CLL 151 - (LT) Studies in Literature

Semester Hours: 3

Fall, Spring

Designed to treat special subjects or authors at the discretion of the department, but with the student’s interest in view. Such subjects as existentialism, death, and the literary imagination, love in literature, or subjects of a like nature have been topics of recent analysis.

Current Special Topics

Literary Stylistics

Literary stylistics examines how readers interact with literary works, and how they understand and are moved by them. we consider how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carrying out stylistic analyses of poetry, drama, and prose fiction in turn. We will analyze brief texts and extracts from English literature, adopting an approach to the analysis of literary texts that can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages. Literary Stylistics provides a clear and broad-ranging introduction to stylistic analysis – covering all three literary genres in detail. The course provides an overview of stylistics as a whole and discusses the links between linguistics and literary criticism, and shows the practical ways in which linguistic analysis and literary appreciation can be combined, and illuminated, through the study of literary style. We will cover all the major theories, concepts, and methods required for the investigation of language in literature, from meter to metaphor, dialogue to discourse. It also captures the latest major developments in stylistics, such as corpus, cognitive, and multimodal approaches to the study of style. The course begins with samples of stylistic analyses. Detailed analysis of each genre follows in subsequent modules, with writing assignments designed to develop skills in stylistic analysis. The course also includes a series of checklists of style features to look for when analyzing literary texts.

Avant-Garde

This course examines the theory and practice of four defining avant-garde movements between the two world wars which sought to create a “revolution of the mind”: Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism redefined the style and politics of art. We read mainfestoes, poetry, an expressionist play, a surrealist novel, see an expressionist film and look at paintings, photomantages, collages, found objects, which defy reality; and analyze the style and politics of the groups. Works include Futurist, Dada and Surrealist Manifestoes, the expressionist play, The Son and the expressionist film, Metropolis, the surrealist novel, Nadja, and poety and art reflective of the movements and their impact worldwide.

Queering Ancient Fiction

This course will pair readings in ancient Greek and Latin literature alongside modern fiction to explore the many ways in which writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have used antiquity to think about modern queer identities. Works by Homer, Sappho, Plato, Sophocles, and Ovid (among others) will be brought into dialogue with E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Mark Merlis’ An Arrow’s Flight, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, and Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe.

CLL 151 WI2 Literary Stylistics

Literary stylistics examines how readers interact with literary works, how they understand and are moved by them. We consider how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carrying out stylistic analyses of poetry, drama, and prose fiction in turn. We will analyze brief texts and extracts from English literature, adopting an approach to the analysis of literary texts which can be applied easily to other texts in English and in other languages. Literary Stylistics provides a clear and broad-ranging introduction to stylistic analysis - covering all three literary genres in detail. The course provides an overview of stylistics as a whole and discusses the links between linguistics and literary criticism and shows the practical ways in which linguistic analysis and literary appreciation can be combined, and illuminated, through the study of literary style. We will cover all the major theories, concepts and methods required for the investigation of language in literature, from meter to metaphor, dialogues to discouse. It also captures the latest major developments in stylistics, such as corpus, cognitive and multimodal approaches to the study of style. The course begins with samples of stylistic analysis. The course also includes a series of checklists of style features to look for when analyzing literary texts.

Prerequisite: WSC 001 and WSC 002 or equivalent

CLL151 DL - Greek Literature in a Comparative Context

Greek Literature in a Comparative Context is a three-week intensive course structured to be interactive with the city of Athens, in particular, and the landscape of Greece, in general. Greek writers, as well as writers and artists from around the world, treat the Greek landscape, the myths surrounding it, its unique history and philosophy, in a special way, as if it had the power to generate both a certain type of moral intelligence and aesthetic pleasure. We will explore works treating Greece as a theme, such as Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Greek works, naturally set in their own environment, that tackle political events, such as Aristophanes’ plays, Lysistrata and the Clouds, poetry which treats the sites we are visiting by diverse poets who traveled to Greece such as Lord Byron, Herman Melville, H.D., as well as poetry by modern Greek poets such as Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Katerina Anghelaki Rooke.

CLL 151 SA - Vampires and the Gothic Imagination

This class serves as an introduction to a period of study as well as an introduction to literary study. Our subject will be the literary study of the representations of vampire in the context of the European Gothic imagination. Our course will consider this period of writing – roughly 1770-1900 – as one of great fluidity and change, as both a reaction to antiquity and a precursor to modernity. We will study the major themes in Gothic literature: horror, death, supernatural, monsters and romance. This fiction often contain cemeteries, castles, asylums, madness, curses, and the uncanny.

The term ‘Gothic imagination’ commands a vast semantic field of varied terrain: a range of possible meanings, definitions and associations. It explicitly denotes certain historical, cultural and literary phenomena—and these are the primary foci of this course. Among others, the following list contains some of the general topics which we shall explore in this course:

What are the significant social, political, and cultural events and developments of the period from approximately 1770 to 1900 relevant to the gothic imagination?
What historical information may be useful in developing a thorough understanding of Gothic texts and themes prevalent during the period?
What does the term Gothic mean in its historical sense? How does the Gothic genre in fiction evolve and how does it function?
What is the place of the Gothic in today’s world?

Prerequisite(s)/Course Notes:
May be repeated when topics vary.

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