Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Young adult fiction, cable television drama, sportswriting, the Western— all are genres that we’re likely to associate more with leisure entertainment than historical inquiry.  And yet, the parameters and conventions of each provide authors with a particular mode of storytelling through which they can imagine the lived experience of past moments and explore its tensions in ways the historical record might not.

Senior Seminar

Literature has always been linked to fantasy and magic, even as it has sought to imitate or approximate reality.

Senior Seminar

In this senior seminar, we will examine our assumptions regarding the study of fictional character. Long-ingrained habits have trained us not to speak of characters as though they were implied people.  We will look at the history of the taboo on reading fictional characters in this way as it develops in twentieth century criticism, asking why a conception of character as an aesthetic instrument came to predominate and why a conception of a literary character as “full person” stubbornly adheres in even the most sophisticated writing on character.

Topics in Modern Greek Literature

In 1844 the American sculptor Hiram Powers unveiled, in Boston, his nude statue, the first full scale American nude, by the title “The Greek Slave”. The fictional identity given to the subject, as stated in the pamphlet accompanying the tour of the statue in 1848, was that of a beautiful young Greek woman chained to a column, completely naked, ready to be sold in the Ottoman slave market.

The Modern Period

In this course we will read a number of literary texts set in colonized territories, largely though not entirely under French domination.  Dating from the turn of the twentieth century to the period of widespread decolonization a half-century later, these texts represent a variety of forms and genres (adventure novels, autobiographical fiction, philosophical novels, political denunciation and/or satire) and emerge out of a number of different cultural situations and geographic locations (including Southeast Asia, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa).  Some of the authors to be considered a

Eighteenth- and 19th-Century Literature

A comparative survey of late seventeenth to early twentieth-century poetry written in English, French, German, and Japanese, during the height of print culture or what Walter Benjamin called the “age of mechanical reproduction.” As we read poems that address themselves as much to the reading eye as to the listening ear, we will give special attention to these poets’ engagement with the nearby visual arts—painting and sculpture as well as the emergent genre of photography.

The Renaissance

In what sense can our contemporary multicultural global world be traced back to the Renaissance? Did the Renaissance take place only in Florence, Rome, Venice and a few other Italian city states, or did it extend itself beyond Europe to include Africa and Asia? Intertwining history, literature, art and anthropology, this course will introduce students to the global Renaissance, stretching its traditional boundaries and examining Italy’s multiple exchanges with Northern Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean, as well as with the New World and the Far East.

THE BIBLICAL TRADITION IN MODERN LITERATURE

This course will explore the biblical tradition in modern literature beyond the dichotomy of East and West. We will focus on close readings of selections from the Hebrew Bible in English translation in conjunction with a series of poems written in different languages that make central use of these biblical sources, from William Blake to Leonard Cohen, from Itzik Manger to Yehuda Amichai, and from Rilke to Else Lasker-Schuler. One underlying concern of the course will be the function of various types of biblical intertextuality (allusion, parody, translation, etc).

Modern Greek Language and Composition

This course examines forms of Modern Greek writing (prose, poetry, drama) and the reading of literary texts as auxiliary to the acquisition of compositional skills.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

A reader for the course is prepared by the instructor.

Introduction to Comparative Literature

What does literature do in the digital age? How have literature and art confronted their relationship with mass media or broader cultural and historical trends? How do media forms condition our relationship with time, and with identity? How are the literary and critical writing about it “media practices” in themselves, and how do they relate to other kinds of “media acts”?

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