How does a self—the most intimate and elusive of concepts—become a text? What is the relationship between living a life and writing about it? What assumptions might authors and readers not share about the ways experience is endowed with symbolic value? For modernists and postmodernists particularly obsessed by the problems of identity and self-expression, the study of autobiography is a fascinating enterprise. This course is intended to introduce students to the autobiographical mode in literature. We will examine a rich variety of “life stories,” including memoirs, letters, and diaries that span from medieval times through the 21st century. Special attention will be paid to the following patterns and themes: the complex interplay between “truth” and “fiction,” sincerity and artifice, memory and representation; the nature of confessional writing; the use of autobiography as cultural document; and the role of gender in both the writing and reading of autobiographies. Among the authors to be included are St. Augustine, Kempe, Rousseau, Franklin, Douglass, Brent, Stein, Kafka, Nabokov, Wright, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Hurston, and Kingston. Students will submit one piece of autobiographical writing at the beginning of the course and will write short, frequent papers on the readings throughout the year.

“Utopia has always been a political issue, an unusual destiny for a literary form”—Fredric Jameson

This course explores the idea of utopia in literature, beginning with St. Thomas More’s Utopia and moving through diverse works of science fiction, speculative fiction, and postcolonial literature. We will contextualize the notion of “utopia” within the tradition of Marxist critical theory, as well as investigate issues of race, gender, and sexuality as they have been articulated in recent decades. The primary focus of the course will be on 20th-century literature and the politics of the contemporary age—globalization, digital technologies, and environmental crisis. Literature, philosophy, and politics will each play a significant role in coursework.

Perhaps more than anything else, literature defines the identity of cultures and nations. At the same time, few cultural manifestations help to bring together peoples and cultures as powerfully as literature, which gives a special significance to the fact that only three percent of the books published in the United States are translations. In a world where technology has made borders obsolete in many ways, the lack of curiosity for the great literatures of the world is an alarming symptom of North America´s cultural isolation. Starting with Latin America, all continents have an astonishing wealth of literatures. Europe is just one of them. The seat of ancient civilizations and empires that conquered the rest of the world, the Europe of today is dramatically different from what it once was. After two world wars and the collapse of formidable utopias, contemporary European reality is extraordinarily elusive and complex. Forty languages are spoken in almost as many European countries nowadays, each of them representing a vibrant body of literature. In this course, we will study the literary manifestations of the new Europe, paying special attention to her youngest authors. In our aproach, we will focus on sociopolitical displacements such as the reshaping of the European identities, resulting from the influx of immigrants from all over the world, and the conflicts derived from the dream of a unity that coexists with the birth of a whole set of youthful countries that transcend the notion of nationality—ethnically, culturally, and linguistically.

On July 4, 1845, Henry Thoreau began spending his days and nights at Walden Pond. His declaration of independence from the America in which he was living epitomizes a tradition that goes to the heart of American literature. Time and again, America’s best writers have adapted the values of the American Revolution to their own times. In rebelling against religious orthodoxy, slavery, a market economy, the relegation of women to second-class citizens—to name just a few of their targets—America’s prose writers have produced a tradition at odds with the country but consistent with the spirit of the Founding Fathers. Declarations of Independence will focus on this tradition in terms of a series of American literary masterworks that feature the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J.D. Salinger. The course will look at the parallels between America’s writers and America’s painters from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century by closely following the contours of American history. Students will begin their conference work putting the classic American novel in perspective by looking at classic, 19th-century British fiction.

For Percy Shelley, passionate love is the bond that connects us “with every thing which exists”; for Jane Austen, on the other hand, a heroine may lose her heart but not her self-control. It is generally known that Romanticism assigned high value to the emotion of love, but “love” has always been understood in many different ways. This course explores the multiple meanings of love as embodied in the literature of the Romantic period (1780-1830) and its long 19th-century afterglow. To what extent did Romantic attitudes toward desire reflect a reaction against Enlightenment rationality? How did the rise of the so-called companionate marriage change family life? Did the idealization of free love presage a new sexual politics—or simply reinforce the existing social order? Why did Romantic love so often emphasize cruelty and pain and impossible longing? We read poetry, fiction, drama, and polemical prose as a means of approaching such questions and of expanding our conversation, with works by Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Austen, Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, Dickens, Brontë, Wilde, Stoppard, and others.

This yearlong lecture will examine pivotal moments and texts in the history of African American letters, ranging from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) to Saul Williams’s The Dead Emcee Scrolls (2006). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, fiction, poetry, drama, polemical prose, autobiography, music, and film), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship, and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African American writing under the regime of chattel slavery and the questions it poses about “race,” “authorship,” “subjectivity,” “self-mastery,” and “freedom.” We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and “authenticated.” Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. We will also focus on the changing notions of racial identification in the 20th and 21st centuries, addressing how the wide array of genres shape and are shaped by pivotal cultural and political movements such as the “New Negro,” the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, Black Arts/Black Power, and Womanism, as well as current debates over matters such as hip hop, same-sexuality, incarceration, and “premature death.” Also, we will examine how the texts deal with recent questions about Black identities and subjectivities that get funneled through notions of a postrace and/or postethnic (international) society. Some authors whom we might study include, but are not limited to, Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Anna Julia Cooper, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Huey Newton, Sonya Sanchez, Carolyn Rodgers, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde.

War is one of the great themes in European literature. The greatest works of Greco-Roman antiquity are meditations on war; and as an organizing metaphor, war pervades our attempts to represent politics, economics, and sexuality. Efforts to comprehend war were the genesis of the disciplines of history and political science; and the disaster of the Peloponnesian War forms the critical, if concealed, background to the first great works of Western philosophy. We shall begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine. We shall go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V), and Hobbes. In the second semester, we shall look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military metaphor; at Marxism, which remilitarized political economy; at Byron’s mock epic, Don Juan; and at two 19th-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy—one of whom concerned himself with war directly; the other used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic and economic life. We will conclude with a look at some 20th-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy. This is an interdisciplinary course. Group conferences will usually be committed to works of modern scholarship, often by historians and social scientists. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.

Joyce once boasted, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one's immortality.” With parallels to Hamlet, the Bible, and Homer’s Odyssey in his own Ulysses, Joyce attempts to rival the epic ambitions of the greatest writers in the Western tradition. No wonder that he is considered an icon of difficulty, arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century, an Irish writer of lasting international influence. In this course, we will confront Joyce’s reputation and social context, as well as his rich complexity—from the deceptively simple sentences of his short stories in Dubliners, to the evolving narrative of Stephen Hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to his experiment in dramatic form in Exiles, to the odyssey of character and language in Ulysses, to the linguistic invention of a short section of Finnegans Wake: “I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition. I’m at the end of English.” In this course, we will tackle Joyce’s comic, epic, modernist, postmodernist, and semi- and postcolonial fictional experiments.

Although they were Victorian critics who dubbed the late 18th century the “Age of Johnson,” contemporaries of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) would have recognized the justice of the term. Aside from compiling the first English dictionary of note, Johnson was a gifted and hugely influential critic, poet, political commentator, biographer, and novelist, as well as a legendarily pithy conversationalist and a master of the English sentence. His overbearing but strangely lovable personality was preserved for posterity by his friend and disciple James Boswell, who in 1791 published the greatest of all literary biographies, The Life of Johnson, which records (among much else) Johnson’s near-blindness, probable Tourette’s Syndrome, and selfless love of cats. Now, three years after the tercentenary of his birth and the flood of books commemorating it, Johnson remains perhaps the most familiar model of a vigorously independent public intellectual, even with (or perhaps because of) his many eccentricities and contradictions (his hatred of both slavery and the American Revolution, for instance). The age of Johnson, moreover, remains uniquely pertinent to students not only of cultural history but also of government and international relations, as it was his era (and, in part, his literary circle) that produced the contesting theories of empire and of cosmopolitanism, of trade and of liberty, with which we are still reckoning as global citizens. This course will reappraise Johnson’s legacy but will do so within a broad cultural survey of the Anglophone world across the second half of the 18th century. In addition to Johnson, Boswell, and other titans of Enlightenment prose—such as Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith—we will sample international writing on imperialism and the slave trade (Olaudah Equiano, the abolitionist poets), the French and American revolutions (Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke), and women’s rights (the bluestocking circle, Mary Wollstonecraft). We will read some novels (Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith), dramas (Richard Brinsley Sheridan), oriental tales (William Beckford), and personal writing (Fanny Burney’s diary, Boswell’s shockingly candid London Journal), as well as pay attention to the emerging literature of Scotland and Ireland (James Macpherson, Maria Edgeworth), visual art (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Rowlandson), and the poetic innovations that laid the groundwork for Romanticism (Thomas Gray, William Collins, George Crabbe). We will also glance at Johnson’s reception and influence over the centuries; for instance, in the work of Virginia Woolf.

Gothic stories, usually linked in people’s imagination to B-movies and best sellers of all times (Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, The Golem, Frankenstein, Edgar A. Poe’s short stories, Carmilla, The Castle of Otranto, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Rapaccini’s Daughter, or Aliens) are all, despite their intense individuality, unending variations on a single subject—mainly the relation between sexuality (the body, the material), art, and Death. Accordingly, the scenarios where these Gothic sagas take place are solitary and archaic places: castles, rundown mansions, and the like. As if a sublime geography and scenery, subdued by awe and despair, were crucial for the display of emotions, that is for the apparition of the unconscious, the hidden otherness of “evil.” Gothic “monsters,” on the other hand, constitute a strange gallery of unwanted and/or orphaned characters—usually artists fixated on desire and sexual fears. In this course, we will explore, through literary texts and films, both the North American and European “classics.” Then, we will concentrate on the wonderful contributions of Latin American writers to the Gothic “canon,” while drawing a possible portrait of the artist/poet as a deprived child who obssessively yearns for the impossible and, in so doing, becomes an intruder into the sexual politics of the symbolic. In other words, we will use Gothic literature to discuss aesthetics—mainly, the relation between beauty and mourning, loss and desire, death and forbidden drives. Mandatory film screenings will be part of this course.

Modernity can be variously conceived (we now speak of Shakespeare’s period as the “early modern”); but for the purposes of this course, we will conceive of it beginning with Romanticism—when crucial concepts such as “literature” and “culture” took on roughly the meanings they still have for us today. We will study works that examine the questions of literary form, style, and genre and the social and political life from which these works emerge. It is hoped that the approach taken in this course will make it possible to explore relationships between literary forms of the period that are usually studied separately; for example, between lyric poetry and the novel, between 19th-century realistic fiction and modernist experimental fiction, and between imaginative or “creative” writing and theoretical and critical texts. Writers to be read include Blake, Emily Bronte, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Melville, Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Conrad, Yeats, Mann, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Faulkner, Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morriison. 

This course will explore the literature, history, and politics of the Late Roman Republic, with particular emphasis on the tumultuous years from the death of Sulla (78 BCE) to the death of Caesar (44 BCE). Closely examining works of Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust, we will consider how the violent struggle for political power resulted in the demise of republican government and the centralization of authority in the hands of one individual. Class discussions and writing assignments will assess the relationship between intellectual views and political action during this critical moment in Western history. The course will be taught in translation. At the discretion of the instructor, qualified students may enroll in the course as Intermediate or Advanced Latin and read selected texts in the original Latin as part of their conference work.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Wordsworth and Coleridge invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths that they inherited. We will trace the impact of their innovation on a sequence of poets from the second generation of Romantics to modernists such as T. S. Eliot, who loudly rejected their Romantic legacy. In doing so, we will attempt to make some sense (at least in relation to poetic tradition) of the terms “Romanticism” and “modernism.” But our most important goal will be to appreciate each poet’s—indeed, each poem’s—unique contribution to the language. Our understanding of literary influence and historical trends will emerge from our close, imaginative reading of texts. Authors will include: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot, among others.

The 18th century introduced the long, realist prose fictions that we now call novels. As often with emergent literary forms, the novel arrived with an unsavory reputation; and its early practitioners labored, usually unsuccessfully, to distinguish their work from ephemeral printed news, escapist prose romances, and pornography. It was not until the defining achievement of authors such as Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, at the beginning of the next century, that the novel earned its status as polite and sometimes serious entertainment. This course looks at the difficult growth of the novel from its miscellaneous origins in the 17th century to the controversial experiments of the early 1700s and the eclectic masterpieces of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Austen. Other authors may include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Tobias Smollett, Matthew Lewis, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth.  Everything we read will be arresting and restlessly experimental; much of it will also be bawdy, transgressive, and outrageously funny. Topics of conversation will include the rise of female authorship, the emergence of Gothic and courtship fiction, the relationship between the novel and other literary genres (lyric and epic poetry, life writing, allegory), novelists’ responses to topical controversies (slavery, the age of Revolution), and the meaning of realism. We shall also consider several films adapted from 18th-century fiction, perhaps including Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones and Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

From sex comedies to epic poems, from ballad operas to courtship novels, the Restoration and 18^th century helped to define the modern conventions of both high art and popular entertainment. Beginning with the reign of a king who loved the theatre and all-too-public extramarital sex (Charles II), the era also thought in new and troubling ways about the nature and potential of performance—not only as an aspect of artistic practice but also as an element of all social and political life. What if all our identities (king and subject, husband and wife) were not God-given and prescriptive but, instead, factitious and changeable—mere roles that we can assume or dispose of at will? This course considers how authors from the 1660s to the 1800s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to the Hollywood films that have inherited and adapted their legacy. The emphasis is on drama—with a survey of major comedies, burlesques, parodies, heroic tragedies, and gothic melodramas from the period—by playwrights such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Henry Fielding, and Horace Walpole. We will intersperse this dramatic reading with viewings of films that show its influence from directors such as Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hal Ashby. Some attention will also be paid to poetry, including excerpts from Milton’s Paradise Lost and verse satires by Behn, John Wilmot (the second Earl of Rochester), Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. We will also consider some prose fiction from a self-proclaimed “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood to Jane Austen’s study of the subversive consequences of an amateur theatrical production, Mansfield Park.

One of John Keats’s sonnets begins, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” This course will step back from Keats to the writing of several of his great predecessors in the English Renaissance to reflect on how imagination shapes environment and environment shapes imagination in the early modern period. The late 16th and 17th centuries were a time of transition between traditional feudal society with its hierarchical ideas of order, of humanity, and of nature and emerging modernity with its secularizing humanism, its centralization of political and economic power, its development of increasingly dense and complex urban centers, and its commitments to the study and potential mastery of nature through empirical science. With early modernity come all the challenges to natural environment and its resources with which we are so familiar and by which we are so challenged: urban sprawl and environmental degradation, privatization of land, air and water pollution, deforestation and exhaustion of other resources, and diminishment of local species populations. We will study how several major writers register and respond to these tensions and these changes in what we might call their environmental vision, their imagination of nature: as wilderness, the “other” to civilization and its values, as chaos and threat, as liminal space of transformation, as pastoral retreat, as cultivatable human habitation and home. Class reading will include major works of Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Margaret Cavendish. Conference work may entail more extended work in any of these writers or literary modes or other authors in the period who are engaged in theorizing and imagining nature and may include study in history, philosophy, geography, politics, or theory.

British literature is often described in terms of tradition and continuity. This course takes a very different point of view and, looking at British writing since 1945, explores a literary culture marked by disruption, change, and remarkable variety. Through fiction, poetry, and drama written since 1945, we examine how the alleged consensus of the postwar period gradually gave way to challenging and provocative questions about the nature of Britishness itself. We consider the cultural effects of the dismantling of the once-powerful British empire and of Cold War politics, the Women’s Movement, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Thatcherism, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and the emergence of the modern, multicultural United Kingdom. Why are Sam Selvon’s Caribbean Londoners so lonely? What is Belfast confetti? What did it take to be a “top girl” in the 1980s? When did North Britain become devolved Scotland? These and other questions direct our conversation—with works by George Orwell, Philip Larkin, Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Seamus Heaney, Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, Alisdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, and others.

Roland Barthes was at the crossroads of all the various literary and theoretical currents that defined post-World War II France. His work thus constitutes a wonderful introduction to the passionate debates that defined this period and still have repercutions today. We will put some of Barthes’ major works in the context of their theoretical influences (Marxism, linguistics) but will also revisit some literary masterpieces with which he was in constant dialogue. Also, from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) and the posthumous Mourning Diary (2009), we’ll try to understand the evolution of Barthes’ writing, which progressively shows a preoccupation with language shared by poets and writers. We’ll thus try to assess Barthes’ position in today’s poststructuralist and postmodern France. Course taught in English, with the possibility of conducting conferences in French or English.

This course aims to provide a long view of literary representations and responses to slavery and the slave trade in the Americas from William Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones. Expressing the conflicted public conscience—and perhaps the collective unconscious—of a nation, literature registers vividly the human costs (and profits) and dehumanizing consequences of a social practice whose legacy still haunts and implicates us. We will study some of the major texts that stage the central crises in human relations, social institutions, and human identity provoked by slavery, considering in particular how these texts represent the perverse dynamics and identifications of the master-slave relationship; the systematic assaults on identity and community developed and practiced in slave-owning cultures; modes of resistance, survival, and subversion cultivated by slave communities and individuals to preserve their humanity and reclaim their liberty; and retrospective constructions of and meditations on slavery and its historical consequences. Since literary structure and style are not only representational but also a means of subversion, resistance, and reclamation, we will do a lot of close reading. Readings will be drawn from the works of William Shakespeare, Aime Cesaire, Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones. Conference work may entail more extended work in any of these writers or literary modes or in other writers engaged in the representation and interrogation of slavery, may be developed around a major theme or topic, and may include background study in history, philosophy, geography, politics, or theory.

The British Romantic movement, it has been said, produced the first “full-fledged ecological writers in the Western literary tradition.” To make this claim, however, is to provoke a host of volatile questions. What exactly did Romantics mean by “nature”? What were the aesthetic, scientific, and political implications of so-called Green Romanticism? Most provocatively, is modern environmental thought a continuation of Green Romanticism—or a necessary reaction against it? This course considers such issues through the prism of late 18th and early 19th-century British literature, with additional forays into contemporary art and scientific writing, as well as German and American literature. Possible areas of discussion may include the following: leveling politics, landscape design, Romantic idealism, colonial exploration and exploitation, astronomy and the visionary imagination, “peasant poetry,” vegetarianism, the sex life of plants, breastfeeding, ballooning, deism, sublime longings, organic form, and the republic of nature—with works by Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy and Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Charles Darwin, and John Keats, among others.

American poetry has multiple origins and a vast array of modes and variations. We will begin our readings for this course with Whitman and Dickinson, the two most influential 19th-century American poets, before turning our attention to at least seven modern American poets, including Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. We will pay considerable attention to the different versions of modernism that emerge in 20th-century American poetry and to the complexity of intergenerational poetic influence. Our study of literary influence and affinity will be in the service, however, of our central task, which is to appreciate and articulate the unique qualities of each of the poets—and poems—that we encounter through close, imaginative readings and informed speculation. 

“Consider, if you will, Me++.” This seminar explores new ways of thinking about the self, society, art, life, politics, and the unconscious that have emerged through theories and practical experimentation with a loose assemblage of things that we call machines. Here, it is the assemblage, rather than the thing, that is to be understood as machinic. Machines invite us to think not about essences but about the event: “not about is but about and.” In this seminar, the notion of a machinic assemblage provides a framework for exploring how we engage with digital media today. In the way that Saussure’s discoveries in linguistics revolutionized the study of literature in the 20th century, it may be that today the study of digital media is reshaping our understanding of reading, writing, and interpretive practices. The interaction of text, image, graphics, and design in the digital work of art also requires creative re-examination of our aesthetic traditions. This seminar contextualizes these emerging forms of art practices within social, economic, political, and aesthetic theories that address the significance of cybernetics, computing, the Internet, and digital media in the contemporary world.

This course will pick up the history of prose fiction roughly at the point at which the novel starts to become a self-conscious and problematic literary form in Flaubert, James, and Conrad. From these writers, we will proceed to the more radical and complex formal experiments of the great “high modernists” of fiction—Mann, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. In the last part of the course, we will consider the question of what is now called “postmodernism,” both in fiction that continues the experimental tradition of modernism while breaking with some of its assumptions (Beckett and Pynchon) and in important recent theorizing about problems of narrative and representation. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the social and political meanings of both experimental narrative techniques and theories of fiction. Previous completion of at least one year of literature or philosophy is required.

FALL SEMESTER: Beginning roughly in the 1830s, a number of American authors set out to “invent” American literature as a distinctively national literature rather than merely an English literature written elsewhere. Thoreau began his experiment living at Walden Pond exactly on the 4th of July. Walt Whitman, in his “Song of Myself,” refers to himself as “Walt Whitman, American.” And Emerson wrote about the “American Scholar.” It was also the case, however, that the country founded upon the proposition that “all men are created equal” had to deal with its Constitution’s provision that some men—slaves—were to count as only 3/5ths of a man, while others—Indians—were not to be counted at all. The land of liberty was also a land of slavery and colonial conquest. This course examines the invention of American literature from roughly the 1830s to 1890, the year Sioux Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee and the year when the Bureau of the Census announced the “closing” of the American frontier. In addition to those named above, our other authors include Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, William Apess, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, and Mark Twain.

SPRING SEMESTER: The Closed Frontier to the Great Depression, 1890-1929: With the “closing” of the frontier in 1890, America had “manifested” its “destiny” from “sea to shining sea.” But as the century turned, America was a very different place from what it had been before. The years 1880-1924 were the great age of immigration; more than three million people from China, Southern and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere arrived here. In those years, Americans were also still coming to terms with the implications of Darwin’s theories—only to discover the new intellectual challenges of relativity and psychoanalytic theory. If Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman struggled to invent a distinctive literature for America, many of the writers of this period had to figure out just what America was before they could produce its literature. This question became even more complicated after 1917, when young Americans found themselves abroad—fighting in World War I.

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself, a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, costumes, possibly scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we study all these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose life span is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare are our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I is our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries is our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings—from within Shakespeare’s wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film—is our work.

This seminar centers on a reading of five great storytellers and poets: Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, and Spenser. The powerful and complex fictions of these five contributed crucially to the ongoing “invention of love,” that profound and profoundly problematic passion that has seemed for more than two thousand years of Western civilization to lie at the heart of human existence. Additional readings drawn from Homer, Plato, Catullus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Roman de la Rose, and Arthurian romance will help us establish cultural contexts and provide some sense of both continuities and revisions in the literary imagining of love from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

The aim of this course is to have students produce a series of nonfiction essays that reflect Tom Wolfe’s belief that it is “possible to write journalism that would read like a novel.” The reading that we do is designed to serve the writing that we do, which will include but go beyond standard journalism. We will read a number of well-known nonfiction writers—among them Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Henry Louis Gates—but this course is not a history of the nonfiction essay. Students will be given assignments with deadlines for drafts, rewrites, and final copy. The assignments are not “writing-class exercises” but the kinds of work any editor would give out. A warning: This is not a course in “creative nonfiction” or covert autobiography. The writer’s subject, not the writer, is our primary concern. Accurate reporting is a nonnegotiable starting and finishing point. The course will begin by emphasizing writing technique and, as we move on to longer assignments, will focus on the role research, interviews, and legwork play in completing a story. Students should bring a writing sample to the interview and should not be taking another writing course.

This course invites the serious student to penetrate the tides of time in order to uncover what really lies behind the making of ancient Greece and Rome from their earliest times to their final transformations. The aimed-for result is a more deeply informed understanding of their direct contribution to us; namely, the classical tradition that still shapes our thinking and exercises our imagination. The methodologies employed will be derived as much from the fields of anthropology and sociology as from those of political science, economics, archaeology, and religious studies. The particular topics pursued will be set through joint decision by class members and the teacher but anchored always in the reality of what these two gifted peoples experienced—or believed to be their experience. To further this goal, all conferences will be in small groups, and all papers will be written as joint productions rather than as individual conclusions. A model for this procedure will be established in the first two weeks of the fall semester through the class’s multidisciplinary reading, in translation, of important selections from Homer’s Iliad.

This course entails an intensive and close textual encounter with the novelistic worlds of the 19th-century realist tradition. The first fictional tradition to accept social reality as the ultimate horizon for human striving, the 19th-century novels that we will study are all intensely critical of the severe limitations to human wholeness and meaning posed by the new social world they were confronting. At the same time that they accept the world as a setting and boundary for human life, they seek to find grounds for transcending its limitations. We will explore the tensions in these novelists’ works between accepting the world as given and seeking to transcend it. At the same time, we will try to understand why—in spite of a century and a half of great historical and cultural change—these novels continue to speak to the issues posed by the human condition with such beauty, depth, and wisdom. We will read in the works of such novelists as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Stendhal, Eliot, Austen, Dickens, Twain, and Goethe.

In this intermediate seminar, students will study various texts from writers and artists associated with The Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance. This movement refers to the highly productive period of African American arts and letters occurring roughly between 1920 and 1935, although its chronological boundaries tend to shift depending on the literary historian's persuasion. This course will engage with that popular and largely taken-for-granted notion of an artistic movement of Black Americans identified exclusively with one district in New York City. Writers and artists whose work (photography, film, poetry, music, and works of fiction and nonfiction) we may engage include, but are not limited to, James Vander Zee, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson. Using a range of critical essays as supplementary reading, we will begin by exploring how Harlem gets constructed as city myth and as work of art, while examining the place it occupied in the cultural imagination of the l920s and ’30s. Why was Harlem considered an exotic-erotic pleasure/tourist zone for some and, for others, the emblem of a utopian ethos of racial renewal and political progress? What were some of the generational tensions among the writers associated most popularly with the movement, as well as the economics of literary production? How were artists patronized and marketed to the American public/s, and what were the corresponding effects of the patronage system on black artistic production—and reception?

This course provides exposure to a wide array of contemporary global writing from sites as various as Turkey, Japan, the former Yugoslavia, France, Israel, Brazil, Canada, India, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States. Readings consist of literary texts written in the last decade, originally in English and in translation, though students able to read these texts in their original languages will be encouraged to do so. Primary attention will be directed to the particular stylistic, formal, and thematic features of the individual works, as we keep in mind the dynamic relation between local contexts and transnational space—the complex circuits by which languages and cultures circulate and exchange in a global economy. Thus, we will interrogate such notions as “cosmopolitan,” “world,” “global,” and “postcolonial” as modes of intertextuality and consider what “comparative literature” means today.

Spanning 1960 to the present (roughly from the Black Arts to the Hip Hop movements), this course will focus on contemporary African American poetry as represented in the writings and performances of writers, political figures, and musicians—including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Stokely Carmichael, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Haki Madhabuti, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Gil Scott Heron, Audre Lorde, Carolyn Rodgers, Askia Toure, Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, The Last Poets, Rita Dove, Dick Gregory, Marvin Gaye, Anita Baker, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Queen Latifah, Sister Souljah, Sarah Jones, Ursula Rucker, Talib Kweli, Jessica Care Moore, Saul Williams, Staceyann Chin, Mos Def, JayZ, Tupac Shakur, Erykah Badu, J. Ivy, and others. We will examine these various genres of Black oral (and written) expressions, paying particular attention to the role that poetry played in creating Black aesthetics, it’s role in giving language to the politics of the moments, and the theories advanced by the poems and poets. We will also look at the role that the space(s) that informed the poems played in shaping its content, theme, and form, as well as wrestle with questions of form with regard to the poems on the stage (oral) and on the page (written). Other themes that we will query include questions regarding intergenerational dialogue and disconnect (within and between movements) and the notion of performing, constructing, reflecting, criticizing, and creating a Black aesthetic and politic within a particular movement or historical moment. In addition to completing two analytic/critical essays and leading class discussion at least once in the semester, students will be required to keep weekly creative and critical journal entries/responses inspired by the works we study, and create/direct (as a class) a final presentation of Black poetry that requires memorizing and performing two poems (one of which must be from a writer on the syllabus; the other may be their own work/journal entry). This final presentation must be open to the Sarah Lawrence public.