Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Advanced study of an author, genre, movement, theme or critical theory. See current announcement for specific topic. Students may be repeated without limit as long as the topic is different.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Selected plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca in English translation; origins of Greek and Roman tragedy; religion and myth in tragedy; Aristotelian criticism; stage production; the influence of ancient tragedy on modern literature.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Study of selected plays of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence. Topics include origins and development, staging, and theories of old and new comedy at Athens and of Roman comedy, mime, farce, influences on later comedy.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid in English translation. Topics include ancient and modern literary criticism of Homer and Virgil; oral versus literary epic; history, folklore, and saga in the ancient epic; basic epic themes (the nature of heroism, fate, people and the gods, etc.); Homeric and Virgilian influence on subsequent literature.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. This course addresses the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, one of the most influential texts in all of world literature, as a collection of texts from several distinct genres, including patriarchal narratives, etiological stories, legal material, psalms, prophetic poetry, erotic poetry, folk tales, historical writing, and wisdom literature. The distinctive literary features of these genres will be addressed. This course also considers the history of the Bible's composition and redaction, how it fits in the context of other Ancient Near Eastern literatures, and its impact on later Western literature. Contemporary critical work on the Bible by feminist scholars, anthropologists, linguists, and historians may also be considered.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. A comparative study of literature and ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on English, French, and German literature, with some attention to Italian and Spanish. Major literary and philosophical trends are analyzed, including the rational and satirical attack on traditional values and the current of "sensibility" which stressed the powers of the emotions and the senses. Works by Swift, Voltaire, Fielding, Diderot, Johnson, Rousseau, Prevost, Goethe, Lessing, and others.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs, or by department approval. The origins and development of romanticism in England and Germany are compared with the later triumph of the movement in France. Representative works of Chateaubriand, Goethe, Novalis, Kleist, Hoffmann, Heine, Musset, and Nerval are studied, and their themes compared with those of the English romantics. (Taught in English. Recommended to French majors as a free elective.) Mutually Exclusive with FREN 536.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Intensive study of three great modern playwrights with an emphasis on dramatic theory and criticism, social context, and literary/theatrical values.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. The course will concentrate on literature from sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora and may include writers from the Caribbean, Asia, and the Americas. Discussion topics may address issues of place; power and its effects, including colonialism and slavery; gender relations, family structures, religious beliefs; the arts and other cultural expressions.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Selected works by European, English, and Latin American masters, illustrating the evolution of the novel during the twentieth century. Works by James, Proust, Kafka, Dos Passos, Woolf, Gide, Mann, Hesse, Stein, Beckett, and others.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. Significant fiction of the last fifty years from at least five countries. Students will be introduced to a variety of fictional forms which will include work from diverse geographical regions.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. An interdisciplinary course which considers theories and practices in the arts across cultures, beginning with classical modernism and its contemporary legacies. Emphasis on literature, with attention to the visual arts and/or music and performance.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. On a rotating basis, different cultural, historical, and aesthetic aspects of American, British, or world film will be examined. See current announcement. May be repeated for a maximum of 6 credits if the topic is different.
Restriction(s): English MA students and undergraduate junior and senior students in the BA/MA and BA/MAT programs only. This course compares international authors' contributions to science fiction, focusing on those texts that highlight its history and meaning: fiction of the future that speculates and extrapolates from the physical and social sciences. It provides graduate students with the critical perspectives to explore the reach of speculative fiction across the globe. Students will become familiar with the roots of literary tropes such as utopias/dystopias and the uncanny, through literature that interrogates what it means to be human.
Prerequisite(s): Departmental approval. The student completes a research project under the supervision of a member of the graduate faculty. This course is designed to allow investigations into areas not covered by regular courses and seminars. Permission of the graduate program coordinator and of the project supervisor required before registration. May be repeated once for a maximum of 6 credits as long as the topic is different.