The Literature Major
Course Offerings

Prerequisite Courses And Required Courses

LITR 122b, World Poetry and Performance.
Richard Maxwell (Course head)
Alexander Beecroft, David Gabriel, David Quint
MW 1.00-2.15
Examines lyric and epic poetry, drama, film, song and performance. Texts are drawn from a broad range of cultures and time periods, from the ancient Near East to our own time. Emphasis on how poetic and dramatic forms shape the stories they tell, on the social and cultural uses to which these forms are put, on relationship between text and performance and on historical and cross-cultural connections among texts.

LITR 143b/FILM 240b, World Cinema.
Dudley Andrew
MWF 11.35-12.25; screenings M 6.30 P.M.
An examination of the varieties of films that have been produced around the globe. Different functions served by the medium, particularly since World War II; analysis and contextualization of selected films from four continents.

LITR 300bG/ENGL 300b, Introduction to Theory of Literature.
Haun Saussy
TTh 11.35-12.25, 1 HTBA
An examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning, interpretation, and representation. Critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to theory and literature.

Freshman Seminars

No offerings this term.

The Ancient World

LITR 159b/CLCV 255b Introduction to Latin Literature.
Kirk Freudenburg
TTh 2.30-3.45 +1 HTBA
Survey of the literature of ancient Rome from the Republic to the sixth century C.E. Readings and discussion in English.

LITR 160b, Classical Indian Drama and Dramaturgy.
David Mellins
MW 2.30-3.45
A survey of Sanskrit dramas, read in translation, and an exploration of Indian dramaturgical theory. Aesthetic, social, and historical dimensions of Sanskrit drama; the evolution of literary methods applied in dramatic context. Technical specifications for Sanskrit drama as they reflect the ritual and political cultures of classical India.

*LITR 161b/*CLCV 218b/*HUMS 258b/*THST 218b, Drama and Demos.
Timothy Robinson
The major plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes read in translation with attention to their theatricality and to their articulation of contemporary attitudes toward politics, psychology, and the consolidation and disintegration of the Athenian polis during the fifth century B.C. Prerequisite: a course on ancient Greece (history or literature) or in theater studies.

Medieval and Early Modern Literature to 1800
No offerings this term

European Literature Since 1800

LITR 206b/RSEE 255b/RUSS 255b, Studies in the Novel: Tolstoy.
Vladimir Alexandrov
MW 2.30-3.20 +1 HTBA
A survey of Leo Tolstoy's legacy. Readings include early stories, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and short later works. Close textual analyses, with primary attention to the interrelation of theme, form, and literary and cultural contexts. Readings and discussion in English.

*LITR 211b/*AFAM 365b/FREN 373b, Creole Cultures of the Caribbean.
Christopher L. Miller
T 1.30-3.20
Focusing on the French and English Caribbean and on Louisiana, this course analyzes the quintessential but ambiguous American condition: that of the "Creole." Encompassing all non-native cultures, this term is inseparable from issues of race and slavery. Readings of historical and literary texts, both well-known and obscure, from the 18th through the 20th century. Reading knowledge of French required.

*LITR 225b/*CLCV 214b/*HUMS 278b/*MGRK 202b/*WGSS 337b, The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy.
George Syrimis
F 1.30-3.20
The course examines the interaction between gender, sexuality, and nationalism in the poetry of C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933). Major focus is given to questions of biography and representation, disclosure and evasion, as well as to Cavafy's aestheticism. The course explores the multiple ways in which Cavafy appeals to and simultaneously resists prevailing notions of writing, desire, language, the Classical tradition and modernity as well as his contribution to our understanding of the history and politics of Greek and gay identity in the twentieth century.

*LITR 226b/*JDST 310b, Readings in Hebrew Poetry.
Benjamin Harshav
T 1.30-3.20
Modernism in Hebrew poetry. Poets studied vary from year to year. Prerequisite: a high level of reading Hebrew texts in poetry and criticism. Students may take a second time. Poets studied vary yearly; may be repeated for credit.

*LITR 228bG/*GMAN 309bG/*GMST 309bG/*HUMS 274b, Literacy Ethics: Dinesen and Sebald.
Carol Jacobs.
M 1.30-3.20
We will be concentrating on the prose works of Isak Dinesen and W. G. Sebald. In reading these singularly popular writers, we will think through how literature and ethics redefine one another, the way in which the performance of the work of art and, specifically, reflections on the nature of language and representability, demand a rethinking of conscience and moral gesture.

LITR 231b/PORT 393b, Modern Brazilian and Portuguese Fiction in Translation.
K. David Jackson
TTh 1-2:15
An introduction to the major writers in modern Brazilian and Portuguese literatures, including J.M. Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, João Guimãraes Rosa, Fernando Pessoa, and José Saramago. Conducted in English.

*LITR 233b/*ENGL 305b, Austen and Brontë and Twentieth-Century Women's Novels.
Katie Trumpener
MW 1.00-2.15 Beginning with key novels by Austen and Charlotte Bronte, this course exams how twentieth-century British, American and Anglophone writers rewrite, revise and reconcile these works, as prototypes of a woman's novel tradition. Particular attention to narrative voice, reader identification, the novel's function as a record of social norms and as an agent of historical change. Novels by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble, Cynthia Ozick, Jean Rhys and others; secondary reading by Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Edward Said, Claudia Johnson, D.A. Miller.

*LITR 236b/*GMAN 252b/GMST 252b, Traditions of the Novella: Short Narratives in the Nineteenth Century.
Kirk Wetters
TTh 1.00-2.15 Survey of the novella as a narrative form from Goethe to Thomas Mann. Emphasis on narrative technique and the development of literature from Romanticism through Realism to Modernism. Among authors to be studied: Goethe, Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Büchner, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gotthelf, Mörike, Keller, C.F. Meyer, Storm, Fontane and Th. Mann. (Texts and class discussion in English, though students with German will be encouraged to read the originals.)

*LITR 241b/*RUSS 323b, City and Country in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.
Molly Brunson
TTh 1:00-2:15
A study of the thematic, aesthetic, and historical significance of the city and the country in the nineteenth-century European novel. Topics include the idyll and urban development, social mobility, travel and transportation, landscape painting, and literacy narrative and spatial organization. Analysis of novels by Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy, as well as historical documents, visual materials, and theoretical texts. Readings and discussion in English.

Non-European Literature Since 1800

LITR 251b/JAPN 251bG, Japanese Literature After 1970.
John Treat
TTh 2.30-3.45
Study of the Japanese literature published between 1970 and the present. Writers may include Murakami Ryu, Maruya Saiichi, Shimada Masahiko, Nakagami Kenji, Yoshimoto Banana, Yamada Eimi, Murakami Haruki, and Medoruma Shun. No knowledge of Japanese required.

LITR 252b/JAPN 260bG, Imagining Space in Japanese Fiction and Film.
Christopher Hill
TTh 1.00-2.15
Representations of space in modern fiction and selected films. Aesthetic forms as they establish social and psychological space; urbanization, wartime destruction, and rural transformations as they affect the representation of space. Writers and directors include Kawabata, Enchi, Oe, Murakami, and Miyazaki. No knowledge of Japanese required. *LITR 267b/*EAST 441b, Translation and Modern Literature in East Asia.
Heekyoung Cho
W 1.30-3.20
This course explores the place and function of translation in relation to the formation of modern literature in East Asia. Using translation as a pivot, we discuss the construction of modern literary language, the appropriation and creation of literary texts, gender created in and by translation, and the power dynamics inherent in the context of translation.

*LITR 275b/*ENGL 383b/*THST 348b, The Common Wealth of Drama.
Murray Biggs
MW 4.00-5.15
Study of plays in English from or about former British colonies, both before and after independence, including Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, the West Indies, and the Indian subcontinent.

Literary Theory and Special Topics

*LITR 309 b G Latin American intellectual Debates of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Moira Fradinger
W 3.30-5.20
This seminar looks at central cultural debates in the region over a period of two centuries, mainly through the literary and political form of the essay. It explores polemics over the idea of America, debates around the Indian question, issues of cultural hybridity, transculturation, negritude, and the discussion over the region's modernity and post-modernity, Authors include de Hostos, Alberdi, Bello, Martí, Sarmiento, Rodó, Ortiz, Vasconcelos, Reyes, González Prada, Mariátegui, Mañach, Cabrera, Zea, Roumain, Césaire, Fanon, Damas, Chamoiseau, Rama, Retamar, Benítez Rojo, Ribeiro, Cornejo Polar, García Canclini, Viñas, and Schwarz. Conducted in Spanish; readings and writing can be done in English as well.

*LITR 323b/*ENGL 336b/*THST 303b, The Opera Libretto.
J. D. McClatchy
T 1.30-3.20
A selective survey of the genre from its seventeenth-century Italian origins to the present day. The libretto's history, from opera seria to opéra comique to melodrama, featuring original libretti by writers such as Homannsthal, W.S. Gilbert, and Auden. Emphasis on literary adaptations, from Da Ponte and Beaumarchais to Britten and Thomas Mann. Source material includes works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Hugo, Melville, and Tennessee Williams. Readings in English; musical background not required.

*LITR 329b/*GMAN 287bG/*GMST 287b, Advocates and Representatives.
Rüdiger Campe
W 3.30-5.20
In contradistinction to our familiar thinking on communication as two parties speaking about the world, the course will develop a triangular scene, in which one person speaks on behalf of another person before a third party. This is the model of communication in law (in the idea of advocacy), religion (in the idea of intercession) and politics (in the idea of representation). Readings will be taken from ancient rhetoric (Aristotle, Quintilian), Jewish and Christian religious texts (on the "paraclete" or helper), as well as modern social and literary theory (Parsons, Derrida); we will also examine selected scenes from ancient and modern drama as well as paradigmatic works by Kafka, Canetti and Celan.

*LITR 334b/*GMAN 181b, Problems of Lyric.
Howard Stern
MW 4.00-5.15
Masterpieces of European and American lyric studied in relation to the various determinants of poetry: grammar and logic, meter and rhyme, self-consciousness and performativity, myth and theme. Poets studied include Brecht, Rilke, Goethe, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Reading knowledge of German or French useful but not required.

LITR 347b/HUMS 349b, History & Critique of Semiotics.
David Larsen
W 3.30-5.20
Meaning is derived from raw phenomena, relayed through interpersonal communication, and variously engaged in the work of art. And yet it is said to have one vehicle: the sign. This seminar is on the conveyance of meaning in all its aspects, combining an introduction to contemporary semiotic theory with a historical survey of semiotic thought, and experimenting with their uses in contemporary humanistic inquiry.

Film *LITR 350b/*FILM 410b/*GMAN 406ab Theatricality in Film.
Brigitte Peucker
Examination of the multiple implications of theatricality in and for the cinema. Theatricality as excess; the appropriation of theatrical modes for film; theatricality as modernist self reflexivity; performance and the relation of theatricality to subjectivity (performing the self); ritual and reenactment in film;theatricality and the real; the matieral impage.

Core Seminars

Two seminars are required for all Literature majors; nonmajors may be admitted with permission of the instructor.

*LITR 402b/*ENGL 329b, Picture Book to Graphic Novel.
Katie Trumpener
MW 2.30-3.45, I HTBA
History of the picture book from the early modern period to the late twentieth century, focusing on the Anglo-American tradition within a broader European context. The picture book's relationship to the comic strip and comic book, and to the contemporary graphic novel. The complex relations between image and narrative, format and address.

*LITR 403b/*FILM 442b, The City in Literature and Film.
Katerina Clark
TTh 1.00-2.15; screenings T 7P.M.
Consideration of the architecture, town planning, and symbolic functions of various cities in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and East Asia. Discussion of the representation of these cities in literature and film. Works include older Soviet and Chinese films about Shanghai and contemporary films about Hong Kong and Beijing.

*LITR 425b/*FILM 344b, Landscape, Film, Architecture.
Richard Maxwell
MW 11.35-12.50
Movement through landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. Simulation of travel using movie cameras and other visual-verbal means, as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary places traversed in works by Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, César Aira, Georges Rodenbach, Patrick Keiller, Georges Perec, and Andrei Tarkovsky.

*LITR 429b Fictional Worlds.
Benjamin Harshav
W 1:30-3:20
The construction of fictional worlds in literature, as exemplified in close readings of stories by Joyce, Gogol, and especially the fictions of interpretation in the work of Franz Kafka. All readings in English; papers may be written on texts in other languages.

*LITR 435bG/*ENGL 348b, The Arabic Novel in Translation.
Ala Alryyes
T 3.30-5.20
Readings from selected modern Arabic novels in translation, with attention to how their themes and forms emulate and diverge from those of the Western novel. Topics include the persistence of orality and the relation between dialect and formal language; the clash between tradition and modernity; the chasm between ordinary lives and official history; defeat and exile; and patriarchy and gender issues. Works by Haykal, Mahfouz, Jabra, Salih, al-Shaykh, and al-Ghitani. Some attention to films and plays.

*LITR 460b, Reconsidering the Categories of East and West.
David Gabriel
T 9.25-11.15
Accepted notions of the Western and Eastern worlds examined in literature, film, and other cultural products from regions and peoples who defy or disturb traditional classifications. Examples include indigenous peoples of North America, Central Asia in the post-Soviet world, and countries that occupy a liminal space between East and West, such as Albania and Turkey. Strategies for understanding the culturally unfamiliar without appropriating or negatively affecting it.

*LITR 480b Topics in Literary Theory: Psychoanalysis in Literature and Film.
Moira Fradinger
W 3:30-5:20
In-depth examination of a field of literary theory; topics change annually, and the course can be taken more than once. The topic for 2009 is concepts in psychoanalytic theory that bridge the clinical world, literary and critical theory, and film and gender studies. Foundational works by Freud and Lacan are considered together with literary and theoretical texts in order to explore the link between the arts and psychoanalytic theory. Concepts from the clinical field that have been imported into theories of culture, society and the arts.

*LITR 488a or b, Directed Reading and/or Individual Research.
Barry McCrea
Special projects in an area of the student's particular interest set up with the help of a faculty advisor and the director of undergraduate studies. Projects cover material not otherwise offered by the department, must terminate in at least a term paper or its equivalent, and must have the approval of the director of undergraduate studies. Enrollment limited to Literature majors.

Senior Courses *LITR 491b, The Senior Essay.
Consult the director of undergraduate studies.
An independent writing and research project. The senior essay is due in the office of the director of undergraduate studies according to the following schedule: (1) by September 11 (for LITR 491a) or January 22 (for LITR 491b), a three-page prospectus signed by the student's advisor; (2) by October 23 (for LITR 491a) or March 1 (for LITR 491b), a full rough draft (not notes); (3) by December 4 (for LITR 491a) or April 16 (LITR 491b) the completed essay. The minimum length for an essay is twenty-five pages. Students are urged to arrange a topic and advisor in the term before the term in which the essay is to be written.

*LITR 492b and 493b, The Yearlong Senior Essay.
Consult the director of undergraduate studies.
Barry McCrea
An extended research project. Students must petition the curriculum committee for permission to enroll by the last day of classes in the term preceding enrollment in LITR 492a or b. For students expecting to graduate in May, the senior essay is due in the office of the director of undergraduate studies according to the following schedule: (1) by September 11, a three-page prospectus signed by the student's advisor; (2) by January 22, a full rough draft (not notes); (3) by April 16, the completed essay. December graduates should consult the director of undergraduate studies for required deadlines. The minimum length for a yearlong senior essay is forty pages.

Next: Graduate Program