2009-2010 Literature Courses
First-Year Studies: Romantic Poetry and Its Legacies
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
In this course, we will be reading and discussing influential poets writing in English during the last two centuries. One of the assumptions of the course is that modern poetry originates in the Romantic era. In the wake of the French Revolution, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they inherited. We will trace the impact of their work on poets from the second generation of Romantics through the modernists, many of whom sought to break with Romanticism. 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 and historical trends will emerge from our close, imaginative reading of texts. Authors will include: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, R. Browning, C. Rossetti, Hardy, Frost, Stevens, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop.
First-Year Studies: Filling the Empty Stage: A Journey through Spanish and Latin American Theatre
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This course will explore in depth how Spanish and Latin American Theatre, from the 16th century to the 21st century, has contributed both as literature and as a performance art to a national identity in constant evolution. The course will encourage the discussion of various cultural, social, and political topics – issues of gender, sexuality, race, immigration, repression, violence, religion, etc. However, we will examine these plays not only as written texts but also as playable material meant to live on stage. By closely working with live and taped plays, film adaptations, and class workshops, students will be introduced to some of the basic principles for analyzing performance.
First-Year Studies: (W)rapping the Black Arts
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
The interest of this first-year studies seminar is black writing and cultural expressions “From Black Arts to Hip Hop.” We will interrogate the last 60 years of black writing, culture, and “thought” in the United States. By examining the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of work in multiple genres, the class focuses on themes and issues such as international collaboration, cross-generational discourse, generational identity, gender, race, space, revolution, the relationship between the written and spoken/performed word, and other interests that students might have. We will begin our study with post-Depression-era works aimed at helping us understand the concerns of the Black Arts Movement and culminate our interrogation with the Hip Hop movement. (How) do the works address the diverse experiences of socioeconomic class, geographic origin, and political outlook in black America? What kinds of materials are borrowed from the cultural expression of the “mass group”—such as folk tales, popular music, vernacular habits of speech—and how are these materials integrated with other materials and forms (sampled) associated with other groups, such as middle- and upper-class Europeans, white americans, West Indian immigrants, and continental Africans? How are we to regard the consumption (and influence) of black culture in contemporary America and internationally? How does hip hop move from a raced (black) and localized (urban) genre to becoming “the voice of Generation X” or wider America? How are the prison-industrial complex, democracy, and freedom related by the genre as a continuing question/concern? Why has hip hop created such controversy? does this controversy differ from debates over previous African American-inspired cultural forms—blues, jazz, and rock and roll? Course requirements/assignments each semester include: two short papers (3-4 pp.), a longer paper (7-10 pp.), weekly critical journal entries/response papers that can develop into papers or be related to conference work (except during the week when papers are assigned), in-class presentations/leading discussions (at least once), attending an in-class webinar with students from another institution, a class field trip (and possible fieldwork), and a public final presentation of conference work (at the end of the year).
First-Year Studies: Text and Theatre
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This course explores the relation between the play as written text and the play as staged event. More than any other literary form, drama depends upon a specific place and time—a theatre and its audience—for its realization. The words of a play are the fossils of a cultural experience: They provide the decipherable means by which we can reconstruct approximations of the living past. With this goal in mind, we will read and examine texts from ancient Athens and medieval Japan to Elizabethan London and contemporary New York (with many stops in between) in an attempt to understand the range of dramatic possibility and the human necessity of making theatre.
First-Year Studies: Literature of Laughter in the Western Tradition
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
If writers are always trying to provoke a reaction in their readers, then laughter is a clear and explicit response, a powerful proof of a work’s impact and validity. At the same time, laughter and its manifestations in the body have always been perceived as a threat to morals, truth, and religion. As a result, there’s always been in the Western world the temptation to control laughter and to limit its implications, in particular by theorizing it through various concepts and genres such as comedy, satire, and parody. Thus, laughter is a very interesting way to approach the question of the fundamental role of the writer and of the status of literature itself in the Western tradition. We will read and discuss masterpieces from Homer to contemporary writers and cover all genres. Authors covered will include Homer, Plato, Aristophanes, Horace, Terence, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Swift, Flaubert, Beckett, and Ionesco, among others.
First Year Studies in Literary Interchange
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This is a course in the give and take of literary traditions. A literary tradition builds up itself out of interchanges between writers and other writers and between writers and readers. The cultural and imaginative power invested in stories makes literary tradition an imagined place for experimentation with ideas of self and society—for the extension of the sense of self and community beyond the limiting factors that seem to define us and lock us into diminished and conflicted forms of social and historical existence. We will study clusters of books where we can see the dynamics of textual interchange and extension at work, linking “modern” texts with “classics” of earlier times. We will consider the ways in which writers in the last two centuries, particularly writers of color, have established their own creative authority and cultural centrality in part by reading and re-envisioning several of the most powerful stories of western literature: Homer’s The Iliad, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost. The modern writers’ strategies of subversion, appropriation, and transformation will vivify and focus our sense of the still challenging imaginative power of the “classical” texts. These instances of literary interchange should provide us with a way of thinking about literary tradition as liberating, dynamic, and pluralistic.
Asian American Text and Image: Harold and Kumar Go Back in Time
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
This course investigates 20th-century American cultural history through the eyes of Asian Americans. Harold and Kumar follow in a long line of ‘Asian Americans’ who were early travelers and ethnographers of Americans before becoming objects of American scrutiny. The course is, at once, the analysis of a particular minority history, as well as the deconstruction of the American way of life. If this humorous duo offer a send-up of the American dream as a search for White Castle, then we might inquire—in 2009—what are the historical origins of such contemporary representations? What do they reveal of the continuities and discontinuities that traverse American society throughout the 20th century? Is the development of a self-conscious American immigrant identity, armed with the goal of making a claim on the nation of the United States, at odds with the turbulent history of U.S. economic and military intervention in various ‘Asian’ ‘countries of origin’? It seems that even Harold and Kumar, after fulfilling their dream of entering the White Castle, end up in Guantanamo Bay. The social and cultural dynamics among different ethnic groups vis-à-vis the U.S. state and their countries of origin undermine any attempt to discover a unified collective. Rather, volatile eruptions, ongoing tensions, fluctuations, reversals, detours, and diversions characterize immigrant genealogies in U.S. history. The course will zigzag between present and past through pairings of contemporary and historical material: Harold and Kumar meet the ghosts of Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: the Making of an Oriental Yankee. Primary materials include memoir, essay, fiction, poetry, photography, film, performance art, and graphic novel. Asian American classics will be juxtaposed with Hollywood cultural icons.
American Stages: The Evolution of Theatre in the United States
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
In a nation invented on suppositions of individuality and equality, theatre has always held a peculiar place. On the one hand, Western theatre and the genres of tragedy and comedy were born from democracy in its ancient Athenian form; on the other hand, the communal nature of theatre goes against the expressions of self-reliance that characterize American vision and enterprise. This course explores the ways in which people who have called themselves Americans, sometimes with significant cultural modifiers, have thought about and made theatre from the 18th century to the present. We shall begin by looking at early attempts to create American “entertainments” based upon European forms. Soon, the displacement of native peoples, African slavery, expansion into the West, mass immigration, and industrialism lead to new social and political uses of melodrama. In the 20th century, a “classic” American drama develops, represented in the works of Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. We shall then retrace our steps in order to gain alternative perspectives. These come primarily from the influence of African American music, particularly jazz, as it informs popular entertainments and blends with European vaudeville and “gaiety” shows to create a new and characteristically American genre: musical theatre. Simultaneously, the element of improvisation as derived from jazz contributes to the idea of unscripted work as quintessentially American, challenging the entire role of the playwright and the boundaries of theatrical space. We will then be in a position to examine the paradoxes of contemporary stages in which the invention of the self—that unique American assumption, privilege, and burden—is conflicted by identity politics, post-modernism, and the reflexive poses of irony.
Epic Vision and Tradition from the Odyssey to Walcott's Omeros
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
The epic is a monumental literary form and an index to the depth and richness of a culture and the ultimate test of a writer’s creative power. Encyclopedic in its inclusiveness, the epic reflects a culture’s origins and projects its destiny, giving definitive form to its vital mythology and problematically asserting and questioning its formative values. This course on the emergence and development of the epic genre developed in the Western tradition will be organized around four central purposes. First, we will study the major structural, stylistic, and thematic features of each epic. Second, we will consider the cultural significance of the epic as the collective or heroic memory of a people. Third, we will examine how each bard weaves an inspired, yet troubled, image of visionary selfhood into the cultural and historical themes of the poem. Fourth, we will notice how the epic form changes shape under changing cultural and historical circumstances and measure the degree to which the influence of epic tradition becomes a resource for literary and cultural power. First term: Homer, Odyssey; Virgil, Aeneid; Dante, Inferno; Milton, Paradise Lost. Second term: Pope, The Rape of the Lock; Wordsworth, The Prelude; Eliot, The Waste Land; Joyce, Ulysses; Walcott, Omeros.
Modern Japanese Literature
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Fall
This course is an introduction to Japanese literature spanning the 20th century. We will move chronologically to consider how writers represented Japanese modernity in its varied forms. As Japan’s borders shifted dramatically from pre-war and wartime imperialism to post-war occupation, its writers radically scrutinized the meanings of Japanese collective and individual identities. We will examine different tensions evident in writings, ranging from a critique of “backward” social caste ideology in Shimazaki Toson’s The Broken Commandment to a mockery of Japan’s idolization of Western culture in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Naomi and the moral imperative of the writer as atomic bomb survivor and witness in Ota Yoko’s City of Corpses. We will carefully and critically read these major writers and examine how they questioned the connections between place, history, memory, and identity. Other writers we will read include Natsume Soseki, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Enchi Fumiko, Oe Kenzaburo, Abe Kobo, Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki.
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Dante’s Divine Comedy is, in many ways, a summa of medieval culture—a prism through which the poet filtered European Civilization as he knew it. Classical and medieval civilizations are melded in one magnificent and totalizing Christian vision that embraces art, literature, philosophy, science, history, and theology. It is a moral construct intended to guide life on earth, for concepts of heaven and hell serve traditionally as repositories for dreams of ecstasy, fantasies of horror, and, ultimately, moral guidance. This course is intended to offer a close reading of Dante’s masterpiece in its multiple contexts in an attempt to understand how the poem works and how Dante saw—and changed—his world. We will read his poem closely, along with some critical articles, other relevant works of both ancient and modern literature, and a look at some important images.
An Introduction to Literary Theory
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The fundamental premises of literary criticism and theory have been interrogated again and again since the Greeks first formulated the notion of poetics. This course offers an introduction to modern and contemporary debates about the nature and function of literature—as well as the nature, function, and status of theory itself—from perspectives as diverse as hermeneutics, New Criticism, Russian Formalism, semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, African American criticism, feminism, queer studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. Our aim is to gain an understanding of how language and other systems of signs provide frameworks that inform (determine?) the ways we read and, more generally, how we interpret experience, construct identity, and produce meanings in the world. Literary texts will include poetry, drama, and fiction by a range of authors against whom we will test the various critical approaches.
Literature and Society from the Romantic Period to the Present
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course attempts to explore some of the relations between literature and social and political issues beginning with the period of 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 connection between questions of literary form, style, and genre and the social, political, and cultural 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 modernistic experimental fiction, and between imaginative or “creative” writing and theoretical and critical writing. Writers to be read include Blake, Dickens, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky; Melville, Marx; Nietzsche, Wilde, Conrad, Yeats, Mann, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, Faulkner, Mailer, Fredic Jameson, and Toni Morrison.
English: History of a Language
Level: Open
Semester: Year
What happened to English between Beowulf and Virginia Woolf? What’s happening to it now? The first semester of this course introduces students to some basic concepts in linguistics, tracing the evolution of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) through the Middle English of Chaucer and the Early Modern English of Shakespeare and the 18th century to an English that we recognize—for all its variety—as our own. Second semester turns from the history of English and the study of language change over time to the varieties of contemporary English and a sociolinguistic approach to the ways language differs from one community of speakers to another. Among the topics for second semester are: pidgins and creoles, American Sign Language, language and gender, and African American English (Ebonics). This course is intended for anyone who loves language and literature; students may choose their conference work from a range of topics in either language or linguistics or both.
The Grammar of Narrative: Issues in the Analysis of Fiction
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The hospital chart and the police report of the traffic accident have narrative properties; however, an eight-year-old could distinguish between these chronologies and a story. What, indeed, makes a narrative sequence a story? This question provokes a second question concerning the many forms and devices—the range of possibilities, or “grammar”—exploited by the narrative artist in pursuit of some kind of meaning. That is, fiction is doubly beguiling. Initial infatuation engenders a second level of enticement: the desire to grasp its manner of working its wiles. To move beyond description/paraphrase to active analysis of fiction, one must develop an explicit inventory of the major features that condition its creation and reception—a poetics of narrative. Thus, we will probe issues such as point of view, the representation of temporality, rhetorical figures, indirect discourse, and its relation to the classical opposition of mimesis and diegesis. Enlightenment on these matters will be drawn from significant writers (e.g., Hawthorne, Cather, Nabokov) and theorists (e.g., Aristotle, James, Lucacs). While this is not a survey course—particular “problems,” rather than a chronology of major books, will be the focus—the historical context of given issues and works will be constantly underscored. As Adorno has admonished, an exclusively formalist analysis doesn’t even grasp the work in formal terms.
Theories and Forms of Comedies
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Comedy is a startlingly various form, and it operates with a variety of logics: It can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for the first semester includes a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras), Aristophanes, Plautus, Juvenal, Lucian, Shakespeare, Molière, some Restoration comedy, and Fielding. In the second semester, we may read Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard; we will also look at film and cartoons. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.
The Two World Wars of the 20th Century: History and Literature
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course will examine World War I and World War II, two vast and savage armed conflicts that shaped the 20th century. We shall spend a year studying these two wars and some of the literature that they produced for two reasons: These wars were among the decisive shaping forces of our civilization; and war is intrinsically, if horrifically, fascinating, calling forth some of the best, as well as much of the worst, in human beings. World War I, generally understood as the ghastly collision of the Industrial Revolution with a nationalist state system, ended with the destruction of three empires. It produced new and starkly violent regimes, preeminently Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy; and it produced an immensely influential antiwar literary response, which has shaped politics down to our own day. World War II destroyed two of these polities and gave a long lease on life to the third of them. It inaugurated the Cold War that dominated world politics for most of the latter half of the 20th century. It doomed the European imperialism that had formally subjected almost the whole of the non-European world over the preceding centuries. And it produced the modern United States as the world’s first hyperpower. These wars, which made our political and cultural world and shattered its predecessor, are thus profoundly worth our understanding. The course will begin by describing the world destroyed by World War I and then assess the causes, courses, literature, and consequences of both world wars. We shall examine the experience of war for individuals, states, economies, and societies. These wars transformed everything they touched, and they touched everything. We shall look at them through the various optics of political history, literature, film, economic history, military history, cultural history, and social history.
The Age of Caesar
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
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 B.C.E.) to the death of Caesar (44 B.C.E.) Closely examining works of Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust, we will consider how the violent struggle for political power resulted in the centralization of authority in the hands of one individual and 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 in their conference work.
Literature in Translation: “Borrachita me voy”: Mexico at the Crossroads
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
This year marks the centenary of the uprising led by Emiliano Zapata (1909) in Chiapas, and with it the real beginning of the Mexican Revolution. As a consequence, Mexico becomes the source of endless fascination and locus for enormous political, social, and cultural ferment of truly international dimensions. Over roughly four decades, political upheavals are threaded with the artists and intellectuals who cross paths there and, in various ways, affect the landscape: John Reed, Trostky, Neruda, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Sergei Ensenstein, Luis Buñuel, and the many exiles from the Spanish Civil War, Carrington, Antonin Artaud, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, etc. Mexican artists and writers also travel abroad—Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz—and themselves become towering figures beyond Mexico’s borders. Others still are most “universal” when they are most “Mexican,” such as Juan Rulfo, while José Vasconcelos, who created a national system of education, proposes a “cosmic race” with Mexico at its center. We will look at the literature, visual arts, and film of this period in the context of the inter/national flux, consider what modernity is, ponder different ways in which literature and the arts intervene in the production of culture. Students who would like to explore Mexico or Latin America beyond the proposed timeline in conference projects are more than welcome. Taught in English.
The 19th-Century Russian Novel
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Henry James called them “baggy monsters”; for the Vicomte de Vogüé they were not romans, but russ-ans. This course will argue that the Russian novel is marked, above all, by its persistent posing of the question of form. We will begin with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and also with Tolstoy’s essay “A Few Words About War and Peace,” which claims that War and Peace is not a novel but only the latest in a long line of 19th-century Russian non-novels, including Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. We will read all these works and more as we attempt to answer the double question that Tolstoy raises—not just what is the “novel” but also what do we mean by “Russia.”
Declarations of Independence: American Masterworks and Their Critics
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
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 reenacted the American Revolution, changing the focus of their rebellion but not the spirit. In rebelling against religious orthodoxy, slavery, the market economy, and the relegation of women to second-class citizens, America’s prose writers have produced a tradition at odds with official culture but internally consistent. This course will focus on that tradition primarily in terms of 19th-century masterworks by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and Henry James. We will end with a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Students will begin their conference by putting the classic American novel in perspective by looking at classic 19th-century British fiction.
Dream Books: British Literature 1790-1890
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Night after night, author and addict Thomas de Quincey was visited by mental “spectacles of more than earthly splendour.” But the “fierce chemistry” of the dreaming mind, as de Quincey well knew, could be a source of pain and horror, as well as of pleasure and great creative power. This course explores treatments of the unconscious in British literature from the late 18th through the 19th centuries, a period marked by the production of dream journals, visionary poetry, phantasmagoria, and the invention of both photography and psychoanalysis. Does daydreaming have value? Why is the double uncanny? What’s on the other side of the looking glass? We explore concepts of the creative unconscious in Romantic poetry and accounts of madness and “night-fears” in letters, essays, and medical writing with works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Fuseli, Lamb, de Quincey, Beddoes, Hogg, Stevenson, Rossetti, Carroll, and Freud.
The Age of Augustus
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This course will explore the literature, history, and politics of the early Roman Empire. Closely examining works of Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Livy, we will assess the extraordinary flowering of Roman culture under Rome’s first emperor. We will examine the emergence of a distinctively Roman humanitas that still exerts an influence on the modern world. 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 in their conference work.
Literature in Translation: Knight, Jester, Lover, Madman: Don Quixote and the Age of Empire
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote, is many things to many people. A madman to his family and close acquaintances, his brain addled by excessive reading of (mostly) chivalric tales, he nevertheless encounters a great many people who, though not essentially in disagreement with that assessment, are more than willing to collaborate and elaborate on his “madness.” To himself, he is a knight in shining armor, whose purpose is to defend and protect the poor, the disenfranchised, and, of course, damsels in distress. To others, he is a sorry-looking old fool who might challenge (older) lions into battle. A member of the lesser, impoverished nobility, he seems singularly obtuse to money matters. A lover ever pining for the lady in his thoughts, he is a staunch defender of a woman’s right to her own choices. Accompanied by his rotund sidekick, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote weaves a luminous path through the latter part of a period most appropriately called the Golden Age of Spanish literature. This is a hilarious, wise, complex text that seems to embrace every genre—the picaresque and the pastoral novel were invented in Spain in the 16th century—yet belongs to none of them. It is both parody at times and always something utterly novel. To enhance this rich tapestry, a series of complementary texts and excerpts will be read. We will consider issues from intertextuality to platonic conceptions of love, what Renaissance and Baroque mean, the emergence and impact of a print culture, how the world expanded but man’s confidence withered, and meditate on youth, wisdom, justice, good government, and (old) age. What we shall not forget, ever, is that this is also a text made of many pleasures.
Open to any interested student.
Jane Austen and Late Enlightenment Culture
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This course seeks to contextualize the achievement of Jane Austen (1775-1817) in the literary and intellectual culture of her lifetime and the quarter century before her birth. In addition to most of Austen’s major novels and some of her juvenilia and letters, we will read a broad assortment of writing from the second half of the 18th century, including lyric poetry, drama, historical writing, literary criticism, political philosophy, and prose fiction, including examples of the gothic novel and pre-Austenian courtship fiction. The result, it is hoped, will be an intimate knowledge of Austen’s work and an understanding of how it participated in the defining controversies of her time: debates over literary form and decorum, the place of women in society, the role of the church, the French and American Revolutions, the slave trade, and the burgeoning British Empire. Aside from Austen, authors may include Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Hannah More, Laurence Sterne, Olaudah Equiano, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft;, Ann Radcliffe, and William Wordsworth.
Gloriana: Elizabeth I in Literature and the Arts
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Four hundred years after her death, it is not surprising that Queen Elizabeth has achieved the status of myth. In truth, however, she was already being mythologized during her life: in popular culture, by her courtiers, and not least of all by herself. “The Virgin Queen” was both celebrated and denigrated. She was the uncanny queen of fairies and the wise Biblical judge Deborah; she was the chaste Cynthia, moon goddess and ruler of oceans; she was male and female, a figurative mother to her nation and, some said, a literal mother of bastards. Elizabeth’s 45-year reign was a national work-in-progress; the many representations of Elizabeth that circulated during her life and after offer a window on the continuing negotiations of political power, religious authority, and gender necessitated by the anomaly of her rule. This course presumes no prior study of the period and can serve as an introduction to the culture of Renaissance England. Our mostly 16th-century materials include biography, history, poems and songs, plays and other dramatic entertainments, portraits, and Elizabeth’s letters and speeches. We will draw on a variety of scholarly disciplines in interpreting those materials and working to understand the achievements of, and the challenges to, Elizabeth’s reign.
Japanese Women: Writers and Texts
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Japanese women have been both writers and subjects of literature from Murasaki Shibiku’s classic The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century to contemporary fiction by Yoshimoto Banana and Ogawa Yoko. How has Japanese literature itself been gendered as “female,” and how does gender affect the production and reception of writings about women in different historical periods? In this course, we will read writing by and about Japanese women writers from the Heian period (794-1185) to the present. Our readings will include selections from Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, love poetry by classical poet Izumi Shikibu and modern poet Yosano Akiko, and writings on the “poison woman,” the “new woman,” the “modern girl,” and “contemporary girl” (shojo) literature. We will also read critical texts that will help us contextualize the social, historical, political, and literary contexts for their writing. Several films will also complement our readings.
Urban Modernism: The Harlem Renaissance, The Jazz Age, and Beyond
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This course will consider the various ways that Manhattan’s “culture of congestion” (Rem Koolhaas) fostered innovation in literature and the arts in the 1920s, when works by Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age artists reflected urban conditions such as density, communality, spontaneity, and alienation. We will read Black Modernism and the Modernism of European origin as parallel and related movements. Several central questions will frame our discussion of literature from 1920 to 1934; among them: Is there an urban poetics—a particular mix of tempo, dialect, and imagery—connecting the writing from this period to the streets, subways, and music clubs of Harlem and Greenwich Village? What is the relationship between 1920s urbanism and transgressing boundaries of genre, race, gender, and sexual orientation? How did the city’s mythic sense of freedom and spectacle fuel nostalgia for a rural past in the American South, the West Indies, or in Africa? Are representations of urban freedom at all related to New England’s more pastoral, transcendental representations of freedom of the self in an American wilderness? What is the lasting impact of a creative boom that ends in catastrophic economic depression? Did this boom effect social change and writing about race relations throughout the United States and Europe? Literary writers will include Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, ee cummings, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Helene Johnson. We will also read urban critics ranging from Jane Jacobs and E.B. White to Rem Koolhaas and Maria Balshaw. Visual art, music, and film will accompany readings, and there will be several class field trips to Manhattan. We will conclude with contemporary writers and artists: Caryl Phillips, Kevin Young, Alvin Ailey, Danzy Senna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kara Walker, among others.
Elective Affinities in Modern American Poetry
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Modern American poetry has multiple origins and a vast array of modes and variations. In this course, we will focus our attention on a double handful of modern North American poets writing in English and largely indebted (sometimes against their conscious will) to the visionary strain in 19th-century Romanticism. We will pay particular attention to the elective affinities of the poets that we study: Hart Crane’s ambivalent reaction to the modernism of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop’s apprenticeship to Marianne Moore, and the decisive influence of Wallace Stevens on John Ashbery. Students are encouraged to explore their own elective affinities in conference and to present readings to the rest of the class during the final weeks of each semester. Our central task will be to appreciate and articulate the unique strengths of each of the poems that we encounter through close, imaginative readings and informed speculation.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
The Poetics and Politics of Translation
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Translation is the process by which meanings are conveyed within the same language, as well as across different languages, cultures, forms, genres, and modes. The point of departure of this course is that all interpretive acts are acts of translation, that the very medium that makes translation possible—language itself—is already a translation. Because difference, “otherness,” or foreignness is a property of language, of every language, perhaps some of the most interesting problems that we will address revolve around the notion of “the untranslatable.” What is it that escapes, resists, or gets inevitably lost in translation? Put otherwise, how do we understand the distinction between literal and figurative language, and what underlies our assumption about the nature of the relationship between the authenticity of the original text or utterance and the derivative character of its translation(s)? Although translation is certainly poetics, it is also the imperfect and yet necessary basis for all cultural exchange. As subjects in a multicultural, multilingual, and intertextual universe, all of us “live in translation,” but we occupy that space differently, depending on the status of our language(s) in changing historical, political, and geographic contexts. How has the history of translation theory and practice been inflected by colonialism and post-colonialism? Our readings will alternate between the work of theorists and critics who have shaped translation studies in the 19th and 20th centuries—Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Nabokov, Paz, Steiner, and Derrida, among others—and literary texts that thematize or enact the process of translation, beginning with Genesis and the Tower of Babel. In addition, a workshop component to this course, involving visiting members of the foreign-language faculty and other practitioners of translation, will engage students directly in the challenges of translating.
Students must demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English; previous study of literature is also required.
Global Images of Asia-Pacific in Late 20th Century
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
In recent years, ‘Asian’ cinema has received significant attention and acclaim from audiences worldwide. This course provides historical context and a critical framework for understanding this global renaissance. We will investigate a selection of East Asian, Southeast Asian, and diasporic film, literature, and art, with an emphasis on the avant garde rather than popular culture. We will examine each work in relation to its immediate context, considering issues of authorship/auteurship, reception (local and global audiences), censorship, culture industries, and social movements. We will also consider these works in relation to diverse modern national histories, in particular focusing on major political and economic shifts of late 20th century (post-colonialism, post-socialism, neo-liberalism, etc). We will explore the various ways in which writers and filmmakers envision the rapidly changing dimensions of nation, society, and culture in the ‘transition’ from the post-colonial era of nation building toward the rapid advance of global capitalism. Equally important to this engagement with the historical context of art production will be an exploration of language, aesthetics, and philosophy as they deeply concern the artists under discussion. For example: How does the very notion of ‘history’ come to be reformulated through experiments with the film apparatus— the time and speed of film? How does ‘national identity’ fare under the twin auspices of ‘global English’ and the reclaiming of local ‘dialects’ and ‘pidgins’? How are gendered identities, sexualities, and bodies apprehended and recast by new media? How does ‘nature’ emerge in the encounter of art and technology? What does it mean to write ‘outside the nation’ yet ‘against the global’? We will attempt to comprehend the significance of such artistic endeavors in order to broaden our understanding of the complexities that today fall under the sign of globalization.
Mother/in Black Lit. Traditions
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
The interests of this year-long seminar build on the productivity and excitement of recent scholarship in both African American and African Caribbean diasporic studies regarding the role of the “mother figure” in black diasporic literature, culture and “thought.” The following central question will guide our study: How does each writer engage the maternal within his or her given historical contexts? We will begin our study with writings from the 18th century and work our way up to discussions of black maternity in the contemporary imaginary. Therefore, we will explore (among other issues) what role “African” and/or black maternity plays within these literary reproductions given its (black motherhood) contested space within (and beyond) the cultural, political, and legal history of slavery as philosophy and practice. We will examine the discourse surrounding formations such as the “slave mother,” “mother of a/the race” or “race mother,” “mammy” and “black nanny,” “welfare queen,” “single mother,” “black matriarch,” “black queen/goddess,” etc. We will study the material using an interdisciplinary approach, which has been and remains central to African American and Caribbean Studies, while examining these maternal tropes through fiction, nonfiction, “life writing,” poetry, music, performance art, popular culture, cultural studies, race theory, etc. Authors whose work we might investigate include, but are not limited to, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Martin Delaney, Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Saul Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Octavia Butler, Aime Cesaire, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, Deborah McDowell, and others.
Juniors and seniors; sophomores with permission of the instructor.
Modernism and Fiction
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course will pick up the history of prose fiction roughly at the point when 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.
Sophomores and above with at least a year of literature or philosophy.
American Literature, 1830-1929
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
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, other of our 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. These were also the years in which Americans were 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 had 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.
For sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students with some college background in literature.
The Literature of Fact: The Nonfiction Essay
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
In the 1973 introduction to his anthology, The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote, “In the early 1960s, a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the features statusphere. The discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would read like a novel.” Wolfe then went on to say, “Not even the journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him.” Wolfe’s history may be off slightly. One can see the kind of nonfiction writing he describes as far back as William Hazlitt’s early essays; and in the 1930s and 1940s, George Orwell and James Agee were practicing the new journalism. But Wolfe’s overall claim is on target. Since the early 1960s, the nonfiction essay has flourished; and it has flourished by showing that the techniques of fiction and the traditional essay can be combined with great effectiveness. The aim of this course is to produce nonfiction as lively as fiction. This emphasis on writing technique should not, however, be taken to mean that this is a course in what is so often called “creative nonfiction.” While personal essays will be part of the work students do, this is not a course in self-exploration or covert autobiography. Students will take on specific assignments and be expected to report accurately on what they discover. The subtitle for this course might well be “the literature of fact.” The course will begin by emphasizing writing technique and the importance of rewriting and then place an increasingly heavy focus on research. Among the writers studied will be Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Henry Louis Gates, Joan Didion, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Sophomores and above. Students interested in the course must bring a sample of their writing to the interview. If admitted to the course, they should not be taking another writing course.
The Greco-Roman World: Its Origins, Crises, Turning-Points, and Final Transformations
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This yearlong 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; and 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 multi-disciplinary reading. in translation. of important selections from Homer's Iliad.
Sophomores and above. Previous knowledge or current learning of classical Greek or Latin is neither required nor preferred.
Studies in the 19th-Century Novel
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
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 are 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.
Sophomores and above.
Shakespeare Off-Stage: Narrative and Lyric Poems
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
When we read Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poems (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, Sonnets, A Lover’s Complaint) we want both to respond as 21st-century people to the thought, feeling, and construction of the poems and also to discover how 16th- and 17th-century readers might have understood them. Accordingly, our reading of Shakespeare will include consideration of the original circumstances in which the poems appeared and circulated, as well as some of the different approaches to them in present-day literary criticism. We will also read Shakespeare’s contemporaries, poets such as Marlowe, Chapman, Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel. Their work established the fashion for the sonnet sequence and the Ovidian narrative, genres to which Shakespeare’s poetry belongs, but which it also transforms and transcends.
Sophomores and above.