[Literary Studies]
MW 7:00 - 8:30pm
Instructor: Stephen Tapscott

This subject offers a reading-intensive survey of English literature from the middle ages to the present, using as its lens the English sense of humor. We will therefore be examining riddles and jokes, satires, different kinds of irony, parodies, farces and their deconstruction. We will focus on formal literary structures, their social function and psychological power, as well as their work of identity formation, aiming to provide a rich and wide introduction to the history of English literature. Authors studied will include (but not be limited to): Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Austen, Swift, Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lewis Carroll, and Monica Ali. We will also look at accompanying visual material, such as prints by William Hogarth and British television comedy (e.g. Ricky Gervais).

 

MW 2:30 - 4:00 Hass-D1/CI-H
Instructor: Wyn Kelley

This course surveys the classic traditions of comedy, with its roots in Greek and Roman plays (Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Plautus’ The Brothers Manaechmus), and its flowering in the works of Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night), Moliere (The Misanthrope), and Aphra Behn (The Rover). We will also look at works that blend comedy and satire: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, as well as films like Some Like It Hot, Bringing Up Baby, Modern Times, and contemporary examples. We will be concerned with the social designs of comedy, its balance between festive and invective urges, its subversive and ordering impulses, its verbal and physical patterns, and its treatment of repression and pleasure.

 

MW 12:30 - 2:00
Instructor: Howard Eiland

This class traces the development of the literary genre of tragedy from the ancient Greeks to modern Europe. Examples of classic tragedy will include plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare and Racine. We will also be considering Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and its various afterlives. The question of modern tragedy will be studied in connection with works by Ibsen and Joseph Conrad.

[Popular Narrative]
TR 3:30 - 5:00
Instructor: Alisa Braithwaite

Manolo Blahnik, Phat Farm, Marc Jacobs, Prada. Thanks to magazines like In Style and GQ, these names have become a part of our daily vocabulary. Popular culture’s current obsession with appearance has made the quest for style much more accessible, but how might this turn to style affect our understanding of this term’s connotations, and, specifically, how might it lead us to reconsider literary style? We will begin with this current obsession with style and then explore its representations, both in fashion and in 20th-century literature. We will explore the role that details -- like the cut of a suit or an intricate sentence -- play in both personal and literary self-fashioning. How does one fashion oneself through words as well as clothes? Authors will include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Malcolm X, Edith Wharton, Patricia Powell, and Lauren Weisberger.

 

TR 3:00 - 4:30
Instructor: David Thorburn

A cultural approach to American television's evolution as a technology and system of representation. Considers television as a system of storytelling and myth-making, and as a cultural practice, studied from anthropological, literary, and cinematic perspectives. Focuses on prime-time commercial broadcasting, the medium's technological and economic history, and theoretical perspectives. Much required viewing as well as readings in media theory and cultural interpretation.

Four weeks will be devoted to the technological and economic history of American television. These classes will also examine the theoretical perspectives from which scholars and policy-makers have perceived our television system. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to a study of the evolution of television's fundamental genres of storytelling: situation comedy, westerns, police and private-eye programs, other forms of melodrama. These categories of storytelling will be studied in a context that emphasizes their continuities with story-forms that developed in other media, such as films, the stage, and prose fiction. Format: informal lectures/discussion. Much in-class analysis of passages from TV programs.

 

MW 12:30 - 2:00
Instructor: Alvin Kibel

The aim of this subject is to sharpen appreciation of film and literary fiction by studying differences between the ways that filmed narratives and written narratives tell their stories. One way to proceed upon this enterprise is to study the filmed adaptations of works of fiction, but we shall be taking another way. Each film we view will be paired with a work of literary merit that either deals with similar thematic materials and narrative situations or else employs a technique of presentation which directly corresponds to a technique employed by the film. To illustrate this latter sort of relationship by referring to materials that we will not study, we may note that Billy Wilder’s film, Sunset Boulevard, derives from stories of vampires and possession and has little to do with stories of romance and social comedy, like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but Wilder’s film and Austen’s novel both depend importantly on the presence of a discernable narrative voice (in the case of Wilder’s film, a voice-over) whose capacities to comment on the action are superior to all the actors in the story and carries a large portion of the story’s meaning and effect. For this reason, although the stories told by Wilder’s film and Austen’s novel have little to do with one another, they can be profitably studied in tandem to investigate the difference made to the telling by the differences in the media –film and literature.

The subject will pair, among others, works by Aeschylus and John Ford, Sophocles and Clint Eastwood, Shakespeare and Francis Coppolla, Henry James and Billy Wilder, Cervantes and Akira Kurosawa, Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles. We will also be reading supplementary texts that offer possible models to analyze story-features

 

MW 1:00 - 2:30
Instructor: Shankar Raman

This subject examines the ways in which we read. It introduces you to different strategies of reading, comprehending and engaging with literary texts developed in the twentieth century, paying special attention to post-structuralist theories and their legacy. (What poststructuralism means will be discussed often in this course, so don’t worry if you don’t know what it means right now!) The literary texts and films accompanying the theoretical material will serve as concrete cases that allow us to see theory in action. So, each week will pair a text or film with a particular interpretative approach, using the former to explore the latter. Rather than attempting a definitive or full analysis of the literary or filmic work, we will exploit it (unashamedly -- and indeed often reductively) to understand better the theoretical reading it accompanies.

 

[Classical Literature]
MW 3:30 - 5:00
Instructor: Arthur Bahr

While groan-inducing, the pun above also encapsulates the dual focus of this course: examining the many ways in which ancient Greek and Latin writers represented love (love in…), and exploring the continuing fascination that the period has held for later writers and artists, from the Middle Ages to the present (lovin’…). As we read Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the love-poetry of Sappho, we will both explore the different forms of love that they record (erotic, divine, familial) and how such classical texts continue to dominate the Western concept of what love is. We will then read three later works that re-imagine both the ancient world and what love meant to it: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a tale of the doomed love of set in the waning days of the Trojan War; Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a tragedy of revenge inspired by misdirected and excessive passion; and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a contemporary novel about the allure and danger of trying to live in the ancient past in addition to, or instead of, the contemporary world. Inherent in all these texts is the idea that love is not just beautiful but also dangerous. Mapping how beauty, passion, and peril intersect will constitute a key form of our intellectual inquiry and aesthetic appreciation.

 

TR 11:30 - 1:00
Instructor: Ina Lipkowitz

The Bible - both Hebrew Bible and New Testament - is a complex and fascinating text, written by many people, in different languages, over a vast period of time, yet still displaying an overarching unity. Our purpose in this course is to consider the Bible as both a collection of disparate books and as a unified whole. Of course it is impossible to discuss the Bible without reference to religion, but religious interpretation - whether Jewish or Christian - is not our primary concern. Rather, we will explore the Bible's literary techniques and its enormous variety of genres - everything from myth to history, from genealogy to poetry - as well as the historical periods that produced and are reflected in it. We will also consider issues arising from the history of the translation of the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek. We will read Genesis, Exodus, selections from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, Isaiah, Job, Song of Songs, Daniel, the Gospels, Acts, Pauline Epistles, and Revelation.

 

TR 9:30 - 11:00
Instructor: Ina Lipkowitz

This course studies important examples of what has become one of the most widely read literary genres today (if not the most widely read one): the novel. We will begin in the early eighteenth century and make our way up to the twentieth, considering such questions as: Why are they called "novels"? Who wrote them? Who read them? Who narrates them? What are they likely to be about? Do they have distinctive characteristics? What is their relationship to the time and place in which they appeared? And, most of all, why do we like to read them so much? Authors might include: Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Penelope Fitzgerald.

 

[Romantic Poetry]
MW 11:00 - 12:30
Instructor: Noel Jackson

This subject will read the major poets of English Romanticism alongside some lesser-known authors of the period. We will situate this poetry in relation to what William Wordsworth described as "the great national events which are daily taking place" (the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, economic modernization, the early feminist movement, the movement for the abolition of the slave-trade, etc.). Our readings will attend more particularly to the invention of a formal literary language responsive to these and other contexts. Authors may include Anna Barbauld, William Blake, Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lloyd, Mary and Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron.

 

TR 11:00 - 12:30
Instructor: David Thorburn

Tradition and innovation in representative fiction of the early modernist period. Recurring themes include the role of the artist in the modern period; the representation of psychological and sexual experience; and the virtues (and defects) of the aggressively experimental character. Works by Conrad, Kipling, Isaac Babel, Kafka, James, Lawrence, Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

 

MW 1:00 - 2:30
Instructor: Anne Fleche

One thing the modern drama has done, arguably, is to cultivate in modern, Western individuals a sense of themselves as actors in a play. We will focus on several historical periods of experimentation in the modern period (1850 to the present), to consider whether certain works created new possibilities for what—and who—could be represented onstage. What and who are still excluded? And how does dramatic performance help us to think about our own lives as onstage performers? Dramatists will include Ibsen, Chekhov, Lorca, Genet, Churchill, Moraga. Assignments include the chance to perform (naturally!).

 

[Contemporary Literature]
TR 1:00 - 2:30
Instructor: Sarah Brouillette

Central to our era is the gradual movement of all the world's regions toward a uniform standard of economic and political development. In this class we will read a variety of recent narratives that partake of, dissent from, or contribute to this story, ranging from poems, plays and novels, to World Bank and IMF statements and National Geographic reports. We will seek to understand the many motives and voices – sometimes congruent, sometimes clashing – that are currently engaged in producing accounts of people in the developing world: their hardships, laughter, and courage, and how they help themselves and are helped by outsiders who may or may not have philanthropic motives. Readings will include literature by JG Ballard, Jamaica Kincaid, Rohinton Mistry, and John le Carré, as well as policy documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and the websites of various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and trade and development commissions.

 

[The American Novel]
TR 2:30 - 4:00
Instructor: Sandy Alexandre

What does it mean to rewrite or deconstruct a great American, classic novel? Why revisit and reconsider what many agree has already been so well expressed? After all, “if it ain’t broke” -- as the saying goes -- then why try to fix it? What, then, is the innovation or the motivation of these purportedly “new and improved” versions of the old classics? Are they instances of parody, satire, or pastiche (and what is the difference among those three genres)? Or are these revisions merely confirmations of the old adage that imitation is the best form of flattery? In this course, we will explore the ways in which American writers riff on, revise, and reclaim the American literary canon for aesthetic and social purposes. We will consider the conceptual costs and benefits associated with such literary impulses to tweak or to revamp altogether. Our readings will focus on the following four textual pairings: