Introduction to the study of literature from a comparative and cross-disciplinary perspective. Readings will be selected to promote reflection on such topics as the relation of literature to the other arts; nationalism and literature; international literary movements; post-colonial literature; gender and literature; and issues of authorship, influence, originality, and intertextuality.

Prerequisites: Not offered in 2008-2009.

Exploration of the 19th-century bourgeois fascination--as evidenced in narrative texts produced and consumed by that class--with marginalized figures from the fringes of acceptable society. Texts consist mainly of novel/short stories featuring protagonists from the poor urban massess, transgressive females such as the adulteress and the prostitute, and the lineage-less figure so popular in the 19th-century narrative, the orphan outcast.

Examination of the grotesque in different cultural contexts from late Renaissance to the postmodern period comparing modes of transgression and excess in Western literature and film. Particular emphasis on exaggeration in style and on fantastic representations of the body, from the ornate and corpulent to the laconic and anorexic. Readings in Rabelais, Swift, Richardson, Poe, Gogol, Kafka, Meyrink, Pirandello, Greenaway, and M. Python.

Independent research, primarily for the senior essay, directed by a chosen faculty adviser and with the chair�s permission. The senior seminar for majors writing senior essays will be taught in the Spring term.

Prerequisites: Completion of the Language Requirement or equivalent.

Introduction to the major theories and methods of translation in the Western tradition, along with practical work in translating. Topics include translation in the context of postcolonialism, globalization and immigration, the role of translators in war and zones of conflict, gender and translation, the importance of translation to contemporary writers.

Using Novels as our primary sources, we will examine the massive social upheavals experienced in the US and USSR during the onslaught of the Great Depression and the rise of High Stalinism. The syllabus includes texts by F. Scott Fitsgerald, Yuri Olesha, William Faulkner, Abdrei Platonov, John Dos Passos, Valentine Kataev, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Richard Wright, as well as supplementary readings in history and literary theory. All readings in English.

The novella, older than the novel, painstakingly crafted, links the worlds of ideas and fiction. The readings present the novella as a genre, tracing its progress from the 17th century to the 20th. Each text read in the comparative milieu, grants the reader access to the intellectual concerns of an era.

Examines how heroes in literature and film 'come into being' through the journeys they make. Readings by Virgil, Chr�tien de Troies, Luiz Vaz de Cam�es, Aphra Behn, Voltaire and others; films by Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott and others.

Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film and literature. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the U.S. and Italy. Readings includes novels, historical studies, and film criticism.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 18 students.

Examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); a critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to literature.

Independent research, primarily for the senior essay, directed by a chosen faculty adviser and with the chair�s permission. The senior seminar for majors writing senior essays will be taught in the Spring term.

Examines the various motives that move our nature to turn to revenge: Orestes, compelled to murder by duty; Ferdinand, pathologically obsessed with his family honor and his sister's body; Heathcliff, driven to frustration and unfocused rage; the Continental Op, just taking care of a job. Organized into four broad categories, we will move through Archaic and Classical Greek poetry, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, the Victorian Novel and finish our study in American film noir. Readings will include: Archilochus, Shakespeare, John Webster, Emily Bronte, and Richard Stark.

What is an operatic text and how do we "read" it? An examination of the changing relationship between text and music in opera; operatic transformations of literature; opera's representation in literature; critical readings of opera (psychoanalytic, feminist, queer). Works by Monteverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Debussy, and Britten.