Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading and Writing: The Novel — LIT4326.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
What is the novel and how is it constructed? This course will treat the novel, primarily, as an exercise in form, and take students on in-depth tour of the traditions as they have evolved: the epistolary novel, the picaresque, the bildungsroman, the sturdy ‘realist’ or ‘naturalist’ novel, meta-fiction in its many different guises. We’ll read from the novel’s beginnings in the
Literature

Reading and Writing: the Personal Essay — LIT4617.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Jo Ann Beard
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

The essay is an intellectual and an artistic endeavor, and work in the form means work in thinking—about life, values, our own ideas and the ideas of others. Good personal essays entertain, inform and move us through the rendering of, and reflection over, our own life experiences. Essays and stories by artists such as Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Daniel Orozco, Annie Dillard

Literature

Reading into Refuge: Stories of Migration — LIT2340.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Stuart Nadler
Credits: 4
The repercussions of the refugee crisis in Syria and at our southern border have once again thrust the politics of migration and refuge into the public discussion. In this course we will investigate the literature of forced exile and resettlement in order to understand how our collective narratives about emigration are formed, and to ask what it means for a writer to
Literature

Reading Poetry: A Basic Course — LIT2357.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In what ways is reading poetry a fundamentally different practice from reading prose? What can we discover about a poem by examining its structure and the choices the poet made? In this introductory course we will trace the chronological development of poetry in English as we carefully consider a range of different poems from different historical periods, as well as
Literature

Reading Poetry: A Basic Course — LIT2357.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In what ways is reading poetry a fundamentally different practice from reading prose? What can we discover about a poem by examining its structure and the choices the poet made? In this introductory course we will carefully consider a range of different poems from different historical periods, as well as a number of contemporary works, as we try to ascertain what a poem is,
Literature

Reading Revolution — LIT4602.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In this seminar, we join in consideration of our consciousness in the act of creation on and off the page, as a means and expression of revolution. We explore what a revolution in reading as writing and writing as reading means, in experience, for each of us; rather than relegating our understanding of consciousness to total mystery, the object of this class is to directly and
Literature

Reading Wilderness — LIT2236.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 4
For generations, the passage west and the idea of wilderness have provided resonant subject matter for American writers. In the words of Wallace Stegner, "the wilderness idea is something that has helped form our character and certainly shaped our history as a people." The course will explore how our understanding of wilderness has evolved from perceived notions of untouched
Environment Literature

Reading Wilderness — LIT2236.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 2
For generations, the passage west and notions of wilderness have provided resonant subject matter for American writers. In the words of Wallace Stegner, “the wilderness idea is something that has helped form our character and certainly shaped our history as a people.” But if that idea is rooted in perceived notions of untouched earth, today it has more to do with managed
Literature

Readings in Chaucer — LIT2124.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Credits: 4
Our overriding aim is simple: to read, discuss, write about, and generally immerse ourselves in Geoffrey Chaucer's masterworks, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. In that process, we'll aim to get sufficiently comfortable with Middle English to read, delight in, and even imitate that rich language. We'll also consider something of Chaucer's life and times as
Literature

Reality and Dreams: Robert Musil and the Vienna Secession — LIT4148.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
The Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942) never lived to complete his multi-volume Modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Written obsessively over more than twenty years and conceived of as an ironic epitaph to the culture of Mitteleuropa that had slid blindly into the catastrophe of the First World War, the novel–and its author–became embroiled in the dark
Literature

Recent Fiction From India and Pakistan — LIT2132.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In this class we will look at novels and stories that have been published by Indian and Pakistani writers over the last twenty years, in the context of the history of the post-Partition subcontinent. We will read works by an array of authors, possibly including Aravind Adiga, Rohinton Mistry, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Mirza Waheed, Amit Chaudhuri, H.M. Naqvi, and Amitav
Literature

Reckless Desire — LIT2545.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 2
I'm not a scientist, but I'm going to full-throatedly argue, scientifically and unimpeachably, that every living creature harbors a desire, whether conscious or instinctive, often more than one desire at a time. A bevy of tree nuts. A good place to take a winter's-long nap. A cup of coffee. A better job. An easier time of it all. Life is rife with desire. And what's more,
Literature

Reinventing the Frost House — LIT2324.02

Fall 2017
Instructor: Megan Mayhew-Bergman
Credits: 2
What and who are writers’ houses for? In this course, we will ask this question in relation to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, looking at Frost’s legacy as a poet, work done while in residence there, and archives, interiors, and grounds. With guest speakers and individual research, we’ll confront the challenges and goals of house museums and make
Literature

Relation, Reflection, Refraction: Contemporary South American Fiction — LIT2424.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Contemporary South American fiction is rife with urgency, politics, and history, as well as narrative mischief, layering, and literary gamesmanship. It is a highly self-conscious stream of writing, with novelists in conversation--and conflict--with earlier writers, with their contemporaries, and with novelists of their own creation. Highly divergent stylists have perforce
Literature

ReVisions Rebellions, Revolution: Latin American Women Writers — LIT2516.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Since the 17th century women writers have been a steadily rebellious, even revolutionizing force in Latin American letters. A number of the writers we’ll read together are also visual and/or performance artists, and intensely political, dealing in formally challenging ways with the residues of 20th-century state terror; as well as the legacies of colonialism; themes of
Literature Cultural Studies and Languages

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and later rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that the two writers have been found new relevance--and controversy--in a post-Black Lives Matter world, we can read their major works together, side by side, and
Black Studies Literature

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: benjamin anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
"As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be," James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and sometimes rival Richard Wright. "We were linked together, really, because both of us were black." Now that both writers have been canonized, we can read their major works together, side by side, and identify the resonances and irreconcilable differences that
Literature

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possibly be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and sometimes rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that both writers have been canonized, we can read their major works together, side by side, and identify the resonances and irreconcilable differences that
Literature

Robert Frost and the Rural Authentic — LIT2353.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Stephen Metcalf
Credits: 2
Robert Frost was born in 1873, the year Thomas Hardy published Far From The Madding Crowd, and he died in 1963, the year Bob Dylan brought out Freewheelin’. In a life that spanned the better part of the 20th century, Frost experienced the emergence of modern America. His poetry–with its focus on the small New England village and the family farm, and its exquisitely preserved
Literature

Robot Dreams: Artificial and Human Identities in Literature and Popular Culture — LIT2402.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In this course we will trace artificial intelligence (AI) in literature and film from the industrial revolution to the ‘hive mind’ of rave music and the age of the Internet. What is the proper response to the prospect of ‘dehumanization’, and to the absorption of individual identity into mass culture? In attempting to answer this question, writers and filmmakers often find
Literature

Russian Jewish Literature and Film — LIT2203.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
The roots of Russian Jewish literature reach back into the Pale of Settlement of the pre-revolutionary era. The vibrant cosmopolitan city of Odessa on the Black Sea provided an important cultural model for the style and political stance of Jewish literature written in Russian. Although Stalin’s purges and the second World War affected all social levels and ethnic groups within
Literature

Sacred to Profane in the Whirlwind of History — LIT2506.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
We will read an international selection of 20th and 21st century Jewish writers who wrestle with religion, myth, history, and language. The agon extends to writing itself—narrative forms, notions of reality, memory, horror, and, in the face of it all, outrageous humor and invention. Expect to read Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Yoel Hoffman, David
Literature

Scenes — DRA4379.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Michael Giannitti
Credits: 4
To write a play, write a scene. And then another. And then another. In this course, we will take a close look at how scenes work by reading great scenes and considering them in the context of their plays. What function does the scene serve in the play? How does the scene work, moment by moment? Where does conflict appear, and how is character revealed? What surprises and power
Drama Literature