Department of Language and Literature
Spring 2008 courses in literature

To see detailed descriptions of the department’s spring 2008 literature classes, click on a course title or scroll down to see the full list.

LITR 100 | Introduction to Literary Analysis
LITR 256 | American Literature II
LITR 258 | British Literature II
LITR 265 | Shakespeare
LITR 267 | Studies in Poetry
LITR 280 | African-American Literature
LITR 291A/391A | Topics: Myth, Legend, and Fairy-Tale
LITR 291B | Topics: Slam Poetry
LITR 352 | Young Adult and Multicultural Lit. in the... Classroom
LITR 362 | Modern Fiction
LITR 370 | Creative Writing: Poetry

Note: Department course offerings are subject to change at any time. For the most up-to-date information, please check BenULive.

 

›› LITR 100 | Introduction to Literary Analysis (Kubek)

As the required introductory course for Literature and Writing and Publishing majors, LITR 100 has two purposes: to prepare students for more advanced work in the study of literature, and to raise and explore the question of how we interpret (and how we should interpret) literary texts. The course will address three major aspects of textual analysis: close reading, conventions of language and genre, and contextual/cultural studies. Class discussions will also give students an opportunity to reflect consciously upon their own techniques as readers of literature and to become familiar with a variety of literary genres, theoretical perspectives, and interpretive strategies.

 

›› LITR 256 | American Literature II (W. Chen)

This course surveys American literature from 1865 to the contemporary period and examines such literary movements as realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. Our engagement with twentieth-century U.S. literature and culture takes seriously the notion of competing visions of modernity, and we will study developments such as twentieth-century feminism, the Harlem Renaissance and its legacies, the diverse artistic production of the “cultural front,” and the dynamic relationships between certain forms of popular music, film, and literary culture. We will also begin to trace the development of twentieth-century U.S. multicultural literary traditions. Texts may include Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, and Helena Viramontes’s The Moths and Other Stories.

 

›› LITR 258 | British Literature II (Amir)

Though sometimes viewed as a last bastion of musty, unreadable literature written by dead people, the British literary tradition is a vividly alive landscape, one populated by monsters, murderous madmen, seductive women, and other unexpectedly strange literary creations. In this introductory survey of British literature written from 1789 to the early part of the twentieth century, we'll study the complex historical and cultural forces that gave rise to these figures and shaped—and reshaped—the literary landscape of Britain in the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist eras. We’ll also consider how texts from these periods participated in vital conversations about gender, sexuality, race, faith, and nationhood, at times reinforcing such categories and at others challenging their seemingly essential or “natural” status. As we explore these issues, we'll discuss strategies for approaching poetry and fiction productively, giving special attention to refining critical reading and writing skills. Texts will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.

 

›› LITR 265 | Shakespeare (Kauth)

LITR 265 offers in-depth study of Shakespeare’s works, both as written and performed texts. The course will provide context while actively engaging students in reading and performing the plays. The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre will provide a highlight for the class; students will attend at least one, or—if they choose—two, of this spring’s performances: Othello and The Comedy of Errors. We will also read King Lear, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and the sonnets and briefly compare film versions of the plays. Students will write two 5-7 page papers analyzing the plays and perform a scene or set of scenes in groups at the end of the semester. No previous acting experience is required.

 

›› LITR 267 | Studies in Poetry (Amir)

In Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry,” the speaker laments that readers too often want to “tie [a] poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” Ideal both for literature majors and for those who would like to improve their poetry-reading skills, this course introduces strategies for studying poems productively—hopefully without torturing either the texts or students involved. We’ll discuss some of the most important poetic forms, devices, and genres used by poets to articulate their ideas; at the same time, we’ll learn how to read and analyze the significance of a poem’s words and images. In attending to these matters, we’ll also consider how we can formulate interpretations of poetry that are responsive to the complexities, ambiguities, and gray areas of particular works.

 

›› LITR 280 | African-American Literature (W. Chen)

This course is an exploration of African-American literature of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moving across several genres and even some traditional disciplinary boundaries, we will study novels, autobiography, short stories, film, and performance art. The course begins with James Weldon Johnson’s fictional The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and then moves on to engage with the literary culture of the Harlem Renaissance and also the literature of the Civil Rights era. We will conclude the course by looking at two important works of the post-Civil Rights era: Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (published in 1994) and Toni Morrison’s Love (2003). Other course texts include Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Paule Marshall’s Reena and Other Stories, and Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust.

 

›› LITR 291A/391A | Topics: Myth, Legend, and Fairy-Tale (Kubek)

“Myth, Legend, and Fairy-Tale” focuses on a set of literary forms that are widely associated with each other but that originate in widely different cultures and possess distinct functions and characteristics. The course will engage students in discussion of the relation between “folk” stories and their literary embodiments, as well as addressing the cultural contexts and functions in which such texts are (re)produced and studied. Readings will include a number of examples of these genres in various media (oral, print text, film, visual image), as well as some theoretical material for those taking the course at the 300 level (LITR 100 pre-requisite). The course is also available as a Core elective at the 200 level, with no prerequisite. Assignments will differ for the two levels.

 

›› LITR 291B | Slam Poetry (Smith)

Click here for more information on this course offered through Benedictine’s 2008 Artist-in-Residence program.
Class meets January 15-March 4; 2 credit hours.

 

›› LITR 352 | Young Adult and Multicultural Literature in the Middle and Secondary School Curriculum (Bandy)

See Dept. of Education for more information.
Crosslisted with EDUC 352 and EDUC 551.

 

In 1953, a young woman named Chloe Anthony Wofford earned a master’s degree from Cornell for her MA thesis on the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. When Wofford later embarked on a writing career—now publishing fiction as Toni Morrison—the influence of Woolf and Faulkner on her work was palpable.

Through careful study of the continuities between the work of Woolf, Faulkner, and Morrison, this course offers an introduction to the aesthetics, major concerns, and narrative strategies of modern fiction. We’ll consider how these authors rethink what can (and should) serve as the subject matter of fiction; at the same time, we’ll examine how their challenges to traditional expectations about style and content motivated and even necessitated key innovations in narrative form. Texts to be studied may include Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Morrison’s Beloved, and, time permitting, critical essays on fiction-writing by these authors.

 

›› LITR 370 | Creative Writing: Poetry (Kubek)

This course is a combined seminar and advanced collaborative workshop in the writing of traditional and contemporary poetic forms. Students will develop skills in creative writing, editing, collaborative work, and poetics by writing, discussing, and revising their own work; helping other students with editing; and studying elements of poetic theory and practice. The course will also require students to submit poems for publication and to participate in the production of the Literature Program’s literary magazine, Quantum Pulp.