Courses

Works of Greek and Latin literature that address the material advantages furnished by imperialism and the moral cost at which they are purchased. Comparison with films, graphic novels, and art installations that engage with similar issues in relation to modern empires. Current problems of globalization and imperialism situated in the context of historical empires.

Poetry in its different forms has been declared by philosophers, poets, and leaders sometimes a great threat, sometimes a great promise. Behind the fears and hopes lies the assumption that poetry has something essential to do with the world. Poetry acts on the world. We explore this presupposition. What is poetry that can change the world? What is a world that poetry can touch? Our primary postulates are that poetry changes the world by influencing our conception of its inner relations: with the self, with an other, in a community, within a state. The course begins with the early formulation of the question in Greek antiquity, which was highly influential on its later manifestations in European thought. We proceed to read and think alongside a selection of poems and theoretical works from the 19th and 20th century, by Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Luce Irigaray, as well as the poets Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Percy Shelley, and others. We then look at how poetry stood in its historical time, reading poetry of resistance and nationalist poetry, written in Cuba, Palestine, and Nazi Germany. At last, in our attempt to ask the question in our time, we read poetry and theoretical texts–mainly from the present–engaged with different struggles of our time: of the figuration of the self and its world, sexuality and gender, and the ecosystem.

The genre of tragedy from its origins in ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance to the present day. Themes of justice, religion, free will, family, gender, race, and dramaturgy. Works might include Aristotle’s Poetics or Homer’s Iliad and plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Hrotsvitha, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Racine, Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Wedekind, Synge, Lorca, Brecht, Beckett, Soyinka, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Lynn Nottage. Focus on textual analysis and on developing the craft of persuasive argument through writing.

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.

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.

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.

An exploration of man and nature in traditional Chinese literature, with special attention to aesthetic and cultural meanings. Topics include the concept of nature and literature; neo-Taoist self-cultivation; poetry and Zen (Chan) Buddhism; travel in literature; loss, lament, and self-reflection in song lyrics; nature and the supernatural in classical tales; love and allusions to nature; religious pilgrimage and allegory.

All readings in translation; no knowledge of Chinese required. Some Chinese texts provided for students who read Chinese. Formerly CHNS 200

An introduction to the Japanese classics (poetry, narrative fiction, drama) in their manifestations in multiple media, especially in the visual and material realm. Special reference to and engagement with a simultaneous Yale University Art Gallery installation of rare books, paintings, and other works of art from Japan.  No knowledge of Japanese required. Formerly JAPN 200.

This course explores writings by and for women in medieval Britain, with attention to questions of authorship, authority, and audience. Readings include the Lais of Marie de France, Ancrene Wisse, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the Showings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, and the Paston letters.

Medieval understandings of womanhood examined through analysis of writings by and/or about women, from antiquity through the Middle Ages. Introduction to the premodern Western canon and assessment of the role that women played in its construction.

A study of some of the principal forms of Arthurian, chivalric, courtly, and parodic romances of medieval French and English tradition.

Study of medieval texts from a wide geographic and chronological range, all of which prominently feature female characters that exhibit supernatural features or practice magic. Narratives about fairies, witches, hags, and monstrous women analyzed in order to explore intersections of gender and sexuality, Otherness, ethics, violence, fantasy, and related themes in medieval culture.

Introduction to medieval English literature and culture in its European and Mediterranean context, before it became monolingual, canonical, or author-bound. Genres include travel writing, epic, dream visions, mysticism, the lyric, and autobiography, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War, from the troubadours to Dante, from the Chanson de Roland to Chaucer.

Introduction to medieval song in England via modern poetic theory, material culture, affect theory, and sound studies. Song is studied through foregrounding music as well as words, words as well as music.