Literature (LITR1-UC)

This course introduces contemporary global literature from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives. Selections may include contemporary works from Asia (east and/or south), the Middle East, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean or North and South America. Students practice techniques of close reading, evidence use, and other forms of literary analysis to engage critically and creatively with works in various genres from around the world.

An interdisciplinary course that examines representations of race and racism in a variety of historical and literary texts written from the Civil War to the present. The course situates readings in historical contexts, examining how figurative, metaphoric, and narrative patterns have shaped historical reality. Texts include novels, poems, humorous tracts, historical accounts, and contemporary journals.

Students read and analyze one of the richest works in American literature. They learn increasingly complex skills of literary analysis by seeking out the relationship between the realistic depiction of 19th-century life at sea and the mythical structures in this work. The use of language, including musicality and linguistic play, is explored.

For thousands of years, humans learned their history, science, religious beliefs, customs, and laws only through oral stories. Contact with writing cultures changed all that. The cultural significance of most oral forms were transformed, if not destroyed, by European written literature. This course explores the question of how bards, singers, and shamans from those preliterate cultures kept alive the vitality, language, and communal aspects of their ways of knowing. In this course students will encounter the cultural contexts and performance modes of various oral traditions as well as the implications of their transformation from voice to written forms. Students may study oral stories from Aboriginal, African, Caribbean, Native American, South American, or other storytelling traditions.

Bursting from the corsets of Victorian constraint, the 20th century is said to be the century of alienation, transformation, and disintegration. Yet 20th-century writers were freed to create new forms, break conventional patterns, explore new realms for meaning and new possibilities for writing. At its beginning, writers such as Stein, Joyce, and Eliot worked against the grain of received language, embodied ideas in new ways, and dismantled conventional language. At its midpoint, two world wars, world economic depression, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima-displayed daily in film and print-destroyed our confidence that language could ever be adequate to name human experience. Yet writers such as Faulkner, O'Connor, Yeats, Stevens, Hemingway, Beckett, Ellison, Baldwin, and Morrison each find new ways to reawaken our sense of ourselves in our world.

This course offers an overview of contemporary Arabic literature. Starting with pre-Islamic genres, we move to twentieth ?century literature and read works by such seminal authors as Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmud Darwish, and Adonis. We will examine a variety of themes that had important repercussions on the aesthetic and ideological development of Arabic literature. This course is divided into sections on East/West relations, Arab-Israel conflict, and women experiences.

Focusing on both the performance’s poetry and narration, this course explores how performance is distinguished from other literature and the rules that govern it and theater in different cultures. Students examine the relationships among ritual, performance, and drama. They both read and attend live performances from Greece, Britain, the United States, Japan, India, and Africa.

While this course emphasizes the epic, the problematic nature of the concept of "genre" asks that we study the historical and developmental controversies which have emerged from the very idea of "epic." What, in fact, is epic? What particular skills do we need to read and understand the qualities which distinguish the epic from other modes of story telling? What distinguishes it from other forms of narrative poetry? This course focuses on the social and historical conditions from which the concepts of epic emerge and evolve.

In this course, students will examine the major definitions and theories of 'genre' while focusing our attention on selected poetic and narrative forms though a number of key questions including: what makes poetry different from prose and how do poetic modes differ from prose modes? Are their different narrative conventions of 'voice' and perspective between poetic modes and narrative modes? Are there different uses of language? Do the distinctions between 'genres' reveal a `deep structure that cuts across cultures, or are genres culture specific? What special kinds of reading skills are required in order to read and appreciate poetry and narrative? By examining a number of literary contexts, students will learn what makes a story a narrative and what makes a poem a 'poem'. Students will reflect upon the importance of such literary structural distinctions from a series of social, political, and psychological perspectives.

This course examines colonialism's effects on literary articulations of history, identity, tradition, and belief. It explores new forms of consciousness and expression produced in the encounter between European colonizers and colonized people in the Caribbean, the Middle East, India, and other parts of Africa and Asia.

In this introduction to literary analysis, students will become active readers of literature. Together they will explore how to attend carefully to language, sound, syntax, structure, rhythm, musicality, and patterns. Students will learn the specific distinctions between the three major literary genres: poetry, drama, and fiction. In becoming close readers, students will also become aware of the relationship between cultural and literary transformation.

In this course students learn to recognize the central characters, metaphors, and ideas that comprise the classical consciousness of Greece and Rome. Works by Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Sappho, and others are studied both through traditional methods of close reading and the questions raised by structuralism and deconstruction. Students also acquire an understanding of classical literature as oral and theatrical genres.

The English Renaissance was a period, not unlike our own, of revolutionary transformation in the realms of science, religion, and politics. As the world moved away from closed feudal certainties toward increasingly open possibilities, it lost its sense of center and truth but promised new freedoms. In the Renaissance world of self-construction and overarching ambition, why does drama become the central form? How does poetry evolve? Students read writers such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Webster, Ford, Marvell, and Donne in their historical, theological, and social contexts.

Students read four of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the context of their Shakespearean world view and attend performances and/or view films.

Covers literary texts of the Middle Ages in their historical, theoretical, and social contexts, with an emphasis on the works of Chaucer.

Introduction to Literature: The Craft of Reading or permission of the coordinator). This course explores literary treatments of the environment in a global context. How have various authors explored the interaction of human beings with our natural environment? How has nature been represented and how have these representations changed our social, ethical and political metaphors?

This two-credit Contemporary Genres course focuses on a variety of contemporary experimental and hybrid forms that blur the edges of the traditional genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Students may take this course with a different subtitle twice for a total of four credits.

A survey of the literary and rhetorical interaction of voices shaping American identity through literature. Beginning with the earliest work about the encounter of European and Native inhabitants, students study traditions such as Native-American, European-American, and African-American within their cultural and historical context. Readings are selected from both conventional works and oral and sacred traditions.

Locates African-American writers within their cultural traditions in Africa and the Caribbean, focusing on how those traditions were transformed by the slave and colonial experiences. Works studied might include African legend and sacred narratives, slave narratives, blues and spiritual traditions, and the writings of Du Bois, Wheatley, William Wells Brown, Hurston, Malcolm X, Morrison, and Baraka.

This course is a survey of British literature that takes students from the early works of chivalry and romance in the Middle Ages through the major playwrights, metaphysical poets, and storytellers of the 17th century. This is the first course of a two course sequence that gives students of literature, writing, or any discipline a sense of the sweep and development of thought and experience in a turbulent and transformative time. Students read stories of monsters and bravery in works such as <i>Beowulf,</i> and chivalry, romance, and bawdiness in <i>The Canterbury Tales</i>. The course culminates in Milton's story of the fall of man and the great love sonnets of Donne, Herbert, and Shakespeare.

Focuses primarily on Latin American literary traditions in poetry, prose, and drama. Students examine the Hispanic and Native American roots of South and Central American literatures in light of their influence on the evolving Latino traditions in North America.

In this interdisciplinary course, students explore theories and representations of desire in a variety of literary and philosophical contexts from Plato onward. Students will address questions such as: How does writing stage and represent desire? How does language claim to know, expose or further displace it? What becomes of the body in this process of representation? To address these questions, we will examine the relation of desire and spirituality, esthetics and sexuality. We will read desire within such theoretical frameworks and psychoanalysis, feminists, while exploring germinal frameworks in the works of Plato, Freud, Nietzsche, and Russo.

Students read four of Shakespeare’s comedies in the context of the bard’s life and times and attend performances and/or view films.

Students read four of Shakespeare’s history plays in the context that shaped their concerns and attend performances and/or view films.

The 19th century in Britain was a period of upheaval and revolution: political, industrial, and psychological. Students study how literature participated in the transformation from pastoral to industrial society through the works of the Romantics, the Victorians, and early modernists. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, Wilde, Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and the Brontes are among those considered.

A survey of the many writers who have shaped the American experience during two centuries of self-definition, conflict, and change. Students might read authors such as Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Douglass, Stowe, Chopin, Faulkner, Silko, Morrison, Sanchez, and Lorde.

Looks at the complex activity that characterized English literary culture in the 18th century-an era of reaction and revolution, of rising cities and great country houses, of the cultivation of formal gardens, and the intellectual ferment of coffeehouses. This period saw the rise of the novel, the age of satire, the origins of romanticism, and the apogee of neoclassicism, with such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Pope, Swift, Dryden, Addison and Steele, Johnson and Boswell, Paine, Gray, Blake, Austen, and Wollstonecraft.

Presents various theories of criticism and examines the implications of these theories for the analysis of literary texts. Students become familiar with the language and concepts of psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist critics as well as the New Criticism and deconstruction. Students explore the major critical theories that have shaped 20th-century literature as well as its interpretation, providing sometimes contradictory ways of reading and writing literature.

In this course students will learn how Psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to literature access the linguistic, political, and cultural unconscious of both characters and texts. By reading the works of such thinkers as Freud, Lacan, and Althusser, students will examine how literary form itself produces and sustains ideological subjectivities be they racial, sexual, political, or socioeconomic. The course also explores how the interaction of Psychoanalytic and Marxist Theory from the 1960s onward has given rise to such theories as Deconstruction and gender and queer studies, crucial to our understanding of literature today.

Introduction to Literature: The Craft of Reading or permission of the coordinator). This two credit Major Authors course allows for close inquiry and analysis of one author or a set of authors from a given historical period. Students may take this course with a different subtitle twice for a total of 4 credits.

Focuses on a different theme or topic each semester, for example: modern poetry or literature, an issue in media studies or a major author. The specific topic is listed in the course schedule for the semester.

This course begins with the bawdy and turbulent 18th century, when invective, satire, the enlightenment, and the novel evolved. Students read the satire of Swift, Pope, and Dryden, and consider the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the Romantic sensibility of authors such as Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats. They witness the repression of the Victorian Age in works such as Jane Eyre and Hard Times.