Courses
Half of this team-taught course is devoted to examining Johannes Vermeer’s subjects, painting techniques, and reception. The other half examines the invention and use of comparable subjects and literary techniques during the three eras in which Vermeer figured prominently on the global stage: the Dutch Golden Age, the American Gilded Age, and the US financial boom of the 1990s.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of major developments in French Caribbean literature of the 19th through 21st centuries. This course focuses on questions of language, race, gender, geography, and class, with emphasis on local, regional, and global frames of reference.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureIslands, because of their size and supposed isolation, have been the site of environmental and military experiments. Similarly, writers have used the island to build a textual laboratory in order to test their philosophical and narrative experiments. In this course, students will look at novels (including graphic novels) to examine this scientific, military and narrative instrumentalization of the island.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents look at the evolution of long-form journalism of postwar America, roughly defined as 1946–1980. Works include Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and the magazine writing of Lillian Ross, Alex Haley, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese. The class also explores more recent authors, such as Isabel Wilkerson and Rachel Aviv, and the influences of the digital age.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents learn how the Bible is the essential foundation for Judaic and Christian cultures, and how it has impacted world history. The course starts with Genesis, the Old Testament, and ends with Revelations, New Testament. Students do close readings of the Bible’s remarkable collection of stories, poems, proverbs and more, all in an historical context.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe literatures of former French colonies are deeply concerned with questions of space: territory, displacement, indigeneity and migration. This course analyzes recurrent spatial tropes (the island, the plantation, the border, etc.) in the French-language literatures of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and Africa to see how received notions of space, including literature as textual space, are reinvented.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWe will look at French-language texts from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Africa. Emphasis will be on transnational conflicts and solidarities. Texts will be read and taught in English, but French majors and minors are encouraged to read the texts in the original French.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn exploration of literary translation for the contemporary moment. Students learn the basics of literary translation craft. Knowledge of languages other than English is not required for this course. Readings include Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Cecilia Rossi’s translations of Alejandra Pizarnik, and Victor Montejo’s translations of Jakaltek Mayan folktales. Students develop their own literary translations.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents read postcolonial African novels, short stories, and plays that thematize the role and place of art and culture within African communities, histories, and epistemologies. Learning about the curation of African objects in Western institutions, students study issues of restoration, restitution, and repatriation. Through engagement with African cultural objects in the Neuberger Museum’s permanent collection, students gain hands-on experience.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWitness literature come alive! Students read work by well-known authors visiting Purchase in the Durst lecture series and read plays staged by the Theatre Program. Students meet independently with authors and attend their public lectures. Directors visit the class and students receive free tickets to all plays. Classwork analyzes material before and after students meet authors and attend plays.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWhat is it we are talking about when we address “Nature”? The closer we look, the more difficult the question becomes. The class looks closely at “Nature,” primarily through various literary texts, as well as through images and videos, considering topics and issues of “natural history,” environmental politics, etc.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWhat is beauty? How does one recognize it? How do—or how should—people respond to it? What is its relation to justice? This interdisciplinary humanities course examines such fundamental questions with the help of philosophers, theologians, neuroscientists, poets, and artists of all kinds.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents trace the development of non-Western identity as it is formulated within the West by examining marginalized characters who are shaped by their powerlessness. Topics include educating the native, victimage, Orientalism, backwardness, and gender. Authors include William Shakespeare, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, William Beckford, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mayo, and Rukeya Sakhawat Hossein.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureSocial borders are examined through literature that explores immigration, assimilation, and the experience of those who exist “between” cultures. A major focus is on the “hybridizing” of cultures and the way that literature expresses the blending of cultures through language and narrative structure.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn introduction to the principles and practice of close reading and literary criticism. Readings include a variety of literary modes, including fiction, poetry, and drama.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe rise of the novel and its continued relevance today. In addition to close readings of novels from a variety of time periods and countries, students read about the conditions that gave rise to the novel as a genre and various theoretical interpretations of the form and its functions.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of a wide array of poems from classical antiquity to the 21st century. In this course, students consider the multiple ways that poetry works to create meaning and emotion and investigate techniques of close analysis. Particularly recommended for students interested in the study of literature, creative writing, and language.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureRead multi-genre literature and social histories and identify and analyze the distinctions and similarities that have shaped the experiences and the cultural imagination among different Latinx communities. Topics include identity formation and negotiation in terms of language, race, gender, sexuality, and class; discuss diaspora and emigration. Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa and Piri Thomas. Taught in English.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureLiterature inhabits, reflects, creates, and ironically examines the “history” that is its context. This course observes the central narrative of American history, American institutions and anti-institutions, and the American international situation through the peculiar lens of American poetry, fiction, cinema, and other literary arts.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines black literary and performance culture from the 18th century to the present. Students explore the self-making and resistance of black authors and activists through literary culture. Discussions focus on the intersections of identity formation (race, gender, sexuality, class) to enhance an understanding of the broader tradition of American letters and black culture. Readings include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Credits: 3
Department: LiteratureThe Zoom Age has prompted many to reflect on feelings of detachment, burnout, and loneliness. These reflections draw from theories of individual autonomy explored by Enlightenment authors and thinkers. Starting with writings on solitude and external nature by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, students explore early novels by Defoe, Sterne, and others before turning to recent works by Marquez and Robinson.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureReadings explore postcolonial and other contemporary global literary representations of animals and the environment, specifically their engagement with narratives of colonization and development, human-centeredness, and the posthuman. Students will consider how these representations invite readers to re-think hierarchical and human-centered visions of our world.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines how literature is shaped by intersections of the local and the global in examples drawn from five regions: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureShort stories by important U.S. writers of fiction, from the beginnings of the literary tradition in the earlier 19th century (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) to current authors. As the sequence of stories unfolds, the development of American issues unfolds as well.
Credits: 3
Department: LiteratureStudents read about South Asians dislocated from their homeland, focusing on issues of cultural displacement, alienation, assimilation, and construction as they follow narratives of South Asians who attempt to preserve the traces of their ethnic, cultural, and religious identities. Authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, V.S. Naipaul, and Amitav Ghosh, among others.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureReadings include literature by 21st century writers of African descent living around the globe, with special focus on the Black Atlantic region. Students consider the texts’ engagement with issues of modernity, postmodernity, identity, belonging, and citizenship. Authors include Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Teju Cole, and Taiye Selasi.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn introduction to literary study for current and prospective literature majors. Readings are divided among three areas: primary texts, secondary texts that offer contexts for the primary texts, and works that define the study of literature. Each course section addresses its own topic.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureReadings illustrate the range of issues, styles, and contexts in the Bible, including Genesis and Exodus, Deuteronomic Histories, prophets major and minor, Job and Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, and Apocalypse. This is not a course in religion, but in a literary and cultural tradition deeply concerned with human action in relation to divinity.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureCovers the diverse literary voices addressing empire, genocide, and enslavement from the 15th-century European invasion of North America through the founding of the United States and the beginning of the Civil War. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between identity, justice, and writing.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of literature written in the U.S. between the 1830s and the beginning of the 20th century. Careful attention is paid to the context of western expansion, slavery and its legacy, industrialization, immigration, and other historical developments. While much of the course is devoted to the “American Renaissance,” students also consider several contemporaneous literary traditions and their interrelationships.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureMyths are the narrative form of a culture’s essential knowledge—of itself, its origins, its contexts. This course substantially engages Greek and Roman mythology as well as myths from many time periods and cultures (biblical, South Asian, Native American, contemporary, and more). Theoretical approaches are also considered.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThrough studying modern Chinese literature, this course offers students an opportunity to approach China in depth in its social, historical, cultural, and political aspects. The stories of people and land, revolutions and traumas, and dream and utopia make it possible to comprehend this vast and seemingly impenetrable entity in an intimate and critical way.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThis course both surveys representative works of modern Chinese women writers and examines general problems such as equality and liberation, desire and subjectivity.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureEngage with literary texts and cinematic productions such as Sozaboy, Beasts of No Nation, A Long Way Gone, War Witch, and Kony 2012 which portray children forced to the front lines of war. What meaning is carried through these literary and cinematic texts? How do genre, point of view, language, medium, etc. impact our reading of these narratives?
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA survey of British literature from Beowulf to Paradise Lost, with a particular focus on the history of literary form and the birth of a vernacular tradition in English.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA survey of British literature from Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” to Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, with a particular focus on the development of a national literature in the dual contexts of empire and transnational modernism.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplore texts that use literary tropes/techniques to create fact-based narratives. Study the formal aspects of this literature as well as its thematic content, paying close attention to its use in works by women and people of color. Topics include speculation, testimony, and archival work among others. Authors include Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Taught in English.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe relationship between the developments of urban modernity and aesthetic modernism is charted through the first half of the 20th century in three major metropolitan centers: Paris, London, and New York. The focus is on British and American modernist poetry and novels.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of the cultural, literary, and natural history of birds. Students read poems and essays, study ornithology texts and field guides, and occasionally go into the field to look at birds. Owning a pair of binoculars would be helpful.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureBeginning as a response to the immigrant experience, writing by American Jews emerged as a central literary presence and the inspiration for important films. This course traces the evolution from early writers such as Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, through major figures such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and I.B. Singer, to their contemporaries and heirs, including Stanley Elkin, Joseph Heller, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA writing-intensive course in which students study the poetry of queer-identified writers through the lenses of sexuality, culture, identity, history, and poetic technique.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines literary depictions of dystopia, from classics of the genre such as Huxley's and Orwell's, to contemporary examples from Atwood and others. Topics to be explored include homogenization of humanity in the name of progress; the strategies by which tyranny operates; and social, political, and environmental catastrophe.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureRead a broad cross-section of writings by international authors to facilitate discussion of global and local values that emerge from and respond to disruptive events, such as 9/11 and global pandemics that disorient cultural arrangements and reset social formations. Topics include terror, isolation and alienation, fragility, silence, nostalgia, and the human capacity for recovery and resilience.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines the intertwined histories of race and the American police state, with a specific focus on the relationship between US policing practices and crime fiction. Students read literature by Poe, Doyle, Hammett, Christie, Wright, Himes, and others, as well as histories and theoretical texts about race, policing, and the different types of crime fiction (detective fiction, police procedurals, mysteries, etc.).
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWe will examine Baldwin’s moving fictional and nonfictional works to understand his enduring legacy up through our contemporary moment. Students read Baldwin’s work through the lens of literary history, civil rights, transnational black activism, the arts, and queer theory. Major texts include The Fire Next Time, Another Country, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Giovanni’s Room.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureConsiders the intersections of sexual difference and cinema. Topics include theories of enunciation and sexual difference, female authorship and the idea of “women’s cinema,” gender and genre, woman as spectacle, the female spectator, and feminist film theory. Representations of sexual difference in films by selected male directors are studied as a means of examining the institution(s) of cinematic expression. The bulk of the course is devoted to studying women directors as they attempt to work within and against that institution.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn investigation of the formation of the literary canon and the women who were written out of it. Students become familiar with the novel form as well as genres such as amatory fiction and the Jacobin novel, and read a selection of the most influential women writers of the long eighteenth century.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn exploration of Toni Morrison’s generous literary career as a playwright, fiction writer, and essayist. Students read a collection of Morrison’s most popular works (Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved) alongside her more recent publications (A Mercy, God Help the Child). Discussions place Morrison in conversation with her literary interlocutors (Hurston, Woolf, Faulkner) and some of her most cherished contemporaries (James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara).
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores a variety of literary and cinematic works that depict the conflicting points of view and the varied interests of contemporary Israeli and Arab writers and filmmakers. Students learn the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and then explore a variety of issues relating to it by reading the work of Amos Oz, David Grossman, Mahmood Darwish, and others. Films include Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005) and Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis, 2008).
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores how ideas about anger influence the tumultuous history of England between 1350 and 1675: an era in which widespread rage against an increasingly unjust establishment fueled massive revolts. In addition to reading historical sources chronicling a variety of uprisings, students read literature by William Langland, John Gower, Margery Kempe, and William Shakespeare that influenced and/or reflected upon these events.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines the representation of colonized places and people in the British literary imagination during the 19th century. Topics include otherness, difference, exoticism, transculturation, assimilation, and hybridity. Authors include Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Thomas de Quincey, Rider Haggard, William Jones, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Moore, Olive Schreiner, and Robert Southey.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureNo American geographical fact is more significant than the West less a place than an idea, an imaginative provocation. Many American writers have been provoked to represent the West, and students read from among their work, including such writers as Raymond Chandler, Sandra Cisneros, Jack London, Nathanael West, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Willa Cather, and many poets.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWe are “a nation of immigrants,” wrote John F. Kennedy. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing to the present, this course explores issues surrounding immigration, ethnicity, and nationality through the lens of immigrant writing. Students look at shifts and continuities over time and among diverse ethnic groups and explore how America creates ethnicity and immigrants create America.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents evaluate the intersections of race and human rights in contemporary global novels, memoirs, and film, considering the narrative strategies and genres that writers have used to publicize discrepancies between Western discourses of freedom and liberality and the realities of genocide, apartheid, and neocolonialism. Students read works by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Indra Sinha, Véronique Tadjo, and Antjie Krog.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn exploration of representative poems in English and associated poetical theories from the late medieval and early modern period (c. 1450–1660), including erotic and religious lyrics, epic and narrative poems, and the emergence of women poets. Poets studied include Wyatt, Spenser, Philip, Robert and Mary Sidney, Southwell, Greville, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, and Crashaw.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplore a global tradition of premodern adventure writing ranging from the Chinese legend of Mulan, to Somalian tales about were-hyenas, to European Arthurian romances, to ancient Inca creation myths. Throughout this survey, students read excerpts from modern fantasy literature drawing on these premodern traditions, including works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Marlon James, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines the literature of England written in French, English, and Latin from the Norman Conquest of 1066 (when England was taken over by a Francophone elite) to the 15th century. Epic, romance, history, and the literature of spiritual devotion are read in their literary relations and social contexts. All readings are in translation.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureCovers the literary genre of romance in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Examines the genre’s roots in classical tales of epic travels, adventure, and fantasy. Includes chivalry, heroism, questing, hospitality, and courtliness and attends to the genre’s place in the periods’ cross-cultural and cross-class encounters. Texts include Arthurian legends, Gawain, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, and Don Quixote.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for students who want an introduction to medieval studies and for those who wish to extend their knowledge of the Middle Ages.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe principal nondramatic genres—lyric poetry, prose fiction, political theory, social commentary, religious devotion—of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, read in their social and cultural contexts.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureLiterature from the songs of the troubadours and the rise of romance to the work of Dante is examined in connection with movements in European intellectual life and social history. Readings are in translation.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureIn this interdisciplinary course students explore the disciplines of history and literature in order to study South Asia, one of the most significant sites of English-language literary production in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course takes a historicist approach to South Asian literature of the last two centuries. Topics covered: Empire; Nationalism; Religion; Modernity; Independence; Development; and Diaspora.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAnalyzing poetry, novels, films and comic series, we consider topics such as colonialism and decolonization, transnationalism and border crossings, and the particular literary and aesthetic sensibilities of island and oceanic literatures. Included are works by Aldous Huxley, Jamaica Kincaid, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Nathacha Appanah, Shenaz Patel, as well as Hergé’s Tintin and excerpts from X-men.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureConsiders the literature of the Italian Renaissance in connection with such movements as humanism and Neoplatonism. Readings include works by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Ariosto in translation, but work in the original language is encouraged when possible.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWas Shakespeare a rebel? Was he a reactionary? To address these complex questions, students explore Shakespeare’s varied depictions of characters rebelling against patriarchal gender norms, tyrannical leaders, and corrupt governments. In addition to reading plays including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Richard II, 2 Henry VI, Coriolanus, and Macbeth, students analyze various modern adaptations of these and related works.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores the process of decolonization in the context of the emergence of India and Pakistan in South Asia and traces the origin of fundamentalism in this region. Students examine the impact that fundamentalism has on religious, regional, and class identity through the works of both literary and nonliterary writers (e.g., Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Nandy, Adiga, Sidhwa, Desai).
Credits: 4
Department: Literature“Havana is a city that has been constructed with bricks and words.” In this course, students explore the extent to which Havana has been constructed as a foundational idea of the Cuban Revolution, from 1959 until today. Students study literary, visual, and sonic texts that have contributed to the formulation of this post-revolutionary Havana imaginary.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudy LGBTQ identities via novels, short fiction, and films, by queer-identified authors who interrogate heteropatriarchy within a postcolonial framework. Texts include Queer Africa (eds. Martin and Xaba), Leche by R. Zamora Linmark, Walking with Shadows by Jude Bidia, Fire (film by Deepa Mehta), Same-Sex Love in India (eds. Vanita and Kidwai), and Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureOne of the greatest English writers and the central poetic influence in the language, Milton is read in the context of the classical literary, political, and religious traditions that he inherited, disputed, and transcended. Special focus is on the relationship of “prophesy” and mythmaking to the radical and dissenting imagination.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureRead the complete short stories of five Eastern European authors, including Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter from The Brothers Karamazov and focus on historical and thematic influences that connect Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Kafka. Trace connections between Dostoevsky’s stories and stories by Gogol and Tolstoy as well as Chekov’s and Kafka's debt to Dostoevskian psychology and paradox.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWhat constitutes the genre of the novel and its various subgenres? Which historical contexts most shaped the novel’s development, and how? What was the novel’s role in culture and society? This course asks these questions about the 19th-century novel in the U.S. In addition to many of the novels from the period, students read various theoretical and historical considerations of the novel.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe novels of Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, and Hardy in the political, intellectual, social, and cultural context of Britain and its empire in the 19th century.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines the emergence of the Romantic imagination, the concept of the subject or self, and the plural nature of Romantic discourse in Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Wordsworth, among others. Topics explored include the writers’ diverse concepts of creativity and originality, sense of their place in society, notions of political identity, and relation to British literary traditions.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureTraces the evolution of Romanticism in the aftermath of the radical promise of the first generation of Romantic poets, through the prose writers who self-consciously documented their literary and cultural heritage, to the full flowering of such writers as Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Emily Brontë.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores Romanticism through a Transatlantic framework, focusing on the Atlantic Ocean as a locus of crossings, encounters, and currents in Britain and the Americas, particularly the United States. Primary readings span the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries and chart Romanticism’s influences on and responses to revolution, war, industrialization, abolitionism, Native American displacement, women’s rights, Transcendentalism, ecological awareness, and more.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureFrom Adam and Eve to the present, numerous authors have written about love. In this course, students examine forms and expressions of both romantic and erotic love in Western literature, from the Bible and ancient Greeks to Bob Dylan. Writers studied include Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nabokov, in addition to love poems, recent American short stories, and more.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn advanced course examining the construction of India and other “Oriental” spaces in the British imagination during the first phase of imperialism in India (1757–1857). This period coincides with the Romantic movement in England; therefore, British Romanticism and also nonliterary writing in Britain during this period are considered in the context of Empire. Topics include otherness, difference, exoticism, transculturation, assimilation, and hybridity.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe Enlightenment, known for its emphasis on humanism, reason, liberty, and the scientific method, emerged, however, alongside the brutal colonization, pillage and enslavement of Europe’s colonial empires. Students will examine this contradiction by reading key Enlightenment texts including Diderot’s Encyclopedia and Rousseau’s The Social Contract, proto-Romanticism novels such as Bernardin de St-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and navigators Bougainville and Cook.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureVictorian poetry against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world during a period that marked the high point of England’s global power. Writers include Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines racial pride, racial origins, and urban blacks through an exploration of essays, poems, short stories, and novels by writers of the period (1915–1930). Authors include Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston. Emphasis is on students’ written analysis of in-class and outside readings.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of the “middle genre,” encompassing the novella and the short novel. Readings provide ample opportunity to sample works embodying the intensity of short fiction and some of the expanded characterization and plot development of the novel. Readings include works by several significant 19th- and 20th-century authors from many countries.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureMetafictions “radically call attention to their status as fictions.” They are hardly new, despite their association with “postmodernity”—Cervantes’ Don Quixote is an example of early metafiction. This course focuses on contemporary texts in the global context: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami; The Hakawati, Alameddine; My Name is Red, Pamuk; Underworld, Delillo. Considerable experience with literature is helpful.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of modern poetry with a focus on T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and others.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents consider world literature of the 20th and 21st century as it reflects and questions national and international boundaries, politics, religion, freedom, nationalism, sexuality, gender, and identity. Readings include a broad cross-section of contemporary writings by international authors.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe 1920s was a decade of promise and anxiety in the US. From shell-shocked soldiers to bootlegging millionaires, flappers to factory workers, expatriates to eugenicists, the Great Migration to the Great Depression, much was changing in Americans’ perceptions of their nation, themselves, and the “other.” This course explores these shifts through Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Hurston, Yezierska, DuBois, and Lewis, among others.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureHelping others to read and write better improves one’s own reading and writing dramatically. In this course, advanced students improve their own writing and gain tutoring experience by serving as peer tutors in first-year courses. In addition to meeting once weekly to study writing pedagogy, each student is attached to a College Writing section and serves as a peer mentor/tutor, attending classes and working closely with the instructor (approx. 2 to 4 hours weekly).
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of the style, production, and reception of Ulysses, one of the founding texts of modernist fiction. Students analyze the distinctive style of each chapter and examine the relationship of the book to political and cultural issues of the period and to other literary texts by Joyce and continental writers. Readings also include historical, cultural, and critical materials.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureIn this Art History and Literature course, the first wave of Gothic novels from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century is examined in relation to visual representations of the themes that dominate Gothic discourse. Topics include horror, imprisonment, madness, gender, ghosts and vampires. Authors and artists studied include Austen, the Brontë sisters, Radcliffe, Collins, Blake, Fuseli, and Turner.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureHow does embodiment reveal shifting notions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability? Students read performance theory and explore contemporary representations of bodies as sites of display, resistance, and re-construction in literature, performance, and everyday practices in transnational and intersectional contexts. Authors include Ntozake Shange, NourbeSe Philip, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, and David Henry Hwang.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureDetailed readings of the major essays, poetry, and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the paradoxical central figure of American culture. The course addresses his powerful influence in literature, political ideology, rhetoric, religion, and popular arts.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureHolocaust scholar Lawrence Langer asks, "To whom shall we entrust the custody of the public memory of the Holocaust?" This course examines eyewitness testimony produced either during or after the Holocaust. Students read works such authors as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Kazik (Simha Rotem), Emanuel Ringelblum, Anne Frank, and Hanna Senesh, a true Jewish Joan of Arc.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureFocuses on a variety of writings (memoirs, letters, fiction, poetry), theatre, and films depicting the Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, home to more than two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920. Readings include selections from the work of a variety of authors, from Yiddish newspapers, films, and other cultural materials.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of the novels, short stories, and essays of Virginia Woolf.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWhat is a realist novel? What does it do, how, and to what end? Students consider these issues by interrogating texts in their cultural contexts, exploring the authors’ critical writings, drawing links among novels, and analyzing their reception over time. Readings include works by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, and Ann Petry.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents' primary focus is on the bizarre and distorted fictions of Poe. Readings also include Poe's poetry, analogous stories by Hawthorne, works by Melville, poetry by Dickinson, and others, extending to James' 'Turn of the Screw' and other late-19th-century writings.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores constructions and representations of childhood and adolescence in post–Civil War U.S. culture and fiction, focusing particularly on ideological linkages between nation and family and how these connections shape the experiences and writings of authors and educators across cultures. Readings may include works by Alger, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Dewey, Adams, Riis, Yezierska, Fauset, Cisneros, and Rita Mae Brown.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureFrom hip-hop to Kerouac, jazz has influenced American culture through its improvisatory nature and capacious style. This course traces the jazz aesthetic (its early developments, definitions, and evolutions) across a range of novels, poems, and musical performances by writers and artists, including Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Billie Holiday, Gayl Jones, Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, Thelonious Monk, and James Baldwin.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores the plays in which Shakespeare most explicitly portrays, solicits, and theorizes the emotion wonder, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Through a variety of theoretical lenses, students explore aesthetic and ethical questions concerning how and why Shakespeare capitalizes on wonder so differently at various moments throughout his career.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe development of U.S. poetry. The course examines its major figures (Dickinson and Whitman from the 19th century; Stevens, Frost, and Williams from the 20th century) and surveys the “minor” poets. Provides an overview of contemporary poetry, as well as much practice in the close reading of poetic texts.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureBringing post-1960s American extremities into focus and organized around units on the Beat Generation, race in the deep south, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, and social class, this course includes texts such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Flannery O’Connor’s stories, Philip Roth’s "American Pastoral", Don DeLillo’s "Libra", Mohsin Hamid’s "Reluctant Fundamentalist", C.T. Boyle’s "The Harder They Come", Tara Westover’s "Educated."
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe major novels of Melville, as well as some of his poetry and several important shorter works of his fiction.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores the lives, works, and times of the Beat Generation authors, examining the literary and cultural landscape from which the Beats emerged and their profound effect on the nascent counterculture and on the music and literature of a generation of artists that followed.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn introduction to the contemporary novel and the art and practice of book reviewing. Students read exemplary novels (e.g., Cloud Atlas and Netherland); they read exemplary book critics (e.g., Zadie Smith and James Wood); and they write their own exemplary reviews of contemporary fiction. Writing assignments range from blog posts to newspaper-style reviews and magazine-style essays.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureModern and contemporary American poetry is studied with an emphasis on craft and the creative process. Poets include T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Sylvia Plath, among others. Attention is given to the imagery, structure, and sound patterns (or “music”) of the poems. Poetry writers are encouraged to enroll, and anyone interested in poetry is welcome.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureLooking at the Western literary canon from outside, we will consider texts at the margins (national, transnational and postcolonial) of the canon: contemporaneous texts which do not have the same literary success as well as those published later and meant as a critical response to the canon. Class is in English and texts will be taught in (English) translation.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines several texts written by American women, including works by Radstreet, Wheatley, Rowson, Stowe, Dickinson, Jewett, Cather, Wharton, Hurston, Bishop, and Naylor. The question of whether there is a traceable female tradition during the past 350 years is addressed. Readings include feminist literary criticism and theory.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of the novels of Jane Austen. Topics include gender and authorship; irony, sympathy, and point of view; the marriage plot; and filmic adaptation.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureConcise and focused, the short story has been a lens through which Americans have explored their identities. Stories written in the last 25 years examine the changing sense of what being an American means.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureSurrealist literature, films, and art in France, Spain, and Latin America. Artists include Aragon, Breton, Buñuel, Césaire, Char, Dali, Eluard, and Lorca. Works are read in translation and lectures given in English; students with French and/or Spanish are encouraged to read in the original language.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureMajor works of the most celebrated Latin American novelists, such as Cortàzar, García Márquez, Carpentier, and Guiraldes, emphasizing the cultural and social contexts from which these novels spring. Although this is a literature course taught in English, students with competent Spanish language skills are encouraged to read the works in the original and write their papers in Spanish.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureNovels, poems, and plays produced in the U.S. from World War II to the present. Focus is on the development of a postmodern aspect, and attention is concentrated on the flourishing literature of minority groups. Writers include Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Adrienne Rich, and Tony Kushner.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureCenters on a close reading of Don Quixote, with attention to other works of Cervantes and to his importance to European narrative as a whole.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThe notion of the “new” in poetry and art is examined. Students read a range of poetry written in the late 19th century through the 1940s in France, Germany, Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., and explore ways in which expressive novelty is linked to particular cultural and social situations. Along with the poems and some visual art, some contemporary texts that advance theories of the “avant-garde” are considered.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn in-depth examination of the life and work of Flannery O’Connor, with a consideration of how later writers like Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, and Kelly Link respond to her legacy.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplores how the emotions dread, sadness, and grief are theorized, represented, and solicited by works of literature written in England between 1000 and 1750. Primary readings include “The Wanderer,” Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Pearl, Hoccleve’s Complaint, More’s The Sadness of Christ, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Gray’s Elegy Written in a County Churchyard.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExplore representations of monstrosity in a variety of early British literature in order to unearth the social anxieties (about gender, class, race, and religion) that animate them. Readings include Beowulf, the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale and Clerk’s Tale, Mandeville’s Travels, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of the development of the British poetic canon in its literary and historical context. The development of lyric poetry is discussed in the context of changing reading practices and uses of literacy, and the multiple relations between literary artistry and the social world.
Credits: 3
Department: LiteratureConsiders seven novels that represent “modernity” as social, ethical, and/or individual crisis. The course explores overlapping modernist prose styles from romanticism to surrealism and concludes with a “postmodern” novel.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines Hurston’s novels, short stories, plays, and essays alongside archival recordings and visual media. Discussions cover Hurston’s influential role in shaping conversations around race, class, and gender in the 20th century and her impact on other writers, including Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureMagic and mythology meet modernity in this unique form of postcolonial narrative critique. What happens when the old gods reemerge in our hyper-rational globalized world? Students read works by Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Amos Tutuola, and Salman Rushdie.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureExamines the central role of war in Western literature, with a concentration on English and American texts.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThis course is designed for students interested in pursuing a career in teaching literature. Topics include how to teach different genres (poetry, prose, and drama), how to sustain classroom conversation, and how to design syllabi and writing assignments.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWilliam Carlos Williams and William Faulkner were both deeply engaged with the historical myths of their time and place, and both were central influences in the evolution of American modernism. Readings concentrate on major novels by Faulkner and poetry by Williams.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA survey of science fiction in literature and film, with particular focus on the genre’s ability to investigate large-scale social, political, philosophical, and narratological questions. Works by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and China Miéville, among others.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA culminating course that draws together the work of the major and prepares students for and complements the senior project. Each course section addresses its own topic; in every section, readings include primary texts, secondary texts that illuminate the primary texts, and works that define the discipline of literature or its interdisciplinary extensions, including theory and cultural studies.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAn examination of two of the greatest novelists in the English language, George Eliot and Henry James. Topics include point-of-view and its relation to ethics; the nature of sympathy; melodrama and realism; and the representation of consciousness in literary form.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThese two poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, dominate not only the American 19th century, but the entire history of poetry at length and in depth. Students also consider some of their marginal work (Whitman’s prose and Dickinson’s letters, for example).
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureHere are poets who epitomize trends, possibilities, or radical departures—poets like Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and James Merrill, among others—interesting not only in their context within the tradition, but for their manifold intrinsic excellences as well.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureIn this seminar, students are guided through the steps required to complete a senior project. Students refine their topic, create a list of secondary sources, write an annotated bibliography, and workshop their first chapter. Required for literature majors in conjunction with the first semester of their senior project.
Credits: 2
PREREQ: LIT2450
Department: LiteratureThis course provides continued structure in the form of writing deadlines for those students who have successfully completed Senior Project Seminar in the fall. Students workshop completed chapters and share, annotate, and incorporate secondary sources.
Credits: 2
PREREQ: LIT4885
Department: LiteratureExplores what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have meant when he wrote that “all of philosophy may be found in the plays of Shakespeare.” The focus is on a close study of selected works, together with commentary by such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Cavell, and Critchley. Plays include Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear.
Credits: 4
PREREQ: THP2205 Or PHI1515 Or PHI2110
Department: LiteratureA study of how philosophical themes have been developed in recent fiction and an examination of the relationship between philosophy and literary criticism.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of memoirs by male and female authors, politicians, activists, and ordinary citizens describing childhood, communities, social changes, and revolutions. Works are drawn from South Africa, South America, Asia, Cuba, and the U.S. The rubric is the non-West’s interaction with the West, a north-south divide.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureA study of modern Latin American poetry from Modernismo through the various avant garde movements of the first half of the 20th century. Poets read include Jose Marti, Ruben Dario, Vicente Huidobro, Cesar Vallejo, Nicolas Guillen, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz.
Credits: 4
PREREQ: SPA3015 Or SPA3070 Or SPA3260 Or SPA3340
Department: LiteratureSelected examples drawn from the significant number of Latin American writers who have made some of their most interesting contributions in this short form. Selected works from 19th- and 20th-century writers are read closely. Taught in Spanish.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureStudents explore themes of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. Students learn to read, edit, and modernize Shakespeare's words, and discover how he promoted, ridiculed, and subverted the sexual norms of his time. The course engages with modern productions, many of which subvert the toxic elements of Shakespeare’s work in provocative ways.
Credits: 3
Department: LiteratureStudents explore how Shakespeare’s works contributed to the historical formation of various racial and ethnic identities and how the global tradition of Shakespearean performance intermittently perpetuates and refutes racial and ethnic stereotypes. Additionally, students study how non-White authors and performers have and continue to respond to racism within the Shakespeare tradition. Students learn to write critically about race in Shakespeare.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureAmerican drama considered primarily as a critique of American society, values, and life. Covers the period from 1916 to 1964, including plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Edward Albee.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureWestern and world theatre from ancient Greece to 1642, when the theatres of Shakespeare’s time were finally closed. What would now be called actors, playwrights, producers, directors, designers, and theatre architects are all considered.
Credits: 3
Department: LiteratureA study of the mystery plays, morality plays, interludes, masques, and entertainments of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Analysis of texts is combined with consideration of theatrical production in light of the ideological, religious, and historical contexts of the plays.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureVirginia Woolf captures sensory detail and internal thought like few other writers. This dramatization of perception makes her work ripe for adaptation. Students will read selections of Woolf's essays, short stories, and novels, and study theatrical adaptations of her work. Students will explore translating Woolf’s iconic vision into theatrical shape by creating immersive stage adaptations of her work
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThis course aims to define a decolonized canon of Black American dramatic works. Plays are read as literature and considered in sociopolitical contexts, alongside study of significant creative movements and influential artists. Playwrights studied span the 20th and 21st centuries, including James Baldwin, Katori Hall, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Tyler Perry, among others.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureShakespeare goes to celluloid, Hollywood, Japan, TV, and elsewhere. On the one hand, this is a Shakespeare seminar, with emphasis on discussions of the plays themselves. On the other, it becomes a film course, focusing on analyses of screen adaptations.
Credits: 4
PREREQ: THP2205 Or LIT2205
Department: LiteratureAmerican theatre and society during the last 50 years. Plays by Jones (Baraka), Mamet, Shepard, Hwang, Kushner, Fornes, Marsha Norman, Sarah Ruhl, and August Wilson. Some knowledge of the American drama of O’Neill, Williams, and Miller is required.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureIs there a childhood picture or storybook or graphic novel that you’ve always wanted to see onstage? This course studies the contexts and conventions related to page-to-stage adaptations of children’s literature. Through the interpretation of source materials, and the development of dramatic and sensory storytelling techniques, students will create multigenerational theatre designed to foster empathy, inclusion and imagination.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureMalaise, futility, despair, and, sometimes, hope in the plays of Pirandello, Brecht, Giraudoux, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Osborne, Pinter, Churchill, and others, from World War I to somewhere short of tomorrow.
Credits: 4
Department: LiteratureThough often seen as simply a test of students’ knowledge and ideas, essays go far beyond what is generally required in courses. Students in this course read and experiment with a wide variety of critical, journalistic, academic, personal, and experimental essay forms. In the process, they further develop their skills as critical thinkers and writers.
Credits: 3
PREREQ: WRI1110 Or WRI2110
Department: LiteratureIn the personal essay, writers adopt distinct points of view, moving beyond the emotional to analytical and reasoned positions. Topics can include personal reflections, thoughts on daily life, art analysis, and political arguments. Students read and analyze contemporary essays and “workshop” each other’s writing. Requirements include attending instructor-supervised events (films, performances, guest speakers) outside of class for some writing assignments.
Credits: 4
Department: Literature