Spring 2024

Course No:  350:511
Index # - 14109
Distribution Requirement:  A1, A2
Monday - 3:50 p.m.
MU 207

Medieval and Early Modern Poetry/Poetics

Ann Baynes Coiro and Sarah Novacich

This team-taught course uses poetics to enter a long conversation about the periods we now call medieval and renaissance (or early modern). We will examine how these two eras and fields of study came to be received as literary historical polarities and suggest how sustained attention to topics such as poetic form; the figure of the poet; poetic technologies (e.g., manuscript and print cultures); and political, linguistic, and religious contexts might nuance received truths about that literary history. We will consider both formal constraints and historical narratives about poetic form (e.g., the rise of blank verse; “Rime […] being but the Invention of a barbarous Age”); the construction of poetic archives and authority, both real and imaginary; and the constrictive organizing principles of periodization itself. We will, moreover, break free from the spare genealogy often offered as connecting the two periods (Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton) in favor of a more unruly, crowded history, one featuring fragments, macaronic poetry, anonymous lyric, and women writers. Primary texts include: Middle English lyrics, poetry by Marie de France, Pearl, Chaucer’s House of Fame, Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, Middle English romance, poetry by Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Amelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, exemplary lyrics from the invented category “metaphysical poetry,” Milton’s “Lycidas”, Marvell’s “Horatian Ode,” and Upon Appleton House. Criticism will include work by Ardis Butterfield, Ingrid Nelson, Sarah Kay, D. Vance Smith, Jonathan Hsy, Guiseppe Mazzota, Cristina Maria Cervone, Rosalie Colie, Peter Davidson, Margaret Ezell, Colleen Rosenfeld, Simon Jarvis and Melissa Sanchez. Assignments will include two close readings over the course of the semester and a final conference paper.

Course No:  350:584
Index # - 14114
Distribution Requirement:  A4, A5
Tuesday - 12:10 p.m.
MU 207

Decadent to Modern Revisited

Jonah Siegel

This course will provide a survey of developments in British literary culture from Aestheticism to the early days of Modernism, with some attention to related developments abroad.  Issues covered will include decadence, degeneration, empire, and the new woman.  Authors will include Baudelaire, Pater, Wilde, Kiplin, Hardy, James, Conrad, and Schreiner.  We will also address ourselves to important manifestoes of the early twentieth century and some continuities between late nineteenth century verse and early Modernism.

Two 10-15 page papers will be required, as well as frequent very brief writing exercises.

Course No:  350:653
Index # - 14117
Distribution Requirement:  A5, D
Tuesday - 3:50 p.m.
MU 207

Culture in Movement: US Literature after 1945

Jeffrey Lawrence

In the United States, the seventy-year period since the end of World War II has been marked by a series of social upheavals and literary transformations. From the Civil Rights, countercultural, and anti-war mobilizations of the 1950s and 1960s to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo in the 2010s, several generations of social actors and movements have reshaped the country’s cultural terrain. Writers have played a key role in these transformations, both as movement participants and as chroniclers of movement trajectories, conflicts, and aspirations. This seminar takes postwar US social movements as a starting point for examining major American literary works of the period.  Over the course of the semester, we will read canonical texts by authors such as James Baldwin, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula Le Guin, Norman Mailer, Octavia Butler, and Maxine Hong Kingston alongside scholarship about US social movements and documents emanating from the movements themselves. The readings for each week will lead us to broader questions about post-1945 American literature and the frameworks we use to analyze it. Writing requirements will be one short paper (4-5 pages) and a final research paper (15-20 pages).  

Course No:  350:516
Index # - 14110
Distribution Requirement:  A4, D
Wednesday - 2:00 p.m
MU 207

Foundational Texts and New Work in Science Studies

Brad Evans

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the major themes, methods, and figures working at the boundary between literature and science studies. The course will unfold with three points of emphasis. The first will be an intensive reading of a handful scientific and philosophical writers who, particularly in the historical context of the United States, have proven foundational for the field. Primary among these will be Humboldt, Boas, Darwin, James, Du Bois and Whitehead. With this material in place, the course will turn to how these figures have figured in the development of what has come to be known as science studies (and more particularly in Science and Technology Studies) with representative examples coming in seminal work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. Finally, the course will consider the broad appeal of this approach for the study of nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. We will thus be reading primary sources from the 1840s to 1920s while also considering recently published monographs on the subject from Branka Arsic, Julianna Chow, Wai Chee Dimock, Brigitte Fielder, Jennifer Fleissner, Erica Fretwell, Nick Gaskill, Mary Kuhn, Britt Russert, Kyla Schuller, Elisa Tamarkin, Jane Thrailkill, John Tresch, Laura Dassow Walls, Kelly Wisecup, and many others.