Undergraduate Courses

The epic tradition traced from its foundations in ancient Greece and Rome to the modern novel. The creation of cultural values and identities; exile and homecoming; the heroic in times of war and of peace; the role of the individual within society; memory and history; politics of gender, race, and religion. Works include Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing.

Arabic-Islamic civilization has produced numerous works that would make it onto almost anyone’s list of wondrous books. In this course, we will read a selection of (or from) those books and study the literary and intellectual cultures that produced them in an attempt to deepen and nuance our understanding of Islamic civilization. Readings will include the Qur’an, classical Arabic poetry, Jahiz’s epistles, the Maqamat of Hariri, al-Ghazali, the Shahnameh,  Leyli ve Mejnun, the Conference of the Birds, the Hang Tuah Epic, Aisha al-Bauniyyah’s Sufi poetry, and much else besides. All readings in translation.

Core concepts and traditions of classical Japanese poetry explored through the medium of translation. Readings from anthologies and treatises of the ninth through early twentieth centuries. Attention to recent critical studies in transcultural poetic theory. Inspection and discussion of related artifacts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Readings and discussion in English. No knowledge of Japanese required. Previous study of literary texts is recommended but not required.

Permission of instructor required

Course multi titled as EALL536/EALL236

To what extent does writing about the land and depicting landscapes in early modern Europe reflect a new interest in engaging the boundaries between the human and non-human? What does it show about the commitment of artists and intellectuals to representing cultures and environments not necessarily their own?  And how did writers and artists seek to legitimize their intellectual labors by invoking images of agricultural work? Since antiquity, artists have often chosen to make the countryside and its human and non-human denizens symbols of other things: leisure, song, exile, patriotism, erotic sensibilities, anti-urbanism. Early Christianity in turn embraced the desert—and the countryside—as a space for spirituality. We explore these origins, and turn to the early modern period when such interests exploded into poems, novels, plays, and paintings—a period that coincided with new world discoveries and new possibilities for ‘golden ages’ abroad. We read works by Virgil, St. Jerome, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Tasso, Seamus Heaney, and others, and take at least one trip to a local gallery (New Haven or NY). Finally, we explore recent work in ecocriticism and environmental studies in order to grapple with ancient and early modern understandings of the natural world. Priority given to juniors and seniors.