Literature

Courses

LI 104H: The Stranger in Literature
Stories, poems, and plays about cross-cultural interaction, drawing on examples from the Bible and classical antiquity to the present. Emphasis on interactions between Americans and Europeans and between Western and non-Western cultures.

LI 106E: Southern Literature and the Environment
What is Southern environmentalism, and what can we learn from it? An investigation of Southern environmental literature, activism, and history with an emphasis on agrarianism, sustainability, and conservation.

LI 212H: Introduction to Comparative Literature
Key texts in European and world literature studied comparatively and in relation to philosophy and visual art. Authors will vary from year to year but may include Aeschylus, Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and Beckett.

LI 218H: Literature and Human Rights
Inquiry into the role of literature in imagining the meaning of human rights and in responding to human rights violations. This course includes a Reflective Service Learning requirement.

LI 221H: American Lit: Madness & Murder
This class surveys villains throughout American literature. Why does America produce such memorable antiheroes, and what can we learn from their twisted ways? Readings may include Poe, Dickinson, Melville, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and McCarthy.

LI 240H: Bioethics in Realism&SciFi
How literature, primarily fiction, can illuminate major issues in bioethics, such as cloning, genetic engineering, euthanasia, and cryonics. Writers to range from classic (e.g. Mary Shelley, Tolstoy) to contemporary (e.g. DeLillo, Ishiguro).

LI 241H: Major American Novels
Major American novels, their narrative art, their reflection of American culture, their engagement of the readers' hearts and minds; exploring some of life's great questions as revealed by masterful writers.

LI 244G: Postcolonial Literature
An introduction to major postcolonial writers, primarily from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Aime Cesaire, J.M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jean Rhys.

LI 245H: Regional American Literature
Exploration of the "sense of place" in literary traditions emerging from American cultural regions (the South, the West, the Northeast) and applying those principles through service-learning. Reflective writing and service at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve.

LI 246H: Breaking Free: 20th Century British Literature
Focused study of several groundbreaking 20th century British authors writing in different genres. To include writers such as Hardy, Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, Lessing, Pinter, Achebe, Rushdie, Naipaul, Stoppard, Atwood, Heaney, Coetzee.

LI 253H: Adaptation: Literature & Film
Investigates filmic adaptations of great literature: how do filmmakers interpret classic drama, Gothic novels, detective stories, and graphic novels in creative and unorthodox ways? Counts as a Film Studies course; lab time used for screenings.

LI 314G: Caribbean Literature and Film
Major writers and filmmakers from the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Particular attention to questions of postcolonial identity, culture and globalization, and relationships between literature and film. All texts in translation. Writing Intensive.

LI 325H: Modern American Poetry
Major American poets from 1900, concentrating on the image of American and the development of modernism. Poets may include Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov.

LI 345H: Word&World: The European Novel
Study of influential works in the tradition of the European novel from Don Quixote to the twentieth century, focusing on major innovations in form and subject matter.

LI 348H: Literature and Film after Auschwitz
Inquiry into the cultural significance of the Holocaust and the challenges of living in its aftermath through study of testimony, literature, visual art, film, philosophy, and memorials.

LI 382H: Contemporary American Poetry
Poems of post-1950 American poets, opposing movements that developed and the values they represent, and the difficult relations between poet and reader.

LI 432: Major Authors
This course will focus on one or two important authors (John Milton; Donne and Jonson; Whitman and Dickinson; Flaubert; Charles Dickens; Joyce and Woolf, Ibsen and Miller, etc.) Junior/Senior standing.

LI 499: Senior Thesis