300
A study of literature written in Britain during the Old English period (8th century to 1066) and Middle English period (1066 to 1485), key periods in the formation of English language and culture. Principal genres include epic and lyric poetry, romance, tale, and drama. Representative works include the epic Beowulf, the mystery and morality plays, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Margery Kempe's autobiography, and Arthurian romances.
This course introduces students to a range of voices and narratives about and by marginalized communities in North American and global contexts through a study of contemporary (20th and 21st century) revisions of classic literary and cultural texts in western and non-western contexts. Examples of texts include the Brother Grimms' fairy tales and Angela Carter's short story, The Bloody Chamber as well as Jane Campion's film, The Piano; Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys' rewrite, Wide Sargasso Sea; One Thousand and One Nights and selected poems from Mohja Kahf's Emails from Scheherazad.
A study of literature written in Britain during the 16th and 17th centuries, which accompanied the spread of human-ism, an emergent nationalism, and the civil strife of the latter period. Principle genres include drama and poetry. Representative authors include Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Amelia Lanier, the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Milton.
Critical and comparative study of selected representative literary works from African, Arabic, Latin American, and Oriental literature.
A study of literature written in Britain from the late 17th to the late 18th century, emerging in conjunction with the rise of rationalist philosophy, experimental science, industrialization, and empire. Primary emphasis is on the rise of the British novel and on the emergence of satire as a key literary mode of the period. Other principal genres include drama, poetry, and nonfiction prose. Representative authors include William Congreve, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson.
A study of literature written in Britain from 1780 to 1830, which both celebrated and challenged the social, political and economic changes that accompanied industrialization and the American and French revolutions. Students read non-fiction prose, poetry and novels by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and John Keats.
A study of literature written for young adults. Students will read, listen to and evaluate a wide variety of literature published for or enjoyed by young adult readers, including traditional folk tales, myths, and legends; fantasy and realistic fiction; biography and autobiography; and poetry. Students will also study techniques for teaching and using literature in the 5-12 classroom.
The study of literature written in Britain from 1830-1900. The course focuses on representations of individual and national identity emerging amidst sweeping social, political, and economic change. Representative works include novels by the Brontes, Dickens Eliot, Hardy, Wilde; non-fiction prose by Carlyle and Mill;- poetry by Tennyson, the Brownings and the Rosettis.
A study of major currents of nineteenth-century literature of the United States, from the antebellum period, through the Civil War, to the very beginnings of the twentieth century. The course may explore any of the following literary movements: the Romantic movement, including Transcendentalist writers and philosophers (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), as well as the writers of the Romance fiction (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville); mid-century domestic fiction (including such writers as Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe); slave narratives (Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglas, among others); and American Realism, including major proponents of realism at the end of the century, such as mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, so-called local color writers, such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and turn-of-the-century naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.
A study of British literature written in the 20th century, shaped by the critical shifts in thought and literary technique associated with modernism and postmodernism. Each movement, developing in the wake of a World War, is characterized by a major break with literary tradition. Principal genres include poetry, drama, novels, short fiction and the essay. Representative authors include William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Iris Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill.
Special Topics courses include ad-hoc courses on various selected topics that are not part of the regular curriculum, however they may still fulfill certain curricular requirements. Special topics courses are offered at the discretion of each department and will be published as part of the semester course schedule - view available sections for more information. Questions about special topics classes can be directed to the instructor or department chair.
Arts & Letters-Literature. Cultural Diversity.
A study of early twentieth-century American literature (called modernism), from World War I through the 1930s. The course explores the work of white modernist writers (many of whom were part of the expatriate community in Paris during the period) alongside that of the African American writers of the same period who lived in the United States and participated in the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Among the writers studied may be Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, H.D. William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Nella Larson, and W.E.B Du Bois.
A study of American literature from the beginning of the Second World War (1939) to the present. Particular focus is given to anti-establishment literature protesting the cultural conformity of the 1950s, the counterculture writers of the 1960s and early 70s and the post-modern writers of the 1980s and 90s. Includes representative literary movements such as the Agrarian writers, Beat writers, the confessional poets, the Vietnam writers, and a wide variety of ethnic writers producing literature in traditional and experimental forms. Representative authors include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Eudora Welty, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Edward Albee, David Mamet and Maria Irene Fornes.