This class will focus on literary texts which use various representational strategies to depict scenes of personal and social stasis.  With each text, we will return to a central question: how does this author represent stasis?  And related questions we will often ask are, what are the consequences for the notion of development in the play, poem, novel, story, etc?  Does this particular piece of literature resolve any of the problems it raises?  If not, how does the author craft the work so that we still derive a sense of satisfaction from it?  We will begin with Hamlet and end with moderni

Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature, music and the visual arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This course will offer a detailed survey of some of the key texts and debates surrounding modernism and its precursors in literature, film and visual culture.

Travel has long been an important literary theme. The Bible, The Iliad, and The Odyssey all are road (or at least sea lane) stories. Before Jack Kerouac went on the road, crisscrossing America’s highway system, Don Quixote had traveled the dirt roads of early modern Spain.  Dante paused “in the middle of the road of our life,” before taking a guided tour through heaven, purgatory, and hell. The voyage can be a spiritual quest, an adventure, an escape, an exercise in satire, self-knowledge, a way to confirm, or dissolve, prejudices .

This course will primarily ask the question: do the literatures of the Americas have a kinship relation?  Is it possible to destabilize established national boundaries for literatures in the Americas?  How does the conquest of the New World continue to resonate and stubbornly return as a transamerican manifestation of primordial violence, violation and cultural conception?  How does the medieval image of Dante’s Inferno haunt representations of the Americas?  What might the outlines of an aesthetics of transamerican literature look like?  How might painting and film in the Americas capture

This course will divide into three main segments each focusing on a form that proved a key juncture in the rise of western lyricism: archaic Greek monody and its Roman counterparts, the Troubadour lyric and the Sonnet.  Within each segment we will read retrospectively, beginning with 20th (and 21st) century versions of the form in question.  We will then turn to the older prototype and think about how the form’s original context relates to its later incarnations.

That which is created from great loss forms the foundation for much celebrated literature. At times that loss stems from our complicated relationship to water. In water we have one of our most precious needs and our greatest fears.  It constitutes our earth, our bodies and in face of great loss, it flows from our eyes breaking through the barrier of what many believe is the soul.  On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated its merciless ferocity and revealed a horrendous human weakness that turned a natural disaster into a national disaster.

In this class, we will examine literary representations of individual identity in relation to various types of collectivities.  We will trace the birth and the development of an individual’s sense of subjectivity in relation to various forms of social groupings, such as urban crowds, revolutionary crowds, the social classes, and even groupings formed by family or school. We will ask ourselves some of the following questions: How does an individual develop a sense of identity in relation to a group?

This course fulfills the second portion of the undergraduate reading and composition requirement. It is designed to help you develop clearer and more effective writing as you also hone your critical reading and research skills.  The course emphasizes reading and writing as processes that are shaped by communities of readers and writers.  This means that peer editing, oral presentations, and discussion in class and on the web-based discussion board will be important components of the course.

Throughout the ages, writers, artists, and thinkers have created works that cannot seem to resist turning their gaze upon themselves—works that reveal a concern not only with relaying a particular narrative, but also with drawing attention to how a narrative is articulated, structured, and produced.  This course will ponder the significance of this strategy, particularly in relationship to how a narrator constructs his or her authorial identity and how s/he positions us as ‘readers’.  We will begin by posing the questions: what is a self-reflexive text or work of art?  How and why do the te

What is guilt?  We will examine the ethical and psychoanalytical problem of guilt as it has emerged in and across literature.  We will probe the following questions.  First, what sorts of events, emotions and/or religious/cultural mores produce feelings of guilt?  How have the causes of guilt shifted over time?  Secondly, who tends to suffer from guilt the perpetrators, the victim and/or the victims descendants?  Third, how has the literary subject coped with guilt?  How and when does forgiveness become possible or impossible?  How does literature represent the irreparable, or that dimensio