Ph.D. In Literature
Course Descriptions
Fall 2006
Students can take up to 15 credits, 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
Travel and Changing Place: Tourism, Exile, Pilgrimage, Exploration, Colonizing, and Migration
(Required for all first-year students)
Lit 73915
Wednesday 1:30 – 4:15
M. Doody
Travel is a universal experience, even though not all human beings travel. It takes many forms: individual travel for pleasure (tourism); surveying a new terrain with a scientific or commercial purpose (exploring); building a new home in a “wilderness” or among alien or hostile peoples
(settling or colonizing); wandering in a group or individually to seek not only a religious site but also spiritual experience (pilgrimage); journeying under compulsion further from an irretrievable home (exile); moving in a fragile or displaced community seeking --often desperately-- another home (migration). Travel entices and alarms us posing questions about who we are and what counts as “home” as we encounter ourselves on the move. To travel is to encounter strangers, to define not only space but also the self and the community in a variety of ways, both welcome and unwelcome. If we are the “stay-at-homes,” travelers may irritate, attract, or frighten us.
Texts include Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, poetic epistles from exile (Epistulae ex Ponto); Bartolome de las Casas, Brief Report on the Destruction of the Indians; Ch=Eng -En Wu, Monkey (trans. Arthur Waley); Mme de Graffigny, Lettres d=une Péruvienne; Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ; Charlotte Brontë, Villette ; Hualing Nieh, Mulberry and Peach; Chu T=ien-wen, Notes of a Desolate Man.
Classics
Greek Tragedy
LIT 73617
Instructor: Professor Daniel Turkeltaub
MWF 8:30-9:20
This third-year course builds on the work of CLGR 20003 and CLGR 20004 and offers close reading of passages from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. These plays illustrate the Athenian invention and development of tragedy that took place when Athens dominated Greece politically between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, the great fifth-century war against Sparta. The ways in which the plays reveal and address the city’s ideological, political, and sexual tensions are key themes for discussion in the course, and matters of style are appropriately examined. The course prepares students for advanced offerings in Greek literature, especially CLGR 40023. Offered in fall semester, alternate years.
Plutarch
LIT 73625
Instructor: C. Schlegel
MW 3:00-4:15
This advanced course introduces students to the most famous biographical literature from antiquity, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Illuminating the virtues and vices of famous and infamous men from Greek and Roman history, the Parallel Lives offers an important guide to understanding the ethical imperatives of the Greco-Roman world. Plutarch’s literary style, his conception of biography, and the Roman imperial context in which he wrote are key themes for discussion in the course.
Roman Lyric Poetry
LIT 73623
E. Mazurek
TR 12:30-1:45
This third-year course builds on CLLA 20003 and CLLA 20004, and offers close reading of passages from the lyric poetry of such authors as Catullus and Horace. The lyric form gives precise and economical expression to a wide range of human thoughts and emotions, from the highly personal to the grandly patriotic. The range of Roman lyric, the technique of its practitioners, and the place of lyric poetry in Roman life are themes that receive special attention. This course prepares students for advanced offerings in Latin literature, especially CLLA 40023, CLLA 40033, CLLA 40043, and CLLA 40053. Offered in fall semester, alternate years.
The Myths of the Greeks and Romans
LIT 73619
TBA
MWF 10:40-11:30
This advanced course investigates the mythologies of Greece and Rome and traces their transmission to and influence on modern literature and art. Special attention is given to the wide range of media in which ancient stories about gods and heroes were expressed and communicated, and to the process by which these marvelous stories survived in later literature and the visual arts, inspiring writers and artists to adapt them to their own purposes. Current theories at the forefront of scholarship in the humanities are explored for their value in interpreting myths.
Seminar: Advanced Syriac
LIT 73624
Joseph Amar
W 2:00-5:00
Syriac is a form of Aramaic that was the literary language of Jews and pagans in western Asia before becoming the common dialect of Aramaic-speaking Christians in the region. Christianity had its matrix in Judaism, and early literature in Syriac preserves the only surviving sustained evidence of the distinctive character of Aramaic-speaking Christianity that is largely unhellenized and that reflects the linguistic and cultural milieu of first-century Palestine.
Because of the shared literary culture of Judaism and early Syriac Christianity, examination of the intertextuality of early Syriac literature reveals a deep acquaintance with the thought and culture of Late Second Temple Judaism and the intertestamental period. A full appreciation for the dependence of Syriac literature upon Jewish literary and intellectual models requires an interdisciplinary focus that takes into account a full range of issues; among the most important are hermeneutical questions related to Jewish and Christian interpretations of scripture. Participants in the seminar will investigate a range of questions based on the following:
1) In what sense may particular texts be called Christian (Jewish, Manichaean, Gnostic)?
2) What evidence is there for intertextuality, i.e. to what extent can texts be shown to occupy “the space between” Judaism and Christianity?
3) From what social and cultural milieu did the texts emerge?
4) What evidence do the texts retain of possible oral or non-literary origins?
5) In what sense are the texts literary? Do peculiarities of language, diction, or genre in any way distinguish the texts? Can the texts be shown to be typical of the time and circumstances from which they emerged?
6) How are the texts to be read? Is it enough to evaluate them as historical documents, relating them to the historical circumstances in which they were generated, and the literary culture to which they originally belonged?
These questions will be based on a deep reading of Syriac texts in light of their affinities to primarily Jewish, and other related texts (Manichaean, Zoroastrian, Gnostic).
Participants must be able to read non-vocalized texts at least at the intermediate level. They must also be able to read related secondary literature in the history, culture, and literature of Late Second Temple Judaism and emergent Christianity in western Asia. Reading knowledge of French and German is presumed.
English
Vercelli Book: Old English Seminar: The Exeter Book
LIT 73644
Thomas Hall (not in system yet; new hire)
TR 11.00-12.15
LIT 73644
The Exeter Book is the largest collection of Old English poetry to survive in a single manuscript, a tenth-century anthology containing some of the best-known poems in Old English (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, the Exeter Book Riddles) as well as others drawn from multiple literary traditions. We will read as much of this poetry as we can set against the background of the shaping events and concerns of tenth-century England, especially those set in motion by the Benedictine Reform and by contemporary developments in Anglo-Latin and Hiberno-Latin literature and Old English prose. A secondary goal of the course will be to introduce students to methods of research in several of the disciplines essential to the study of Old English poetry, including the liturgy, hagiography, eschatology, cosmology, biblical exegesis, mythology, and folklore of the early medieval West.
Lit Historiography & 15th Cent
LIT 73657
Katherien Zeiman (not in system yet; new hire)
TR 9.30-10.45
Over the last twenty years, the fifteenth century has gone from being regarded as “a literary prolepsis of the Slough of Despond” to become an important, even “sexy” sub-field of Middle English Studies. This course will examine some of the literature of this period in terms of this recuperation. We will consider the various historical narratives into which the works of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Pecok have been inserted, whether of usurpation, vernacularization, censorship, canon-formation, or the emergence of the public sphere. More importantly, we will consider the stakes of this recuperation for our understanding of literary history-its tenets and goals-by examining some of the theoretical bases for such narratives in theories by Bourdieu, Habermas, and Macherey.
Shakespeare & the Supernatural
LIT 73710
Jesse Lander
W 3.00-5.30
In the last twenty years there has been an extraordinary efflorescence of work on the place of religion in early modern England. This course will take up and extend this recent work by turning to the category of the supernatural. An introductory unit will consider the classical theories of secularization and disenchantment associated with Weber and Durkheim, the critique of these theories in the late 20th century, and the recent emergence of arguments for the postsecular. The syllabus will feature a representative range of Shakespeare’s plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Tempest) as well as recent work by literary critics (such as Debora Shuger, Stephen Greenblatt, and Julia Reinhard Lupton) and historians (such as Stuart Clark, Peter Marshall, Alexandra Walsham).
The Fantastic
LIT 73756
Margaret Doody
M 1:30-4:15
The eighteenth century (“The Long Eighteenth Century”), “The Age of Reason” might also be termed “The Age of the Fantastic.” Many of its best-known works are fantastic: The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Gulliver’s Travels and Candide (all on our reading list). Ideas of sexuality, gender roles,science organization, even the creation of new constitutions—all these relate at various levels to publicly available fantasy. A staple of satire, and also of the visual and performative arts, fantasy runs through many genres and leads to the creation of new ones. New modes of writing include science fiction; we will read examples of fabricated alternative worlds such as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World, and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and Sun, considering these in relation to a well-known antique precursor, Lucian’s Vera Historia (True Story) as well as to successors like Swift’s Travels. What was called “the Orient” also provides an “alternative world”; we shall explore the impact of The Thousand and One Nights and the vogue for “Oriental tales,” culminating in Beckford’s Vathek. Fairy tales now first rise to literary prominence, through Perrault’s Contes (1697), giving us Bluebeard, Cinderella, and others, we approach the use and significance of such stories. The eighteenth-century stage offers nonsense plays like The Dragon of Wantley, and pantomimes centering upon the ever-present Harlequin (now available through ECCO). Opera, masquerades and special stage effects call for investigation. An under-inspected area of our period is mystic literature; speculative religious writings connect with scientific thinking and social observation in unexpected ways. We will look at extracts of texts by Paracelsus and Jakob Boehme), and at extracts of Rosicrucian and anti-Rosicrucian works, including Villars’ Le comte de Gabalis, drawn on by Pope for his Sylphs in the The Rape of the Lock. The rise of the “Gothic” will be studied in this religious or quasi-religious context. English Gothic material by authors like M.G. “Monk” Lewis and Ann Radcliffe will be mingled with some material by non-English writers, such as Schiller (with his story The Ghost-seer [Der Geisterseher]), and Goethe. We will also look into the rise of new, redesigned or freshly created “traditional” works like Oriental tales and fairy stories. A new genre appears at the turn of the new century, the fantasy story written expressly for children, with appealing non-realistic illustrations, like William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807). We will end with a reading of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814) in the light of the multiple traditions other than the “realistic” at work within it.
TEXTS:
Perrault
Lucian
Godwin, Voyage ot the Moon
Cavendish, Blazing World
Arabian Nights
Vathek
Burney’s The Wanderer
Victorian Literature & Culture
LIT 73761
Chris Vanden Bossche
TR 11.00-12.15
This course will explore the Victorian concern with the ways literature seeks to act on its readers as well as the ways it portrays agency, the capacity for action, transformation, and reform. We will focus in particular on the period between the two great Reform Bills, of 1832 and 1867, during which recurrent debates about reform shaped conceptions of gender, class, and nation. The course will cover the range of major authors and genres, including works by Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, and Alfred Tennyson. Students will complete a series of assignments (bibliography, prospectus etc) leading up to completion of a substantial research essay. Prior to the start of the semester, an online syllabus will be posted at www.nd.edu/~cvandenb
Conceptual Fiction after Kafka
LIT 73813
Gerald Bruns
TR 12.30-1.45
In this course we will study a number of writers whose fiction achieves a certain intellectual complexity by means of absurd premises, arbitrary constraints, polymathy, cognitive dissonances, and other excesses of reason like games, jokes, puzzles, tricks of language. We’ll start with some stories by our progenitor, Franz Kafka, followed by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose Ficciones includes a story about a library whose books contain all the possible combinations of the letters of the alphabet and other orthographical symbols, which means that somewhere on its shelves is a text containing the course description you are now reading. Then we will take up some pieces by one of the strangest fiction writers of the last century, Raymond Roussel, who philosophy of composition is summarized as follows: “the work of art must contain nothing real, no observation of the real or spiritual world, only totally imaginary arrangements.” Roussel (along with Kafka and Borges) exerted a powerful influence on the Ouvroir Littéraire Potentielle (Workroom of Potential Literature, or OuLiPo), a group of European and American writers whose goal was to create new literary structures by writing under various forms of restraint (for example, on the model of algebraic equations). We’ll read works by three members of OuLiPo: Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. Raymond Queneau’s Saint Glinglin, begun during the year in which Raymond Roussel committed suicide, is about a bizarre festival in honor of the patron saint of a country in which it never rains. Georges Perec’s A Void (La Disparition) is a three hundred page novel that does not contain the letter e. Unfortunately this book is out of print, so instead we will make an attempt to read Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual, a book filled with lists of every object in every room of an apartment house in Paris, and whose chapters are arranged like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that can be put together by means of a complex series of chess moves. Meanwhile, one of Calvin’s novels, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, is a novel made of ten interrupted novels, each one of which is about interruption as the most metaphysical of events (“The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive puffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph”). Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies is a work of fiction in the form of proverbs and anecdotes. We’ll conclude the course with three American writers who have a good deal in common with their European colleagues: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Lydia Davis’s Break It Down, and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan’s Stew, a novel of plagiarisms. Assignments: perhaps some in-class reports and one longer paper of 15-20 pp. will be required in addition to participation in class discussion. Students may also be invited to try their hand at writing a piece of conceptual fiction.
Texts: Paul Auster, New York Trilogy. Viking Penguin. 0-140-13155-8; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones. Grove Press. 0-8021-3030-5; Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Harcourt Brace. 0-1564-3961-1; Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies. Noonday Press. 0-374-53410-6; Lydia Davis, Break It Down. High Risk Books. 1-85242-421-4; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories. Viking Press. 0-8052-0849-6; Georges Perec, Life, A User’s Manual. David R. Godine. 0-8792-3751-1; Raymond Queneau, Saint Glinglin. Dalkey Archive Press. 1-564-78230-1; Raymond Roussel, How I Came to Write Certain of My Books. Exact Change Press. 1-878972-14-6; Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan’s Stew. Dalkey Archive Press. 1-504-78087-2.
Poetry & Theory
LIT 73814
Romana Huk
Tuesday 2.00-4.30 pm
This course serves that “area” of twentieth-century literature our graduate program has described as British and Irish Writing since 1939, focusing on the genre of poetry. It also functions as a theory course in that we will study the major theorists whose ideas – both specifically about poetry and about language and culture at large – have contributed to the genre’s innovations. We will read the major figures of both “mainstream” movements and “avant-garde” ones, concentrating on how these poets who continue to avoid actually speaking to one another have always been in tacit “conversation” through their work. Beginning with the death of Yeats and Freud in 1939, the course will move through wartime and post-war reactions to the “Red Decade” or “Auden Era” (as expressed in movements like the New Apocalypse and the gnomically identified “Movement”) before running up against the cultural revolution, the “linguistic turn,” intra-national devolution, the women’s movement, post-colonial immigration and their enduring legacies in the increasingly complex, archipelagic contemporary poetry scene. The last weeks of the course will emphasize those writers and issues that class members, upon reading deeper into the post-1970 poetic landscape, find most interesting. Two presentations and two papers (as well as attendance at one or two poetry readings and lectures) will constitute the requirements; students may instead opt to write one longer essay (with an eye towards possible publication) if they so desire.
A Nation of War: Narratives of Violence and Identity in 19th C. America
LIT 73816
Javier Rodriguez
M 3.00-4.30
3 slots
Was William James right when he claimed early in the twentieth century that we should direct our energies not on ending war, but replacing it with a non-violent substitute? Is America, as many charge, an especially war-driven society? Why is war so horrible and, for many, so seductive? How does sacrifice through violence suspend rationality and activate the stirrings of spirituality? Why might the experience of war so often leave gaps, voids, elisions, as well as scars and haunting memories? These are some of the societal questions we will investigate through our literary readings, beginning with Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and including pension depositions from the Revolutionary War, Cooper’s The Spy, popular literature from the Mexican War, Melville’s and Whitman’s Civil War poetry, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, World War I poetry, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and various materials dealing with Vietnam and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our films will include Patton, Glory and Full Metal Jacket. We will investigate and test the relationships between art and the world, asking how authors and filmmakers have dealt with the most vexing questions about war, and American wars in particular. Our secondary readings will range across various fields, but they will include texts on war narrative and American cultural history, including Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, and various secondary materials on narrative, nationality and psychology. Two primary assignments, a 15-page mid-term essay, and a 25-page final paper, will constitute the core of each students’ grade, but our class format will require high degrees of collaboration at many levels. Students will be expected to contribute course readings, to lead discussions, to offer criticism on weekly, short writing assignments, to participate actively in class, to both challenge and support others in the class, to discover possible relationships between our readings and their own literary motivations.
African American Literature
LIT 73817
Toni Irving
R 2.00-4.30
In 1827 Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper, the editors argue, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly.” From the nation’s beginning, the recognition of full personhood in the United States has depended on privileges related to race, class and gender. This course is interested in how various representations of otherness and the way the public takes notice of them – frequently with delegitimizing aims – presents a commentary about national politics, the public sphere, and entitlement. We will read court cases and public policy along side autobiographies, novels, slave narratives, plays, and poems written by people who found their humanity challenged by federal law. Through this lens we will consider how citizenship finds stability through imagined and actual excavating of “others”.
Three historical problems will structure our examination of fictions of citizenship: the production of national identity; the language of personhood; and the organization of counter publics. This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with the theoretical debates animating citizenship studies and the way that they intervene in critical conversations within African American literary studies and critical race theory.
American Film
LIT 73818
William Krier
TR 12.30-1.45
The underlying premise for the course will be derived from genre theory. Each film will be studied not only as itself but also as representative of hundreds of other comparable films. Additionally, each film will be considered in light of other critical approaches such as feminism or auteur theory. So, there will be careful looks at some of the more important critical texts in the efforts by the academy to come to terms with Hollywood.
The course will be structured by pairing films from the “classic” period with films from the more recent past in order to highlight essential critical features, particularly genre iconography, the work of directors, and the performances of “stars.” Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, for example, might be paired with Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night could be paired with Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. And so on.
There will be no scheduled showings of the films. Instead, I will ask you to join Netflix or some comparable service. Thus, you can work with the films according to your own schedules. I hope that we can work with at least a dozen films.
There will be a research paper in which you create your own pairing of films. Also, the written requirements for the course can be fulfilled with a full-length screenplay which we will revise during the semester. This script, then, needs to be written over the summer before the semester starts. If you are interested in this possibility, please see me during March.
French
“Fiction and History, from Perrault to Tocqueville / La Fiction et l’histoire, de Perrault à Tocqueville”
LIT 73731
Fall semester 2006
Prof. Julia Douthwaite
This course traces the central debates on historiography and fiction--on vraisemblance and truth, personal vs. official history-- through readings of key texts from the 17th to the 19th century in France. In keeping with the polemical, “philosophical” atmosphere of the period, we will also consider both kinds of narrative as vehicles of social or political commentary on events such as the reigns of the great (and not-so-great) Bourbon kings Louis XIV and Louis XVI, the slave uprising in St Domingo, and the French Revolution. Class readings will be supplemented with parallel readings in literary and historiographical theory by authors such as Darnton, Barthes, Ladurie, White, Bakhtin, LaCapra, and Gossman.
Literary texts to study include:
Perrault, Contes de ma mère l’oye
LaFontaine, Fables choisies
Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Anon. Voyage du diable et de la folie
Hugo, Bug-Jargal
Balzac, Les Chouans
Historiographical writings to study include:
Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV
Goncourt frères, La femme au dix-huitième siècle
Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la révolution
Francophone Literature
LIT 73906
Alison Rice
R 03:30-06:15
This graduate course will focus on 20th and 21st century literary works in French by writers from Eastern Europe and the Maghreb. A number of novels, as well as a few plays, will make up the corpus of texts we study in-depth. We will pay close attention to the themes (historical, political, and philosophical) that emerge in writing by authors from outside the hexagonal space of contemporary France as we seek similarities and differences from two geographical regions that are at once near and far from the country whence comes the language of literary composition. We will examine the choice of French as the idiom of literary composition and the ways in which this language is treated explicitly in writing, but we will also seek to discern the unique rhythms and unusual syntax that characterize works by writers whose mother tongue may be Arabic, Berber, Czech, or Russian. We will study these texts alongside theoretical works that focus on what is often called “postcolonial” literature as we seek to determine whether or not these texts fit within definitions of such literature. The theoretical and practical concerns of writing will come together when we make comparisons between the publishing situations in the various “minor countries” represented in texts by writers as diverse as Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Milan Kundera, and Andreï Makine.
Life, Love, And Literature In Renaissance Lyon
LIT 73711
J. DellaNeva
MW 1:30-2:45
The chief goal is to become familiar with the cultural climate of Renaissance Lyon. This is essentially a literature course with a significant cultural studies component. Specifically, this course will focus on authors who lived in Lyon during its glory days, corresponding to roughly the first half of the sixteenth century; accordingly, much of the course will be devoted to the three poets who comprise the “Lyonnais school”: Maurice Scève, Pernette Du Guillet, and Louise Labé. However, we will read excerpts from many authors associated with this city at various times in the Renaissance, including Lemaire de Belges, Rabelais, Marot, and Jeanne Flore, among others. Moreover, many cultural topics will be addressed, through the presentation of articles on subjects such as music, art, printing, the role of women, economics (the fairs and banking), medicine, education, religion, and the like. Requirements include a brief paper on a literary topic, an oral explication of a poem, the oral presentation of an article on a cultural topic, a very brief first-hand written description of any Renaissance book printed in Lyon found in the rare book room of the library, and a longer research paper on a cultural topic (with a summary to be presented orally to the class) in lieu of a final exam. IMPORTANT: If a sufficient number of students are interested, we may try to arrange a trip to Lyon during Fall break! Please contact the professor by email ASAP if this prospect interests you. Costs will depend largely on the size of the group interested.
German
Goethe & His Time
LIT 73801
Robert Norton
MWF 12:50 – 1:40
An intensive study of Goethe’s major works of poetry, prose, and drama within the cultural framework of is times.
Goethe to Nietzsche to Kafka: The Search for God in German Literature and Philosophy
LIT 73907
Vittorio Hosle
TR 9:30 – 10:45
One of the peculiarities of German culture is the strong connection between
philosophy and literature; another the heroic attempt to develop a religion no
longer based on authority, but on reason. We will discuss the main steps in
this German quest for God, alternating philosophical and literary texts by
authors such as Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kafka. Texts and discussions in English. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing. 2 seats
Irish
Early Versions of Modernity, 1790-1820
LIT 73815
Seamus Deane
TR 6:30-9:00
{Course meets 8/23-10/13/06}
The aim of the course is to discover the basic structure of the early analyses of modernity in the following writers: Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Benjamin Constant, Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth. The central themes will be (a) the nature of the difference between revolutionary modernity and the preceding socio-political world; (b) the interconnnection between versions of political and psychic dislocation. The main texts will be Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and his 1792 ‘Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe’ ; Scott’s Heart of Midlothian and Old Mortality; Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Constant’s Adolphe and his ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, selected poems and passages from Wordsworth, including ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Resolution and Independence’, passages from The Prelude.
Ideology, Poetry & Politics in Jacobite Ireland
LIT 73727
Breandan O’Bauchalla
W 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Jacobitism, or allegiance to the cause of the House of Stuart (from Latin Jacobus ‘James’ the deposed James II), was the common voice of political dissent in 18th century Ireland, Scotland and England. Irish Catholic advocacy of the Stuart cause had already become a political orthodoxy in the course of the 17th century and when the Stuarts were deposed by William of Orange (‘King Billy’) later succeeded by the Hanoverians (1714) the culture of dispossession and displacement and the rhetoric of return and restoration became firmly entrenched in the political ideology of Catholic Ireland. This course will examine the development of Irish Jacobitism in its various literary, historical and ideological aspects in addition to placing it within its wider British and European context in the 18th century.
Italian
Boccaccio and Novella Tradition
LIT 73668
Piotr Salwa
T 03:30-6:00
Though one of the most entertaining texts in literature, Boccaccio’s Decameron has been called “the most enigmatic of medieval texts, richly difficult to fathom.” The text that lies behind Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and that created the modern short story, the Decameron is one of the most important and influential works in literature: it is a profound meditation on the grounds of faith and the meaning of death, on the relation between language and reality, on literature as a response to human suffering and mortality, on the nature of crisis and historical change, and it is a subtle exploration of the concepts of fortune, human intelligence and creativity, love, social hierarchy and social order, and religious language and practice. We shall also pay special attention to the representation of women in the Decameron, and to the book’s apparent “feminism.” Students will be free to explore other topics as well, such as magic, the visual arts, mercantile culture, travel and discovery, and new religious practices. We will also discuss the great short story tradition of Italy, and the Decameron’s role in it, and in establishing it. Conducted in Italian. Open to advanced and qualified undergraduates by permission.
Modern Italian Novel I
LIT 73863
John Welle
W 03:00-5:30
Italy from the early nineteenth to the mid - twentieth century. Canonical novels as well as some “best sellers” are analyzed in their historical contexts. Themes to be dealt with include: the epistolary novel, the historical novel, the questione della lingua, verismo, the publishing industry and Italian reading public(s); the “romanzo d’appendice;” women writers and new readerships; the novel of social commentary; modernism and the avantgarde; subjectivity and self-reflexivity; European currents and Italian literature under fascism. Authors to be studied will include some mixture of the following: Foscolo. Manzoni, De Amicis, Collodi, Verga, Invernizio, Salgari, D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Aleramo, Palazzeschi, Vivanti, Svevo, Tozzi, and Moravia. Requirements include extensive reading, active participation in the seminar, a number of oral reports and presentations, a research paper.
Spanish
Medieval Literature
LIT 73621
Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez
M 12:30-03:15
The defining feature of medieval Spain is the Reconquest, the fluctuating repossession of lands conquered by Muslim invaders in 711 that lasted from seven to more than seven hundred years. This course will survey the masterworks of the Spanish Middle Ages within the ideological, social, cultural, and political context of reconquest Spain and will include the kharjas, Poema de mio Çid, romancero, Los milagros de nuestra Señora by Gonzalo de Berceo, Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel, Libro de buen amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Talavera by Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro, Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, and miscellaneous selections. Primary texts in Spanish will be supplemented with critical, scholarly, cultural, and theoretical readings in Spanish and English. The course is crosslisted with the Medieval Institute and will be taught in English; coursework will comprise oral presentations, midterm and final exams, and a paper.
Spanish American
LIT 73868
Hugo Verani
W 03:30-06:00
This course will provide an overview of the principal aesthetic and socio-historical tendencies that have characterized short fiction (short story and nouvelle) in XXth Century Spanish America. Authors discussed will Include Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos, Onetti, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario
Vargas Llosa and José Emilio Pacheco. Course grade will be determined by one 12-15 page term paper, weekly
critiques, and class participation.
Psychoanalysis and the Baroque
LIT 73869
Ruben Rios Avila
T 3:30-6:00
(graduate seminar)
This course proposes an analogy between the aim of psychonalysis --the unmasking of civilization’s “discontent”-- and the understanding of the baroque as a poetics of desengaño. It departs from Lacan’s discussions of Gracián’s El Criticon in his Seminar XVII, The reverse of Psychoanalysis, where the aim of a radical critical gesture is conceived as the birthing of truth. Our aim will be to underscore the analytical stand of the baroque vis a vis the baroque logic of psychonalysis. To the extent that they are both rhetorics of the signifier, we will explore their antagonistic relationship to modernity through their simultaneous defense and undermining of the supposed autonomy of reason. The baroque will be examined through closed readings of some of its classical texts by Góngora, Gracián and Sor Juana, as well as some of its most daring modernist or neo-baroque re-writings in texts by Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas and Néstor Perlongher.
Teaching Practicum for Romance Languages
Acquisition & Instr Methods
LIT 61603
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz
M 01:00-03:30 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.
Practicum in French
LIT 61605
STAFF
T 01:00-02:15
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.
Practicum in Italian
LIT 61606
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz
T 01:00-02:15
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.
Practicum in Spanish
LIT 61604
Janet Fisher-McPeak
R 01:00-02:15
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.
