Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Cultural Identity in Modern Italian Novel (in English Translation) — ITA2115.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Barbara Alfano
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
How is Italy, and its cultures, reflected in its literature? How have Italian writers positioned themselves vis à vis the history of their country? How much of it all can we grasp in translation?  These are some of the questions that will guide us in our exploration of Modern Italian fiction. We will read in English a few Italian masterpieces that went on to win
Languages Literature

Cultural Legacies of Argentina's "Dirty War" — LIT4263.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
The "Gentleman's Coup" of 1976 ushered in years of terror, the forced disappearances of 30,000 citizens, and the establishment of hundreds of secret torture centers. We will study not only the repression itself, but literary, artistic, architectural, and cinematic works of the repressive 1970s and their complicated aftermath to this day. You will be expected to keep a reading
Literature

Dante's "Inferno" — LIT4271.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
"The Inferno" will be read in a large variety of highly creative English translations. Dante will be considered as a poet, a religious thinker, and an exiled public servant enraged at the bad governance of his native Florence. Students will be encouraged to debate Dante's poetic inventions, lyrical, rhetorical, and metaphysical, as well as his principal social
Literature

Deadly Writing – Reading Salman Rushdie — LIT4605.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Faculty TBA
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Born to a multilingual family and culture, with connections to both India and Pakistan, and educated at Cambridge in the UK, Rushdie was already a celebrated writer when an Iranian clerical fatwa against him in 1989 launched him to another level of fame (or infamy). Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini charged Rushdie with blasphemy in his novel, Satanic

Literature

Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and Public Action — MOD2136.04

Fall 2014
Instructor: brooke allen; alison dennis
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 1
Since its publication in 1843, Charles Dickens' allegorical tale about a miserly businessman has never gone out of print. While the novella's holiday-themed story is widely known, a close reading of the original text reveals sharp criticism of industrial capitalism and its devastating impact on social welfare. In this module we will read A Christmas Carol aloud together and
CAPA Literature Modules: Transferable Approaches

Dickensian Binge — LIT4174.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Let's start with this hot-take -- Charles Dickens was the Shonda Rhimes of Victorian-era serialized storytelling -- and see what happens when we go from there. With his serialized novels, beginning with The Pickwick Papers, published in monthly installments from March 1836 until November 1837, Dickens helped refashion the publishing world and storytelling itself. Dude could
Literature

Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and Public Action — MOD2136.04

Fall 2015
Instructor: Brooke Allen; Alison Dennis
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 1
Since its publication in 1843, Charles Dickens’ allegorical tale about a miserly businessman has never gone out of print. While the novella’s holiday-themed story is widely known, a close reading of the original text reveals sharp criticism of industrial capitalism and its devastating impact on social welfare. In this module we will read A Christmas Carol aloud together and
CAPA Literature Modules: Transferable Approaches

Dickinson and Hopkins — LIT2542.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This seminar will look in depth at the work of two idiosyncratic mid-to-late 19th-century devotional poets, the legendary American recluse Emily Dickinson and the tormented British Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whom reimagined the lyric poem and revolutionized poetic language, transforming the sound and texture of English verse through their original approaches
Literature

Digital Frost — LIT2260.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Megan Mayhew-Bergman
Credits: 2
How can we use digital tools to help share knowledge and scholarship about Robert Frost's time in the Stone House? In this course, we'll explore the relationship between technology, literature, and public history. We'll discuss ways to encourage engagement with Frost's legacy and time in Shaftsbury. Students will help design and produce a digital, self-guided tour, and assist
Literature

Documentary Poetics — LIT4576.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Drawing from news articles, interviews, archival materials, and more, writers throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries have sought to document the world through poetry. As Phillip Metres writes, such poets often collage first-person narratives with found materials in order to “give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media

Advancement of Public Action Literature

Don Quixote: "The First and Most Completest Novel" — LIT2182.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
We will immerse ourselves in the first European novel, Cervantes’ 1605 tale of the wandering knight, his faithful Sancho Panza, and the cast of hundreds they meet along their way through La Mancha. We will read Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote, as well as biographical sources (such as Cervantes in Algiers, on the author’s years of captivity by the Barbary Pirates
Literature

Dostoevsky's Major Novels — LIT2332.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In their encounters with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), readers find themselves entering into a world that is vividly three-dimensional .Dostoevsky’s novels are abundant with sharply etched inner struggles of individuals and groups who are drawn from a wide range of human experience, striking a balance between keen psychological insight and attentive social
Literature

Dostoevsky’s Major Novels — LIT2332.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
In their encounters with Dostoevsky’s fiction, readers enter into a world that is rich with the inner struggles of a wide range of individual identities. In this course, we will read Memoirs from the House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, three novels that represent different stages in the evolution of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of power, social
Literature

Double Portrait: Of a Lady and Her Novel — LIT2223.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Doug Bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
We will be examining Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady from several perspectives, starting with a close reading of the novel itself. As well, we’ll be reading Michael Gorra’s recently published Portrait of a Novel, which uniquely blends criticism, biography, historical context and earned authorial speculation as a guide to James’s life during the time he was writing his book
Literature

Dybbuks, Golems, Tradition Resistance: Isaaac Basheveis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley — LIT2071.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
In this course, we’ll read fictions by read three major Jewish writers of the last and present century: I.B. Singer (1902-1991), the first Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; Cynthia Ozick (1928- ) and Grace Paley (1922-2007). Old World shtetls and the streets of Warsaw; Broadway, the Bronx, and Greenwich Village are settings rife with dybbuks, ghosts, and
Literature

Early American Confessions — LIT2251.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
From the Puritans’ first unpromising glimpse aboard the Mayflower of this “hideous desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” America has inspired, even required, bold new feats of language and the imagination to capture it in literature. This course will explore the beginnings of the American literary tradition and its roots in Puritan 'confession,' from the
Literature

Early American Literature — LIT2197.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: benjamin anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
From the Puritans' first unpromising glimpse aboard the Mayflower of this "hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beats and wild men," America has inspired, even required, bold new feats of language and the imagination to capture it in literature. This course will survey the beginnings of the American literary tradition, from the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and the
Literature

Early Christian and Sufi Mystics — LIT2579.01

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

Mystics––historically portrayed as passionate, dangerous, romantic, heretical, satanic––are a thorn in the side of organized religion. From the very beginnings of recorded human time, the presence and practice of mystics has been controversial. Sufi mystic al-Hallaj’s pronouncement that he was “the Truth” was received as blasphemy by the

Literature Society Culture and Thought History

Eastern European Literature and Cinema — LIT2171.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Alexandar Mihailovic
Credits: 4
In this course we will examine contemporary literature and cinema from Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the present, exposing the intricacies of daily life in a region where the past is always present. The cinematic and literary texts will be drawn from the former East Bloc nations and their successor states in post-Communist Europe, including iconoclastic writers and film
Literature

Eastern European Literature and Cinema: From the Cold War to the Present — LIT2171.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In this course, we will examine contemporary literature and cinema in the “other” Europe, exposing the intricacies of daily life in a region where the past is always present. The cinematic and literary texts will be drawn from the former Yugoslavia and the successor states of East Bloc nations in post-Communist Europe. We will consider the work of iconoclastic writers and film
Literature

Ecopoetics: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire — LIT4381.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The course will be divided into four sections corresponding to four elements of nature that have been transformed in the anthropocene. In order to strengthen our environmental literacy, we will read scientific articles as well as news articles about wildfires in California, Europe, and Australia. We will educate ourselves about disappearing islands through the rise of sea
Literature

Ekphrastic Poetry — LIT4122.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Credits: 4
In the earliest known example of ekphrasis, at a crucial moment in the Iliad, Homer interrupts the epic battle with a long description of the Shield of Achilles so powerfully cinematic that the listener or reader often forgets that the shield is a static and imagined object. This shield has become a paradigm in the history of ekphrasis—the genre of writing in
Literature

Eliot and Oppen — LIT4123.02

Spring 2018
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 2
This 7-week course will explore two vastly different but strangely similar writers who explore different aspect of Modernist poetry: Eliot as Modernism's forefather and Oppen as part of the Objectivist group. Where Eliot was stunned into his most well-regarded work "The Waste Land" by the aftermath of the first World War, Oppen abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political
Literature

Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama — DRA4361.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: kathleen dimmick
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course investigates the great flourishing of drama in late 16th and early 17th century England, a period of little more than fifty years that produced the most robust theater in the English-speaking world. We read plays by several of the major writers of the period, with the exception of Shakespeare: Kyd, Marlowe, Green, Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Middleton, and
Drama Literature