Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Madame Bovary — LIT4270.02

Spring 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 2
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, is universally regarded as one of the two or three greatest French novels. It was the object of an obscenity trial in 1859, though the prosecution failed to establish anything indecent in its content. The book is also regarded, by novelists and critics alike, as almost perfect in construction - musical in the unfolding of the story, vivid,
Literature

Madame Bovary Middlemarch: Small Worlds, Big Novels — LIT4128.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Virginia Woolf once famously said of Middlemarch that it was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and George Eliot's novel is widely considered one of the best novels, written in English, of the 19th Century. Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary is considered by many as one of the best novels ever written and is perhaps the first 'modern' novel ever published.
Literature

Magical Realism and Black Speculative Fiction: On Radical Cosmogony — LIT4603.01) (course description title updated as of 11/11/2024

Spring 2025
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Writers like Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and Samuel Delany have helped define the field of Black speculative fiction. Fantasy, sci-fi, and horror seem to all meld together in this field, allowing writers to combine the supernatural with the technological. Likewise, writers of Central and South America like Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Elena Garro have largely
Black Studies Literature

Malamud, Bellow, and Roth — LIT2391.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Douglas Bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
We will immerse ourselves in the novels and stories of three extraordinary American writers of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. We'll be starting with Malamud, then turning to Bellow, and finally to Roth, almost twenty  years the youngest and still very much a dominant -- if self-proclaimed "retired" -- figure in
Literature

Malicious Compliance, or The Canterbury Tales — LIT2580.01

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

According to "All Englang," Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, Geoffery Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, "was the freshest, clearest, and sweetest of the great English poets." She goes on to say that, living in the 14th century, he was also perhaps the first great English poet. Still. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of Chaucer that "He is the poet of the

Literature

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Douglas Bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course is founded on the belief that the way to a writer’s personal style and voice is through the close study, absorption, and imitation of others’. We will be reading and replicating many contemporary master stylists, from Doctorow to DeLillo to Toni Morrison to Denis Johnson to Amy Hempel, and others. In every case, we will conduct a three-part examination of the work
Literature

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Doug Bauer
Credits: 4
This course is founded on the belief that the way to a writer’s personal style and voice is through the close study, absorption, and imitation of others’. We will be reading and replicating many contemporary master stylists, from Doctorow to DeLillo to Toni Morrison to Denis Johnson to Julie Otsuka, and others. In every case, we will conduct a three-part examination of the work
Literature

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Doug Bauer
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course is founded on the belief that the way to a writer’s personal style and voice is through the close study, absorption, and imitation of others’. We will be reading and replicating many contemporary master stylists, from Doctorow to DeLillo to Toni Morrison to Denis Johnson to Amy Hempel, and others. In every case, we will conduct a three-part examination of the work
Literature

Medieval and Early Modern Female Visionary Writers — LIT2569.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
In this seminar, we’ll read an assortment of Medieval and Early Modern female visionary writers alongside contemporary writers that they inspired. Primary readings will include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), writer, nun, and polymath in colonial Mexico and poet Eileen Myles (1949- ), who wrote a play inspired by her life; Margery Kempe (1373-1438) and Margery Kempe
Literature

Medieval Britain and Shakespeare's History Plays — LIT2317.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff; Carol Pal
Credits: 4
Shakespeare wrote his history plays for an audience living in a newly nationalistic England. It was a realm constructing the idea of Britain as the natural inheritor of Roman glory. But what, precisely, was this new "British" identity? In this course, we will follow the construction of British identity in history and literature. We will study the history of Britain from the
Social Science Literature

Migration, Diaspora and Exile: New Voices in the Literature of Global Dislocation — LIT2286.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
The recent mass migrations of people due to armed conflict, the globalized economy, the fall of the colonial world order and climate change have unsettled political establishments throughout the West and set of waves of pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant protests. In literature, however, the voices of the dispossessed have arguably never been stronger or more influential. This
CAPA Literature

Modernist Poetry — LIT2367.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In the first half of the twentieth century, mainly between the two world wars, Modernist poets broke from Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. The poets during this time used deeply various aesthetic strategies, yet some similarities can be discovered—Modernists privileged difficulty over clarity, the imagination over realism, skepticism over conviction, and fragmentation
Literature

Muriel Spark and Jeanette Winterson — LIT2267.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
***Time Change*** One was born half-Jewish in Edinburgh, Scotland and found Christ while starving in a London bedsit and taking Benzedrine to stay up writing; the other came from Manchester and was raised to be an evangelist by the Pentecostal family that had adopted her until her first lesbian affair got her kicked out of church and family and she had to work her way through
Literature

Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel — LIT4534.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Muriel Spark, beginning in the late 1950s, produced a string of fiercely ambitious and savagely witty novels that harnessed the experimental power of the French nouveau roman and skewered the pieties of life in the postwar period of the 20th century. The problem of knowing; the relationship of art to life; the godlike power of authorship; the criminal scheming of flesh-driven
Literature

Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel — LIT4534.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TU 4:10pm-6:00pm
Credits: 2

Muriel Spark, beginning in the late 1950s, produced a string of fiercely ambitious and savagely witty novels that harnessed the experimental power of the French nouveau roman and skewered the pieties of life in the postwar period of the 20th century. The problem of knowing; the relationship of art to life; the godlike power of authorship; the criminal

Literature

Nasty Women of Antiquity — LIT4278.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Monica Ferrell
Credits: 2
This seminar in comparative mythology will serve as a journey through the narratives produced by a number of ancient and pre-modern civilizations that feature a complex female character. In these stories, feminine archetypes are not nurturing mother or fertility goddesses but warriors, witches, choosers of the slain and of rulers, ethically ambiguous and often terrifying
Literature

Native (North) American Literature — LIT2567.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Native storytelling has thrived in recited, sung, painted, etched, sculpted, and danced forms since centuries before European colonists arrived on the North American continent. Against the backdrop of this long, linguistically complex, and multi-national artistic tradition, we will closely read the works of Indigenous North American authors, studying how their formal and
Literature

Niedecker, Graham, Ford — LIT4259.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 4
This is an advanced literary study of three women poets who seem connected aesthetically through the modernist school of poetics, focusing on fragmentation, lyricism, formal inventiveness, and interrogation of self and self's participation/existence in their specific time. What bridges exist between Lorinne Niedecker, an early objectivist poet; Jorie Graham, arguably one of the
Literature

Nonsense, Surrealism, and The Absurd — LIT2407.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will consider the multifarious ways writers have sought to subvert linearity, coherence, logic, and reason. We will begin with contemporary prose poet and fabulist Sabrina Orah Mark and then move backwards into the strange and satirical 1970s fictions of Donald Barthelme, a master of the collage form; the surrealist short fictions of Argentina's Julio Cortazar; and
Literature

North of the Border: Mexican-American Literature — LIT2257.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
What does it mean to be American in a country that once belonged to your ancestors? 35 million Mexicans live in the United States, yet their own stories have been historically underrepresented in both literature and academia in comparison to other Hispanic groups. This course will read and discuss the Mexican-American experience as its evolved through various labels – Latino,
Literature

Not Quite Passing: Understanding Racial Identity in America — LIT2254.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
In this class, students will confront the idea of “passing,” which is what happens when someone tries to get something tangible to improve their daily quality of life by occupying a space meant for someone else. Passing can happen in any context (you can pass for another gender, social class, or sexual orientation), but most often occurs in the context of race. This course
Literature

On Sustaining a Practice of Documentation — LIT2002.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The violence enacted on marginalized people is met with a poetry of resistance: art and literature as a political tool accessible to the masses. What service do poetics and artists' practices offer to liberation, memory, and grief? Through a critical analysis of documentary poetic practices within a Black feminist framework, this course seeks to identify a common thread across
Literature

Origins of the English Novel — LIT4145.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
The first English novel appeared more than a hundred years after the publication, and translation into English, of Don Quixote. Where did the English novel come from? And how did it develop? We will read the works of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and excerpts from those who came before them. Students will write two essays. Corequisite: Students are required to be in
Literature

Origins of the English Novel — Canceled

Spring 2015
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Credits: 4
The first English novel appeared more than a hundred years after the publication (and translation into English) of Don Quixote. Where did the English novel come from? And how did it develop? We will read Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, among others. Students will write two essays.
Literature