Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

The Comedy of Manners — LIT2207.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: brooke allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
An examination of a number of English comedies of manners, mostly novels but also a few plays, within their social contexts. Authors we study might include Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Aldous Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse, Barbara Pym, and Henry Green.
Literature

The Courtly World: Lady Shonagon and Lady Murasaki — LIT2379.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
Written in eleventh century, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu is considered the world’s first full novel and a masterwork of classical literature. Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book is a memoir recounting life in the Japanese court of the same time, also regarded as a masterpiece of observation and wit in evoking natural and human worlds. Both authors were ladies in waiting at
Literature

The Devil — LIT2404.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Phillip Williams
Credits: 4
The Devil has taken many shapes and sizes throughout history and around the world. His story of origin has inspired canonical works that delve into Judeo-Christian theological examinations of daily life, political life, and the metaphysical. Who we are as people on earth seems to depend heavily on how we view our relationship with "good" and "evil." This class will focus on
Literature

The Ecstasy of Influence: Style in Fiction — LIT4124.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Kathleen Alcott
Credits: 4
“Nothing is inherently interesting,” wrote John Gardner, discoursing on the crucial center of any fictive work: style. When it comes to writing short fiction and novels, the ideas we’ve absorbed about narrativizing from our outside lives often don’t apply. Even the most thrilling story, if written without a reverence to form, loses its audience quickly. In this seminar on
Literature

The Family Album: Reading and Writing the Short Story — LIT4188.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Stuart Nadler
Credits: 4
The poet Czesław Miłosz said once that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” This idea of the writer’s position amid the family has always mirrored the writer’s position in society, existing both within it and outside of it at the same time. In this class, we will interrogate the family narrative as a particular idea and obsession of the American short
Literature

The Faulkner Fan Club — LIT2408.01) (cancelled 1/5/2023

Spring 2023
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
You sent in your application weeks ago and now you've finally gotten your swag: your Faulkner patch, your Faulkner commemorative button, the coffee mug with Faulkner's pen and ink drawn face on it, and your special edition copy of Absalom! Absalom!, and maybe now you're wondering, Well, who else is in this club? Wonder no more. In this class, we'll be reading not Faulkner but
Literature

The Female Grotesque — LIT4391.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Credits: 4
In this class, we will read prose that engages with the Female Grotesque, a subgenre of the Gothic and Grotesque in literature, art, and performance. Readers of the Female Grotesque may experience repulsion and fascination, as the genre reveals how women have been traditionally represented as both abject and ideal. Our focus will be on fiction: novels and short stories. (I
Literature

The Flower Songs of the Hungry Coyote: Pre-Columbian Indigenous Poetry — LIT2536.01) (day/time updated as of 10/9/2023

Spring 2024
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 2
While much of our study of North and Central American poetry begins after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, indigenous poetic traditions begin centuries before. Nezahualcoyotl, or the “Hungry Coyote,” is considered one of the greatest poets of pre-colonial Mexico. His “flower songs” inspired an entire generation of pre-Columbian Native poets, whose work we can read as a
Literature

The Flower Songs of the Hungry Coyote: Pre-Columbian Indigenous Poetry — LIT2536.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 2
While much of our study of North and Central American poetry begins after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, indigenous poetic traditions begin centuries before. Nezahualcoyotl, or the “Hungry Coyote,” is considered one of the greatest poets of pre-colonial Mexico. His “flower songs” inspired an entire generation of pre-Columbian Native poets, whose work we can read as a
Literature

The Global Enlightenment: 18th-20th cent. Literature — LIT2563.01) (day/time updated as of 5/10/2024

Fall 2024
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Credits: 4
This course takes a comparative approach to the global Enlightenment. Exploring ideas of the human and humanity developed across the world at this period, we pursue the idea that forms of difference such as race, gender, and sexuality became essential to defining “human” and “humanity.” Indeed our contemporary world grapples with this legacy. We ask: who is allowed to be fully
Literature

The Harlem Renaissance — LIT2403.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In Harlem, during the decade separating the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression, a generation of black artists and writers born around the turn of the century emerged as a self-conscious movement, flourished, and then dispersed. They described themselves as part of a “New Negro Renaissance”; cultural historians describe them as participants in the Harlem
Literature

The Haunted South — LIT2376.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Annie DeWitt
Credits: 4
The American South, with its complex and difficulty history, has long given rise to voices both lyrical and confessional, empathic and dangerous, realistic and strange. Rooted in this landscape's shifting racial, domestic and socio-economic identity, we will explore the grand and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern Literature from the Civil War to the Present. Writers to be
Literature

The History of English Prosody — LIT2276.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Phillip Williams
Credits: 4
This class explores the history and development of poetry in the English language. We will investigate the evolution of poetic techniques, forms, and tropes across history. We will begin with meter, syllabics, received forms such as the sonnet and villanelle, the ode, lyrical versus narrative poetry, accentual verse, structure versus form, prose poetry, and free verse. We will
Literature

The Immigrant Novel — LIT2540.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The immigrant novel often bears the burden of “building bridges” between cultures, portraying “the good immigrant” or “the tragic immigrant” as a helpless individual on a journey to assimilation in a new country. But, for over a century, alongside the stereotypical immigrant novels, there have been numerous irreverent immigrant novels that push back against oversimplification,
Literature

The Inexorable(Middle)March of Time — LIT4384.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Diving deep into George Eliot's brilliant, funny, heartbreaking novel, Middlemarch, a novel whose story spans only the years 1829 to 1832, we will examine the use and passage of time by one of the 19th century's most insightful and incisive authors. Eliot at once slows down and then speeds us through time, rounding back, leaping forward, using to great effect the omniscient
Literature

The Invention of the 19th Century: A seminar on Honoré de Balzac — LIT4329.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Oscar Wilde liked to say that Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) invented the 19th century. The Human Comedy (La Comédie Humaine) comprises approximately 3,000 characters in a total of 92 novels, sketches, stories, and philosophical tales. For the first time in the history of the novel, characters recur—a star of one book may reappear as a minor figure in the intricate social
Literature

The Jazz Age Revisited — LIT2304.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution, fueled by new communications technology, music, popular entertainment, the end of racial segregation, and a creative renaissance in a neighborhood in Upper
Literature

The Jazz Age Revisited — LIT2304.02

Fall 2020
Instructor:
Credits: 4
"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age in 1931. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution fueled by new communications technology, mass popular entertainment, Jazz and the Blues, and a bold “collaborative energy” (Ann Douglas) between the
Literature

The Jazz Age Revisited — LIT2304.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: M/W 8:00AM-9:50AM
Credits: 4

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age in 1931. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution fueled by new communications technology, mass popular entertainment, Jazz and the Blues, and a bold “collaborative energy” (Ann Douglas) between

Literature

The Jewish Annotated Gospels — MED2121.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Michael Cohen
Credits: 4
Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jesus' mother Mary and Mary Magdalene were all Jews even though they appear prominently in the Christian Bible, also known as the New Testament. Their lives were imbued with Jewish history, beliefs, and practices. Often those nuances and meanings are lost when those texts are read without that understanding. In this class we will read some of the
CAPA Literature

The Journey and the Pity: Revisiting Dante’s Inferno — LIT4597.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
T.S. Eliot famously said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them.” Agree or disagree, but the work of Dante Alighieri, the fourteenth century Florentine poet and statesman, remains vital to the study of poetry and its history—particularly as the lyric tradition intersects with long-form narrative and Christian allegory begins reconciling with pagan mythology in
Literature

The Literature of Artistic Obsession — LIT2250.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Creativity itself--elixir and torment, liberation and bondage, enchantment, exhilaration and irresistible adventure--has from time immemorial inspired great works of literature. Our readings will embrace a spectrum: protagonists caught in the throes of creative fixation; the artist who tries madly to impose himself, according to his own "impossible" terms, on society; the
Literature

The Literature of Black Insurgency — LIT4390.01) (day/time updated as of 10/9/2023

Spring 2024
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Looting, shooting, and gangs. We have many words for Black violence, a violence frowned upon not just by the racist and reactionary, but also by the ‘reasonable’ neoliberal. Stokely Carmichael’s “The Pitfalls of Liberalism” describes liberals’ tendency to “try to convince the oppressed that violence is an incorrect tactic, that violence will not work, that violence never
Black Studies Literature Society Culture and Thought