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.
Courses will be scheduled on the following days:
M = Monday
T = Tuesday
W = Wednesday
R = Thursday
F = Friday
TR = Tuesday & Thursday
Please note: this listing of courses may change
for various reasons.
LITERARY THEORY: Required Course for all first year students)
LIT 73902 CRN: 23680
PHILOLOGY AND WELTLITERATUR
Buttigieg
W 6:30 – 9:30 PM
The Literature Programs course on Literary Theory deals with theories of different time and places with emphasis on the critical problems that arise when what we call "Literature" is investigated in a multicultural context. Issues that may be expected to arise include the following the problems of translation, the meaning of metaphor, hermeneutics complexity, the meaning of the word "style" the relation between oral and written literatures.
Eric Auerbach's essay, from which this course derives its title, serves as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of developing an approach to literary history and literary interpretation that: (a) attends to the historical, cultural and aesthetic specificity of the individual literary work and (b) at the same time, brings into relief the complex ways in which cultures interact, overlap, and modify one another. The course will focus primarily on the pertinent works of Vico, Herder, and the German Romantics, Auerbach (and other historicists), Arnold, C. L. R. James, Raymond Williams, and Edward W. Said, as well as selections from the writings of Fanon, Ngugi, Lamming, Cesaire, and others.
Classics
LIT 73620 CRN: 27822
THE ROMAN WORLD OF APULEIUS
Prof. Keith Bradley
TR 2:00-3:15
An advanced course in Roman history and literature that investigates the Latin author Apuleius in his socio-cultural context. The course begins with the Romano-African setting into which Apuleius was born, recreates the educational travels to Carthage, Athens and Rome that occupied his early life, and focuses especially on his trial for magic in Sabratha in Tripolitania before following him back to Carthage where he spent the remainder of his life. Notice will be taken of all Apuleius' writings, but special attention will be paid to the Apology, a version of the speech of defense made at his trial, and to the socio-cultural significance of his work of imaginative fiction, the Metamorphoses. The course is open to students with or without Latin.
LIT 73658 CRN: 27888
CREATION, TIME AND CITY OF GOD IN AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
W 1:30-4:00
S. MacCormack
In his youth, Augustine (354-430 AD) received an excellent education in the Latin classics, the benefits of which remained with him throughout his life. Later, he also read philosophical writings, and, after his conversion, works by Christian authors. The book he quoted most frequently was the Bible. From his childhood, Augustine was endowed with a most unusual ability to ask awkward questions. Initially targeting his teachers, he later addressed his questions to the authors whose books he read, and to God. His writings therefore tend to take a dialogic form where the interlocutors include not only the reader but God, and-among human beings-Cicero, Vergil and other Romans, and also Augustine's Christian contemporaries, including Jerome, Paulinus of Nola and Count Marcellinus to whom he addressed the City of God. In following these dialogues, we will read not just Augustine's best known writings (Confessions and City of God) but also his commentaries on Genesis, and some of his letters and sermons. The purpose is to arrive at an understanding of Augustine's ideas about creation and time, and about the nature of human society and its goals. We will also ask what can be learnt from Augustine's dialogic and sometimes disputatious way of thinking, explaining and debating. Almost all of Augustine's writings have been translated into English, but obviously, an ability to read Latin will be most useful.
LIT73659 CRN: 27840
SOCRATIC LITERATURE/PLATO
Christopher Baron
MWF 11:45-12:35
Prerequisite: Third year Greek
This advanced course offers accelerated reading and detailed study of the philosophical dialogues of Plato, whose writings, often radical and challenging, represent a cornerstone in the Western intellectual tradition. The development of Plato's philosophical ideas in their historical context is a key theme for discussion in the course, and attention is paid to the main features of his prose style in selections of his works.
English
LIT 73901 CRN: 27807
20TH CENTURY INTERNATIONAL POETRY
Zhenkai Zhao
MW 4:30-5:45
This course is designed with a precise aim to introduce students into a condensed and distinctive poetry written with rich imagery. This objective will be mostly achieved through close readings and appreciation of some masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in an international context, departing deliberately from a kind of narrative poetry that has been dominant in the American mainstream poetic world today. We will cover international poets such as Federico Garcia Lorca, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Gennady Agyi, Gunnar Ekelof, Thomas Transtromer, Paul Eluard, and Dylan Thomas.
LIT 73806 CRN: 27808
MILTON
Stephen Fallon
TR 12:30-1:45
John Milton is a paradoxical figure: a theological writer constantly at odds with religious establishments, a republican political theorist finally mistrustful of the people, an advocate of both patriarchalist and egalitarian understandings of gender, and a celebrant of virginity who matured into one of the great singers of erotic love and sexuality. History has treated Milton paradoxically as well. A radical figure, pushed to the margins in his own time, he has come to be seen by many as the voice of establishment authority. In this course we will study the length and breadth of Milton's career, looking for keys to these paradoxes.
Perhaps more than any other English author, Milton is present in his works; we will pay close attention to his self-representations. We will test the possibility that the dissonances in the early self-representations bear fruit in the creative tensions of the mature poetry. We will pay attention to the high level of control Milton exerts over his texts and his readers, and at the same time we will explore what happens when that control slips. Above all, we will also work toward an appreciation of Milton's aesthetic achievements.
We will read widely in Milton's poetry, with special emphasis on the "Nativity Ode," A Mask, "Lycidas," Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. We will study also several of his prose works (e.g., The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and The Readie and Easie Way). While our focus will be on Milton's texts, we will explore some of the central debates of Milton criticism. Students will complete a series of assignments (bibliography, prospectus, etc.) leading up to completion of a substantial research essay.
LIT 73732 CRN: 27809
HISTORICIST APPROACHES TO LONDON READING CIRCLES AND THE RISE OF RICARDIAN POETRY IN ENGLAND AND ANGLO-IRELAND
Kathy Kerby-Fulton
T 3:30-6:00
This course will examine Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, Thomas Usk, Thomas Hoccleve, and James Yonge, and other writers who found their initial and most sophisticated audiences in the court and civil service in London and in Dublin. Topics to be discussed will include "self-fashioning," authorial representation, political dissent, colonialism, and the role of women in the rise of a "national" literature. We will look at various traditional Historicist approaches to the study of reading circles, Medieval Literary Theory, and newer methodologies including manuscript study and the cultural history of the book.
LIT 73733 CRN: 27811
IDENTITY & AGENCY IN THE REIGN OF ALFRED
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeeff
TR 9:30-10:45
To explore constructions of identity and of agency in the late ninth century in Anglo-Saxon England, this course engages one of the remarkable achievements of the program of Anglo-Saxon translation, the Old English version of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. The course will look at early medieval ideas of agency (and the ways in which structures of identity enabled and curtailed agency) and will draw on contemporary theoretical descriptions of agency and its manifestations. One of the interests of the course will be the active way in which the Old English translation modifies and rewrites Boethius's text, incorporating Anglo-Saxon ways of knowing into the sixth-century text. The course will attend to notions of transgression and of obedience as modes of expressing agency in order to analyze the anxieties of agency voiced in the Old English text. Students are advised to read Boethius's Consolation as a preliminary to the class. Pre-requisite: completion of "Introduction to Old English" or permission of the instructor.
Requirements: daily translation, one or two class presentations, a short experimental paper (aimed at trying out the idea for the final paper), a final paper of 15-20 pages. Topics will be chosen in consultation with the instructor.
LIT 73734 CRN: 27812
ROMANTIC ERA DRAMA AND THE PUBLIC THEATER
Greg Kucich
M 11:45-2:15
"Just now the drama is a haunted ruin"
---Thomas Lovell Beddoes
"Dramatic genius . . . is kindling over the whole land"
---Blackwood's review
One of the conventional stereotypes about British romanticism involves its alleged failure to produce significant drama. With stage flops, vapidly sensationalist quadruped entertainments, and unperformable "closet dramas" littering romanticism's theatrical landscape, it seems that lyrical drama like Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound emerged as the period's sole achievement in dramatic form. Yet if Beddoes's vision of a "haunted ruin" characterized the era's anxiousness about the state of its drama, Blackwood's championship of a teeming "dramatic genius" tapped into a counter vein of enthusiasm for the age's theatrical fecundity. Recent historicist scholarship, alert to the problematics of staging meaningful drama in the romantic era, has also begun to recover the prolific richness of the period's stage life while demonstrating the political importance, especially for women dramatists and actors, of the public theater. The cultural significance of the drama has thus become one of the more compelling new topics in studies of romanticism, inspiring new monographs, conference workshops, special journal issues (including a recent issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts), and various experimental restagings of romantic era drama. Our seminar springs from these new developments with the aim of joining the burgeoning critical effort to relocate the drama and the social life of the theater within the centers of romantic era culture. Focal points of this enterprise will include: the material history of stage performance and state censorship; the social significance of theater reviews and high dramatic theory; the politics of gender, empire, and abolition as manifested in the public theater; and the relationship among so-called unperformed "closet drama," serious stage plays, and wildly inventive, "illegitimate" theatrical forms such as pantomime, melodrama, and farce, featuring such titles as Harlequin and Humpo, Timour the Tartar, and Jocko the Brazilian Monkey. Readings will address such major figures as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shelley, and George Byron, but we will also engage with a number of hitherto less well-known known dramatists, many of them women, who achieved prominence in their time: Joanna Baillie, Matthew Lewis, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Mariana Starkes, among others. We will also read the theatrical criticism of William Hazlitt, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, as well as contemporary theater theory. Students will produce a book review, a substantial research paper, and, possibly, stage entertainments of their own. Enthusiasm for acting encouraged, but no acting experience required.
LIT 73870 CRN: 27813
MODERNISM
Maud Ellmann
R 3:30-6:00
This course focuses on the work of major modernist authors (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett) in their wider cultural context. There will be opportunities to make comparisons between literary modernism and the visual arts, and to consider the relations between European modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Wright, Baldwin). We will also study theoretical approaches to modernism from the Frankfurt School to the present.
Requirements: weekly response papers, regular oral presentations and literature searches, and a final 15-20-page paper.
LIT 73817 CRN: 27814
ANGLO-IRISH IDENTITIES 1600-1810
Christopher Fox
W 11:45-2:15
Colin Kidd points out that "the contentious role played by ethnic identity in the history of Ireland makes it easy to forget that the Irish, like other nations, have played out their conflicts in a world of imagined communities." Within this context, how did the Anglo-Irish come to define themselves as a group? How did they differentiate themselves from the native population or "meer Irish" or from the so-called "Old English," the Norman descendants of Strongbow? From the Presbyterians, Baptists, Brownists, and other Dissenters, or from the English themselves? The course will examine this question of identity and difference in some representative writers who have dominated the teaching and understanding of Irish history and literature of this critical period: Edmund Spenser, William Molyneux, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, and Maria Edgeworth. For comparison sake, we will also explore some constructions of "Englishness" and "Scottishness" in Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell. Close readings from the works of these figures will take place with a discussion of their historical, political, and ideological contexts, which have connections to our larger understanding of the construction of identities in colonial and post-colonial worlds.
LIT 73735 CRN: 27816
FORMS OF DEMOCRACY IN 19TH C U.S. LITERATURE
Sandra Gustafson
TR 11:00-12:15
This course will explore two central concerns in American literary studies: what is "democratic" about literature written in the United States? And how does the problem of representative politics influence literary and textual representation? From F.O. Matthiessen's definition of a canon of five authors who shared a "devotion to the possibilities of democracy" in American Renaissance (1941); to the efforts to broaden that Cold War canon to be more democratically representative in the anthology projects and multicultural criticism of the 1980s; to the New Americanist project of decoupling "democracy" and "America" in order to critique U.S. imperial hegemony in the 1990s, democracy has been a central concept in the study of U.S. literature. One emphasis of this course will be on historical and contemporary theories of democracy as they relate to literary texts.
A second emphasis will be on textual forms as they figure in democratic theory. The possibilities of democracy today are frequently tied to new media, notably the Internet, which for some promises to realize ideals of participation and transparency. New media enthusiasts of the nineteenth century saw similar democratic possibilities for immediacy and the diffusion of knowledge in the electric telegraph. An older tradition dating at least to the Reformation, with important exponents in the antebellum U.S., identifies democracy with print culture and literacy. Yet another view saw the "logocracy" of public speech and the emergent popular, participatory forms of the drama and the spectacle as essentially democratic. Specific literary genres - the novel, free verse - have also been characterized as "democratic," while critics have vigorously debated the political effects of particular literary styles, notably sentimentality.
Our readings will include classic and contemporary works of democratic theory, critical readings that explore the relationship between verbal and political representation, and a range of literary works that foreground the problem of mediation and its relationship to democratic politics. Among these literary works will be: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables; selections from Emily Dickinson's manuscript fascicles; Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon; William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip; selected speeches by Daniel Webster, Henry Highland Garnett, and Maria Stewart; William Wells Brown's Clotel; and Henry Adams' Democracy.
Requirements include regular attendance and active participation, a presentation, and a 20-25 page seminar paper produced in stages.
LIT 73736 CRN: 27817
SINGULAR POETRIES: THE WRITINGS OF SUSAN HOWE AND LYN HEJINIAN
Gerald Bruns
TR 2:00-3:15
This course will be devoted to the poetry and poetics of Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Lyn Hejinian (b. 1941), with collateral readings of some of their older and younger contemporaries (Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Rae Armantrout). Howe and Hejinian are often associated with the movement known as "Language Writing," which is frequently characterized in terms of its "break" with the forms and conventions of the romantic lyric and its modernist versions in which an "expressive" self presides over the materials of formal construction. For the language poets, these materials are not reducible to the forms of mediation that the term "expression" implies. Mediation is what language poetry aims to disrupt - hence the terms that (perhaps prematurely) came to define its poetics during the 1980s: disjunction, fragmentation, indeterminacy.
No doubt Howe and Hejinian exemplify a "disjunctive poetics," but the point needs additional inquiry because they do so in ways that are always changing. What is interesting about these poets is that their writing is grounded less in a break with certain kinds of lyric traditions than in a critical appropriation of a wide range of literary and philosophical antecedents. Appropriation means understanding another - a text, a law, a foreign language - by making it one's own (Howe's My Emily Dickinson and Hejinian's essays on Gertrude Stein are showcase examples of this).
But there is more. Appropriation as these poets practice it appears to be a process of self-creation in something like the Emersonian sense of self-individuation through reading. Howe and Hejinian are irreducible to the "art contexts" that they nevertheless help to constitute, and this means irreducibility to any general characterization of their work as "women's writing." "My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else," Howe writes. What we will want to study is the process by which this "singularity" is formed. Singularity is also a crucial concept in Hejinian's work. She writes: "The phrase 'there are no opposites' appears more than once in my poetry." Poetry, she says, is an "art of linkages" unconstrained by a logic of exclusion or of identity and difference. (Not disjunction, in other words, but combination.) It will be interesting to read her celebrated My Life in the context of this conception of poetry.
Students will be asked to write a paper of about twenty pages and to contribute enthusiastically to class discussion. Perhaps brief reports from each of us will prove useful.
I. Susan Howe
Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Awede, 1987)
Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993)
Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-79 (New Directions, 1996)
Pierce-Arrow. (New Directions, 1999)
The Midnight (New Directions, 2003)
My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic, 1985)
The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)
II. Lyn Hejinian
My Life (Burning Deck, 1980; expanded version, Sun & Moon, 1987)
The Guard (Tuumba Press, 1984)
Oxata: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991)
The Cell (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)
The Cold of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994)
A Border Comedy (New York: Granary Books, 2001)
The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
ENGL 90120
PEARL POET: POETRY MEETS THEOLOGY
Dolores Frese
TR 2:00-3:15
Four Middle English alliterative poems - Pearl, Cleannesse, Patience, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight - composed in Northwest Midlands dialect at the close of the fourteenth century by a gifted anonymous artist, and preserved in the British Library's unique manuscript copy (Cotton Nero A. x), will occupy us for the semester.
Through close readings, and by imaginative immersion in the dense world limned by this brilliant quartet of poetic fictions, we will attempt to formulate some significant questions and provisional answers concerning the general nature of medieval poetics and hermeneutics, while assessing the particular accomplishments of this artist, conventionally designated as the "Pearl-poet" or the "Gawain-poet".
We will begin with some attention to the manuscript particulars (less-than-100 7"x5" folio pp.) in order to focus fundamental questions about the idea of the book as a material artifact at the close of the Middle Ages. Why these four poems, in this particular order, with these (twelve) colored illustrations, produced for what patron or population of readers? Are we dealing here with authorial or scribal editorial arrangements?
In the course of our individual and collective investigations, we will also consider questions of genre (the four poems include elegy, dream vision, consolatio, allegory, homiletic sermon, courtly satire, chivalric Arthurian romance, etc.); we will also consider verifiable sources and arguable poetic precursors (Old & New Testament biblical narratives, Anicus Boethius, Dante Alighieri, et al.).
Most importantly, as we become the imaginative familiars of this medieval poet, whose keenly critical and equally compassionate gaze extends variously to the intersecting worlds of grieving parent and imperious child, hospitable husband, seductive wife, and courtly lover caught in the exquisite vise of social, magical and Christian norms - a poet whose imagination recreates the citizens of Sodom, Nineveh, Camelot, and the Celestial City of New Jerusalem, each time with striking revisionist force - we will become securely grounded in many of the aesthetic conventions of form and content that characterize the medieval text world. At the same time we will encounter one of that world's most energetic and poetically innovative minds, at play in this field of received religious and secular textual traditions.
Mid-term, final examinations. Term paper (20-30 pp.). Text: The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. Eds., Malcolm Andrew & Ronald Waldron.
ENGL 90190
POSTMODERN NARRATIVE
James Collins
MW 1:30-2:45
In this course we will begin by focusing on the emergence of postmodernism in the sixties and then trace its evolution through the nineties. Initially, our primary concern will be the conflicted conceptualization of the term, i.e. just what did postmodern mean in terms of a narrative practice and in terms of a "cultural condition". Once we have established some operating definitions, and become familiar with some of the narratives that were first called postmodern (Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, etc.) we will begin to discuss the novels and films which became synonymous with postmodern textuality in the eighties (Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, Paul Auster's Moon Palace, etc.). In the last third of the course we will turn to more recent narratives which expand our understanding of the term, particularly in regard to the increasingly complicated relationships between literary, film, and television cultures (Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, David Foster Wallace's The Girl With Curious Hair, Martin Amis' The Information, etc.). In addition to these titles there will be a substantial course packet that will include relevant theoretical material.
ENGL 90412
GENDER AND SPACE
Barbara Green and Pam Wojcik
TR 12:30-1:45
This is a team-taught interdisciplinary course focused on an encounter between gender and space in modernity. Through planning and design, as well as through habitation and use, spaces both public and private take on specific, and varied, gendered meanings. Our home departments are English, and Film, Theater, and Television, so many of our materials will be drawn from literature and from film. Since the course employs a cross-disciplinary approach to space, place, and gender, we will also include a range of materials - not only films and novels, but theoretical texts, architectural plans, histories, and philosophical texts - to survey the complexity of various gendered meanings attached to space in the cultures of modernity. We will examine spaces both public and private (the department store, the cinema, the street, the apartment, the country home, etc.) as traversed and inhabited by a variety of twentieth century figures (the flaneur, the New Woman, the shop girl, the sapphist, the suffragist, the single girl, the bachelor, etc.). Students will examine issues of gender and the public sphere, the significance of public spaces such as department stores, and cinemas; the mapping of gendered hierarchies into office spaces; voyeurism in private spaces including the home and the apartment; the specific meanings that attach themselves to separate spaces within the home such as the kitchen or the bedroom. Literary texts may include George Gissing's, The Odd Women, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and her London essays, Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Janet Flanner's Cubical City, Nella Larsen's Passing, Mary McCarthy's The Group, and selections from various materials on single life in the city, like The Girls in Apartment 3B and Sex and the Single Girl. Films featuring spaces both public and private will be included, such as It, fifties melodramas such as All that Heaven Allows, office films such as The Best of Everything or How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, apartment films such as The Apartment and That Funny Feeling, and more. In addition, we will consult theories of space, place, and gender by Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Bachelard, Dolores Hayden, Daphne Spain, Doreen Massey, Beatriz Colomina and others. Requirements will include a research essay of twenty pages or more, and a presentation.
Note: The course will include a Lab for film screenings, ENGL 91001, for which students must register. The course will be open to undergraduates from FTT, Gender Studies, and English by permission.
French
LIT 73730 CRN: 27767
AUTOUR/AUTEURS DE PORT-ROYAL
M 3:00-5:45
L. MacKenzie
In this seminar we will consider the theological, philosophical, psychological and political movement called Jansenism through the writings of those authors who have been enshrined in the so-called canon. These authors will, to a lesser or greater extent, include Pascal (Lettres provinciales, Pensées), Racine (Phèdre), La Rochefoucauld (Maximes), La Bruyère (Les Caractères), LaFayette (Le Princesse de Clèves). Critical works will include Benichou (Morales du grand siècle), Goldmann (Le Dieu caché) and others.
LIT 73661 CRN: 27766
LYRIC POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE
R 3:30-6:15
J. DellaNeva
An in-depth study of the oeuvre Du Bellay, including non-amatory poetry.
German
LIT 73961 CRN:
DISCOURSES OF UNITY OR DISUNITY? REPRESENTING GERMANY AFTER 1990
MW 3-4:15
Anita McChesney
The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 brought the hope of unity to two diverse German traditions. Yet despite rapid political and geographical unification, even now, more than 15 years later, Germany seems in many respects more dis-unified than ever. In this course we will examine the unity discourse in contemporary German film and text. Focusing in particular on current depictions of the former East and West, we will consider whether theses representations contribute to a new sense of national unity by emphasizing the similarities in a common past and present, or whether in fact they accentuate a sense of disunity by bringing out areas of difference, divergence, and even conflict.
The course will facilitate explorations of literary, cultural, and historical impact of (dis)unity in present-day Germany through intensive discussion, written essays, and short student-led presentations.
Irish
LIT 73962 CRN: 27668
HEROIC LITERATURE IN MODERN ADAPTATION
O'Leary, Phil
MW 11:45-1:00
Beginning with a study of the ethos of Irish/Celtic heroic literature in its historic and cultural context, this course examines the ideological, aesthetic, and personal uses to which that material has been put by Irish writers of the past two centuries (19th and 20th centuries) writing in English and Irish. Among the authors to be studies are: Seamus Heaney, Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Eugene Watters/Eoghan Ó Tuairisc. Particular attention will be paid to shifting concepts of
"authenticity" and the degree to which various creative artists have retained, reinterpreted, or reinvented what they perceived to be the essence of their originals. This course will interest English majors, modernists and medievalists.
Italian
LIT 73563 CRN: 73563
HISTORY OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE
T 3:30-6:00
T. Cachey
An advanced introduction to the history of the Italian Language from Le origini to the High Renaissance with special emphasis on Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio during the medieval period and Bembo, Castiglione, and Machiavelli for the Renaissance.
LIT 73665 CRN: 23715
DANTE II
C. Moevs
T/R 9:30-10:45
Dante's Comedy is one of the supreme poetic achievements in Western literature. It is a probing synthesis of the entire Western cultural and philosophical tradition that produced it, a radical experiment in poetics and poetic technique, and a profound exploration of Christian spirituality. Dante I and II are a close study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its cultural (historical, literary, artistic, philosophical) context. Dante I covers the works that precede the Comedy (Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia) and the Inferno, Dante II covers the Purgatorio and Paradiso, along with the Monarchia. These are separate courses, and can be taken independently, though they do form an integrated sequence. The course and all discussion will be conducted in English. Dante's minor works will be read in English translation; all critical articles will be in English. The Comedy will be read in facing-page translation, and we will refer to it in Italian. Acquaintance with Latin or a Romance language is therefore helpful, though not strictly necessary.
LIT 73819 CRN: 27765
RENAISSANCE ITALIAN THEATRE: ORIGINS THROUGH THE COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
R 12:30-3:00
C. Moevs
(awaiting course description)
Spanish
LIT 73872 CRN: 27768
WOMEN NOVELISTS IN CONTEMPORARY SPAIN
W 3:30-6:00
C. Jerez-Farran
The course will seek to familiarize students with the evolution and present situation of the most representative contemporary literature written by women in Spain. Some of the writers to be studied include Carme Riera, Merce Rodoreda, Carmen Martín Gaite, Enther Tusquets, Rosa Montero, Rosa Regás and Lucía Etxeberria. We will study these authors in relation to the social and political circumstances of their time to see the way in which feminist literature reflects the diversity of female identities.
LIT 73873 CRN: 27769
COLONIAL STUDIES SPAIN
T 3:30-6:00
P. Boyer
This course examines continuities between colonial and contemporary writings by pairing
canonical works from the early Spanish-American world with postcolonial and contemporary texts. We will explore the ways that historical writing and fictional writing from and about Spanish America interweave, blurring generic boundaries and historical categories, as well as the ways that literary culture comes to articulate both national subjects and a series of conflicting ideological narratives. Authors studied will include Columbus, Fray Servando, Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, Hernán Cortés, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Reinaldo Arenas, and W.H. Prescott, among others.
