Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Wavians Among the Ruins — LIT4328.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Evelyn Waugh is often described as a Bright Young Thing, a master of farce, the 20th century’s ironist, a modernist, an anti-modernist, a Catholic apologist, or the victim of a particularly elegiac, unforgiving case of enantiodromia. We will read his major novels, though with an eye on their critical reception, both then and now, since part of the course will be devoted to
Literature

Wharton and James: Gender and Power — LIT2331.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Kathleen Alcott
Credits: 4
Long before ideas about the 'performativity' of gender entered the cultural conversation, the Progressive-era writers Henry James and Edith Wharton—who were also correspondents and travel companions—produced fiction that subtly examined the ways that factors including class, region, age, and travel operated upon our conceptions of personhood, and particularly as they related to
Literature

When Books Become Films — LIT2100.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
What is lost and what is gained when a work of literary fiction becomes a film? Who gets to retell what stories, and when? What makes a successful adaptation, and why? To what degree does the spirit of the original story persist, when, like the Ship of Theseus, its various components have been replaced, repurposed, and removed? In this course we will look at issues of craft,
Literature

William Maxwell: Writer and Editor — LIT2281.02

Fall 2014
Instructor: annabel davis-goff
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
William Maxwell was an editor at the New Yorker for forty years; he was also one of the twentieth century's great American writers. We will read three of his novels and a selection of the stories he edited. These will include work by Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazzard, and Frank O'Connor. This course is suitable for students of all levels. This course will be offered the second
Literature

Word and Image Lab: Poems into Print — PRI4250.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Thorsten Dennerline and Mark Wunderlich
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In this hybrid Literature / Visual Arts course, students will experience the full range of the poet's creative process, from the conception of the poem, to writing it, shaping and editing it, designing its printed material aspects, setting it in type, printing on the letterpresses, and producing the work in a readable, distributable form. The process will be a dialog between
Literature Visual Arts

Workshop: Walking and Writing — LIT2398.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
The workshop will examine the literary traditions of walking and writing, focusing on how the first can assist the second.  Themes would 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
Literature

Wounded Literature: Trauma and Representation — LIT2262.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Sarah Harris
Credits: 4
This course will be a study of the paradox of trauma literature. Stories that compel their telling, yet are unassimilated and unspeakable, these works grow out of disasters on an individual and/or collective scale. To better understand Anne Whitehead's assertion that writers "have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its
Literature

Wounded Literature: Trauma, Memory, and Representation — LIT2262.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Sarah Harris
Credits: 4
This course will be a study of the paradoxes of trauma literature. Stories that compel their telling, yet are unassimilated and unspeakable, this writing grows out of disaster and crisis on an individual and/or collective scale. To better understand Anne Whitehead’s assertion that “Novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by
Literature

Writing a Life — LIT4510.01) (time change as of 11/11/2022

Spring 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In this course, we will move chronologically through a life, from childhood to old age, with the help of sixteen different writers. We will read broadly (novels, plays, short stories) and focus on one key question at every life stage. As kids, we will investigate imperfect narrative voices and strategic silences. As teenagers, we will explore writing about politics with humor,
Literature

Writing Essays About Literature — LIT2102.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Writing Essays is an introduction to writing clearly-constructed and logically-argued essays in response to reading, analyzing, and appreciating literary genre, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays, and novels. The course offers an analysis of the technical elements in literature: imagery, symbolism, metaphor, point of view, tone, structure, and prosody. The class
Literature

Writing Essays about Literature — LIT2102.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Writing Essays is an introduction to writing clearly-constructed and logically-argued essays in response to reading, analyzing, and appreciating literary genre, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays, and novels. The course offers an analysis of the technical elements in literature: imagery, symbolism, metaphor, point of view, tone, structure, and prosody. The class
Literature

Writing Essays About Literature — LIT2102.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Writing Essays is an introduction to writing clearly-constructed and logically-argued essays in response to reading, analyzing, and appreciating literary genre, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays, and novels. The course offers an analysis of the technical elements in literature: imagery, symbolism, metaphor, point of view, tone, structure, and prosody. The class
Literature

Writing Essays About Literature — LIT2102.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Writing Essays is an introduction to writing clearly-constructed and logically-argued essays in response to reading, analyzing, and appreciating literary genre, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays, and novels. The course offers an analysis of the technical elements in literature: imagery, symbolism, metaphor, point of view, tone, structure, and prosody. The class
Literature

Writing Landscape — LIT2201.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: akiko busch
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
"Nature is our widest home," Edward Hoagland once wrote, and the workshop would examine why this is so. The course would consider how the cycles, rhythms, and disturbances of the natural world have always had a place in American letters. Some students would have the opportunity to use their observations from and experience in fieldwork as raw material from which to develop
Science Mathematics and Computing Literature

Written California, 1850s to the Present — LIT2374.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Kathleen Alcott
Credits: 4
“Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” Traveling through the brand new state of California to conduct a survey of its geology, William. H. Brewer couldn’t help but think of this line from Heber. Even in its earliest iteration, California was a place where the fantasy of expansion—whether mental, geographical, technological—came at a dramatic cost. As the
Literature

Yeats and Visions of the Apocalypse — LIT4167.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
This course takes William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” as its starting point, launching from this often invoked poem to other poems and writings by Yeats that concern his unusual concepts of time, aging, and apocalypse including his prose work A Vision. We will examine Yeats’s prosodic choices regarding meter, rhyme, and form and how these musical decisions enhance
Literature

Zeitgeist and the Political Poem — LIT2325.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Credits: 4
“Poets are: a) clowns b) parasites c) legislators d) terrorists” —“Quiz” Linh Dinh In this course we will explore the ever changing role of the political poem. We will begin by reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit to use as a lens with which to explore how art reflects the zeitgeist of the culture that creates it. What role does the poet play in reflecting the popular
Literature

“Beastly and Beautiful”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — LIT2571.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
(Important Notice: This course focuses on the novel Lolita, which can be disturbing to some readers. Our class discussions will not be able to circumvent the narrative of an older man exploiting a child. Please be aware of this difficult material before registering for the course.) In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert writes, “I am
Literature

“My father said to my mother…”: Literary Portrayals of the Modern Italian Family — CSL2131.01) (course code changed 6/3/2024

Fall 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
“Two years before leaving home, my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” Thus begins Elena Ferrante’s coming-of-age novel that tells us, without qualms, about The Lying Life of Adults. This course will focus on Italian first-person fictional accounts of family life, which we will analyze with the support of relevant literary criticism, including love, Feminist, and
Cultural Studies and Languages Literature