to the structure of the Divine Comedy, the course will examine major scenes and themes specially grouped to enable us to read through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Such will be, for example, the themes of the “noble heart” (from Dante’s early works to the Paolo and Francesca scene in Hell, and onwards), of the dignity of the human being (from Limbo to Farinata and Cato), the episodes of Ulysses and Ugolino, the various accounts of the Donati family, the recurring versions of Creation, and the final vision of God. Text: the paperback edition of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso published by Oxford University Press with the translation of John Sinclair. Exams: there will be a mid-semester test before the break, and a final exam before Thanksgiving.

LIT 73859 Calvino & Levi: The Narrative of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino
P. Boitani
3:30–6:00 M
We shall read all the major novels and selected short stories of Levi and Calvino, the two greatest narrators of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy. From Levi’s account of his experience at Auschwitz, Se questo è un uomo, and of his odyssey back home in La tregua, a new, painful awareness of the human being takes shape, which will be deepened in Se non ora, quando? and in his last book, I sommersi e i salvati. At the same time Levi’s work as a chemist inspires some of his best short stories in Storie naturali, Vizio di forma, Il sistema periodico, and La chiave a stella, where science becomes literature. A similar impulse is present in Calvino as well, whose Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero belong to the genre of humorous science-fiction. Calvino’s paradoxical tales (the trilogy of Il visconte dimezzato, Il barone rampante, Il cavaliere inesistente) develop into an exploration of the mechanism itself of narrative in Le città invisibili, Il castello dei destini incrociati, and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. Texts: all the books by Primo Levi listed above are published in paperback by Einaudi; those by Italo Calvino in paperback by Mondadori. A final paper will be expected.

LIT 73667 Petrarch: “I frammenti dell’anima” (The Soul’s Fragments)
T. Cachey
2:00–3:15 TR
Poet, scholar, and diplomat, Petrarch (1304–1374) was a central figure in the intellectual and literary worlds of his time. His introspective and meditative lyric poetry in Italian has moved readers and influenced poets and writers for the last seven hundred years. Describing his spiritual and literary project in the autobiographical dialogue Secretum (The Secret), Petrarch wrote: “I will attend to myself as far as I am able. I will collect the scattered fragments of my soul, and I will diligently focus on myself alone.” The course will focus on Petrarch’s Italian poetry, both the Canzoniere (Songs and Sonnets) and the Trionfi (The Triumphs), upon which his reputation as one of the best and most influential lyric poets of world literature is based. Before taking up the Canzoniere and the Trionfi, we will consider the life of Petrarch, his intellectual activities and his other works, including selections from his epistolary collections (Letters on Familiar Matters and Letters of Old Age) and other Latin works, especially the Secretum. The seminar will be conducted in Italian. Advanced undergraduate students of Italian language and literature are welcome (prerequisites: Introduction to Italian Literature I and II and ROIT 310). English translations of Italian and Latin primary sources will be made available and utilized. Requirements: a seminar presentation; mid-term exam; final paper.

MEDIEVAL

LIT 73656 Plato Christianus
Stephen Gersh
2:00-3:15 TR
This course is designed as an introduction to the philosophy of Plato, the "Platonism" (i.e. Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism) of antiquity, the transformation of Platonism by the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, and the medieval and Renaissance traditions derived from the above. In the first half of the semester, we shall survey the tradition as a whole and deal with a variety of general questions. However, particular attention will be given to two fundamental hermeneutic criteria employed by the followers of this tradition: namely, "radical selectivity" and "philosophical allegorization." In the second half of the semester, two specific texts which have arguably set the pattern for the Latin and Greek intellectual traditions respectively will be studied in more detail: Augustine's "On the City of God" and the works of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The course is intended to be accessible to students without knowledge of Latin or Greek. Requirement: one final paper of ca. 20 pp.

LIT 73655 Poetry and Philosophy in the 12th Century
Stephen Gersh
12:30-1:45 TR
This course will aim to provide a close reading of Bernard Silvestris' "Cosmographia" and Alan of Lille's "De Planctu Naturae" against the background of early twelfth-century philosophical thought and grammatical-rhetorical theory. Although it will be initially necessary to cover the philological and historical ground with some care, the course will also attempt to explore in a more speculative and creative manner the question of the kind of relation between philosophy and literature in general that works like the "Cosmographia" and "De Planctu" suggest. As stimuli to such reflections, we shall pause to examine in some detail such textual phenomena as the philosophical allegory, the hermeneutical and metaphysical implications of number, the notion of self-reflexivity, and the negative symbol. The course is intended to be accessible to students without skill in Latin (although the latter would, obviously, be an advantage). Requirement: one final paper of ca. 20 pp.

LIT 73650 The Medieval Book
Calvin Bower
3:30-4:45 TR
A historical survey of the medieval book as a cultural, archeological, artistic, and commercial object from about A.D. 300 to 1500.

PORTUGUESE

LIT 73860 Portuguese Colonialism Revisited
I. Ferreira Gould
3:30–6:00 T
With readings from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Portugal, this course examines colonialism and its aftermath in Africa in light of postcolonial fiction and contemporary sociological and anthropological writing from the Lusophone world. The course brings the Lusophone experience, with its important varieties, yet overlooked implications, into broader debates in the field of postcolonial studies. Course requirements include a mid-term examination, two papers, one oral presentation, and active class participation. Course conducted in English with readings in Portuguese and/or English.

SPANISH

LIT 73862 The Generation of 1927
C. Jerez-Farrán
3:30–6:00 M
The Generation of 1927, known as the second Golden Age of Spanish poetry, is the name given to a group of poets who wrote during the third and fourth decades of the 20th century. This generation is primarily represented by poets like Alberti, Garcia Lorca, Salinas, Guillen, Cernuda and Alexandre. Their poetry is as varied thematically and stylistically as it is innovative. One of the purposes of the course is to develop and enhance the understanding of the works they wrote and thereby develop and enhance the understanding of the hermeneutic process of reading poetry. With these aims in mind, the course will focus on the metaphorical experiments these poets introduce, their stylistic development, thematic preoccupations, their relation to the different avant-garde literary movements of the time and their personal aesthetic credos. These aspects will be studied against the intellectual and social background of their time and country.

LIT 73846 Spanish American Poetry: avant-garde/surr
Verani, Hugo
W 3:30-6:00
This seminar will study the principal tendencies of twentieth-century Spanish American poetry, from the 1920s to the end of the century. The emphasis will be on close readings of the texts along with recent developments in critical theory. The poets to be considered are: Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Nicanor Parra, and José Emilio Pacheco. Course Grade will be based on the following criteria: Term paper, 50%; Class participation, 30%; Oral presentation, 20%.

 

ENGLISH
Acceptable for the literature requirement

LIT 73864 Theory and Theater
Susan Harris
3:00-4:15 MW
In this course we will investigate the history of Western theater and its relationship to the evolution of literary theory. Beginning with Aristotle's Poetics, we will progress through twentieth and twenty-first century performance theory; the goal is to achieve an understanding of the history of dramatic form and theatrical practice while engaging with the theoretical constructs that have emerged during this centuries-long and still-inconclusive attempt to explain the power and potential consequences of live performance. Although the course will focus primarily on the evolution of the English-language theater, it will also locate that tradition in a European context, including figures like Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Pirandello, etc. Although the bulk of the reading will be theoretical, each unit will be grounded by one or more dramatic texts which will serve as the focal point for our discussion of the theoretical material. Coursework will consist of several short response papers, in class presentations, and a 25-30 page final project.

ENGL 90715 American Modernisms
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
12:30-1:45 TR
Discussions of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century literary and cultural movement of modernism often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasize the modern movement’s experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider the role of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), and a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance, as well as pertinent issues, such as progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, as well as the question of “Americanness” and its importance to an understanding of American literature during this time, in order to arrive at a much more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning and significance of the modern in American culture. In exploring these different vanatage points in American literary modernism, we will seek to imagine the contours of “American modernisms,”and draw some conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context.

Course Texts: Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio and Dark Laughter; Waldo Frank, Holiday; Jean Toomer, Cane; Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem: Carl van Vecthen, Nigger Heaven; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!; Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, Torrents of Spring, and A Farewell to Arms; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives and F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Requirements: presentation, article-length research essay.

LIT 73672 "The Premature Reformation?": Religious Literature and the Rise of Dissent in Late Medieval England
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
2:00-3:15 TR
This course will examine the major literary religious writers of late medieval England, including William Langland, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and (via Middle English translation) Marguerite Porete. These texts will be read alongside Wycliffite writings of the same period in order to illuminate how literary writers sought to defend or enlarge their orthodoxy in response to the challenges of these newer reformist ideas and the sudden rise of heterodoxy. Wycliffism is currently of major concern to both modern literary and historical scholars, as well as to theologians, and therefore the course will take a broadly interdisciplinary approach. Controversially called "the Premature Reformation" by the leading scholar of the field, Anne Hudson, the Wycliffite movement raises fascinating theoretical and ideological problems in relation to these early literary texts in which they first appear in the English religious tradition.

Texts: Piers Plowman: by William Langland: An Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Edward Arnold/University of Exeter); The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B.A. Windeatt (Penguin); Women's Writing in Middle English, ed. A. Barratt (Longman's); Anne Hudson, Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge)
Optional Texts: William Langland's Piers Plowman: The C Version, trans. G. Economou (U. of Penn.); any original language edition of Chaucer; Medieval English Political Writings, edited by James M. Dean (Medieval Institute Publications/Western Michigan University).

ENGL 90237 Seventeeth-Century Poetry
Regina Schwartz
Course to be held at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Details TBA.

ENGL 90312 18th-Century Satiric Fiction and/as Cultural Theory
John Sitter
12:30-1:45 TR

This seminar will study satiric fiction as cultural analysis and early cultural theory as a discourse of irony. (18th-century cultural theory, much like our own, exists at the borders of history, economics, ethics, social psychology, and political philosophy.) The texts to be studied include four novels, two novellas, and four works (or parts of works) of cultural critique: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones; Sarah Fielding, David Simple; Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker; Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Samuel Johnson, Rasselas; Voltaire, Candide (in trans.); Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments; David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary; Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History or Civil Society. We will also discuss some contemporary views of satire and its relation to the early novel.

Seminar participants will be expected to contribute to the ongoing conversation, present two brief papers, post questions periodically and electronically for discussion, and submit a final paper of about 20 pp.

ROMANCE LANGUAGES TEACHING METHODS

The classes on this page are required for all students
who are teaching in the Romance Languages Department
August 15–19 is a full week of required training.

LIT 61603 Foreign Lang. Teaching Methodology & Second Lang. Acquisition
C. Ryan-Schuetz
1:00–3:30 F
This course introduces language instructors to the theoretical background and debates that inform current teaching methodologies for second language learning. Language instructors will learn to develop a communicative classroom environment that blends listening, speaking, reading, and writing while building toward a proficiency goal. Students will familiarize themselves with key concepts in linguistics and research methodologies. They will gain a historical perspective on theories of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching methodologies and be encouraged to develop informed views of their own. Projects include presentations, peer observations, self-assessment, small research components, micro-teaching demos, and developing basic elements of the FL teaching portfolio.

LIT 61605 Practicum in Teaching French
S. Dubreil
12:00–1:15 W
This course will prepare students to teach elementary French courses. It will cover basic teaching techniques/methods used in the ND French curriculum, setting up and maintaining a grade book, course management, as well as test design and evaluation techniques.

LIT 61606 Practicum in Teaching Italian
C. Ryan-Scheutz
1:15–2:30 W
This course is designed for graduate students in the M.A. program in Italian/PhD. Lit and is mandatory during their first year of teaching. It complements the theoretical basis for foreign language teaching methodology provided in LLRO and gives students hands-on practice with the organizational tasks and pedagogical procedures that are pertinent to their daily teaching responsibilities.

LIT 61604 Practicum in Teaching Spanish
A. Farley
12:30–1:45 W
This weekly practicum is designed for graduate students who serve as Spanish teaching assistants in the department of romance languages. The course focuses on the development of organizational and presentation skills needed to excel as a foreign language teacher. Students carry out micro-teaching projects and collaborate to develop a portfolio of their own activities based upon the principles learned in the course.

 

Courses will be scheduled on the following days:
M = Monday
T = Tuesday
W = Wednesday
H = Thursday
F = Friday
TH = Tuesday & Thursday

Please note: this listing of courses may change for various reasons.