Department of Language and Literature
Spring 2009 courses in literature

To see detailed descriptions of the department’s spring 2009 literature classes, click on a course title or scroll down to see the full list.

LITR 100 | Introduction to Literary Analysis
LITR 210 | Literature and Film
LITR 256 | American Literature II
LITR 258 | British Literature II
LITR 263 | Literature of the Early Modern Period
LITR 264/364 | Global/Postcolonial Literature and Theory
LITR 266 | Studies in the Novel
LITR 291/391 | Topics: Environmental Literature
LITR 352 | Young Adult and Multicultural Lit. in the... Classroom
LITR 357 | The Nineteenth Century
LITR 381 | Theories of Gender in Literary Analysis

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 (Amir)

As the required introductory course for both Literature majors 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.
Note: this course does not count as Literature core elective.

 

›› LITR 210 | Literature and Film (Tuzar)

This course introduces students to issues of adaptation and the relationship between the genres of literature and filmed media. The course texts will thus include both literary fictions and a series of films. We will discuss the conventions governing filmic texts and how they intersect with literary convention, as well as examine the cultural context for the production and reception of “literary” film texts. We will also read selected critical materials in order to acquire the proper terminologies and methods for the critical analysis of film texts. Students will be required to write papers using these critical methods, and will also take a series of short tests and write reaction papers designed to elicit responses to the films.
Counts as Literature core elective.

 

›› LITR 256 | American Literature II (Chen)

This course surveys American literature from 1865 to the contemporary period and examines such literary movements as realism, naturalism, and modernism. 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. Course readings will likely include Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, selected short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, selected short stories by Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
Counts as Literature core elective.

 

›› 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 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 Jane Austen's Persuasion and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.
Counts as Literature core elective.

 

›› LITR 263 | Literature of the Early Modern Period (Kubek)

LITR 263 covers the emergence of modernity in British and Anglophone culture during, roughly speaking, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This course is designed to provide students with an overview of the significant writers and ideas of the period, with close attention to literature as cultural production. As part of the Writing and Publishing major, the course will also emphasize widely disseminated printed materials, especially emerging prose forms such as the novel and the periodical, and on drama and poetry as forms of political discourse.  Students will read, discuss, and write about Early Modern literature specifically in terms of its relationship to the rise of modern individualism and the controversial concept of the development of a “public sphere” of shared political and ethical discourse.  We will study the emergence of standards of literary quality (the ideas of literary criticism and of a canon) and will also examine the contributions made by literary texts to modern concepts of gender, race, and class. Texts to be studied may include the revenge tragedies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; the short novels of Eliza Haywood; the early American novel Edgar Huntley; and selected poetry and periodical essays.
Counts as Literature core elective.

 

›› LITR 264/364 | Global/Postcolonial Literature & Theory (Chen)

This course is a comparative study of literature and theory concerning colonial, postcolonial, third world, and diasporic cultures and communities. We will explore such topics as education and the colonial/postcolonial condition; intellectual culture and imperialism; the politics of tourism; identity and diaspora; travel, migration, and globalization; and trauma, genocide, and historical fiction. Course readings will likely include Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. We will also be studying essays by theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chandra Mohanty, Aihwa Ong, and Stuart Hall, among others. Students taking this class for LITR 364 credit are required to complete a medium-length literary research paper.
Counts as Literature core elective when taken as LITR 264.
Prerequisite for LITR 364: LITR 100.
Fulfills diversity requirement for English Language and Literature majors and the multicultural/non-western cultural requirement for Education majors.

 

›› LITR 266 | Studies in the Novel (Chen)

Conceptually organized according to the subtitle, “The Novel, the Nation, and Narratives of Difference,” this course will trace the development of the British and American novel. In addition to reading four major literary works drawn from both British and U.S. literary traditions, we will study various competing theories of the novel. Course readings will likely include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997).
Counts as Literature core elective and also as Writing Intensive (WI) course.

 

›› LITR 291/391 | Topics: Environmental Literature (Kauth)

Scientists warn that if we do not head off climate change, our children may inherit a very different world from us. Rates of cancer, autism, and Parkinson’s disease are soaring, at least in part because we are changing the chemical composition of the human body. Even newborns are born pre-polluted. We all know we cannot continue as we have. But how can we change the world if we cannot even envision our world changed?

In this course, students will explore the connections between humans and their environment, between imagined landscapes and the real. We will read works by Thoreau, Silko, Leopold, Steingraber, Kolbert, and others in an effort to understand how such authors have helped to define and construct the relationship between humans and nature. The course will combine literary analysis with science-based activism and so will be suited to both Literature majors and others with an interest in the environment.
Counts as Literature core elective when taken as LITR 291.
Prerequisite for LITR 391: LITR 100.

 

›› 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.

 

For most readers, selected works editions and other kinds of “greatest hits” collections offer a typical point of entry into a poet's oeuvre: editors select the most canonical poems and arrange them for the reader’s consumption. What such anthologies often obscure, however, is the significance of the textual context(s) in which poems were first published. Far from appearing as solitary, disconnected texts, most major works of poetry were published in collections strategically constructed by their authors.

In this course, we’ll learn about the work of four major nineteenth-century poets through readings of their most important collections of poetry: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), Robert Browning (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842), and Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862). We’ll give sustained attention to close readings of poems by these authors and discuss what made the poetic sensibilities embodied in their work revolutionary. However, we’ll go a step further and also study these poems in light of the collections in which they appear, considering how they fit into a broader imaginative design. How do a collection’'s poems revisit, reinforce, undermine, or otherwise complicate ideas and themes raised by other texts in the collection? In what other ways do such poems enter into dialogue with one another? At the same time, how might the ordering of the poems within a collection itself prove significant? Time permitting, we will also read excerpts from these authors’ major epic poems—such as Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Browning’s The Ring and the Book—as well as selected literary criticism.
Prerequisite: LITR 100.

 

›› LITR 381 | Theories of Gender in Literary Analysis (Kubek)

This course involves the advanced study of current literary theories, and the theoretically informed reading of literary texts, based in an interrogation of the concept of gender.  Students are assumed to have some background in the study of literature and ideally will have some knowledge of gender studies as well.  Readings will include critical writing from the disciplines of men’s studies, gender studies, and women’s studies, as well as selected fictional texts, with a focus on reading those texts through the lens of literary theory.  Literary forms to be studied will include examples of the novel, the feature film, and “comix”/the graphic novel.

Students should be aware that this course necessarily involves the study of certain aspects of sexuality and its representations.  If you believe that such matters are inappropriate for serious intellectual discussion in a classroom environment, you should choose another class.
Prerequisite: LITR 100 or GENS 100.
Fulfills diversity requirement for English Language and Literature majors.