Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Honors Seminar: Recent African American Poetry — LIT4118.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This Honors Seminar will intensively explore the work of established and emerging African American poets of the past forty years. We will begin with a brief overview of African American poetry from the eighteenth century to the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, then proceed to discuss a different poet each week. Along the way we will consider whether a distinctive "Black
Literature

Honors Seminar: The Man Without Qualities — LIT4283.01

Fall 2016
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. Conceived of as an ironic epitaph to the culture of Mitteleuropa that slid blindly into the catastrophe of the First World War, the novel--and its author--became embroiled in the dark upheavals that would lead to another suicidal conflict
Literature

Honors Seminar: War and Peace — LIT4108.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
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

Honors Seminar; Bowen and Pym — LIT4287.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Credits: 4
Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym provide a record of England life - social, political, and cultural - from the end of the First World War until the 1960s. Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Her novels describe political tension, love, and war. She is admired for her description of landscape, her descriptions of London during the Blitz, her use of
Literature

Horror Fiction — LIT4325.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Paul La Farge
Credits: 4
Pleasure is one part of the aesthetic experience of fiction; another part is terror. This course will be a survey of major works of horror fiction from the 19th century through the present. We’ll pay particular attention to the techniques of writing horror, and the uses to which fiction writers have put them, from psychological examination through social critique and beyond.
Literature

Horror Fiction and Film — LIT2333.01

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Pleasure is one part of the aesthetic experience of fiction; another part is terror. This course will be a survey of major works of horror fiction (whether classified as such or otherwise) from the 19th century through the present, and of some important horror films from the 20th 21st centuries. The emphasis in this class will be on techniques for creating horror in fiction,
Literature

Horror Writing and the (Postcolonial) Afterlife — LIT2538.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
It’s one thing to feel scared when we watch scary movies, and it’s another to feel that same fear as we read books. After all, in books, there’s no eerie music, nor the possibility of being jolted by a sudden jump scare. Yet still, horror writing abounds and writers throughout history have found ways of communicating dread, terror, paranoia, and anguish through the written word
Black Studies Visual Arts Literature Society Culture and Thought

How the "Boom" Went Bust — SPA4706.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Credits: 4
In 1961, Jorge Luis Borges shared the Formentor prize with Samuel Beckett, thus internationalizing Latin American culture and supposedly initiating the “Boom.” Whether the swagger of the ensuing decades marked the apex of the continent’s artistic production, or was simply the result of a single Spanish publishing house’s hype, feeding a neo-imperialist world’s expectations of
Literature Languages

How to Read a Story — LIT2179.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: doug bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
The challenge in this class will be to read and then to write critically about great literature with an appreciation of its aims and ambitions, and with earned opinions regarding the writers' intentions. (In this effort you'll be reading criticism of the works that will inform but not dictate your own carefully considered views.) All that while also retaining the immediate
Literature

How to Read a Translation — LIT2187.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
What, exactly, is a literary translation? A faithful rendering of an original text? But then, what do we mean by "faithful"? What do we mean by "original"? Form, syntax, grammar, not to mention puns, wordplay, and allusion are all part of the action in reading, writing, and the interpretative art we call translation. Time, too, plays a role: languages are dynamic, even
Literature

How to Read a Translation — LIT2187.02

Spring 2021
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
What, exactly, is a literary translation? A faithful rendering of an original text? But then, what do we mean by “faithful”? What do we mean by “original”? Form, syntax, grammar, not to mention puns, wordplay, and allusion are all part of the action in reading, writing, and the interpretative art we call translation. Time, too, plays a role: languages are dynamic, even
Literature

If I Loved you Less, I Might be able to Talk about it More: Jane Austen's Heroines — LIT2510.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
In this seminar, we will train our eyes on four of Jane Austen’s novels — Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion — with an aim to discover what connects and binds Jane Austen’s heroines together, what separates these women from each other, and to explore Austen’s evolution as a writer through the evolving nature of her protagonists. We will
Literature

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more: Jane Austen's Heroines — LIT2510.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

In this seminar, we will train our eyes on all six of Jane Austen’s novels — Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma — with an aim to discover what connects and binds Jane Austen’s heroines together, what separates these women from each other, and to explore Austen’s evolution as a writer through the

Literature

Imaginary Worlds — DRA2313.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Michael Giannitti
Credits: 4
In this course we will consider playwrights who have created imaginary worlds as a means of escaping from, critiquing, or simply distorting the real world. In doing so, we will consider how imaginary worlds might open up new spaces and possibilities for our own world, as well as how they reflect a playwright’s unique vision and philosophy. We will consider the inherent
Drama Literature

Immortality — LIT2300.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Immortality. Everyone seems to want it. Or, well, practically everyone. Well, not me. I don't want it. But, look, even the world's oldest recorded epic hero, Gilgamesh, struggled against the notion of mortality and his own impending, inevitable death, and ever since (and probably long-before) members of our species have sought ways to subvert it. This course aims to explore
Literature

In Search of Elena Ferrante — LIT2351.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 2
No one knows who the author “Elena Ferrante” really is: not her publishers (allegedly), her reading public, the critics who greet each new novel with rapture, the acclaimed Italian film directors who’ve adapted two of her novels for the screen. In an international literary scene fueled by personality, publicity, and the celebrity machine, how has Ferrante managed to stay
Languages Literature

In the Eastern, Green Mountains: Poetry through an Experimental Buddhist Lens — LIT2568.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
While we conventionally read poetry through a western critical academic lens, in this course, we will approach western poetry from an experimental eastern lens, in an effort to experience the mutually illuminating relationship between poetry and contemplative study and deepen our relationship to the mystical nature of American poetry. In the first part of the semester,
Literature

In Translation: Lives, Texts, Cities — LIT2370.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
In this course, we will study writers who live and write in more than one language (Beckett, de la Torre, Stavans, Djebar, Huston, etc.); multiple translations (linguistic, temporal, geographic) of particular texts; and several cities, which in their multi-lingual, multi-cultural essences are dramatic cases in point of a rapidly changing world. Questions of legibility,
Literature

International Modernist Poetics — LIT2522.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Much of modernist writing was a rebellion against the aesthetic values of late-19th century poetry. This course will explore art, poetry, and other media to provide a comprehensive understanding of Modernism from a global perspective. In studying modernist manifestos, we will investigate the reasons that these writers and artists attempted to create radical, new ways of
Literature

InTranslation: Lives, Texts, Testimony — LIT2279.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
What does it mean to be "rooted," "uprooted," "living in translation"? Can a language, literary tradition, or far-flung literary republic be one's homeland? Does "cultural authority" derive from being considered "native"? How is it that immigrant literary translators have been met with apprehension on the part of publishers? Might this stem from definitions of "fluency" and
CAPA Literature

Intro to Afropessimism — LIT2547.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Afropessimists believe our world is basically hopeless. White supremacy is written into every layer of life, an escapable aspect of the modern condition. This hopelessness, though, is just the beginning for the Afropessimist, who nonetheless plots out a radical course forward–– Could pessimism be the real path to freedom? Through a deep reading of Frank B. Wilderson III,
Black Studies Literature

Introduction to Contemporary African American Poetry — LIT2505.02

Spring 2017
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
African American poetry has a rich tradition that begins in the 1700s with Jupiter Hammon, moves through the early 1900s with the Harlem Renaissance, and finds itself in the radical politics of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) during the 1960s. We will explore this lyrical moment post the BAM Era in order to excavate current prosodic expressions of the human condition from
Literature

Introduction to Dramaturgy — DRA4281.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Maya Cantu
Credits: 4
The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. They bridge the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. In this course, we will learn about the history and practice of dramaturgy, while learning how the critical and research skills of the dramaturg can apply to a wide array of
Drama Literature

Introduction to Dramaturgy — DRA4281.01

Fall 2020
Instructor: Maya Cantu
Credits: 4
The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. She bridges the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. In this course, we will learn about the history and practice of dramaturgy, while learning how the critical and research skills of the dramaturg can apply to a wide array of
Drama Literature

Introduction to Dramaturgy — DRA4281.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Maya Cantu
Credits: 4
The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. They bridge the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. In this course, we will learn about the history and practice of dramaturgy, while learning how the critical and research skills of the dramaturg can apply to a wide array of
Drama Literature