Courses

From Weimar to Film Noir

Semester: 

Summer

Offered: 

2021

Coined by two French film critics in 1946, the term film noir refers not so much to a clearly-defined cinematic genre as to the instantly recognizable dark look, mood and undercurrent of violence and eroticism which marks a wave of distinctly American films largely influenced, or even created, by German and Austrian émigré directors. In the process of unconsciously fashioning what we now call film noir, Hollywood borrowed heavily from the expressionist film techniques and chiaroscuro lighting codes used by German directors like F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst and...

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Solitude Surrounded

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2020

Solitude, isolation, alienation, anxiety and loneliness (or sometimes a combination of each at once, often when we are surrounded by others, whether in contexts public or private) are a temporary way of life in our pandemic present and an enduring aspect of the human condition. In this course, we will examine a set of works that explore this aspect of the experience of being in a variety of ways.

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The Meaning of Life

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2018

This course takes up the foundational question of the humanities: what is the meaning of life? The question of the meaning of life and how best to live it that has preoccupied literature and philosophy from antiquity to the present is as vast and vague a question as it is a venerable one. Many major philosophical figures have sought answers to the question of what, if anything, makes life worth living (consider, for example, Plato on reason, Aristotle on human function, the Stoics on eudemonia, Aquinas on beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good)....

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Novels of Thinking

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2015

This course examines selected contemporary “novels of thinking,” powerful literary works that seek to engage the deep questions of life that also animate philosophical writing in a variety of different ways. Focusing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical papers and Under the Net, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, David Foster Wallace’s essays and The Broom of the System, Marilynne Robinson’s Lila and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, we will...

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The Legacies of Modernism

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2015

This course examines works of contemporary literature that demonstrate a continued engagement with the formal, cultural and thematic ambitions of modernism as well as an investment in working to respond to or revise the aesthetic and ideological challenges that are modernism's most recognizable legacy to world literature. Reading more recent literary and filmic works by (to be chosen from among such authors as Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, the Coen Brothers, Agnès Varda, Michael Haneke, Marilynne Robinson and Ricardo Piglia) alongside modernist precursors like Woolf, Kafka...

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The Modernist Story, the Millennial Film

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

This course examines modernist novels and works of short fiction (by Kafka, Zweig, Borges, Eliot, Faulkner and Woolf,) alongside recent popular mainstream films (by the Coen brothers, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, Wes Anderson, Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Noah Baumbach, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Christopher Nolan, Richard Linklater and others) that draw upon techniques, aesthetics and themes of modernist literature (without actually ADAPTING them) in their films.

Introduction to British Literature II, Survey

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2014

This course traces the evolution of British and Irish literature from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Through the enormous breadth of the production of the fiction in this period makes any truly comprehensive survey inconceivable, the readings chosen from the canon of British and Irish literature from the Romantic period to the present are meant to indicate the range of that production. During the course of the semester, we will discuss the literary movements that the define different eras of the period, focusing on how literary texts engage with forces of...

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Transatlantic Modernism, Graduate Seminar

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2013

Literary modernism is a multifaceted transnational phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the meaning and limits of which scholars continue to dispute. In this course, we will examine this broad “movement” under the banner of the general theme of question and quest, and in terms of three definitive aspects of modernism as it is commonly understood—as a particular historical period, a set of heightened stylistic concerns and as a kind of ethical orientation toward the world.  We will read texts by some of the main figures of the (mostly Anglo-American)...

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The Booker Prize: Aesthetics, Commerce and Canon-Making | Literature 196 (Harvard)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013

This study of a selection of Booker Prize winning novels focuses on the publicity and politics of prize culture; canon-building, literary innovation and its relationship to a diverse set of linguistic, theoretical, and world literary traditions. Course readings will include novels by Murdoch, Rushdie, Hulme, Ishiguro, Byatt, Okri, Ondaatje, Roy, McEwan, Coetzee, Pierre, Hollinghurst, Desai and Barnes, each seen and through the lens of the cultural phenomenon of a prize Barnes has described as "posh bingo."

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