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The course elucidates sixteenth-century English poetry in a continental context. While narrative and discursive poetry will be explored, the emphasis is on lyric poetry, and the continuous focus is on generic experimentation from several distinctive standpoints: e.g. Petrarchism; the plain style; psalters, religious lyrics, and contrafacta; lyric sequences and other fictions of scale; and socially (but not necessarily poetically) marginal voices. Even where the course broaches conventional material, there will be an effort to redefine the questions that animate the field.

British literature of the long 18th century

A study of major theories of the baroque by theorists such as Wolfflin, Croce, and Benjamin together with a close reading of baroque tragedies by Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Calderon, Racine, Joseph Simon, and others.

Our seminar will be devoted to a slow and careful reading of Herman Melville's 1850 masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. To enhance our appreciation of the novel, we'll be reading a selection of critical, historical, ecocritical, political-theoretical, and formal studies of the novel. We'll consider its 19th-century literary-historical context in order to understand Melville's experiments with the novelistic genre in relation to his keen interest in the meaning of America and Americanness. We'll also take a look at the religious, philosophical, social, technological, commercial, and scientific issues of his day to which he alludes repeatedly throughout Moby-Dick.

Major novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, with a focus on our readerly and critical engagement with this basic category (major novel). Why such long narratives, such complicated plots, such multifarious character-systems? Why the strange mixture of realism and aesthetic eccentricity? How do we experience and understand the conspicuous scale, density, energy, or excess of such novels as Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch? The focus of the seminar will be reading these challenging, provoking, seductive texts; on the peculiar reading experiences produced by the nineteenth-century novel; and the history of critical response to this experience.

This course explores the fraught and fruitful relationship between diaspora and translation. If diaspora refers to the movement of peoples across physical space while translation points to the movement of meaning between languages, how might the subtle asymmetries and political stakes of each help to better understand the processes of the other? How do key questions of cultural transmission, original/target audience, and identity formation inflect differently across archives of diasporic and translated literature? We will read works spanning various diasporic geographies, including that of Langston Hughes, Eileen Chang, Don Mee Choi, Valeria Luiselli, Yaa Gyasi, and Mohsin Hamid. Students will gain a grounding in translation theory and diaspora studies and practice creative methods of combining them. Knowledge of a non-English language will be helpful but is not required for this course.

It is often said that "life is a narrative," or that "we live our lives in stories." But is this true? Do we always live our lives as narratives? Could we fail to live our lives as narratives? Could we choose not to live our lives as narratives? Even for those who do see their life as a story, will any old narrative do, or is there something special about the examples provided by the literary tradition? How does literary genre factor in? What is closure? And why are middles what they are? Readings from Appiah, Aristotle, Camus, Hume, Nietzsche, Simmel, G. Strawson, Velleman; Brooks, Woloch; Kahneman, Sacks; Shakespeare, Balzac, Sartre, Beckett, Calvino, Levi, Morrison. Films by Ephron, Kaufman, Polley. Taught in English.

In his "Narrate or Describe?" Georg Lukacs influentially defined narration and description in opposition to each other and proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of the former. This course examines how writers working before the advent of the novel theorized and practiced the craft of description. To do so, we will survey a wide range of genres including ancient epic, Middle English narrative poetry and travel writing, and Renaissance ekphrasis and blazon, placed in conversation with recent scholarship on description, as well as classic works of narrative theory.

This course serves as the Core Seminar for the PhD Minor in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. It introduces students to a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy with literary and arts criticism. The seminar is intended for graduate students. It is suitable for theoretically ambitious students of literature and the arts, philosophers with interests in value theory, aesthetics, and topics in language and mind, and other students with strong interest in the psychological importance of engagement with the arts. In this year's installment, we will focus on issues about the nature of fiction, about the experience of appreciation and what it does for us, about the ethical consequences of imaginative fictions, and about different conceptions of the importance of the arts in life more broadly. May be repeated for credit.