Undergraduate Academics
Literature
The literature discipline introduces students to the history of written culture from antiquity to the present day, as well as to methods of research and textual analysis. Course offerings cover major works in English and other languages in addition to literary criticism and theory. Some courses focus on individual authors (Virgil, Shakespeare, Woolf, Murakami); others, on literary genres (comedy, epic), periods (medieval, postmodern), and regional traditions (African American, Iberian). Students are encouraged to employ interdisciplinary approaches in their research and to divide their time between past and present, as well as among poetry, prose, drama, and theoretical texts.
Literature 2026-2027 Courses
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
LITR 1081
The modern concept of romantic love was, by some estimations, an invention of the 12th century. Significant Church reforms and the emergence of a chivalric aristocracy gave rise to amour courtois, a cultural phenomenon that reshaped notions of consent, courtship, and desire. This course will explore an expansive literary tradition in which authors experimented with popular tropes of love-suffering and the service of an always-distant beloved, while proposing complex and often contradictory theories of desire. Our study stretches from the Italian poems of Dante and Petrarch to the English sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, and pays special attention to visions of love in Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and the medieval romance genre. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
Faculty
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
LITR 1223
This seminar will examine how contemporary literature uses the fantastic to reorganize time. Moving across a global constellation of novels and hybrid works, we will study how ontological instability, anomalous causality, temporal repetition, and estranged worlds unsettle linear succession and challenge the assumptions of homogeneous, developmental history. Rather than treating the fantastic as genre escapism, the course will approach it as a structural intervention into how temporal unfolding is imagined: time may thicken into strata, bend into recursion, displace across scale, compress into repetition, or thin toward limit. Across the year, students will develop a precise vocabulary for describing these configurations of time and will practice close reading attentive to form rather than theme. Drawing selectively on theoretical reflections on non-homogeneous time and minor histories, the seminar will ask how literary form renders co-implicated temporal registers perceptible and exposes the constraints of linear progression. Emphasis will be placed on conceptual clarity, sustained analysis, and the development of original arguments grounded in textual detail. Readings will include works by Michael Ende, Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Can Xue, Marlen Haushofer, Marcia Douglas, Louise Erdrich, Bora Chung, Yoko Tawada, Sjón, Italo Calvino, Yōko Ogawa, Solvej Balle, Samantha Harvey, Bhanu Kapil, and Clarice Lispector. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.
Faculty
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
LITR 1065
As our societies address the challenges of climate change, it is important that we explore the implications of the concept of “nature” in the Western and Judeo-Christian tradition. In this course, we will read literary classics—such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, among many others—and examine how they represent the environment, animals and the natural world in ways that directly shape our own perception of nature. We will take different approaches by comparing, for example, stories of world creation from Indigenous nations with narratives taken from the Bible and Greek and Roman texts, or exploring the combination of Celtic magic and Christian symbolism in medieval Arthurian romances, or examining how the aesthetic concept of the sublime is present in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as in the written account of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River. Going in different directions, we will analyze how feminism developed new ways of relating to nature as counter-narratives to masculine domination, explore the questions of science, machines and technology, or examine how writers and philosophers have integrated animals in their thinking as a way to move beyond the “human-ist” understanding of nature inherited from European Renaissance. In previous iterations of this first-year studies course, students have developed a variety of personal projects: from how flowers are featured in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, or how a community farm in the Bronx challenges outdated urban-planning decisions, to the depiction of nature in Hayao Miyazaki’s films or in Jane Austen’s novels. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside weekly small group activities.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3340
This course will examine representations of disability in literature and other media while also exploring how disability shapes the experience of readers and audiences. Course readings will include stories such as H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind,” novels like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and poetry collections like Ilya Kaminsky’s "Deaf Republic." We will also watch films such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Crip Camp. In addition to these works, we will read a range of secondary texts about the history of audiobooks for the blind and dyslexic, sign-language poetics, and legislation for closed captioning, among other topics. We will look at particular artists and their work to consider how a deaf poet blends standard English and ASL, how a blind memoirist describes her experiences in art museums, and how an actor with cerebral palsy experiences the physicality of his craft. Conference work will include community engagement with local organizations such as the Wartburg Adult Care Community and Yonkers Public Library. At Wartburg, we will consider how our readings in disability studies might contribute to our understanding of aging and, by extension, what resources we might draw on to better engage with seniors in Wartburg’s adult day care program. Disability scholars have often pointed out that anyone who lives to an advanced age will most likely experience disability. What resources might we glean from disability studies that could address the challenges faced by our aging population? At Yonkers Public Library, students will think about community access and how the library might expand their collections and make their existing resources more accessible. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to consider access needs and work together with our community partners to help make literature, music, art, and film more accessible to members of our local communities.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3543
Note: This course is conducted in English; no knowledge of Spanish is required.
Horror movies are a staple of recent Spanish cinema. With titles like The Others, The Orphanage, Buried, Rec, and Julia’s Eyes, directors Alejandro Amenábar, Juan Antonio Bayona, Paco Plaza, Jaume Balagueró, Rodrigo Cortés, Guillem Morales, and others have conquered the international market, attracting the attention of online platforms and theaters alike. Spanish horror mirrors the function that German Expressionism held in the Weimar Republic: it incarnates social anxieties in the figure of the monster. This genre rose to prominence during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in which a similar typology of monstrous characters (vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, etc.) provided an allegorical cover and line of escape during a period of profound repression. This course will trace a genealogy between the key works of that historical moment and the present. We will tackle the resurgence of horror in the early 2000s in Spain, coinciding with the onset of aggressive neoliberal policies that led to the economic crisis of the 2010s. We will ask how recent horror movies, such as Carlos Vermut’s Magical Girl (2014), Carlota Martínez-Pereda’s Piggy (2022), and Mar Coll’s Salve Maria (2024) make sense of their political context. What distinguishes this new period of horror? How do these films renegotiate the toxic masculinity and macho aesthetics that traditionally characterize the genre? Where can we locate the influence of feminist, ecocritical, and anti-ableist social movements in this genre’s shifting aesthetics? Throughout the course, students will design an original research project and discuss its development in individual conferences with the instructor.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3807
Note: Course content is translated or subtitled into English; no knowledge of Japanese is required. Same as ASIA 3807.
What is “the long postwar”? For decades, Japanese intellectuals and cultural historians have been engaged in debate over when (or whether) the “postwar period” will ever really be over, and how to understand Japan’s current national, geopolitical, and culture identity in relation to the empire that came before. This discourse has been reignited with the political rise of Takaichi Sanae, elected Japan’s first female prime minister in 2025, who seems intent on radically revising Japan’s postwar constitution. This course will examine Japanese culture since 1945 through key works of fiction and film, tracing the arc from the devastation of war and the United States Occupation, through the reconstruction of social order and national community, to the development of a hyper-modern consumer culture. Some of the issues we will explore include the depiction of the war and its aftermath, the influence of the United States Occupation, the disintegration of the family system, questions of cultural and personal memory, historical revisionism and ideas about the remilitarization of Japan, radical New Left movements in the 1960s, the representation of marginalized groups in postwar society, and the culture of postmodernism. Students will connect the historically informed close reading skills we develop in the course with individual conference work on a topic related to media from postwar and/or contemporary Japan or East Asia.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3254
This course will put Dostoevsky at the center of a genre that we will define only partly in terms of detectives and clues and more essentially as an exploration of ways of knowing. We will start with the most canonical of nineteenth-century detectives as we make the case that Sherlock Holmes’s method is not “deductive,” but “abductive” as Peircean semiotics would have it; in Holmes’s own words, “[i]t is the scientific use of the imagination.” From Conan Doyle we will turn to a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” as anything but. We will then read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1881) in the context of the contemporary British tradition that Dostoevsky knew well, including Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). We will end the semester with a brief excursion into the sense of place that also marks the genre. While twentieth-century detective fiction is particularly striking in this regard, from Poe’s Paris, Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, and Collins’s English country house, we will go straight to the highly atmospheric rendering of two more recent spaces of detecting, one real and the other imaginary. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of Your Dead (2009), 2018 Nobel Prize Winner Olga Tokarczuk tells a story of the unstable borderland between Poland and the Czech Republic where the real author lives. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Michael Chabon’s stunning achievement is not least a fully realized, but entirely invented Yiddish-speaking Sitka, Alaska.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 2101
Without the literature of classical antiquity, William Shakespeare would not—and could not—have written some of his most beloved plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, The Comedy of Errors, and The Tempest—not to mention his two longer poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—all owe much of their plot, style, form, and content to authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, and Lucan. This course will explore Shakespeare’s relationship with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and the opportunities that literature afforded him for exploring ideas of gender, sexuality, politics, race, class, and the connection between past and present. Reading works like Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the plays of Plautus and Terence alongside Shakespeare’s plays and poems, students will explore the formation of literary canon and tradition, gain familiarity with some major works of classical antiquity, and discover Shakespeare’s complex, innovative approach to the authors who shaped his education and literary milieu. In your work for this course, students will chart Shakespeare’s transformation of classical works, learn to engage with and evaluate early modern printed books, and master not only Shakespeare’s English, but the ancient source material from which his most compelling drama springs. As we discuss Shakespeare’s relationship to his classical counterparts, we will gain a new understanding of the ways Shakespeare’s use of literature of the past came to define the social, sexual, and political structures of our present.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3017
Note: Prior college-level literature course recommended.
Virginia Woolf was a novelist of the future: a hyper-modern literary innovator, a pioneer of psychological forms, a theorist of gender and sexuality, and champion of women’s literary progress whose radical vision revolutionized literature of the 20th century. Woolf’s thinking about the future, however, was grounded in an equally robust fascination with the past. Throughout her fiction and nonfiction writing, Woolf articulates an insatiable need for history’s stabilizing, guiding, and authorizing power—a history that she, and queer women authors at large—often lacked. This course will explore Virginia Woolf’s career-long mission to write the history she—and women writers at large—needed to support her literary endeavors. We will examine how Woolf made and remade literary history for herself in works of criticism, such as the first and second Common Readers, and in novels such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and Between the Acts. Charting Woolf’s idea of literature from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and early modernity, to the 20th century, we will read Woolf’s criticism alongside excerpts from the historical texts that inspired it, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sappho’s fragments, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Brontë’s Jane Eyre. We will chart the ways Woolf assembles female characters and authors from literature of the past and attend to the ways her fictions both attempt to fill the gendered gaps of history and move marginalized figures to the center of literary conversations. Students will become familiar with feminist, queer theoretical, new-historical, and post-colonial approaches to Woolf’s work as we discuss issues of canonicity, reception, gender, sexuality, and authorship. Throughout the course, we will think through the ways other marginalized peoples—especially queer people, trans people, and people of color—have struggled to restore their own buried histories, and the ways in which Woolf’s methods might aid, hinder, damage, and support these ongoing projects. As Woolf well knew, one needs a past to imagine a future: in this course we will take the real lessons Woolf gives us in recovering pasts to create a history that is lively, reparative, and ultimately, generative.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3006
Innovation has always been at the center of Black and Latinx literary traditions. They are often a kaleidoscope of the written word, orality, musicality, symbols, and even forms of “unsaying.” This course will ask us to stand at the intersection of Black and Latinx literary, sonic, and visual culture. We will begin by interrogating what defines a text, what it means to read, to listen, and what we can learn when those practices converge. We will engage with novels, short stories, poetry, theoretical scholarship, essays, music albums, DJ sets, film, and sculpture. Some of the Black and Latinx writers and artists we will study may include James Baldwin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Pedro Pietri, Toni Morrison, Martín Espada, Rita Indiana, Kara Walker, DJ Lynée Denise, Bad Bunny, and others.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 3042
Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, died in late November of 2025. For much of his life, Stoppard was widely considered among the greatest of contemporary English-language playwrights, and at his death, compared to both Shakespeare and Shaw. Over this semester, we will read and think about a number of Stoppard's greatest plays, and in seminar discussions, we will go wherever the plays take us. Stoppard dramatized the mind and defended the body: he was always funny, never only funny, and invariably worth our attention, which we will now give him.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
LITR 2068
This seminar will examine how aesthetic forms emerging from Asia and Asian America render infrastructure perceptible. Moving across film, literature, installation, and media art, we will study how institutions, colonial education systems, Cold War geopolitics, urban development, projection technologies, and digital interfaces condition perception. Rather than treating “Asia” as a fixed cultural entity, the course will approach it as a historically layered field shaped by empire, diaspora, and transpacific circulation. Through close analysis of works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Nalini Malani, and Tishan Hsu, students will trace how surface, repetition, enclosure, and mediation shape what becomes visible. A semester-long field notebook project will train attention to infrastructure across artworks and everyday environments.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3520
Note: A registration interview with the instructor is strongly encouraged for interested students. Also offered as GREE 3510 and LATN 4020.
When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3512
Victorians were often sick. As an increasingly urban population, concentrated in cities like London, they suffered from communicable diseases ranging from tuberculosis to syphilis. Living in the metropolitan center of a vast global empire, they were often the victims of the goods that they traded from tobacco to sugar to opium. In this course, we will examine how nineteenth-century British writers portray health, illness, disability, pain, addiction, and madness. Writers of this period wrestled with the image that Victorians had of themselves as rational, orderly, dutiful, and manly (or womanly); this self-image was haunted by fears about physical and moral degeneration. Reading novels by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Bram Stoker, we will ask what role infirmity plays in the development of character and plot in the Victorian novel. Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whose lives were shadowed by illness, will allow us to think further about the relationship between poetic form and the unruly body and mind. We will also read works of nonfiction by Charles Darwin, Mary Seacole, and others. Students in this course will learn to develop interdisciplinary approaches to literature that draw upon the medical and health humanities. Through our readings, we will chart the story of how treating sickness became a respectable profession in the nineteenth century, as medicine became a middle-class career governed by professional organizations. The widespread adoption of germ theory put a spotlight on hygiene as a public health imperative and hospitals were no longer places more likely to make you sick than to help you recover. Campaigns for public health also stoked fears about immigrants, who were often characterized as threatening the racial hygiene of the nation. At the same time, institutions came to play a larger role in rehabilitating and containing those who were seen as threats to the social order. Colonial administrators and settlers often got sick, exposed to new diseases or ones that they first introduced and that were now running rampant. This sickliness produced racial anxiety about their relative fitness in relation to their colonial subjects. Was the white man well enough to pick up the burdens of Empire? Meanwhile, across the Empire, from Ireland to India to Africa, Victorians were encountering alternative approaches to health and illness that would conflict with their increasingly scientific and medicalized approaches to disease. In charting this history across literature, we will ask how writers in this period shaped our current understanding of sickness and health.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Year | 10 credits
LITR 2327
Note: Closed to students who have taken Acting Up: Performance and Performativity From Enlightenment Era London to Golden Age Hollywood (LITR 3327).
Powdered, ruffled, and bewigged, the ghosts of the 17th and 18th century playhouse still stalk the stages, screens, and red carpets of the global entertainment industry. After a period of suppression by a puritan government, London theatres came roaring back to life in the 1660s, thanks in part to England’s first professional female actors—by some accounts the original modern celebrities—and the reign of a king, Charles II, who was besotted with drama and the people who made it. Over the coming century, the practices and theories of the theatrical arts would be thoroughly and durably transformed, and a new dramatic canon would be consolidated through both print and repertory enactment. Theatre was not only big business in Enlightenment Europe but also, arguably, the representative art form of the age. Part of the public’s fascination with stagecraft lay in the unsettling questions it raised about the nature of performance itself, not only as a form of artistic practice but also as an element of social and political life: What if, for instance, our putatively God-given identities (king and subject, wife and husband) were merely factitious roles that could be adopted or discarded at will? This seminar will consider how authors and theatrical professionals from the 1660s to the 1790s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to major films, mostly from classical Hollywood, that inherited and adapted the legacy of Restoration and 18th century entertainments. Our primary emphasis will be on plays, with a survey of major Enlightenment-era comedies (some of the funniest and most outrageous ever written), parodies, afterpieces, heroic tragedies, imperial pageants, sentimental dramas, and Gothic spectacles by authors such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider nondramatic writing on performance and theatrical culture, including 18th-century acting manuals, racy theatrical memoirs, and a “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood, in addition to films by directors such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Oscar Micheaux, F. W. Murnau, Lois Weber, and Billy Wilder. Wigs not required.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3125
The 18th century introduced the long, realist prose fictions, printed and marketed to readers on a large scale, that we now call novels. As often with emergent literary forms, the novel arrived with an unsavory reputation; and its early practitioners labored, often unsuccessfully, to distinguish their work from ephemeral printed news, escapist prose romances, and pornography. It was not until the defining achievements of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, at the beginning of the 19th century, that the novel achieved a status as polite and even prestigious entertainment. This course will look at the difficult growth of the novel, from its miscellaneous origins in the mid-17th century to the envelope-pushing experiments of the early 1700s and the eclectic masterpieces of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Austen, and Scott. Other authors may include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Tobias Smollett, Matthew Lewis, Frances Burney, Charles Brockden Brown, and Maria Edgeworth. Everything that we read will be arresting and restlessly experimental; much of it will also be bawdy, transgressive, and outrageously funny. Topics of conversation will encompass the rise of female authorship, the emergence of Gothic and courtship fiction, the relationship between the novel and other literary genres or modes (lyric and epic poetry, life-writing, allegory), novelists’ participation in the leading debates of their time (those over slavery, empire, and revolution), the reinvention of the novel in North America, the representation of consciousness, and the meaning of realism.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3317
In this seminar, we will examine the First and Second World Wars, two vast and savage armed conflicts which shaped the 20th century and its aftermath. In the first semester, we will study the course, outcome, and aftermath of the First World War, and our syllabus will focus on theories of the war’s origins, some of its literature and its representation in other media, the logic of its development, the experience of combat, the experience of the home fronts, and the effect of the war on cultural history, including the much-debated question of the war’s relationship to modernism and modernity. The second semester will focus on the Second World War, and we will be looking at many of the same questions. Our own era remains shaped by the memories of these wars and by their outcomes and afterlives. Both wars shaped and reshaped our cultures, including our understanding of the nature of war itself, which in their wake we have successively mythologized, demythologized, re-mythologized, and serially reimagined. Memories and interpretations of these wars have produced the rise and fall of modern ideas of the heroic, the false heroic, the anti-heroic, and the post-heroic. We shall explore all of these ideas.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3051
Against the backdrop of the bloodiest half-century in human history, continental European culture produced an astonishingly rich and diverse body of lyric poetry. Robert Frost famously remarked that "poetry is what gets lost in translation," but the unmistakable genius of modern European poetry largely survives its passage into English, thanks to the inspired efforts of its translators. In this course, we will learn to hear the voices they have made available to English-language readers, often comparing multiple translations of a single poem, or referring to the original in bilingual editions. We will read selections from twelve poets translated from seven languages: Cavafy, Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Pessoa, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Cernuda, Montale, and Celan.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
LITR 3142
In popular culture, Dante’s name is virtually synonymous with his Inferno and associations of fire and brimstone. Yet, in the Divine Comedy the point is to leave hell: to emerge from darkness into the light and steadily climb the mountain of Purgatorio in order to ascend to Paradiso, to experience the love that moves the sun and other stars, the divinity that underlies all things and is our true nature. Much more than of the diabolical, Dante is a poet of divine love: “I am one who when / Love breathes in me, I take note, and as / it dictates within, so I go signifying” (Purgatorio 24.52-4). For Dante, poetry becomes a vehicle of truth when it is itself moved by the love that is not merely a passing feeling, but the very ground of being. This course will be an exploration into the ways Dante is a poet and philosopher of love, truth, and being. In the fall, we will embark on a close reading of all three realms of the Comedy, paying particular attention to these themes, and the way Dante’s poetry is both profoundly philosophical and even more profoundly experiential. In writing the Comedy, Dante seeks to transform not only his life but also our own: he writes “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and bring them into a state of happiness” (Letter to Can Grande XIII.39). So, to read the Comedy is to read our own lives into the poem and to read the poem into our own lives. In the spring, we will read Dante’s philosophical treatise, the Convivio (the Banquet), as well as selections from his treatise on language, On Eloquence in the Vernacular, and on politics, Monarchy. Alongside these texts, we will read Dante’s major philosophical sources, especially Aristotle, his Arabic commentators, and Thomas Aquinas. All the while, we will revisit selected cantos from the Comedy, grouped by philosophical themes such as the essence of human happiness, vice and virtue, and the prime mover—being, truth, and love.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 2018
Do new media fundamentally alter the way we produce and consume works of art? This seems like a 21st-century question, but it was also a central preoccupation for modernist writers in the first half of the 20th century. How, they asked, can literature reach the distracted modern reader? Writers we will read this semester, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, rejected Victorian literary conventions, which they argued were no longer able to touch the modern reader’s senses directly; in doing so, however, they relied on techniques such as collage, allusion, stream of consciousness, and symbolism that often alienated the “common reader.” Other forms of entertainment were increasingly available to such readers: the cinema, the music hall, newspapers, radio, and (later) television. Literature was, for many, losing its audience to these other venues. Scholars have argued that modernism emerged as a reaction against the rise of mass culture; however, as we will see in this course, modernist reactions to media are, in fact, diverse and complicated. We will identify and explore a range of critical approaches and, in so doing, will detail the extent to which modernist aesthetics emerged alongside the rise of new forms of popular mass culture—whether as a negative, positive, or ambivalent response. We will also interrogate the enduring legacy of modernist approaches to media and question whether we have, in fact, moved beyond these concerns or whether they continue to define our literary and popular cultures. Working through a range of texts—including novels and stories, as well as radio plays, manifestos, and films—we will identify the intimate relationship between modernism and changing media.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3064
Note: Course content is translated into English; no knowledge of Spanish is required.
This course will deal with a set of discourses and practices around the concept of españolidad (Spanishness). How has it been mobilized and by whom? What are its centers, its peripheries, and its boundaries? In order to critically examine these questions, the course will sample a wide range of materials comprising literary works, poetry, political and cultural essays, cinema (fiction and documentary), music, painting, visual art, comic, photography, and performance. This course will highlight works created by women and with strong female characters, featuring texts by Cristina Morales, Meryem El Mehdati, Silvia Albert Sopale, Alana S. Portero, Ana Penyas, and Federico García Lorca, among others. Throughout the course, students will design an original research project and discuss its development in individual conferences with the instructor. Additionally, students will work in groups to develop other research and curation projects. For group projects, students can choose between planning and guiding a visit to an exhibition or cultural event that relates to the course content, preparing and coordinating a guest visit to the class, or coordinating a cultural event open to the entire Sarah Lawrence College community. This will be a reading and writing intensive course. Students are expected to read full novels, theater plays, and long-form essays.
Faculty
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Open, Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 2201
Note: Same as ANTH 2201 and FILM 2201.
This is a collaborative lecture course taught by faculty in anthropology, filmmaking, and literature. Bringing these three disciplinary lenses to the cinematic image, the course will ask how films can think—how, that is, cinema gives form to ideas about temporality, perception, memory, history, and life itself, not only through story, but through cinematic design including: rhythm, duration, framing, voice, and the relation between image and sound. Working primarily with ethnography, documentary, the essay film, and the film-journal, we will study cinema's engagement with lived reality. Rather than understanding film solely as representation, the course will treat it as a mode of inquiry: a means of engaging social and environmental worlds and reflecting on lived experience, political conditions, and moments of transformation. We will examine how concepts of culture and the natural world take shape in film form, and how diary and essay practices are transformed when translated into a time-based medium. Across screenings, lectures, and group discussions, students will develop a vocabulary for describing how films make meaning through temporal design and patterning. Attention to sequence and suspension, and to bodily gesture and camera motion, will open larger questions of ethics, representation, and mediation. Throughout the semester, we will ask how experimental documentary, hybrid essay film, animated, and mixed-media work respond to pressing political and existential concerns while also reflecting on their own conditions of mediation. Filmmakers whose work will be considered closely include Trinh T. Minh-ha, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Signe Baumane, Hayao Miyazaki, Su Friedrich, and the Karrabing Film Collective, among others. In addition to class time and screenings, students will attend group conferences, meeting with each faculty member in rotation.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3229
Note: Course content is translated into English; no knowledge of Japanese is required. Same as ASIA 3229.
This course will explore how conceptions of Japan as a modern nation state have always been entangled with ideas about sex, gender, and reproductive bodies, from the eugenicist policies of reproductive control that were foundational to the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), to the current Japanese government’s attempts to combat the depopulation crisis. In many cases, such as the “fertile womb battalions” (kodakara butai), which commended and rewarded women who gave birth to multiple children during the empire’s mobilization for total war (1937-1945), there is also an eerie resemblance to the recent surge in pronatalist sentiments within the United States government. Together, we will learn about how eugenics and reproductive rights were intertwined in early Meiji-era debates on womanhood and motherhood, reading key early feminist texts from Hiratsuka Raichō and the Japanese Bluestockings, and then trace how those ideas echo and transform through the radical uman ribu (women’s liberation) movement in the 1970s through to the present day. Other topics covered will include resistance and collaboration with the Empire among female proletarian writers in Japan and colonial Korea; Hayashi Fumiko's literary representation of licensed prostitution under the United States Occupation; postwar depictions of the discriminatory fixation on the reproductive lives of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Pan-Asian feminism and the “comfort women” redress movements in the 1990s; and the contemporary rise of a new generation of popular writers in Japan (and East Asia more broadly) who seek to complicate prior understandings of gender, parenthood, and the human body. We will end the term by looking at techno-natalist dystopias (or utopias?) in recent Japanese science fiction. Students will complete an individual conference project related to modern Japanese media and/or the themes of the course.
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3346
The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet spaces has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will supply some historical context while centering our attention on the remarkable flowering of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature currently underway. We will begin with the curious emptiness of Russian nationalism as expressed first in Russian-American journalist M. Gessen’s recent contribution to This American Life, “Eight Fights,” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831). While still in the 19th century, we will make a brief foray into Polish and Ukrainian literature as written at a time when neither Poland nor Ukraine existed as sovereign nations: our reading here will include Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem “Pan Tadeusz” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1834); a few shorter poems by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko; and a few short stories by the Ukrainian writer Mikolay Hohol, better known by his Russian name, Nikolai Gogol. We will then jump to the 20th century with Viktor Shklovsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Sentimental Journey (1921). With the Russian empire re-established now in Soviet terms, we will trace the rise of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature in turn. In the Polish context, we will read Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934) as written in the shadow of the Nazi invasion; Witold Gombrowicz’s gender-bending tale of post-World War II exile in Trans-Atlantyk (1953); and watch Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then finish with the 21st century and 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007). For Belarus, we will return to World War II with The Ordeal (1972), first as originally written by the Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ (in Russian, Vasilii Bykov) and then as adapted by Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by the 2015 Nobel Prize-winning writer, Svetlana Alexievich. From Alexievich’s Russian-language account of a disaster that struck Belarusians and Ukrainians alike, we will turn to Markiian Kamysh’s more narrowly Ukrainian reflection on life after Chernobyl, Stalking the Atomic City (2014), before exploring just a few of the works that mark the vibrant contemporary Ukrainian scene: Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Evgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks (2022), Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2017), and Halyna Kruk’s recent collection of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023).
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 2340
Why do people believe the promises of tyrants? How do you tell the difference between truth and lies? How do people use words to gain power over others? How can we stop them from doing so? These questions worried Renaissance readers as much as they worry us today. Taking their cue from their predecessors in antiquity—Plato, Cicero, Caesar, and many others—the early moderns were fascinated by rhetoric, or the study of persuasive speech. While they rejoiced in rhetoric’s power to create the charming poems and plays that enchant us to this day, authors like Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton were equally worried about the power of words to dominate, control, and even to shape reality according to the will of the speaker. In this course, we will examine some of history’s most famous tyrants through the literature of early modernity—Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard III, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko—as well as the ancient texts that underpinned the Renaissance discussion of rhetoric: Gorgias’ Helen, Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, Cicero’s De Oratore, Lucan’s Bellum Civile. In our examination of these texts, we will ask how tyrants create themselves, how they gain power over others, and how they establish, repeat, and amplify vocabularies of oppression, gaining power over real-world institutions through their control of language. We will then extend our study to the ways tyranny works outside of the political sphere: in relationships, in the home, and in society at large. As we will come to understand through our reading, the tyrant’s most disturbing legacy is not his power to self-create, but his power to limit the self-creation of others. In close reading the texts that contain these tyrants and their victims, students will come to understand that tyranny—and its resistance—begins at the level of the individual word.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3198
Sappho has been famous for a very long time: born in the sixth century BCE (a couple hundred years after Homer), Sappho has been considered one of the greatest poets of the western canon for millennia, a writer whose poetry has influenced authors from Plato to Anne Carson. Sappho’s fame was such that it outlived even her poems: today, Sappho’s poetry survives only in 600 fragments, with only one complete poem remaining. This course will consider the reception of Sappho—as both a literary character and a corpus of poetry—over 2,600 years. Beginning with the composition of her poems, we will discuss the possible contexts of their creation, their critical reception, and their thematic material. We will also explore the formation of Sappho as a character, in plays, poems, and testimonia and her simultaneous characterization as the Tenth Muse, the gender-bending personification of queer erotic desire, and the self-destroying victim of cultural forces. As we chart the intertwined reception of both poems and character over two millennia—through Plato, Menander, Catullus, Horace, Boccaccio, Sidney, Donne, Katherine Philips, Swinburne, H.D., Woolf, Mary Barnard, Anne Carson, and many others—students will become familiar with the larger currents of Sappho’s long afterlife. We will gain experience applying a variety of theories and methodologies, including lyric theory, historicism, queer theory and historiography, book history, feminist theory, and reception theory. Through our reading, we will come to understand that the only question more interesting than who Sappho was is the question of what she has meant to people over time and what about her poetry, persona, and potential has kept us going back to her for more than 20 centuries.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3006
Innovation has always been at the center of Black and Latinx literary traditions. They are often a kaleidoscope of the written word, orality, musicality, symbols, and even forms of “unsaying.” This course will ask us to stand at the intersection of Black and Latinx literary, sonic, and visual culture. We will begin by interrogating what defines a text, what it means to read, to listen, and what we can learn when those practices converge. We will engage with novels, short stories, poetry, theoretical scholarship, essays, music albums, DJ sets, film, and sculpture. Some of the Black and Latinx writers and artists we will study may include James Baldwin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Pedro Pietri, Toni Morrison, Martín Espada, Rita Indiana, Kara Walker, DJ Lynée Denise, Bad Bunny, and others.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3091
On the final page of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, her heroine, Esther Greenwood, describes herself as “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road.” Esther’s ironic comparison of herself with a tire captures both the stresses she has endured in her short life and her belief that she has gained perspective on these stresses. In this view of herself, Esther is emblematic of the heroines of American literature who are at the center of this course. Starting with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and moving through such classic novels as Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we will read the eight books that make up this course in chronological order with the idea in mind that they offer an evolving view of three centuries of American heroines and their struggle to retain their independence. Our reading will include two memoirs, Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Hospital Sketches and Tara Westover’s Educated, as part of blending fictional and nonfictional views of what it means to be an American literary heroine.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3111
Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues), but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama—plays we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition (for example, much of Greek tragedy)—and it is very famously true of some of the greatest work by Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. Some of the best contemporary playwrights also set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony (the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot), but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present or necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past setting little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s fascinating play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960’s and attempted to locate the causes of the then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960’s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late 18th century politics and the politics of the present. A play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, sought to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In this course, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature, all of them, in one sense or another, history plays, written for various purposes and of generally very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3526
“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic; and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels of this course. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the novels we will read reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, James, and Woolf that make up this course. They are novels that stand on their own, but read through the lens of the marriages that dominate them, these books take on added richness by exploring how the most intimate and enduring relationship most of us experience during our lives has changed over time.
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Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
LITR 3176
Prerequisite: at least one prior course in the humanities or social sciences
Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time is a towering monument of 20th-century literature, one that continues to fascinate and intimidate readers to this day. At its heart, Proust’s novel traces the intellectual and sentimental development of its narrator as he moves from childhood to adulthood, eventually discovering his vocation as a writer. Through its historical arc, the novel also portrays the nuances of a French society transitioning from the late 19th to the early 20th century. One of the main goals of this course will be to understand Proust’s contributions to the novel in the age of modernism and modernity. We will see how he pushed the limits of the genre by blurring the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and essay, and we will analyze in detail his singular style characterized by a digressive prose rich in associations. We will also explore how the expansiveness of Proust’s narrative allows for the inclusion of extensive reflections on a vast variety of different topics: time, memory, art, social class, sexuality, jealousy, religion, history, speech, and the writing of life itself. Our primary focus will be on a close reading of the novel in order to better understand Proust’s narrative, voice, and worldview. We will read in English translation the first volume, Swann’s Way, and the final volume, Time Regained, in their entirety, alongside key scenes from other volumes. We will also read a selection of secondary texts that adopt different approaches to reading Proust, including biography, psychology, sociology, gender studies, and philosophy. In conference, students will be able to explore diverse aspects of Proust’s novel in more depth, or pursue projects that help us situate Proust in his literary, historical, and cultural contexts.
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