People today don’t have enough poetry in their heads, and everyone should be able to recite one or two of their favorite poems. In addition to its purely personal benefits, knowing some poetry by heart has practical applications: in a tough job interview, you can impress the prospective boss by reciting just the right line, say, from Dylan Thomas: “do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light.” Or at a party sometime, you’ll be able to show off with a bit of T.S. Eliot: “in the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.”

In the masterful hands of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, the novel becomes an instrument for studying and for experiencing what it means to exist in the world and in time. Both Woolf and Proust saw the world around them changing rapidly – the world of the new twentieth century, increasingly global, a world of artistic revolution, of technological innovation, of political upheaval,  of rapid social change, of international warfare.

From Virgil’s epic of state-building to Petrarch’s coronation as poet laureate of Italy in the fourteenth century or Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again,” writers have always reflected upon, critiqued, and embodied national identities in poetry. Think of how much the Aeneidexemplifies Rome and her history, or Walt Whitman’s exuberant “Leaves of Grass” defines the expansive American landscape and spirit.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.