University Bulletin (2011-2012)

ECS 98a Independent Study
May be taken only by majors with the written permission of the ECS program coordinator.
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ECS 98b Independent Study
May be taken only by majors with the written permission of the ECS program coordinator.
Usually offered every year.
Staff

ECS 99d Senior Thesis
Independent research under the supervision of the thesis director. Usually offered every year.
Staff

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
[ hum wi ]
Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.
Mr. Dowden

ECS 100b European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Making of European Modernity
[ hum wi ]
Investigates how the paradigm of what we know as modernity came into being. We will look at the works of writers and philosophers such as Descartes, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Petrarch, Ficino, Rabelais, and Montaigne. Artwork from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will be used to understand better what "the modern" means. Usually offered every spring semester.
Mr. Randall

COML 100a Comparing Literatures: Theory and Practice
[ hum wi ]
Core course for COML major and minor.
What is common and what is different in literatures of different cultures and times? How do literary ideas move from one culture to another? In this course students read theoretical texts, as well as literary works from around the world. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Powelstock

COML 104a Revisions, Rewrites and Remakes: From the Classical Period to the Present
[ hum oc ]
Analyzes canonical works that have been parodied, criticized or happily re-interpreted by later artists. By viewing and listening to these transformations, we come to a deeper understanding of the original artist and also gain insight into the cultures that elicited subsequent changes. Canonical writers include: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe with modern interpretations by Kundera, Beckett, and Anouilh. We will also look at works in the visual and cinematographic arts: "Picasso Looks at Degas" and John Sturges reconsiders Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai." Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ratner (Romance Studies)

COML 115b Fictions of Liberty: Europe in a Revolutionary Age
[ hum ]
The "Age of Enlightenment" fostered new notions of human rights that found their tumultuous proving ground in the French Revolution. Through writings from several genres and nations, this course explores some of the political, economic, religious, racial, and sexual "fictions of liberty" that have shaped our own time. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lanser

COML 117a Magical Realism and Modern Myth
[ hum ]
An exploration of magical realism, as well as the enduring importance of myth, in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and film from the United States, Latin American, and beyond. authors include Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie; films include Wings of Desire and Hero. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

COML 120b Dangerous Writers and Writers in Danger
[ hum ]
Examines the works of modern, twentieth-century writers from different areas of the world who have suffered exile, imprisonment, or death for their free thinking. Writers include: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Wole Soyinka, Gao Xinjan, Breyten Breytenbach, Reynoldo Arenas, and Salman Rushdie. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Ratner

COML 122b Writing Home and Abroad: Literature by Women of Color
[ hum nw ]
Examines literature (prose, poetry, and memoirs) written by women of color across a wide spectrum of geographical and cultural sites. Literature written within the confines of the "home country" in the vernacular, as well as in English in immigrant locales, is read. The intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class as contained by the larger institutions of government, religion, nationalism, and sectarian politics are examined. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh

COML 123a Perfect Love?
[ hum ]
Analyzes how the desire to achieve a "perfect form of love," defined as one that denies the body in favor of a more spiritual attachment, can lead to illness and highly unhealthy behavior in literary texts and modern film. Filmmakers and authors studied include Wang-Kar Wai, Marguerite de Navarre, Boccaccio, Chrétien de Troyes, and Hawthorne. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

COML 135a Before the Law: Justice in Literature and Film
[ hum ]
Examines works of fiction and film as a means of addressing the problem of justice, highlighting by the same token the symbolic fabric of the law and the performative elements of legal institutions. We will focus on cultural expressions from Europe and Latin America that address the problem of the state and its subjects in a context of modernity broadly defined. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Rosenberg

COML 144b The Outsider as Artist and Lover
[ hum ]
Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Simone Weil exemplify the struggle to achieve meaning through literature, but they believed that art or God required them to renounce love and marriage. Buber's analysis of "dialogue" will clarify the interrelation of creativity, faith, and human intimacy in their short stories, prose poems, essays, and philosophical and autobiographical writings. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

COML 146b Classical East Asian Poetics
[ hum nw ]
An introduction to the classical poetic forms of China, Japan, and Korea. Special consideration is paid to issues of canonization, classical theories of literature, and the development of multilingual literary traditions. All readings are in English. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Fraleigh

COML 150b Critique of Erotic Reason
[ hum ]
May not be repeated for credit by students who took HUM 125a in spring 2008.
Explores transformations in erotic sensibilities in the novel from the early nineteenth century to the present. Works by Goethe, Austen, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Bronte, Chekhov, Garcia-Marquez, Kundera, and Cormac McCarthy. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

COML 160a Contemporary East European Literature
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English.
Examines works of major East European (Polish, Czech, Russian, and other) authors in the historical context of late Communist and post-Communist experience. Special attention to reading for artistic qualities and engagement of historical and political problems. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

COML 165a Reading, Writing, and Teaching across Cultures
[ hum nw wi ]
This is an experiential learning course.
Examines contemporary literary representations of literacy, schooling, and language from a cross-cultural perspective. Students also analyze their own educational trajectories and experiences with writing and reading. Students have the opportunity to work directly on projects in Haiti and Lesotho designed to encourage the development and distribution of picture books for young children in their home languages. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

COML 166b Literacy, Language and Culture
[ hum nw ]
This is an experiential learning course.
Considers emergent literacy in cultures where different languages are spoken at home and school. Students have the opportunity to work directly on projects in Haiti and Lesotho designed to encourage the development and distribution of picture books for young children in their home languages. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

COML 179a Life Stories, Spiritual and Profane
[ hum ]
Examines modern life stories (such as biographies, autobiographies, journals, fiction) concerning personal identity in relation to the search for God, mysticism and anguish, conversion, moral action, and intimate love. Augustine's Confessions and Teresa of Avila's Life provide models for contemprary writers such as Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

COML 185a Dickens and Dostoevsky
[ hum ]
Considers such issues as narrative, literary realism, and the manipulation of the grotesque and the sublime in representative works of Dickens and Dostoevsky. Because Dostoevsky was an avid reader of Dickens, class addresses questions of influence, particularly with regard to their shared thematic interests. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

COML 190b Fictional Thinking
[ hum ]
"We can only think, in language, because language is and yet is not our voice," writes Slavoj Zizek. Studies how fictional characters in James, Proust, Woolf and others think before is and for us -- and each other. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum wi ]
This is an experiential learning course.
How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and American literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "the religious". Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 114b Gender and the Rise of the Novel in England and France
[ hum ]
Explores the emergence of the novel as a modern genre in the eighteenth century, asking why the novel arises first in England and France, and what the new genre's preoccupations with women and gender can teach us about European society, culture, and literature. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

HIST 132b European Thought and Culture since Darwin
[ ss ]
Main themes and issues, modes and moods, in philosophy and the sciences, literature and the arts, from mid-nineteenth-century realism to late twentieth-century unrealism. Usually offered every year.
Staff

HUM 10a The Western Canon
[ hum ]
May not be taken by students who have taken FYS 18a in prior years.
Foundational texts of the Western canon: the Bible, Homer, Vergil, and Dante. Thematic emphases and supplementary texts vary from year to year.
Staff

HUM 125a Topics in the Humanities
[ hum ]
An interdisciplinary seminar on a topic of major significance in the humanities; the course content and instructor vary from year to year; may be repeated for credit, with instructor's permission. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

POL 194a Politics and the Novel
[ ss ]
Selected works of fiction as sources of political ideas and pictures of political and social life. How modern fiction helps us understand social change, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. Authors such as Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Dostoevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Babel, Greene, Malraux, and Carpenter. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

CLAS 151a Greece, Rome, Myth, and the Movies
[ hum ]
Explore classical mythology through several key texts to demonstrate the strong connections between antiquity and out own society, especially as revealed in an array of modern cinematic experiments. Charts the transformation of these myths for our own cultural needs. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 165a Roman Sex, Violence, and Decadence in Translation
[ hum wi ]
Famous Roman texts (200 BCE-200 CE) are read from social, historical, psychological, literary, and religious viewpoints. The concept of "Roman decadence" is challenged both by the Roman literary accomplishment itself and by its import on subsequent periods. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Koloski-Ostrow

CLAS 166a Medieval Literature: A Millennium of God, Sex, and Death
[ hum wi ]
A survey of medieval Latin literature in translation, beginning with the fourth-century church fathers and ending with the early Renaissance. Includes Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Egeria, Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, Hroswitha, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Hildegard, Anselm, and others. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Walker

CLAS 170a Classical Mythology
[ hum ]
An introduction to Greek and Roman mythology. Considers ancient song cultures, and the relationship between myth, drama, and religion. Also explores visual representations of myth. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Muellner

CLAS 171a Greek Epic and Athenian Drama
[ hum ]
Surveys Greek epic poetry and the tragic and comic drama produced in the city-state of Athens (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes). The intention is to convey the place of these works in the social, political, religious, and intellectual life of ancient Greece as well as their enduring universality. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Muellner

CLAS 181b Eros: Love, Desire, and Identity in Ancient Greece
[ ca hum ]
An exploration of dance and dance culture in classical Athens through the different genres of choral poetry, tragedy, and comedy that incorporate choruses. Also considers philosophical texts that reflect on the origins and role of choral performance. Investigates the occasions that call for choral performance, the identity of the dancers, the ethical, political, and philosophical messages of the poetry that accompanies their performance, and the role that the community attributes to their dance. Discusses how philosophers view choral performance and examines the relation between ethical cultivation, political indoctrination, and the natural power of dance. Special two-time offering: spring 2008 and spring 2009.
Ms. Visvardi

ENG 1a Introduction to Literary Studies
[ hum wi ]
This course is designed to introduce students to basic skills and concepts needed for the study of Anglophone literature and culture. These include skills in close reading; identification and differentiation of major literary styles and periods; knowledge of basic critical terms; definition of genres. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

ENG 4a The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
[ hum ]
1660-1800: The age of reason and contradiction, enlightenment, and xenophobia. Surveys literary, critical, philosophical, political, and life writing, investigating the emergence of a literary public sphere, a national canon, and the first professional women writers. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King

ENG 5a British Literature in the Age of Darwin and Dickens
[ hum ]
Offers general coverage of the major literary genres in the nineteenth century. The course studies the cultural context forged by the interaction of fiction, prose, and poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 11a Close Reading: Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
Examines the theory, practice, technique, and method of close literary reading, with scrupulous attention to a variety of literary texts to ask not only what but also how they mean, and what justifies our thinking that they mean these things. Multiple sections. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 17b Poetry and Social Crisis: Twentieth-Century British Poetry
[ hum ]
An exploration of poetry in times of extreme social change, world war, and mass culture in Britain and the Commonwealth. Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Owen, Heaney, Walcott, Hill, LK Johnson, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 18a Irish Literature, from the Peasantry to the Pogues
[ hum ]
Explores Irish poetry, fiction, drama, and film in English. Begins with the tradition's roots among subjugated peasants and Anglo-Irish aristocracy and ends in the modern post-colonial state. Authors include Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Bowen, Joyce, O'Brien, and Heaney. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 18b Writing the Holocaust
[ hum wi ]
Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonials, interviews, and historical records; explores written representations of the Holocaust. Considers the role second, third, and fourth generation responses to the Holocaust, including the responses of students, who will write their own post-Holocaust narratives. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Skorczewski

ENG 23a Remembering and Dismembering: Staging the Body in Early Modern England
[ hum ]
Seventeenth-century London performance investigated through the domains of its production--the court, the city, and the emerging "town," center of a new leisure class. Drama, masques, and music drama studied as modes of representation negotiating class mobility, changing concepts of state authority and personal identity, and shifts in gender and sexual relations.
Mr. King

ENG 33a Shakespeare
[ hum ]
A survey of Shakespeare as a dramatist. From nine to twelve plays will be read, representing all periods of Shakespeare's dramatic career. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff

ENG 40b The Birth of the Short Story: Gods, Ghosts, Lunatics
[ hum wi ]
This is an experiential learning course.
How old is the short story? It may go back to the Stone Age, Aesop's fables, or medieval saints' lives, but some credit Edgar Allan Poe and the Scottish shepherd James Hogg. This class takes an in-depth look at three key centers of the genre: Edinburgh, New York, and Moscow. Authors include Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Gogol, and Chekov. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 43a Major English Authors, Chaucer to Milton
[ hum ]
A survey of major English authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, including Chaucer, Wyatt, Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton. No prior experience in medieval or Renaissance literature is required. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 45b Romanticism: Gods, Nature, Loneliness, Dreams
[ hum ]
Surveys Romantic-period literature covering novels, poetry and non-fiction prose. Novels: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights. Poetry and non-fiction prose by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt and DeQuincey. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Quinney

ENG 50a Love Poetry from Sappho to Neruda
[ hum ]
This course explores the relationship between love and poetry. Starts with the ancient Greek poet Sappho and proceeds through the centuries, reading lyrics by Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Rossetti, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 57a Modern British and Irish Fiction
[ hum ]
Twentieth-century British and Irish fiction in its worldwide context. Begins with the modernism of Woolf, Beckett, and O'Brien; usually includes Iris Murdoch, Caryl Phillips, Commonwealth writers Salman Rushdie, George Lamming, Peter Carey, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Includes comparisons with contemporary British films such as Trainspotting and My Beautiful Laundrette. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 63a Renaissance Poetry
[ hum ]
Examines lyric and narrative poetry by Wyatt, Surrey, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch or Ms. Targoff

ENG 64b From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theater, 1660-1800
[ hum wi ]
Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. King

ENG 68a The Political Novel
[ hum wi ]
How do novels change and how are they changed by politics? From the satires of Eastern Europe (Kafka and Milan Kundera, Koestler's Darkness at Noon) to fiery American calls to action on racial issues (Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man); from utopia to postcolonial disaster (Things Fall Apart). Film screenings included. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 73a Witchcraft and Magic in the Renaissance
[ hum ]
Focuses on the representation of witches, wizards, devils, and magicians in texts by Shakespeare, Marlow, and others. Historical accounts of witchcraft trials in England and Scotland are read and several films dramatizing these trials are viewed. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 75b The Victorian Novel: Secrets, Lies, and Monsters
[ hum ]
The rhetorical strategies, themes, and objectives of Victorian realism. Texts may include Eliot's Middlemarch, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Brontë's Villette, Gaskell's Mary Barton, Dickens' Bleak House, and Trollope's The Prime Minister. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 78b Modernism, Atheism, God
[ hum ]
Explores European and American literature after Nietzche's proclamation, at the end of the 19th century, that God is dead. How does this writing imagine human life and the role of literature in God's absence? How does it imagine afterlives of God, and permutations of the sacred, in a post-religious world? How, or why, to have faith in the possibility of faith in a secular age? What does "the secular" actually mean, and how does it persuade itself that it's different than "the religious". Approaches international modernism as a political and theological debate about materialism and spirituality, finitude and transcendence, reason and salvation. Readings by Kafka, Joyce, Rilke, Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Pynchon, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 80b The Tale
[ hum wi ]
The oral form of the story; also a non-realist modern literary genre. Students study and create myths, ballads, folktales, ritual drama, and ethnographic approaches to the transmission of tales, including Genesis, Metamorphosis, fairy tales, pre-Columbian myths, Poe, Angela Carter. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 88b Contemporary British Literature
[ hum ]
British fiction, poetry, drama, and film since WWII that tackles the changing politics of empire, sexuality, and social class, especially. A close look at the weird pleasure of British humor, includes Jean Rhys, Philip Larkin, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Harold Pinter, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Sherman

ENG 103a Exploring the Self in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
[ hum ]
Examines the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries, including George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell. These "metaphysical poets" will be read alongside critical accounts by Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 104a Eighteenth-Century British Poetry, from Dryden to Blake
[ hum ]
The major British poets of the eighteenth century, from Dryden to Blake, with an emphasis on the expressive experiments in form and content which set the terms and showed the possibilities available to all subsequent English poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 105b The English Novel, Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy
[ hum wi ]
Focuses on Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. Explores the relationship between the novel, the era's most popular culture, and our own popular culture. It examines desire, concealment, sex, and romance, as well as the role that literature plays in creating and upsetting communities, defining racial and ethnic categories. Film screenings. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Plotz

ENG 111a How Fiction Works: Narrative in Theory and Practice
[ hum ]
We will explore the forms and functions of fictional narrative, emphasizing the workings of plot, narration, character, time and point of view, and studying the variety of effects produced by the diverse, historically shifting practices of short stories and novels. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 114b Gender and the Rise of the Novel in England and France
[ hum ]
Explores the emergence of the novel as a modern genre in the eighteenth century, asking why the novel arises first in England and France, and what the new genre's preoccupations with women and gender can teach us about European society, culture, and literature. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 123a Dream Visions: Genre, History, and the Mysterious
[ hum ]
A study of the mysterious function of imaginary dreams in medieval and Renaissance writing, along with actual dream dictionaries and dream transcriptions of the period. Visions of Hell, prophetic dreams, apocalypse, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Nashe, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 123b English Literature in the Age of Shakespeare
[ hum ]
An exploration of the literary world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. Readings include poems by Spenser, Sidney, and Donne; plays by Marlowe and Jonson; essays by Montaigne and Bacon, as well as a few works by Shakespeare. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Targoff

ENG 125a Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
[ hum ]
Examines the major poetry and some prose by the first generation of English Romantic poets who may be said to have defined Romanticism and set the tone for the last two centuries of English literature. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt or Ms. Quinney

ENG 125b Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats
[ hum ]
The "younger generation" of Romantic poets. Byron, Shelley, and Keats continue and react against poetic, political, and philosophical preoccupations and positions of their immediate elders. Examines their major works, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Burt, Mr. Flesch, or Ms. Quinney

ENG 128a Alternative Worlds: Modern Utopian Texts
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 11a.
British, European, and American works depicting alternate, often "better" worlds, including More's Utopia, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Voltaire's Candide, Casanova's Icosameron, selections from Charles Fourier, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star, Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis: Dawn, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin! Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 132b Chaucer I
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a or ENG 10a or ENG 11a.
In addition to reading Chaucer's major work The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, pays special attention to situating the Tales in relation to linguistic, literary, and social developments of the later Middle Ages. No previous knowledge of Middle English required. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 133a Advanced Shakespeare
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 33a or equivalent.
An intensive analysis of a single play or a small number of Shakespeare's plays. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG 137a Postimperial Fictions
[ hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 37a in prior years.
In what ways, and for what purposes, has postcolonial Britain sought imaginatively to recreate its imperial past? Discusses recent literary and cinematic representations of empire, in which critique, fascination, and nostalgia are, often problematically, blended. Authors include Paul Scott, Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

ENG 143a Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
[ hum ]
A study of the revenge tradition in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The problem of blood revenge will be looked at as a historical phenomenon in Renaissance society and as a social threat transformed into art in such dramatists as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Marston, Tourneur, Chapman, and Webster. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

ENG 144b The Body as Text
[ hum wi ]
How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. King

ENG 145b Jane Austen: Gender, Art, and History
[ hum wi ]
Explores Austen's writings from multiple perspectives, with particular attention to the historical and aesthetic dimensions of her work. Considers divergent interpretations of her novels and the impact of gender, not only on her novels but on their reception. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lanser

ENG 148b Me, Myself, and I: The Theme of Self-Conflict
[ hum ]
Study of the images of inner division in literary and philosophical texts, from ancient to modern. Readings include: Plato, Gnostics, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Freud, and Lacan. Special one-time offering, spring 2009.
Ms. Quinney

ENG 152b Arthurian Literature
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 1a, ENG 10a, HUM 10a or ENG 11a.
A survey of (mostly) medieval treatments of the legendary material associated with King Arthur and his court, in several genres: bardic poetry, history, romance, prose narrative. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Campbell

ENG 165b Victorian Poetry and Its Readers
[ hum ]
Studies how poetry was written and read during the last time poetry held a prominent role in England's public life. The course centers on Tennyson's career as poet laureate, but also gives full attention to Robert Browning's work. The course also surveys the work of E. B. Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others, and concludes with the poetry of Hardy and of the early Yeats. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

ENG 171a The History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to Postmodernism
[ hum ]
Explores major documents in the history of criticism from Plato to the present. Texts will be read as representative moments in the history of criticism and as documents of self-sufficient literary and intellectual interest. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Morrison or Ms. Quinney

ENG 173a Spenser and Milton
[ hum ]
Prerequisite: ENG 10a, 11a, or HUM 10a (may be taken concurrently) or by permission of the instructor.
A course on poetic authority: the poetry of authority and the authority of poetry. Spenser and Milton will be treated individually, but the era they bound will be examined in terms of the tensions within and between their works. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Flesch

ENG/HIST 118b London from Restoration to Regency: People, Culture, City
[ hum ss ]
Sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities as part of its thematic focus on 'The Human and the Inhuman'.
Explores the history and culture of London from the Great Plague of 1665 to the onset of the industrial age. Topics include the natural and built environments, the city's changing population, and its literary, visual, and musical cultures. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Kamensky and Ms. Lanser

FREN 110a Cultural Representations
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Examines how alienation, which is often understood as exemplifying western modernity, manifests itself in literary works and films from throughout the Francophone world and French history. We will look at authors such as Assia Djebar, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mohammed Dib, Albert Camus, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre Corneille, and Molière. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 111a The Republic
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The "Republic" analyzes how the republican ideal of the citizen devoid of religious, ethnic, or gender identity has fared in different Francophone political milieux. Course involves understanding how political institutions such as constitutions, parliaments, and court systems interact with reality of modern societies in which religious, ethnic, and gender identities play important roles. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 113a Great French Novels
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Power, passion, and creativity in the French novel. Major novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Balzac, Stendhal, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust reflect France's social and political upheavals. Topics include psychological analysis, revolution and class conflicts, male and female relationships, and the creative process. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 114b Quest for the Absolute
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Imagination, the drug experience, even madness can convey absolute meaning. We read creative journeys in prose and poetry by Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maria Krysinska, Senghor, Bonnefoy to explore topics of good and evil; racial and gender identity; love and intimacy; spiritual faith. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 120a The Middle Ages: Before France Was France
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Before the creation of the French nation-state in the sixteenth century, what we know as France today was a tapestry of feudal and postfeudal states. Modern students often find medieval culture much more exotic than many modern foreign cultures. We will try to understand and appreciate the alterity of the Middle Ages in works such as eleventh-century hagiographies, the Romance of the Rose, the knightly romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the poetry of the troubadours, Christine de Pizan, and François Villon. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 122b The Renaissance: When France Became France
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The creation of the modern nation-state in the sixteenth century was inextricably linked to the literature and art of the period. The defense of French language and culture was the battle cry of the cultural vanguard of the Renaissance. The political and religious turmoil of the period is matched only by the intensity and beauty of its artistic creations. Works studied include Rabelais' Gargantua, Montaigne's Essays, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, as well as the poetry of Ronsard, du Bellay, and Louise Labé. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 130a Heart and Mind in French Classicism
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
An examination of the combat of heart, mind, and social convention in seventeenth-century masterpieces—Molière’s comedies, Corneille and Racine’s tragedies, Pascal’s Pensées, and the psychological novel La princesse de Clèves. Topics include the conflict of love and duty, social class, skepticism and religious faith, gender roles. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 131a Orientalism and Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
An examination of how French literature has often represented the "Orient" or "the East," in particular North Africa, parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as its opposite, its imaginary "other." Will also look at how some twentieth-century writers of North-African backgrounds have reacted to these misrepresentations. The course includes paintings, film, and readings in many different genres (novels, travel literature, etc.). Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 133b Visions of Change in the Enlightenment
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot. They defined a new framework for thinking about human civilization and progress based on reason and knowledge. Longstanding notions of the universal relevance and truth of their ideas are challenged by our awareness of the diversity of cultures in the emerging global order. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 134b Masculine/Feminine
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Examines diverse representations of masculinity and femininity in French literature with special focus on historical and cultural aspects. Readings include: Racine, Andromaque; Rousseau, Emile; Stendahl, Le Rouge et le Noir; Duras, L'Amant; and articles from Beauvoir and Badinter. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 135a Rebellion Against Romanticism
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Liberation and selfhood in nineteenth-century France: short stories, novels, poetry, and theater. Topics include love and intimacy, the struggle for identity, gender roles, myth and folklore, religion and secularization. Authors may include Lamartine, Hugo, Desbordes-Valmore, Musset, Nerval, Sand, and Balzac. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 137a Literary Responses to Mass Violence
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writers’ responses to humanitarian and political crises of the past hundred years, e.g., Camus’ La peste, Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour, Beckett’s Catastrophe, Diop’s Murambi, Sijie’s Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, and Laferrière’s Tout bouge autour de moi. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 142b City and the Book
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Analyzes the symbolic appearance of the city in French literature and film from the Middle Ages to the present day. The representation of the city in literature and film is contextualized in theoretical writings of urbanists and philosophers. Literary texts include medieval fabliaux, Gargantua (Rabelais) and Nana (Zola) as well as theoretical texts by Descartes, Ledoux, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, and Paul Virillo. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 143a Existentialism: Identity and Commitment
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Sartre and Camus are known as the founders of French existentialism, a philosophy of the absurd, loneliness, freedom, and responsibility. Novels, plays, and essays are read on moral commitment and on black, Jewish, female identities in light of war, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 145a Baudelaire and his World: Evil, Beauty, Finitude
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The life and works of Baudelaire, germinal figure of a European literary and cultural revolution, including Les Fleurs du Mal, prose poems, and critical essays. Topics: sex and love, painting, music, laughter, the drug experience, good and evil, the city, and modernity. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 147a Jewish Identities in France since 1945
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
After the Holocaust, French thinkers such as Sartre, Levinas, and Memmi provided a foundation for reconstructing Jewish life. Topics include assimilation, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, Muslim, black, and Jewish identity, the role of women, secularism, ethics, and religious faith. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan.

FREN 155b Contemporary Theater: Literature or Performance?
[ fl hum ]
This is an experiential learning course. Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Reading and in-class performance of plays ranging from Jarry’s Ubu roi and Beckett’s Godot to more traditional texts by Sartre and Giraudoux. Concludes with Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du carnage. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 186b Literature and Politics
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
We will be interested in how the literary is political and the political literary. We will organize the class around the relationship of the individual and the community. Texts include: Montaigne’s Essais, Corneille’s Horace, Genet’s Les nègres, Arendt’s What is Politics?, Dumont’s Essays on Individualism, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 190b Advanced Seminar
[ hum ]
May be repeated for credit with permission. Refer to the University Writing section of this Bulletin for information regarding applicability to the writing-intensive requirement. Offered as needed.
Staff

FYS 1b Jewish Literatures in Eastern Europe
[ hum ]
The emergence of a modern literary consciousness was one of the results of the breakup of traditional Jewish society. Examines some of the leading Jewish writers in Eastern Europe who wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, or Russian.
Mr. Polonsky (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

GECS 100a German Literature, Music, and Film
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation. This is an experiential learning course.
This seminar offers a basic look into the ways in which German music, literature, and film are intertwined--with one another and with non-German art. Beginning with Mozart's Don Giovanni and Goethe's Faust, students study some of the texts that are basic to both the German and the larger Western tradition. Also includes works by Beethoven, Schiller, Buchner, Kafka, Schoenberg, Mahler, Mann, Rilke, and Celan. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Dowden

GECS 118a Seduction and Enlightenment
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Explores the dialectic of reason and the irrational from the late eighteenth century in Germany and Austria until their collapse in World War I. Works by Beethoven, Kant, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Lessing, Mozart, Heine, Novalis, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 119a From Goethe to Thoman Mann: The Emergence of German National Self-Consciousness
[ hum ]
Explores the emergence of Germanness in nineteenth century works and the parallel rise of the Jew as the German's antithetical doppelganger who can never be "German." Examine works by Goethe, Hoffmann, Kleist, Heine, Buchner, Fontane, Nietzsche, and Mann. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Klingerstein

GECS 150a From Rapunzel to Riefenstahl: Real and Imaginary Women in German Culture
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Exploring German cultural representations of women and real women's responses. From fairy-tale princess to Nazi filmmaker, from eighteenth-century infanticide to twentieth-century femme fatale, from beautiful soul to feminist dramatist, from revolutionary to minority writer. Readings include major literary works, feminist criticism, and film. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 155a Modern German Jewish History
[ hum ]
Course to be taught at Brandeis summer program in Berlin.
Study of Germany and the European Jews from the period of emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the present. Examines the role of German Jews in German politics, economic life, and culture; the rise of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century; the Nazi government's anti-Jewish policies to the postwar period. Usually offered every year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 160a In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Global Encounters
[ hum ]
Traces the experience of German exiles in different parts of the world. Addresses issues of identity, linguistic displacement, problems of integration, (post) colonial encounters, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, nostalgia, and the experience of those who eventually returned to Germany. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 167a German Cinema: Vamps and Angels
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
From silent film to Leni Riefenstahl and Nazi cinema, from postwar cinema in the East and West to new German film after unification, this course traces aesthetic strategies, reflections on history, memory, subjectivity, and political, cultural, and film-historical contexts with an emphasis on gender issues. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. von Mering

GECS 170a Viennese Modernism, 1890-1938
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
An interdisciplinary exploration of cultural and intellectual life in Vienna from the end of the Habsburg era to the rise of Nazism: film, music, painting, theater, fiction, philosophy, psychology, and physics. Works by Berg, Broch, Canetti, Freud, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kraus, Mach, Mahler, Musil, Schoenberg, Webern, Wittgenstein, and others. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Dowden

GECS 180b European Modernism and the German Novel
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
A study of selected novelists writing after Nietzsche and before the end of World War II. Explores the culture, concept, and development of European modernism in works by Broch, Canetti, Döblin, Jünger, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Rilke, and Roth. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Dowden

GECS 182a Franz Kafka
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English.
A detailed exploration of Kafka's works, life, and thought. Emphasis is given to his place in the larger scheme of literary modernism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

GECS 185b Contemporary German Fiction
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Explores the postmodernist rejection of the German tradition in fiction after World War II, a multifaceted confrontation with German history and organized amnesia that has continued into the present. Works by Koeppen, Grass, Johnson, Bernhard, Handke, Bachmann, Seghers, Treichel, Sebald, and others. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Dowden

GECS 186b German Opera and Pathology
[ hum ]
Conducted in English. No prior knowledge of music or opera is required.
Examines a number of German operas and explores their relationship to discussions about disease and degeneracy, including sexology and psychoanalysis, and to the modernist aesthetics of Central Europe. What is it about opera that lends itself to representations of "evil," illness, and excess? Works by Wagner, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg, Freud, Kleist, Hofmannsthal. Special one-time offering, spring 2009.
Ms. Duncan

GECS 190b German Masterworks
[ hum ]
Offers students the opportunity to immerse themselves in the intensely detailed study of a single masterpiece of pivotal importance. Any one of the following works, but only one, is selected for study in a given semester: Goethe's Faust (parts I and II); Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra; Kafka's Castle; Musil's Man Without Qualities; Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus; Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama; Celan's Sprachgitter. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Dowden

GER 103a Contemporary German Media and Society
[ fl hum oc ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a.
Investigates the cultural history of Germany since reunification through a variety of print and electronic media, including the newspaper, radio, television, film, video, and the internet. In project-oriented segments designed to expand reading, writing, speaking and listening competencies, students explore and analyze the social, cultural, political, and economic issues concerning today's Germany. Conducted in German.
Ms. Duncan

GER 104a Let's Talk! Shall We?
[ fl hum oc ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a.
Designed to focus on fostering students' oral skills. Numerous mock situations and roleplaying exercises provide students with the opportunity to develop and polish oral competency in the German language. Various mock social gatherings like student outings and parties, festive family events, romantic dates, academic and professional interview situations offer the know-how for interns to be successful and gain the most out of their experience abroad, travel and restaurant "language," and also a certain amount of business German. All this and more are practiced in this course. Usually offered every year.
Staff

GER 105a Learning Language through Literature/Learning Literature through Language
[ fl hum wi ]
Prerequisite: GER 30a or the equivalent.
Provides broad introduction to contemporary German literature while further enhancing various language skills through reading, writing, student presentations, class discussion, and partner and group activities. Covers the entire twentieth century, examining ways in which literature reflects culture, history, and politics, and vice versa. Focuses on a significant expansion of vocabulary as well as ironing out some subtle grammar traps. Students' writing skills improve by means of numerous creative writing assignments. Speaking skills are challenged in every class, as the course is designed as an interactive language/literature course. Usually offered every year.
Staff

GER 109b Meisterwerke Deutscher Kurzprosa
[ hum ]
Conducted in German.
Tailored to suit the needs of advanced intermediate students, this course explores in detail several short prose masterworks by writers including Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Schnitzler. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

GER 110a Goethe
[ hum ]
Intensive study of many of Goethe's dramatic, lyric, and prose works, including Goetz, Werther, Faust I, and a comprehensive selection of poetry. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 120a German Enlightenment and Classicism
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: GER 39a, A- or better in GER 30a, or the equivalent.
Careful reading and discussion (in German) of some of the most moving dramatic scenes and lyrical poems written by Lessing, Klopstock, Lenz, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and others will provide an overview of those fertile literary and intellectual movements--enlightenment, storm and stress, and idealism--that eventually culminated in German classicism. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 121a Der Eros und das Wort: Lyrik, Prosa, Drama
[ hum ]
Focuses on the prose, poetry, and drama of love in German literature since Goethe. Workes by Goethe, Kleist, Novalis, Tieck, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Treichel, and others. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

GER 140a Bertolt Brecht und das Theater des 20.Jahrhunderts
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: GER 103a or equivalent. Conducted in German.
Examines the role of theater and drama as "moral institution" and entertainment. How does theater hold postwar Germans accountable for remembering the past and promoting social justice? Students will also work collaboratively on a performance project. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. von Mering

GER 145a Berlin in Literature/Literature in Berlin
[ hum ]
Prerequisites: GER 103a, 104a, or 105a. Course to be taught at Brandeis summer program in Berlin.
Berlin as the covert capital of the twentieth century and newly revitalized modern metropolis has served as background to many literary masterpieces. Follows the life and work of Berlin authors, both male and female, including site visits. Usually offered every summer.
Ms. Opitz-Weimars

GER 181a Franz Kafka's Erzählungen
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: GER 105a is recommended.
A detailed exploration of Kafka's works, life, and thought. Emphasis will be given to his place in the larger scheme of literary modernism. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Dowden

HECS 150a Staging Early Modern Spain: Drama and Society
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Explores readings and representations of seventeenth-century Spanish drama in social and political contexts. Special attention to gender and violence in texts dealing with seduction, cross-dressing, revolution, and wife-murder, by writers such as Cervantes, Lope, Caro, and Calderón. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HECS 169a Travel Writing and the Americas: Columbus's Legacy
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English translation.
Following the arrival of Columbus, the continent later known as America engaged with other continents in a mutual process of cultural, historical, geographical, and economic representation. The development of some of those representations is explored, beginning with travel writing and ending with recent images of the encounter. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HISP 110a Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature: Gender, Class, Religion, Power
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 106b, or HISP 108a, or permission of the instructor.
Was el Cid a political animal? How do women, Jews, and Muslims fare in classical Spanish literature? Study of major works, authors, and social issues from the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. Texts covered range from from lyric love poetry and the epic Cantar del Cid to Cervantes and masterpieces of Spanish Golden Age theater. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 120b Don Quijote
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
A reading for fun and critical insight into what is often called "the first modern novel." Discusses some reasons for its reputation as a major influence on fiction and films throughout the Western world. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 121b Teatro Español: Lope y Lorca
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Examines drama of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) in the context of that of Lope de Vega (1561-1635), considering theories of theater, gender, and sexuality. Both writers were renowned during their lifetimes and mythicized afterwards for their art and their remarkable personal lives. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 125b Literary Women in Early Modern Spain
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Examines works by and about women in early modern Spain, with particular attention to engagements with and subversions of patriarchal culture in theater, prose, and poetry. Writers include Caro, Zayas, Cervantes, and Calderón. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Fox

HISP 170a Topics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b, or HISP 110a, or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor. Course may be repeated for credit.
Topics will vary from year to year, but might include Spanish Enlightenment and romanticism: costumbrismo, Romantic drama, Bécquer, Galdós (the novelas contemporáneas), or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry of the sublime. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell

HISP 185b España 200X
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisites: HISP 109b, HISP 110a, HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Looks at cultural production and its context in Spain for an entire calendar year. The goal is to familiarize students with what has been read and watched in Spain most recently and to understand it in terms of contemporary politics and society. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Mandrell

HIST 170a Italian Films, Italian Histories
[ ss wi ]
Explores the relationship between Italian history and Italian film from unification to 1975. Topics include socialism, fascism, the deportation of Jews, the Resistance, the Mafia, and the emergence of an American-style star fixation in the 1960s. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Kelikian

HIST 192b Romantic and Existentialist Political Thought
[ ss ]
Readings from Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and others. Examination and criticism of romantic and existentialist theories of politics. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Hulliung

IECS 140a Dante's Divine Comedy
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English with readings in English
translation.
A close study of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso as a symbolic vision of reality reflecting the culture and the political, philosophical, and theological thought of the Middle Ages. Readings to include the Vita Nuova, the Aeneid (Bk. 6), and selections from the Bible, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and St. Thomas' Summa Theologicae. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Lansing

ITAL 106a Advanced Readings in Italian
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a or the equivalent.
Close study and analysis of representative works of Italian literature (prose, poetry, drama) and culture (art, history, music, cinema, politics) designed to enhance the student's reading skills. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Servino or Staff

ITAL 110a Introduction to Italian Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a or the equivalent.
Surveys the masterpieces of Italian literature from Dante to the present. It is designed to introduce the student to the major authors and literary periods, styles, and genres and present an overview of the history of the literature. Conducted in Italian. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Servino

ITAL 120b Modern Italian Literature
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: ITAL 30a or the equivalent.
Focuses on the literature of twentieth-century writers such as Moravia, Pavese, and Pirandello, as well as on several contemporary figures, with emphasis on the theme of historical, individual, and familial identity within the context of traumatic socio-economic upheaval and transformative cultural events. Several films based on these works will also be examined, with emphasis on an analysis of cinematic innovation. Conducted in Italian. Usually offered every other year.
Ms. Servino

POL 194a Politics and the Novel
[ ss ]
Selected works of fiction as sources of political ideas and pictures of political and social life. How modern fiction helps us understand social change, societies in transition and decay, revolution, law, bureaucracy, and ethnicity. Authors such as Kafka, Conrad, Borges, Dostoevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Babel, Greene, Malraux, and Carpenter. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

POL 195b Shakespeare and the Politics of Leadership
[ ss ]
Shakespeare as sources for understanding selected work of the role of leaders and followers, elites and masses, class and ethnicity, social change, the relations between disparate social orders, and societies ins transition. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Levin

RECS 130a The Russian Novel
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
A comprehensive survey of the major writers and themes of the nineteenth century including Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 131a The Twentieth-Century Russian Novel
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
An introduction to the major novels of the modernist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, including the emigration, such as those by Sologub, Bely, Olesha, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Erofeev, and Pelevin. Also includes some short stories. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 134b Chekhov
[ hum wi ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Offers a detailed investigation of the evolution of Chekhov's art, emphasizing the thematic and structural aspects of Chekhov's works. Attention paid to methods of characterization, use of detail, narrative technique, and the roles into which he casts his audience. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 135a The Short Story in Russia
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Focuses on the great tradition of the short story as practiced by Russian and Russian Jewish writers and the connection and divisions among them. This genre invites extreme stylistic and narrative experimentation ranging from the comic to the tragic, as well as being a vehicle for striking expressions of complex social, philosophical, and religious themes. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 137a Women in Russian Literature
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Examines questions of female representation and identity and of female authorship. Readings include portrayals of women by men and women authors. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

RECS 146a Dostoevsky: Gods and Monsters
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
A comprehensive survey of Dostoevsky's life and works, with special emphasis on the major novels. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 147b Tolstoy: Freedom, Chance, and Necessity
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Studies the major short stories and novels of Leo Tolstoy against the backdrop of nineteenth-century history and with reference to twentieth-century critical theory. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Miller

RECS 148a Russian Drama: Text and Performance
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
Examines the rich tradition of Russian drama and theater. Readings include masterpieces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those by Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovsky, Mayakovsky, Erdman, and others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 149b Russian Modernism in: Culture and Arts
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Students may choose to do readings either in English translation or in Russian.
An interdisciplinary immersion in the period, emphasizing the connections between historical and artistic trends and employing prominent theories of culture. Focuses on major figures, works, and events in film, literature, the performing and visual arts, and political, philosophical, and religious thought. Usually offered every fourth year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 150a Russian and Soviet Cinema
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
Examines the Russian/Soviet cinematic tradition from the silent era to today, with special attention to cultural context and visual elements. Film masterpieces directed by Bauer, Eisenstein, Vertov, Parajanov, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov, and others. Weekly screenings. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RECS 154a The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
[ hum ]
Open to all students. Conducted in English. Readings in English.
A concentrated study of Vladimir Nabokov, the most noted Russian author living in emigration and one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Focuses on the major Russian- and English-language novels. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

RUS 153a Russian Poetry and Prose in Russian: Undergraduate Seminar
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: RUS 29b, RUS 40b or RUS 50b with a grade of C- or higher, or the equivalent as determined by placement examination. Taught in Russian.
An undergraduate seminar focusing on the advanced study of Russian literataure in the original Russian and development of Russian oral and written language skills needed to analyze and discuss poetry. Includes a selection of the very best Russian poetry and prose of the nineteenth century. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Powelstock

THA 76a British, Irish, and Postcolonial Theater
[ ca wi ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took THA 106a in prior years.
An exploration of the playwrights, political struggles, and aesthetic movements that shaped the evolution of British, Irish, and post-colonial drama in the twentieth century. Attention paid to race, class, gender, sexuality, and theater in performance. Playwrights include: Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Orton, and Churchill. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Holmberg