Literature (LIT-SHU)

This course provides an introduction to literary theories and methodologies. We will analyze such different approaches to literary expressions as classical, modern, structuralist, post-structuralist approaches; Marxist, colonial and post-colonial approaches, including feminist and post-human methodologies for different literatures. The course will emphasize the shifts and turns in these approaches. The aim is to acquire knowledge of a variety of literary approaches at work when reading literature and of the relationships between text, author, writing and audience. Pre-requisites: None Fulfillment: Humanities Foundations/Introductory course(18-19: Critical Concepts/Survey).

This course takes as its subject the Belle Époque, that period in the life of France’s pre-World War I Third Republic (1871-1914) associated with extraordinary artistic achievement, as well as the Second Empire (1851-1871) that preceded it. In this course, we will attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the literary works of this era by placing them in the context of the society within which they were produced, France’s Second Empire and Third Republic. Like the United States today, the Third Republic was a polity in which issues of the rights of minorities, freedom of expression, the place of religion in the public sphere, and the proper relationship between democracy and imperialism were subjects of constant debate. Furthermore, like the U.S. but unlike contemporary France, the Third Republic relied much more on the market and less on state subsidies to support artistic endeavors. Among other questions, we will examine to what extent the cultural flowering of this period occurred as a result of, or in spite of, this reliance on market forces. Near the end of the course we will take on the challenge of Proust’s Swann’s Way, which we will read together in its entirety. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Other Introductory Courses (18-19 Survey Courses).

Modernism is a 20th-century literary, artistic, intellectual, and theoretical movement. It started in the West from 1890 as a reaction to major socio-cultural, political, intellectual, economic, scientific, and technological developments that left many feeling unsettled, lost, and disillusioned. Modernism and modernist literature also took off in other locations in the world but not necessarily during the same period of 1890 to the 1940s. Furthermore, modernism in the West has arguably witnessed a comeback. This 200-level course covers the rise of modernism as a global phenomenon of thematic, generic, and stylistic experimentation and will draw attention to canonical writers from across the globe such as William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Frantz Kafka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Lu Xun, and Tayeb Salih. We will also situate literary modernism in relation to nineteenth-century literary realism, the subsequent postmodernism, and, where relevant, postcolonialism. Students will be exposed to different genres: these may include short stories, poems, visual arts, film, plays, novels, and theory; and as needed we will examine how visual culture, architecture, and popular culture interacted with, influenced, and were shaped by, modernist aesthetics. The course will unpack major thematic, generic, and stylistic elements found in modernist literature and artistic and visual forms. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course; Humanities Minor.

When Latin American writers burst onto the world stage in the 1960s, they dazzled readers with works that merged formal experimentation with local traditions. Soon the “magic realism” that made Rulfo, García Márquez, and Allende famous became synonymous with Latin America. But what began as a new literary sensibility quickly became a marketing label—and, for some, a straitjacket. Was magic realism just a way to sell a colorful cliché to readers in Europe and North America? In this introduction to Latin American fiction, we will study the rise and legacy of magic realism, along with some of the many alternatives that preceded and responded to it. We will study major figures from the 1930s to today to explore how they understood literature’s political stakes and the writer’s responsibility to history. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Elective.

How can different words say the "same" thing? This course explores the linguistic, aesthetic, cultural, and political implications of moving between languages. We will study key statements of translation theory, compare several versions of a single text, and read fiction that intentionally crosses linguistic boundaries. We'll even try our own hands at this fascinating, frustrating art. Knowledge of a language other than English is not required. Our goal is to learn how thinking about translation can make us more careful readers and writers. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major introductory course

Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Identity, Gender, and Language: Humanities Advanced course.

To read, write and tell stories is to leave a record of human expression. This course engages with literary works that explore the long human past, asking how modern and contemporary cultures re-wrote and reinterpreted the human experience during the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. This class looks to the global prehistorical imagination through diverse literary, philosophical and cultural works. Focusing in on archaeological discoveries including the first prehistoric cave art recognized at Spain’s Altamira caves in 1879, the first translation and publication of Gilgamesh in 1880, the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts in Mogao Cave in 1900, the “Peking Man” of Zhoukoudian in 1921 and the Lascaux caves in 1941, we will read related writings and works from a range of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, philosophers and intellectuals. Authors may include Charles Darwin, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Guo Moruo, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Dafu, Jean Baudrillard and others, as well as contemporary scholars of deep time (e.g. Robert MacFarlane). Through close attention to their rhetoric, images and ideals, the course will allow students to identify a range of discourses through which writers and others theorized human modernity and grounded major artistic, political or pseudoscientific projects. Whether understood as mythical, universal, romantic, national or otherwise, the search for humanity’s prehistories was inextricably tied to an evolution of modern imaginaries, fictions and desires. Prerequisite: GPS. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Advanced Course.

The European Middle Ages remains a common subject in popular culture, often as a setting for fantasy, romance, Arthuriana, warfare, and adventure. This fascination endures, in large part, because the period in question captures our imaginations with its mythical creatures, legends of chivalry, codes of honor, and damsels in distress. But at the heart of this reimagined world that has become so central to a collective cultural consciousness are the literature and events that inspired it. In medieval literature we find much more than dragons, manticores, King Arthur and his knights: we find the foundations for love, sexual relations, marriage, as well as the seeds of bias, exclusion, and persecution that endure into the twenty-first century. And while the Middle Ages did not invent these concepts, we can clearly trace a direct line back from the present to the shape they took during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries in the medieval West. This course begins with troubadour poetry as the foundation of ‘courtly love,’ a literary topos that continues to be proliferated in television, film, novels, and popular song. It examines the troubadours’ role in shaping and gendering sexual desire, passion, and fin amor. We then turn to chivalric romance, where the concept of courtly love flourished in the adulterous adventures of knights and ladies–for true love and passion could only exist outside of marriage. In the second half of the course, we turn to another vestige of the medieval past by examining what the scholar Robert I. Moore has called “the formation of a persecuting society.” We will look at how the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils sought to marginalize Jews, Muslims, and lepers, among others. We will read crusade chronicles, memoirs, and poetry that reflect and contribute to the growing culture of categorization and exclusion that emerged. Through class discussions and in-class activities, we will explore the connections between contemporary expressions of love and hate with their medieval origins. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: Topics)

This course examines the historical and poetic dimensions of nineteenth-century British imperialism with a focus on the literature of the romantic period. As we explore the connections and tensions between imperialist politics and romantic aesthetics, we will follow three paths of inquiry: 1) how did empire inform the cultural and literary perspectives of the time, 2) what were the historical models and lineages empire was associated with both in political and literary discourses of the period, 3) what definitions empire and imperialism gained in romantic imagination, and how do they inflect the notions and concepts regarded quintessentially romantic such as the sublime? We will seek answers to these questions by returning to the landscape of the romantic period in a comprehensive and inclusive way, reading the works of marginalized authors alongside their rather widely studied contemporaries. Prerequisite: GPS Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Course.