Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Literature of the AIDS Pandemic — LIT2513.02

Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the AIDS epidemic was regarded as a global catastrophe with no hope of remedy. For many, the disease was an uncomfortable subject, one that some at first refused to address by name and others chose to ignore entirely, an illness intertwined in the collective imagination with mainstream culture’s perceptions of, and fears of, gay culture. In this

Literature of the Holocaust — LIT2526.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Philosopher Theodor Adorno famously claimed that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno didn’t write this statement to silence poets. Specifically referencing the poet Paul Celan, he meant that poetry after the Holocaust would need to be radically different to account for these historic atrocities. We will begin by reading Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Castle,

Literature of the Renaissance — LIT2265.01

Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
The literature of the European Renaissance did much to help shape the modern mind and the modern world. In this class we will begin in Italy with Petrarch and Boccaccio, then go on to works by Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, Wyatt, Sir Thomas More, Cervantes, Rabelais, Vasari, and Montaigne, discussing them in the context of their time and in terms of

Literature of the Spanish Civil War — LIT2396.01

Instructor: Sarah Harris
Credits: 4
"Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple." (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia) Technically a Civil War, the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) was also an intensely international conflict in a number of ways: though no other nations officially entered the war, German forces used it to rehearse the blitzkrieg tactics they would employ in World War II;

Literature of World War I — LIT2345.01

Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
The First World War, 1914-18, was a cataclysm that left ten million dead and created the modern world. It was also a period of tremendous artistic innovation and activity. In this class we will read the work of writers who fought the war, on both sides: soldier-poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden; novelists like Henri Barbusse, Ernest

Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America — LIT2420.01

Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of the Transcendentalist movement through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous time in America's intellectual life. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson,

Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America — LIT2420.01

Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: M/Tu 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 4

In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous period. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, poet Jones Very

Living in Translation: A Student-Run Literary and Cultural Publication — LIT2347.02

Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
This course, while rooted in Literature, is part of the Lexicons of Migration cluster. Taking as a point of departure Isabelle de Courtivron's touchstone Bilingual Lives: Writers and Identity, students will update, complicate, and enrich the binary orientation of this collection, originally published in 2003. We will delve into the personal, familial, communal, and political

Living to Learn, Learning to Live: Readings in Contemporary South American Fiction — LIT2255.01

Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Contemporary South American fiction is rife with urgency, politics, and history, as well as narrative mischief, layering and literary gamesmanship. In this course we will read a selection of novels and stories from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and El Salvador from such authors as Cesar Aira,  Roberto Bolano, Alicia Borinsky, Sergio Chefec, Claudia Hernandez,

Lowell, Plath, and After — LIT2575.01

Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: MO,TH 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 4

This seminar will study the mid-20th century revolution in poetic style and content known as "confessional poetry," a school of poetry that gave voice to the private and personal, highlighting extreme autobiographical experience, as well as subjects that were previously seen as improper or taboo, including mental health, sexuality, suicidal ideation, trauma, menstruation,

Lyric Theory — LIT4616.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: TU 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 2

What is the lyric? How did lyric poetry emerge as a genre, and how have reading practices evolved alongside it? This is a 2-credit survey class exploring theoretical engagements with the modern idea of the lyric, including readings in genre theory, new criticism, structuralism,  post-structuralism, and beyond. Drawing primarily from <

Madame Bovary — LIT4270.02

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,

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

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.

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

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

Malamud, Bellow, and Roth — LIT2391.01

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

Malicious Compliance, or The Canterbury Tales — LIT2580.01

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

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

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

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

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

Masters of Style — LIT4362.01

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

Medieval and Early Modern Female Visionary Writers — LIT2569.01

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

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

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

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

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

Modernist Poetry — LIT2367.01

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

Muriel Spark and Jeanette Winterson — LIT2267.01

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