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 The Str

“Every self defines itself by engaging an Other, some one or thing that is both attractive and repulsive, similar and different.  On a larger scale, whole social groups define themselves through the same dialectical process.” –Timothy S. Jones and David Sprunger

Marvels, Monsters and Miracles: studies in the medieval and early modern imaginations.

Rhetorical and literary traditions have for a long time sustained the distinction between content and form, meaning and style, logos and lexis, res and verba. Of course, this distinction also implies a valuation of the terms that tends to favor the former over the latter.

The Strunk and White dictum to “omit needless words” will guide our work on writing.  Students interested in crafting streamlined, energetic prose and prepared to rewrite may find this class especially congenial. Along with prose composition, students will also receive instruction and practice in researching topics in the humanities.  Besides assigned essays, requirements of the course include active participation in classroom and online discussion, regular attendance and a group presentation.

In this course we will try to define women’s voices in war, both in male and  female authors from various places and eras.  The texts we will read range from a Greek epic of the eighth century B.C.

Are loyalty and betrayal mutually exclusive?  To what and to whom do we owe fidelity and how and why do we pervert it?   We will seek—and maybe answer—questions like these as we examine works from Shakespeare to Borges.

We will explore the relations between the seemingly contradictory patterns of behavior that are our theme and the ways in which artists have dealt with them for half a millennium in drama, prose fiction, and film.

Murder, infidelity, and unrequited love. What ever happened to happily ever after?  In this reading and composition course, we will consider texts and films from a number of historical periods and linguistic traditions that deal with love going bad, marriages on the rocks, murderous partners, and the agonies of jealousy and betrayal.

Texts

Euripides, Medea

Shakespeare, Othello

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler

Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”

We mortals are always telling stories about the dead.  This course will investigate a rich and strange collection of textual ghosts as they embody life and death questions for art:  the relation of the past (personal and historical) to the present; the potential and limits of the attempt, through writing or picture-taking, to make present what is irretrievably gone; the function and stakes of stories that challenge the rules of official reality.  The modern ghosts of Morisson’s Beloved, Vesaas’ The Ice Palace, and Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel will visit us bearing sociopolitical questions

In this reading and writing seminar we will revisit the questions “what is reading?” and “what is interpretation?” in relation both to the problematics raised by psychoanalytic literary theory and to the complexities within debates of race relations.  We will begin with an introduction to psychoanalysis and then revise these ideas in light of readings that span from antiquity to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. In this maneuver we will dispel the misreadings of psychoanalysis as merely academic theory and focus on psychoanalysis as a concrete tool for social and cultural change.

“If she’s mad, so much the better, let everyone be mad like her.”  (M. Duras, 1976)

What does it mean to be “mad”? or “not mad”?  Who decides and to what ends?  Is it necessarily always desirable to be considered “sane”?   This course will explore answers to questions such as these by looking at the various ways in which madness has been represented in French, English, and American texts by different authors, at different times, and across different genres (the novel, the short story, theatre, and film).

Required Texts:

The Random House Handbook, Frederick Crews