Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Through Syntax to Style: A Grammar of Writing — LIT2169.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: John Gould
Credits: 2
"Syntax" is the aspect of grammar concerned with the relationships of words in a language, with how they fit together to create meaning.  By exploring various English syntactical structures, we will discover a variety of ways to combine the same words to say slightly different things.  The course will rely heavily on the linguistic work of Noam Chomsky.  We will
Literature

Time-Travel 101: Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler — LIT2548.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Both Toni Morrison's and Octavia Butler’s novels push us to consider time differently. Rather than as static artifacts, both women’s characters treat time, memory, and history as malleable materials. Take Morrison’s idea of "re-memory" in her novel Beloved, for example, a vivid reliving of the past that seems more than memory itself, something closer to being transported
Literature

Tolstoy's Short Fiction — LIT2395.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
In this class we will read a number of the shorter works of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). These will probably include, but might not be limited to, "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," The Kreutzer Sonata,"  "Master and Man," "Hadji Murad," "The Cossacks," "Father Sergius," "The Devil," "Family Happiness," and "Strider."
Literature

Tom Stoppard — LIT4376.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Maya Cantu
Credits: 4
Exemplified by works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, and Arcadia, the plays of Tom Stoppard perform dazzling high-wire acts of language and theatricality. Jumping between literary erudition and vaudevillian hijinks, Stoppard’s plays use meticulous technical precision to chart the enigmas of the brain and the chaos of the heart. As the playwright
Drama Literature

Toni Morrison and Afro-Diasporic (Re)Mything — LIT4538.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
Toni Morrison is one of America’s most cherished, studied, and criticized writers. Using antebellum and contemporary American history as her thematic and temporal foundation, Morrison has written about race, gender, class, and sexuality with a keen eye on mythology and fable. In this class, we will read through many of her novels, including but not limited to Sula, Song of
Literature

Toni Morrison and Afro-Diasporic (Re)Mything — LIT2256.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Toni Morrison is one of America’s most cherished, studied, and criticized writers. Using antebellum and contemporary American history as her thematic and temporal foundation, Morrison has written about race, gender, class, and sexuality with a keen eye on mythology and fable. In this class, we will read through many of her novels, including but not limited to Sula, Song of
Literature

Total Theory — HIS4215.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Credits: 4
Whether we love theory or hate it, rejecting it on the basis of a lack of understanding of its esoteric hermeneutics or jargon isn’t really a viable position, and certainly not an excuse. It’d be nice to know why, thus debating it on its own terms and perceiving its implications in all manner of contexts beyond them. The plan is to give at least an introduction to historicism,
Social Science Literature

Transcendentalism and its Discontents — LIT2208.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
A comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through the writing of its major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller) as well as more overshadowed club members like Orestes Brown, Bronson Alcott and Ellery Channing. We will explore the contentious debate the movement set off among thinkers of the time and come to a keen understanding of
Literature

Translating from Zero — LIT2573.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: TU,FR 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 4

Designed to help beginner translators with no experience build their own ethical translation practices—with attention to issues of race, gender, and queerness—this course offers an introduction to translation via a hands-on approach. What pronouns do you use when translating from a language that doesn’t have gendered pronouns? Do you translate slurs? We

Black Studies Literature

Translation Atelier — LIT4426.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: F 9:30AM-12:20PM & F 2:10PM-4:00PM
Credits: 5

This course for translators of all levels—from absolute beginner to seasoned translators with an ongoing practice—offers space, time, guidance and community to work on self-directed translation projects. In other words, the class operates as an atelier. It is comprised of a major workshop component to get feedback on work and to direct revisions and progress; and

Literature

Tristram Shandy and the Pointless Novel — LIT4766.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
“Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last,” Samuel Johnson wrote in 1776, a decade after Laurence Sterne’s novel was published. Tristram Shandy is indeed an odd book: an autobiographical novel which takes hundreds of pages to get to the moment of its own narrator’s birth; a story which is forever interrupting itself with digressions and typographical oddities, and
Literature

Truth and Consequences: The Uses (and Misuses) of Literary Persona — LIT2514.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Paul La Farge
Credits: 4
This will be a class about writers who have invented literary personae which complicate (and in some cases frustrate) the reading of their work. Questions about the uses of persona, the historical contexts in which persona become valuable, and the boundaries of the “literary” – the places where works of literature create anxiety by impinging on ideas about authority,
Literature

Turgenev and Flaubert — LIT4204.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Dan Hofstadter
Credits: 4
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883), the great Russian novelist, left his homeland in 1854 and spent most of the rest of his life in Paris, where he died. Though he wrote in Russian, he was also a writer of pan-European cultural connections, his closest friends being Pauline (García) Viardot, a distinguished Spanish-born opera singer and composer, and Gustave Flaubert (1821
Literature

US Publishing Today — LIT2574.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: FR 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

This course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity and representation in publishing. Major inquiries will include:


- What identities are over or underrepresented in publishing? 
- Who is able to get published and how? 
- Do writers with various identities, including those with disabilities, writers of

Black Studies Literature

Victorian Children’s Literature: Girls in the Underworld — LIT2515.01

Spring 2027
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Days & Time: TU 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 4

Quintessential to the Victorian cult of the girl-child, Alice Liddell and Wendy Darling have emerged as contemporary mythic icons of both traditional and subversive femininity. In this class, we will investigate how girl-children are entrapped and enchanted in the works of men, focusing on J.M. Barrie’s <

Literature

Victorian Children’s Literature: Girls in the Underworld — LIT2515.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
Quintessential to the Victorian cult of the girl-child, both Alice Liddell and Wendy Darling have emerged as contemporary mythic icons of both traditional and subversive femininity. In this class, we will investigate how girl-children are entrapped and enchanted in the works of men, focusing on J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books,
Literature

Victorian Ephemerality: Poetry, Photography, Paper — LIT2532.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
Time collapses while industry and science expands. Looking to the future, the Victorians clung to sentimentality as a response to a world that seemed to have industrialized overnight. From Arnold to Wilde, we’ll explore the prevailing poets of the Victorian era alongside investigations into Victorian visual culture, photography, and paper arts. In a time when letters were
Literature

Virgil, Ovid, Horace: Latin Poets in Translation — LIT4185.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Dan Hofstadter
Credits: 4
These Latin poets lived in the age of Caesar Augustus. Ovid's Metamorphoses, a book-length poem (he called it a "perpetual song") is our central interest. In this work Ovid recasts Greek mythology in an account of the loves of the gods and men, working in ancient Roman enthusiasms with distinctly New Age overtones, such as vegetarianism and the migration of souls. Mythology is
Literature

Virginia Woolf and the Craft of Consciousness — LIT4598.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
In addition to being one of the major novelists of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was also an incisive literary critic, an influential editor and publisher, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a prolific diarist, and a public figure whose lectures and essays re-shaped the discourse on women’s roles in literature and society. This course is a close study of Woolf’s major
Literature

Virginia Woolf: Honors Seminar — LIT4526.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
In this Seminar, we will focus intensively on the fiction and nonfiction of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) whose enormous output, experimental techniques, and intellectual reach revolutionized the form and subject matter of both the novel and the essay. As a thinker and social critic, Woolf is artful, radical, and full of complication—a foundation for modern feminism and pacifism,
Literature

Voltaire and Rousseau — LIT4143.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were towering figures not only of the age of Enlightenment but of all Western intellectual history. Their subjects ranged from philosophy to politics to religion to history to education; their works remain as readable and provocative as they were 250 years ago. Great radicals in their time who are still politically
Literature

Walking and Writing — LIT2398.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 4
The workshop will examine the literary traditions of walking and writing, focusing on how the first can assist the second. Themes will include walking as a passage; walking as escape; walking as a meditation; walking towards something; walking away from something; and those times when walking manages to be both of these things. Of his outings in Concord, Henry Thoreau said
Environment Literature

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson — LIT2199.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
In this course we will examine the work and worlds of these two canonical American poets. We will read the poems and letters of Dickinson and the poems and prose of Whitman, paying special attention to his lifelong masterwork, Leaves of Grass. We will also dip into the biographies of these authors and attempt to place them within the context of 19th century literature and
Literature

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson — LIT2199.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
In this course we will examine the work and worlds of these two canonical American poets. We will read the poems and letters of Dickinson and the poems and prose of Whitman, paying special attention to his lifelong masterwork, Leaves of Grass. We will also dip into the biographies of these authors and attempt to place them within the context of 19th century literature and
Literature

War and Peace — LIT4108.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
War and Peace, Vanity Fair, and Shirley are novels that are set during the Napoleonic Wars. Charlotte Bronte's novel is set in a Yorkshire deeply affected by the Peninsular wars, Tolstoy describes both Napoleon's Russian campaign and the domestic and social life of a huge range of characters, and Thackeray's greatest novel reaches its climax with the Battle of Waterloo.
Literature