3000 Level Literature Course Descriptions

HUMANITY 3105
Contemporary Authors and Issues
The works of contemporary authors are explored in relation to particular social, ethical, or artistic issues. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3110
Masterworks
A detailed, intensive study of a small number of recognized masterworks that have demonstrated their power outside of their own national and historical context. Recent examples: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3111
The Short Story
A representative survey of American and international short stories, including such authors as Hemingway, Carver, and Welty. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3112
The Novel
A study of the nature of the novel as an invented form of literary art. This course typically includes works by a variety of authors representative of a wide range of cultures and historical periods, so that the variety of the novel is explored. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3121
European Drama:
Twentieth-Century Survey
Intensive study of a single playwright, national theater, or survey of a particular period. Topics and periods vary, for example, Ibsen, Chekhov, and the Roots of Modern Drama; Beckett, Ionesco, and the Absurdist Theater; or the Theater of the Irish Renaissance. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3122
Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s major plays are discussed and students may see local productions. A group of Shakespeare’s plays is chosen to include tragedies, comedies, romances, and histories. Videotaped productions of the plays are viewed; emphasis is placed on the actual experience of performance and on Shakespeare’s achievement as a working playwright. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3135
Recent Poets
Intensive study of a selected group of the poets who have come into prominence since 1950, including Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and Phillip Larkin. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3136
Poetry and Latin American Avant-Garde
This course focuses on poetry produced by key figures in avant-garde circles throughout Latin America. Class discussions center on close readings of works (in translation) by poets such as Vicente Huidobro (Chile), Jorge Luis Borges and Oliveiro Girondo (Argentina), Manuel Maples Arce (Mexico), and Cesar Vallejo (Peru). The relationships of these highly influential writers to avant-garde movements in Europe and their place in the literary histories of their own countries is addressed in class lectures, as are their connections and collaborations with visual artists who shared their aesthetic concerns. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3140
Advanced Writing Workshop
Students write in a variety of creative forms: verse, prose poems, film or performance scenarios, and short fiction. For graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Prerequisite: ENGLISH 1003.

HUMANITY 3151
Topics in American Literature
Topics may include eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twentieth-century American literature, literature by women, or African American literature. Topics and periods vary. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3153
Introduction to Medieval Literature
The spirit of the middle ages manifested itself in works of art that still fascinate the modern eye, as well as in a wide array of written forms that embody the same intricacy of craft, brilliant color, and sense of the marvelous. This course introduces the student to a representative selection of works from the high middle ages (eleventh to fourteenth centuries), while exploring the many facets of a compelling and often contradictory world view. Readings and discussions are supplemented with slide lectures on the arts and handicrafts of the period, videos of reconstructed dramas, and recordings of medieval music. Students are assigned one classroom report on an aspect of medieval life or thought, and one paper requiring independent research. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3154
Shiva, Krishna, Ishtar
Before the Greeks had even thought of themselves as Greek, the Mesopotamians in Ur and Babylon were dancing in parades and singing great songs to the goddess Ishtar, their goddess of war and lust. She was said to appear in the sky rejoicing over the field of battle, and would throw her rejected lovers into the pit of Hell. This course introduces the mythology and literature of one of the world’s first civilizations, which lasted for 3000 years, and served as a model and a dream of glamour to the founders of the West. In addition to the mythology and ritual of Ishtar, students will read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian poem of creation), and numerous shorter poems, songs, and magical incantations. Halfway through the semester, we turn to India, to myths of Shiva, Brahma, and Indra, to the ecstatic trance-songs of the Rig Veda, and to Bhagavata Purana, which tells the wonder-tales of the fabulous child-god Krishna. The class will culminate with a reading of a version of the epic Mahabharata, and with its mystic centerpiece, the Bhagavad-Gita. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3156
Romantic Literature
In its strict sense, Romantic literature refers to works of the late eighteenth and early- to mid-nineteenth centuries which reacted against the decorum and formal restraint of the literature of the Enlightenment. Such works valued an intuitive, emotional understanding of experience rather than a purely logical one, which Romantics found ponderous, stultifying, and artificial. Romantics exalted in the organic beauty of nature, and distrusted the conventions and strictures of society. Chief among the Romantic writers are Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Also considered is literature of any historical period which shares or extends these writers’ sensibilities. This course examines works of the Romantics as well as works of kindred writers such as Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, Yeats, Stevens, Woolf, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, and contemporary writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3160
Topics in European Literature
Intensive study of a single author, genre, or issue. Recent example: Literature of The Troubles: Northern Ireland. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3182
Literature of African Americans
A survey course focusing on the major writers from Phillis Wheatley to James Baldwin. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.

HUMANITY 3190
Literature in Historical Contexts
Mastering a body of literature in the context of its specific historical, sociological, and ideological period is emphasized. The period and works vary. Prerequisite: First Year English requirement.