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Literary Studies Courses
Browse the literature courses offered at Simon’s Rock.
Literature class with Professor Brendan Mathews
INTRODUCTORY COURSES
Introductory courses serve as an entry into literature and writing. “Art of” courses introduce genres, close reading, and textual analysis. One “Art of” course (LIT 201-206) is required for the Literary Studies concentration.
Guest Writers
Literature 100 | Filkins, Mathews | 2 credits p/f
This course gives students the opportunity to get to know the work of the authors who are visiting campus as part of the Poetry and Fiction series in a given semester. Course work includes attending the authors’ four public readings, as well as the afternoon master classes offered by each writer, and one preparatory session on each writer, for which students read one of the writer’s works. Students write responses to each of these sessions and complete a final project, which might be a review for the newspaper, an analytical paper, or a story, personal essay, or poem in imitation of one of the writers.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once a year.
Nature Writing/Writing Nature
Literature 101m | Hutchinson | 2 credits
This course offers students the opportunity to write personal essays about the natural world while also studying some classic and contemporary nature writers. Regular writing assignments and activities will be complemented by discussion of selected readings by classic and contemporary nature writers. In the tradition of many nature writers, we will occasionally make use of our own “backyard” (in this case, the College campus) as a source for observation, writing, and reflection. At the end of the module, students will submit a portfolio of their work that includes both the informal and formal writing done during the course, a nature journal, a major revision of an earlier piece, and a substantial self-evaluation. Students interested in the sciences as well as the humanities are encouraged to enroll.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Creative Nonfiction
Literature 106m | Hutchinson | 2 credits
Creative nonfiction is sometimes called “the fourth genre,” or the literature of reality. It includes various forms of writing based upon personal experience, including personal narratives, personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism, and more experimental lyric or hybrid essays. During the term, students write a series of working drafts, which are then read and discussed in class. In addition, students read and discuss the work of published authors in the field and engage in informal exercises that help to expand their awareness of style, content, structure, and point of view. At the end of the module, students submit a portfolio of their work that includes all of the working drafts, a major revision of one of these drafts, a write-up of an oral presentation on at least one of the assigned writers, a writer’s journal, and a substantial self-evaluation.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Introduction to Creative Writing
Literature 150 | Filkins, Mathews | 3 credits
The course will explore the possibilities offered by different forms of creative expression, especially, but not limited to, fiction, poetry, and essays. Students will be introduced to the repertoire of strategies—voice, irony, metaphor, style—available to creative writers as they choose a medium in which to express themselves. By looking at selections of contemporary writing in a variety of genres, the students will deepen their critical abilities as well as sharpen their own skills as writers.
Unlike more advanced workshops, this course is open to all students, and does not require submission of writing samples. This course is generally offered once a year.
Modes of Making
Literature 151 | Filkins | 3 credits
This is a creative writing workshop that uses some of the techniques and strategies of translation to provide students with a unique means of generating material for their writing. While students with at least a year of foreign language study will be encouraged to work directly from the original, no prior knowledge of a foreign language is required. Exercises will include the adaptation of a classical poem to a more contemporary idiom, work on new versions of previously translated poems or stories, the alteration of a text’s voice and imagery to affect its dramatic context, and the creation of original works through imitation. Specific emphasis will be given to stylistic and tonal choices made in the translation process. Completion of the course serves as a prerequisite for advanced writing workshops.
No prerequisites.
Art of the Short Story
Literature 152 | Mathews | 3 credits
Frank O’Connor once wrote that an inferior writer could still be a great novelist, but that no inferior writer could ever be a great storyteller. After touching on the roots of storytelling in fable, parable, and tale, we will focus on the work of major storytellers (a.k.a. short story writers) of the 19th and 20th centuries, exploring their contributions to the ongoing evolution of this literary genre. Writers studied include Poe, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, Kafka, Hemingway, O’Connor (Flannery), Borges, and Munro—as well as new voices from Jhumpa Lahiri to Junot Díaz. Although this is a literature course and not a course in writing fiction, students planning to major in creative writing will benefit from the discussions of literary craft and exposure to the broad range of writers and stories.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Art of the Novel
Literature 153 | Mathews | 3 credits
According to one contemporary author, all novelists share a single goal, “to create worlds as real as but other than the world that is.” Free to tell us what might happen, what might have happened, or even what couldn’t happen “once upon a time,” novelists help us understand the social, political, intellectual, and emotional frameworks shaping what did happen. This course examines the worlds of novelists from the 17th to the 20th centuries whose works both embody their individual visions of what the novel can be and do and offer examples of a range of novelistic forms, such as the romance and antiromance, the Gothic, science fiction, realism, naturalism, impressionism, surrealism, and stream of consciousness. Most recently, students read novels and novellas by Fielding, Kleist, Austen, Balzac, Brontë, Dostoevsky, Wharton, Joyce, and Woolf.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Art of Literary Analysis
Literature 154 | Staff | 3 credits
This course acquaints the student with ways of thinking and writing about literature at the college level. The class reads and discusses poems, short stories, and at least one novel as a means of introducing the formal study of literature and the disciplines of contemporary critical analysis. Attention is also given to various modern and contemporary critical approaches and their underlying assumptions. Frequent short papers, an oral presentation, and a survey of critical responses to an assigned text constitute the main course requirements.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Art of Autobiography: Textual Constructions of Identity and Culture
Literature 155 | Browdy | 3 credits
In this introductory literature course, we will read a series of contemporary personal narratives in prose, poetry, and graphic memoir formats from different cultures and geographic regions, including the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and China, exploring the various ways the self is textually constructed across a range of cultural contexts. We will use these texts as springboards for literary analysis, as well as inspirational prompts for students’ own autobiographical writing. Texts will include autobiographies by James McBride, Marjane Satrapi, Lijia Zhang, Joy Harjo and Dara Lurie, among others. Weekly response journals, a midterm and a final paper will be the primary assignments.
No prerequisites. The course is generally offered every two years.
Art of Film
Literature 156 | Vo | 3 credits
Starting with some of the earliest examples of motion pictures dating back to 1895, this course examines a selection of films that are significant in the development of cinema as an art form. We will investigate the various ways in which the artistic impulse found a place in this new medium, including avant-garde and experimental works, as well as the narrative form as realized in such acknowledged masterpieces as Citizen Kane and Vertigo. In conjunction with the viewing of these films, the class will examine and discuss a number of significant essays on the nature of art and cinema. Through close analysis of film sequences, as well as through discussion and readings of film theory and criticism, the class will seek to develop critical viewing skills, an understanding of cinematic structure, and an appreciation of cinema’s place in the Arts.
Art of Drama
Literature 157 | Staff | 3 credits
This course examines drama as a literary genre and mode of artistic expression as it has evolved from the 5th century BCE to the present. Readings will include both plays and theoretical statements that span centuries, countries and cultures, and introduce students to categories such as tragedy and comedy, epic and poetic drama, realism, naturalism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, and absurdism. Writers and works will vary each time the course is taught. This semester, they will include Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Seneca; The Wakefield Master; Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson; Calderon and Sor Juana de la Cruz; Moliere and Racine; Wycherly and Behn; Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Shaw; Pirandello, Brecht, and Beckett.
This course is offered once every two years.
Art of Poetry: The Lyric Moment
Literature 158 | Filkins | 3 credits
What is poetry and what do poems ask of the reader and the poet alike? This course provides the skills essential to the understanding of lyric poetry, as well as an appreciation of the rich tradition of poetry as an art form. Besides gaining familiarity with the historical developments of poetry in English, students will also study the uses of rhythm, rhyme, meter, tone, voice, metaphor, imagery, and formal strategies in the making of poems. They will then employ these skills in writing critical papers on poems, as well as in writing and sharing their own poetry in class. The aim is to discover the “lyric moment” that poetry opens up for us as both readers and writers, and to use that to deepen our understanding of the nuances of language and art.
No prerequisites.
INTERMEDIATE COURSES
Intermediate courses expose students to a larger set of questions or texts. The primary aim of these courses is breadth. These courses serve either as preparation for advanced courses for concentrators in literary studies or as general courses in literature for non-concentrators.
No Place Like Home: Utopia and Dystopia in Literature
Literature 209 | Staff | 3 credits
Etymologically, utopia means “no place,” and for centuries, writers have responded to social problems by using utopian vision to imagine hypothetical, idealized societies. Dystopia, or "bad place," features the opposite approach, depicting societies broken by authoritarian regimes, environmental catastrophe, and/or economic, racial, and gender oppression. In literature, the concepts of utopia and dystopia often work together; writers imagine alternate pasts and possible futures in order to illuminate the social and systemic dynamics of the world around them, to interrogate the nature of power, and to explore possibilities for resistance. In exploring the dynamics of power in and cultural contexts of these texts, the course explores the dystopian threats-and utopian possibilities — of a range of current political and cultural moments — not least our own. Prospective texts include: Utopia (More), 1984 (Orwell), The Parable of the Sower (Butler), and The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood).
History and Identity in Caribbean Literature
Literature 213 CP | McMorris | 3 credits
This interdisciplinary course surveys the historical development of the Caribbean from the early modern period to the present. Our studies begin with an exploration of the Caribbean world before and during the European Age of Discovery. As we consider the relationship between explorers and natives, we use this encounter as a foundation for our study of the region. We also focus on the reconstruction of the region through the development of the plantation system. Ultimately, we read 20th and 21st century texts to engage the post-plantation imaginary of the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Shakespeare's Problem Plays
Literature 214m | Staff | 2 credits
Some of Shakespeare's plays are relatively easy to categorize: Hamlet, tragedy; As You Like It, comedy. Others are a bit harder to sort, and these plays, which defy genre conventions and reflect persistent moral and thematic ambiguity, tend to be called Shakespeare's "problem plays." This mod takes a closer look at what it might mean to address a play as a problem and expands the definition of the term to encompass other thorny issues with interpreting Shakespeare's works today. Topics will include genre, authorship, and Shakespeare’s treatment of issues such as domestic violence and anti-Semitism. Prospective texts include Measure for Measure, Pericles, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice.
Focus
Literature 216m | Staff | 2 credits
Offered periodically, depending on student and faculty interest, each of these modules invites students to spend six weeks focusing intensively on the major works of a single writer. Courses may treat literature in English, or another language, or may allow qualified students to read texts in either. Recent modules have focused on Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. No prerequisites.
No prerequisites.
Secrets and Lies in 19th Century English Literature
Literature 219m | Staff | 2 credits
This mod explores a trio of Victorian novels linked by their shared interest in secrets and lies, gossip and scandal, and the complex relationship between private and public identities. Spanning over 50 years of Victoria’s reign, these texts, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, help illustrate key movements in the form during the period, including the social problem novel, the rise of sensation and detective fiction, and the advent of modernism. This course explores these novels in terms of their social and literary contexts while also exploring how each uses deception and intrigue to explore issues of identity, gender, class, and power. With an additional pre-20th century modular course, this course counts toward that requirement in the literary studies concentration.
Modern Irish Literature
Literature 225 | Mathews | 3 credits
This course explores the work of writers who have contributed to an examination of Ireland and its people during the 20th century—a time that saw the struggle to end colonial rule, civil war, cycles of poverty and emigration, sectarian violence, an economic boom and bust, and a fragile peace. The course offers a grounding in the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century, a movement that was intimately connected with both literary modernism and Irish nationalism, and traces how debates about literature and “Irishness” continued to play out over the course of the century. Writers studied include James Joyce, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, and Anne Enright.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Poetry and Prophecy: Ginsberg, Blake, Whitman
Literature 226 | Hutchinson | 3 credits
The figure of the poet as seer-prophet can be traced back to ancient times, but was also a central element in the Romantic movement. Shelley’s claim that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and Emerson’s description of poets as “liberating gods” are among the better known expressions of this tradition. The poet is seen as one who possesses visionary insight into the hidden realities of the world, as well as one who argues for and helps bring about changes to the social order. This course provides students with an introduction to this tradition through the examination of three revolutionary and influential poetic voices, spanning the period from 1788 to the 1990s: William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg (Ginsberg, in fact, frequently pointed to Whitman and Blake as his literary ancestors). Taken together, they help reveal the nature and significance of the prophetic tradition in literature.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every four years.
American Drama: Moderns and Contemporaries
Literature 231 | Staff | 3 credits
This course offers a survey of American dramatists of the past century. The focus will be on reading several plays by each of a handful of writers and examining these plays as individual works, as part of the playwright’s oeuvre, and as representative of broader trends in modern and contemporary drama and culture. Writers and works will vary each time the course is taught. Recently, they have included O’Neill, Wilder, Hellman, Williams, Miller, Hansberry, Albee, Shepard, Mamet, Wasserstein, Wilson, and Kushner.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
The Harlem Renaissance
Literature 232 | W. Brown | 3 credits
In Harlem, during the decade separating the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression, a generation of black artists and writers born around the turn of the century emerged as a self-conscious movement, flourished, and then dispersed. They described themselves as part of a “New Negro Renaissance”; cultural historians describe them as participants in the Harlem Renaissance. In this course, students will survey the literature, culture, and politics of the Renaissance by examining essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, art, and music of the period. Readings will include works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Rudolph Fisher; Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown; Arna Bontemps, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston. The course will also consider the work of artists and musicians of the period.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Crossing the Water: Contemporary U.S. and U.K. Poetry
Literature 239 CP | Filkins | 3 credits
Throughout the last two centuries there has been a rich exchange and influence at work between poets of America and the United Kingdom countries. This course will look closely at the work of six American poets – Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, John Ashbery, and Rita Dove – in tandem with six United Kingdom poets – Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, John Kinsella, and Carol Ann Duffy – in order to draw comparisons and distinctions between poetry on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to consider the global developments of poetry written in English over the last 50 years in Australia, the Caribbean, England, and Northern Ireland. In addition, students will read and respond to 12 other U.S. and U.K. poets, whose poems will be placed on electronic reserve, in order to provide themselves with a fuller picture of the wide range of poetries that have developed in each of these regions. Themes to be explored will include the uses of autobiography, the uses of nature, cultural history, gender, national identity, and evolutions in language and formal approaches. Through papers and journals, students will also hone their critical skills in reading and celebrating the richness of contemporary poetry in English throughout the world.
No prerequisites.
Shakespeare and Politics
Literature 249 | W. Brown | 3 credits
This course focuses on eight of Shakespeare’s plays in order to demonstrate how the power of the state is gained, enforced, undermined, and lost through the actions of individuals. One of the reasons for Shakespeare’s continued cultural presence throughout the world is that his plays speak to the political realities of the present. No matter how power is exercised and abused globally, we can learn much from Shakespeare's dramatization of the public fate of nations through the personal motivations that drive human behavior. The goal of this course is to engage students in the political relevance of the themes in Shakespeare’s plays to the realities of the 21st Century, by experiencing the language of his plays as alive in the present.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every year.
The 19th Century Novel: Inventing Reality
Literature 258 | Staff | 3 credits
This course examines major works of realism and naturalism by 19th-century European and Russian novelists in their social and political contexts. Novels are selected from the works of writers such as Austen, Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Flaubert, Gogol, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Zola.
No prerequisites. This course is offered every four years.
History, Politics, and the Novel
Literature 260 | Staff | 3 credits
This course examines post-World War II works in which writers have used the novel as a means of confronting fundamental public, historical, and political issues. Set in the United States, Europe, Africa, India, and the Caribbean, these novels employ techniques ranging from allegory and fable to historic reconstruction and fantastic reinvention. The most recent reading list included Camus’ The Plague, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Morrison’s Beloved, Pamuk’s Snow, and Roth’s The Plot Against America
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Contemporary African Literature
Literature 261 CP | Mathews | 3 credits
Over the past 60 years, African writers have produced a range of novels and other works examining the continent’s colonial legacy; its struggle for independence; the competing claims of tradition and modernity; the nature of the family; the presence of conflict; and the relationship of the people, their countries, and continent to the West. The project of many of these writers has been to define (or redefine) Africa and its people on their own terms and in their own voice after centuries in which both the land and its inhabitants were defined from without. In this course, we will read novels, plays, poems, essays, and other works in order to probe the current state of African writing and to examine the picture of Africa that emerges from the efforts of a broad array of its writers.
No prerequisites.
Nature and Literature
Literature 264 | Hutchinson | 3 credits
This course examines various literary responses to the natural world, both as works of art and as expressions of different cultural beliefs and values (e.g., Buddhist, Zen Buddhist, Laguna Pueblo, Blackfeet, American Transcendentalist, Christian). Among the writers typically studied are Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Matsuo Basho, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Faulkner, Annie Dillard, Peter Matthiessen, Margaret Atwood, and Mary Oliver. Students have the opportunity to do some of their own nature writing in addition to pursuing critical explorations of writers and issues.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
21st-Century Fiction
Literature 265 | Mathews | 3 credits
This course focuses on a range of literary works published in the past 15 years. As we read, we will ask how and why these works caught the attention of readers and critics: Is there such as thing as a “timeless classic,” or does everything depend on the context out of which a work arises, and into which it appears? Among the issues discussed are the intersections of personal and political history, familial relationships, and the ways in which writers revisit the past in order to achieve insight into the present. Writers include Alison Bechdel, Junot Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg, Aleksandar Hemon, Edward P. Jones, David Mazzucchelli, Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, and others.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Women Writing Resistance in the Caribbean
Literature 269m CP | Browdy | 2 credits
Since colonial times, Caribbean women have been struggling to negotiate the complex hierarchy of race/class/gender oppressions and to carve out autonomous spaces and independent voices for themselves. This interdisciplinary modular course will draw on the discourses of history, politics, sociology, and economics, as well as a blend of feminist, postcolonial, and literary theory, to explore a series of non canonical works, including novels, poetry, and essays by contemporary women writers of the Caribbean. Special attention will be paid to the themes of exile and homelessness, racism, decolonization and nationalism, and the ways each author meshes politics and aesthetics in her work. Students will come away from this course with an introduction to the most pressing questions for women from any postcolonial, underdeveloped region, and a sense of some of the answers that have been posed by a series of important contemporary Caribbean women writers, including Maryse Conde, Aurora Levins Morales, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
The Beheaded Angel: Postwar German Literature
Literature 268 | Filkins | 3 credits
This course examines developments in German literature following World War II. Topics considered include the various ways that writers and film directors dealt with the historical atrocities of the war itself, the issues attached to both the guilt and suffering of the Holocaust, the increased industrialization brought on by the German "economic miracle" of the 1950's, the separation of the two Germanys, and the forwarding of philosophical and aesthetic approaches to poetry and the novel in the contemporary work of West Germany, East Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and the reunited Germany. Writers discussed will include Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Wolfgang Koeppen, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, W.G. Sebald, and H.G. Adler. In addition, we will look at films by Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
No prerequisites.
Latin American Women Writing Resistance
Literature 270m CP | Browdy de Hernandez | 2 credits
Since colonial times, Latin American and Caribbean women have been struggling to negotiate the complex hierarchy of race/class/gender oppressions and to carve out autonomous spaces and independent voices for themselves. This interdisciplinary modular course draws on the discourses of history, politics, sociology, and economics, as well as a blend of feminist, postcolonial, and literary theory, to explore a series of non canonical works, including testimonials, novels, poetry and essays, by contemporary women writers of Latin America, including Rigoberta Menchu, Gloria Anzaldua, Helena Maria Viramontes and others excerpted in the anthology Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Dr. Browdy de Hernandez. Special attention will be paid to the themes of political and economic disenfranchisement, the intertwining of racism, sexism, elitism and imperialism, environmental justice, and the ways each author meshes politics and aesthetics in her work.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
African Women Writing Resistance
Literature 274m CP | Browdy | 2 credits
This course will open a window onto the issues and concerns of contemporary African women writers. The primary text will be the 2011 anthology edited by J. Browdy de Hernandez, Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho, and Anne Serafin, which brings together women’s writing from all over the African continent in a variety of genres including personal essays, poetry, fiction, and scholarly articles, on topics including women’s gender role constraints; sexuality and health issues; the effect of armed conflict and globalized resource extraction on women; and women as agents of positive social change. In addition to this anthology, we will read selections from the 2005 anthology African Gender Studies, edited by Oyeronke Oyewumi, and possibly one full novel, depending on time constraints. We will also see selections from several documentary films.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Women Writing Resistance in the Middle East
Literature 276m CP | Browdy | 2 credits
This two-credit course will focus on the history and contemporary experiences of women in the Middle Eastern countries through the lenses of various contemporary women writers. Topics to be discussed include Shari’ah law and other religious-based gender role constraints; honor killings; the history of feminism in the region; the effect on women of violence (domestic, civil, and international); and women’s strategies of resistance in various specific national contexts. Required readings may include: Zainab Salbi, Between Two Worlds (Iraq); Nawal El Sadaawi, selected essays (Egypt); Saira Shah, The Storyteller’s Daughter (Afghanistan); Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening (Iran); and selected essays from Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Esther Fuchs. We will also see the films Enemies of Happiness (Afghanistan) and Beyond Borders: Arab Feminists Talk about Their Lives.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
All the Single Ladies: British Women Writers Pre-1900
Literature 280 | Staff | 3 credits
In her 1929 essay on female authorship, Virginia Woolf famously declared that “A woman must have money and a room of her own” in order to write. Historically, this level of independence has been difficult for women to obtain, and perhaps as a result the British literary canon has—from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Joyce—tended to be dominated by men. This course surveys the terrain of British literature before 1900 through the eyes of female authors, probing the dynamics of agency and authorship raised by women who were able to forge their own paths in the literary landscape. In doing so, we will trace the development of British literature from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and up to the rise of the novel in the 19th century. Authors studied will include medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, Queen Elizabeth I, playwright and spy Aphra Behn, proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte.
No prerequisites.
Women Write the World I: Human Rights and Social Justice
Literature 283m CP | Browdy | 2 credits
This half-semester course introduces students to a series of contemporary women writers from around the world who have used their writing as a way to strengthen and manifest their political ideals, specifically in the areas of human rights and social justice. Drawn from different countries, cultural backgrounds, and languages; representing various facets of the interconnected global struggles for social and environmental justice; and working in a range of literary genres (fiction, essay, testimonial), these writers provide inspirational models of the ways in which women activists have melded together their art and their politics into effective rhetorical strategies. Authors include, but are not limited to, Malala Yousefzai, Rigoberta Menchu, Zainab Salbi, and Helena Maria Viramontes. In addition to these primary texts, we will also consider shorter readings (essays, articles, and poetry), as well as other media women have used as activist texts (for example, music, art, film, and theater). Required coursework will include response journals, a turn at leading discussion, and a final project with process notes.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every year.
Women Write the World II: Nature and Environmental Justice
Literature 284m CP | Browdy | 2 credits
This half-semester course introduces students to a series of contemporary women writers from around the world who have used their writing as a way to strengthen and manifest their political ideals, specifically in the areas of environmental justice. Drawn from different countries, cultural backgrounds, and languages; representing various facets of the interconnected global struggles for social and environmental justice; and working in a range of literary genres (fiction, essay, testimonial), these writers provide inspirational models of the ways in which women activists have melded together their art and their politics into effective rhetorical strategies. Authors include, but are not limited to, Julia Butterfly Hill, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, and Terry Tempest Williams. In addition to these primary texts, we will also consider shorter readings (essays, articles, and poetry) as well as other media women have used as activist texts (for example, music, art, film, and theater). Required coursework will include response journals, a turn at leading discussion, and a final project with process notes.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every year.
The Personal Essay
Literature 287/487 | Hutchinson | 3/4 credits
This course offers students the opportunity to write in an informal style and personal voice about a wide range of topics. The personal essay typically combines elements of storytelling and description with reflective exploration. By locating the writer’s personal experience within a larger context of ideas, the personal essay draws the reader into situations and settings that address questions of more universal relevance. Over the course of the term, students experiment with different ways of achieving the essay’s mixture of rendering and reflection. Students produce some new writing every two weeks, both on assigned topics as well as ones of their own choosing, and must write and revise two extended essays during the course of the term. Class time is spent discussing students’ writing and the work of published essayists, as well as occasionally engaging in informal writing activities.
Prerequisite: Literature 150 or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Fiction Workshop
Literature 288/388 | Mathews | 3/4 credits
For students who have some experience in writing short fiction and want to give and receive helpful criticism in a workshop atmosphere, this course combines structure and freedom: Structure in the form of assigned exercises drawing attention to the elements and techniques of fiction and freedom in the form of longer, independently conceived stories. Some time is spent each week discussing short fiction by contemporary writers as well as that of students in the workshop, with the goal of sharpening our abilities as writers, editors, and critics. Admission to the course is selective; candidates must submit samples of their writing to the instructor before registration.
Prerequisite: Literature 150 or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once a year.
Poetry Workshop
Literature 289/489 | Filkins | 3/4 credits
The workshop is intended for students willing to make their own writing a means of learning about poetry, poetic devices, and techniques, and the discipline of making and revising works of art. Class time is divided between a consideration of the students’ work and the work of modern British and American poets, but the central concern of the course is the students’ own writing, along with the articulation, both private and shared, of response to it.
Prerequisite: Literature 150 or 151. This course is generally offered once a year.
Gender and Power in Shakespearean Drama
Literature 292 | Staff | 3 credits
In Shakespeare's plays, women appear as witches and lovers, servants and queens; men are warriors and villains, fathers and fools; male actors played female parts and female characters impersonate men. This course will explore how Shakespeare's plays relate gender to power through study of major texts reflecting his broad range of dramatic modes and the chronological span of his career. These dramas constantly remind us that the meaning of gender cannot be taken for granted, and the plots illuminate a complex array of intersections between gender and power, animated by issues such as performance, language, embodiment, violence, marriage, and inheritance. This course will explore this terrain in light of the broader cultural and literary context of early modern drama and a range of critical approaches in contemporary Shakespeare studies.
No prerequisites.
Doing Digital Media: From Mainstream to LiveStream
Literature 297 | Browdy | 3 credits
In this media studies practicum course, we will explore the current state today of the media in the U.S. and the world today, asking questions such as: What impact has the widespread use of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc. had on the business and practice of journalism, as well as on our political system and all aspects of daily life? How is media being used most effectively for various purposes, including social justice and environmental advocacy, business, education, entertainment, and communication? How has the saturation of our lives by the media affected the ways we perceive each other and the world around us? Much of the class will be spent in hands-on exploration and collaboration, since media workers today must be versatile and nimble, learning new skills and platforms on the fly. We will work on basic journalistic techniques such as interviewing, sourcing, writing, and structuring various kinds of stories across various media platforms, including blogs, podcasts, short videos and infographics. There is a moderate course fee.
No prerequisites. This course is generally offered once every two years.
ADVANCED COURSES
Advanced courses deepen experience in literature; a major goal is depth. Advanced courses build on the introductory and intermediate courses and prepare students to write a thesis in literature. In these courses, students are asked to problematize ideas, give more detailed analysis of texts, and demonstrate “independent foraging” for critical material. Critical readings are assigned by the professor, but students are also expected to find their own critical material and apply criticism regularly in their papers, presentations, and discussions.
Dante Illustrated: Poetry, Anime, Art, and Graphic Novels of The Divine Comedy
Literature 303 | Filkins | 4 credits
Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the most influential works ever written and remains a major source of inspiration to writers and artists to this day. Along with a thorough reading of Dante’s epic poem, this course will consider modern and contemporary reworkings of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise toward his beloved Beatrice. These will include Peter Greenaway’s 1989 A TV Dante, the 2010 film Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic, Giuseppe de Liguoro’s 1911 silent film L’Inferno, Gary Panter’s 2004 punk art graphic novel Jimbo in Purgatory, Seymour Chwast’s 2010 graphic novel Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation, Go Nagai’s 2004 anime Demon Lord Dante, Sandro Botticelli’s, William Blake’s, Gustave Doré’s, Salvador Dali’s, and Robert Rauschenberg’s illustrations of the Inferno, Seamus Heaney’s conjuration of a modern Irish pilgrimage, Station Island, and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Prerequisite: 100-level Literature course or permission of the instructor.
Kafka and the Kafkan
Literature 304 | Filkins | 4 credits
Along with Kafka's novels, The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle, and several of his short stories, the course will explore what is meant by the idea of "The Kafkan," a term posited by Milan Kundera. We will then trace this element, as well as Kafka's influence, in novels ranging across a number of cultures and eras of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Works considered will include Samuel Beckett's Molloy and Malone Dies, Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K., H.G. Adler’s The Journey, stories by Jorge Luis Borges, W.G. Sebald's Vertigo, and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
Prerequisite: 100-level Literature course or permission of the instructor.
Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville
Literature 306 | Morrell | 4 credits
Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville emerged as distinctive and influential voices in American poetry and prose during the first half of the 19th century. This course examines some of their major works: Poe’s poetry, fiction, and literary theory; Hawthorne’s tales and romances; and Melville’s short stories and novels. In different ways, all three writers engage in a critique of American life and character that is sharply at odds with the more optimistic attitudes expressed by such contemporaries as Emerson, and Whitman.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and a 200-level literature course or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Modern Poetry: Modernists and Misfits
Literature 310 | Filkins | 4 credits
When we think of Modern Poetry, names like T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Gertrud Stein, and Ezra Pound immediately come to mind. However, literary movements are not forged by just a handful of writers, nor do all writers in a given time think and write alike. That is to say, some Modernists did not know they were modernists, others did claim the moniker, and still others were working simultaneously in entirely different, but important ways. Hence, alongside a consideration of iconic Modernists, we will also consider poems of lesser-known poets, such as Jean Toomer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as better-known writers such as Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes, who countered or adapted modernist poetic techniques in ways that may not seem modern, but were nevertheless part of the times. The roles of convention and innovation in modern verse will also be explored, as will the philosophies and poetics manifest in the work of the poets chosen for study.
Prerequisite: 100-level Literature course or permission of the instructor.
American Modernism: Making it New
Literature 311 | Staff | 4 credits
This course is a detailed examination of the literature of American modernism in its intellectual and historical contexts. Students read Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Stein’s Three Lives, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Toomer’s Cane, and Cather’s My Antonia. They also study selected poems by Cullen, Cummings, Eliot, Frost, H.D., Hughes, Amy Lowell, Masters, McKay, Moore, Pound, Robinson, Sandburg, Stevens, W.C. Williams, and others. Topics discussed include the movements (imagism, vorticism, symbolism, cubism, futurism, the Harlem Renaissance), the attitudes (the postwar temper, the revolt against the village), the tenets (the tradition of the new, the impersonality of poetry, the avant-garde role of the artist), the centers (Chicago, Paris, London, New York), and the little magazines and papers (Poetry, Little Review, Blast, Others, The Crisis) that helped to define and shape the writing of the period.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and a 200-level literature course or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Literary Theory
Literature 321 | Staff | 4 credits
This course considers some of the major arguments in modern literary theory. It begins by discussing the advent of English as an academic discipline. Next, students consider some of the major schools of modern literary theory, beginning with Structuralism and concluding with Postmodernism. Texts include works by Saussure, Jakobson, Foucault, Kristeva, and Derrida. Each student’s research project involves a presentation to the class and a term paper.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and a 200-level literature course or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once every two years.
Literature Re-vision and Reinvention
Literature 324 | Mathews | 4 credits
This course explores literary works and the ways in which they have been interpreted, adapted, and reimagined in later centuries by a range of writers and filmmakers. While each work is examined on its own, we will also look at the ways in which the works together illuminate both the source text and the counterpart, offering opportunities to examine the times and the cultures that produced each. The source texts will be canonical English works; the counterparts demonstrate how this act of transformation occurs across eras and cultures. The course examines different ways that this transformation is enacted, with pairings that turn the tables on the relationship of protagonist to antagonist, that explore inventive adaptations, or that suggest connections that are more associative or intuitive. Texts include Beowulf, Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, King Lear, Jane Eyre and later works by John Gardner, Akira Kurosawa, Jean Rhys, and others.
Compelling Forms: Early Modern English Literature and the Body
Literature 326 | Staff | 4 credits
This course explores early modern (15th-17th century) English literature with a particular focus on how it engages, illuminates, and problematizes questions of embodiment. In texts from this period, the body emerges as a site of critical and creative fascination--a locus of medical and magical thought, a political metaphor, and an emblem of diverse developing literary forms. This course probes that complex interplay, analyzing historical and theoretical constructions of embodiment and taking them as lenses through which to engage a range of texts from the English literary renaissance. As course texts demonstrate, the body is an insistently compelling form, at once metaphorical and material, insistently changeable, and a source of both power and vulnerability. Prospective texts include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's King Lear, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and poetry by Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne.
Prerequisites: Sophomore standing and a 200-level literature course or permission of instructor.
The Inklings
Literature 330 | Hutchinson | 4 credits
C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield are the best known members of the loosely knit group of writers and thinkers known as the Inklings. Along with others, they met in Oxford in the years before and after WW II to share their writing and their perspectives on various philosophical and religious issues. Although they are not generally seen as belonging to the mainstream of twentieth century thought, they are increasingly being recognized for their literary achievements, as well as their contributions to Romantic philosophy and Christian theology. This course focuses on their lives, their relationships with one another, and their literary, religious, and philosophical writings. Works studied include Lewis’s theological and philosophical essays, along with the novels Perelandra and Till We Have Faces; Williams’s theological writings, along with the novels The Greater Trumps, Descent Into Hell, and All Hallows Eve; Tolkien’s discussions of fantasy and the imagination, two of his short stories, and The Lord of The Rings trilogy; and Barfield’s studies of language and consciousness, along with his verse play Orpheus.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and a 200-level literature course or permission of the instructor. This course is generally offered once every three or four years.
Literature Tutorial
Literature 300/400 | Staff | 4 credits
Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their interests and programmatic needs, which may be either literary or creative. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.