This course will trace the “Gothic” tradition in America from its initial manifestations in Brown and Irving through its first great flowering in the “American Renaissance” era of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. We will emphasize questions of methodology as well as practicing close analysis and defining a literary tradition. (G)
Along with a number of Woolf’s major works, students read theoretical and critical texts that give a sense of the range of contemporary approaches to Woolf. (B, G)
This survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (with an emphasis on the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world. We will address foundational and recent critical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage the art of landscape, an influx of exotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism and naturalism of Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” the (literal) fruits of empire, vegetarianism, and the place of pets. (C, F)
A study of Milton’s major writings in lyric, epic, tragedy, and political prose, with emphasis upon his evolving sense of his poetic vocation and career in relation to his vision of literary, political, and cosmic history. (C, E, F)
This course explores some of the major plays in the genres of tragedy and romance in the latter half of Shakespeare’s career. After having examined how Shakespeare develops and deepens the conventions of tragedy in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, we will turn our attention to how he complicates and even subverts these conventions in three romances: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Throughout, we will treat the plays as literary texts, performance prompts, and historical documents. (D, E)
This course explores Shakespeare’s histories and comedies. Topics for discussion will include: arguments for the social, political, and moral benefits of theater, as well as for its perniciousness; representations of gender, sexuality, family, and friendship; actors’ and spectators’ experiences of performance; and philosophical theories of laughter, pity, and catharsis. Readings are likely to include Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night—as well as a play in which comedy veers into tragedy (Othello) and a film adaptation (Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight). (D, E)
This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England. (C, E)
This course is an examination of Chaucer's art as revealed in selections from The Canterbury Tales. Our primary emphasis is on a close reading of individual tales, with particular attention to the intersection of literary form with problems in ethics, politics, gender and sexuality. (C, E)
This course approaches the history of the novel through detailed study of at least one masterpiece from each of the last four centuries from the 18th through the 21st. We will also study shorter works of fiction and key works of narrative theory, along with films based on some of the set texts. We’re likely to begin with Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782), which has inspired dozens of film and television spin-offs; we’ll then move on to the 19th century with works by Austen and Flaubert; to the 20th century with James and Nabokov; and to the 21st century with Tom McCarthy and other writers. Course requirements include two papers and regular Chalk posts, in addition to written exercises in class and participation in discussion sections. (B, F, G)
This course will introduce students to narrative fiction from a variety of time periods, genres, and media, as well as to select works of criticism and theory. We will focus on key elements of narrative form (including voice, characterization, setting, description, plot, etc.), as well as on the uses and pleasures of narrative art. The course aims to help students broaden and deepen their historical knowledge and practical experience of fiction, and to develop analytical tools for reading and writing about it. (A, B)
