Classes

The Comic Enlightenment

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012
course website

Against the eighteenth century’s so-called progress of Reason ran a countercurrent that emphasized the irrational, the emotional, and the ridiculous. Beginning with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels & The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, the course will read comic works by authors such as Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Goethe, and Jane Austen. Alongside these, we will also examine traditional Enlightenment texts by thinkers such as Francis Bacon & John Locke.

Late Romantic Poetry (Graduate Seminar)

Semester: 
Spring
Offered: 
2012
course website

This course reads two Second-Generation Romantics, Byron & Shelley. Other writers include Keats, Wordsworth & Coleridge, Friedrich Schlegel & Soren Kierkegaard, Stanley Cavell & Alain Badiou, and others.

David Foster Wallace & Environs

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2011
course website

This course looks at the scene of contemporary American fiction via the work of someone whom many--perhaps controversially--have called the writer of his generation: David Foster Wallace. Other writers may include John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Aimee Bender, David Markson, Jhumpa Lahiri, or Junot Dîaz. Particular attention will be paid to Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Narrative Poetry

Semester: 
Fall
Offered: 
2011
course website

This course is a general introduction to reading poetry, with a focus on narrative poetry. We begin with Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, and then turn to eighteenth-century mock epics and verse narratives by Pope and Swift, and work by the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. The course will end with Byron’s satiric masterstroke, Don Juan, and TS Eliot’s toppled epic, The Waste Land.