Literature

LARTS 252 — Origins and History of Drama
Theater is a part of the developing story of every human culture, an inherent paradox—the attempt to explore psychological depths and spiritual mysteries in a controlled scheme. This course examines the origins of European drama and traces its development through key transitional periods. Plays are chosen according to what is being produced locally and according to shared thematic content. Students attend at least one play in performance. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 325 — Shakespeare: The Tragedies
Shakespeare’s tragedies feature astonishing figurative language, intriguing plots, complex, multi-faceted characters, and themes that speak to the core of human experience. This course will set the tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear in the social-political context of Elizabethan England and will examine the plays’ major themes and patterns: the tragic characters’ increasing isolation from identity and society, the complete divestiture of self and the inversion of order, the conspicuous waste of talent and feeling, glimpses of transformative understanding among the ruins, and the effect of the tragic theatrical ‘process’ upon audiences, past and present. Students attend one play in performance. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 326 — Women and Literature
This course examines the writing of British and American women within a social and cultural context, paying particular attention to issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 329 — Shakespeare Studies
The works of William Shakespeare have inspired far more works of scholarship, as well as far more musical compositions, than any other English writer. This course not only examines Shakespeare’s historical and literary contexts and linguistic complexities, but also focuses on making Shakespeare’s ‘foreign’ language more accessible, so that students can appreciate just how remarkable and relevant his works are. Students read a representative selection of sonnets and plays and attend one play in performance. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 345 — Transcendence and Entrapment: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
In pioneer narratives, American Indian stories, tales and poems from New England and the Southwest, Transcendentalist essays, and African-American slave narratives, writers of nineteenth-century America explore the tension of transcendence and entrapment. This survey course focuses on how writers imagine transcendence—of literary conventions, of cultural norms and codes, of racial or gender-based identities, of geographical constraints, or of culture itself in a realm of nature or spirit—even while they detail the entrapments of culture, nature, place, identity, and the human mind. Authors will include Black Hawk, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 347 — British Literature Since 1800
This course presents readings and analysis of individual works within the English literature to develop an understanding of the methods and techniques of literary creation, the relationship between the writer and techniques of literary creation, the aesthetic ambitions of the individuals and their roles as artistic creators. Works by Wordsworth, Austen, Tennyson, Auden, Lessing and others will be discussed. (2 credits) Klein

LARTS 348 — American Literature
Reading and analysis of representative works from American literature to understand its central themes and impact on American society. Authors include Twain, Dickinson, Hemingway, Hughes, Percy, and Morrison. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 349 — Contemporary American Poetry
This course will examine various styles, methods of writing, and groups of poets that have made contemporary poetry ‘contemporary,’ emphasizing the ways in which contemporary poetry records the workings of the mind and the ways it breaks down the hierarchies of language. Reading and listening to the work of some of the most innovative poets of our time, we will think about their choices in syntax, placement of words, speaker, imagery and figurative language, levels of diction, point of view, and word choice, and listen for tone, sounds, line breaks, and rhythmic effects. (2 credits) Lepson

LARTS 351 — Contemporary Drama
Contemporary plays are obsessed with the elusive past; they pivot on dark secrets lurking behind and, to some degree caused by, superficial systems of structure and meaning. Beneath these belief systems are lives eroded by greed, injustice, isolation, and deep psychological and social wounds that seem impossible to heal. This thematic uncertainty creates some interesting technical effects on stage, testing conventional boundaries of time, space, and reason—especially in the various examples of Alternative Theatre we will explore, such as Multimedia productions, Happenings, and Performance Art. Students attend at least two of the assigned plays in performance. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 381 — Modern Drama
Modern Drama reflects a time when deeply entrenched social and psychological structures were being challenged or shattered, creating a world that seemed to teeter on the edge of either chaos or rebirth. This climate of instability was reinforced by rapid and exciting change in the theatre arts. From the intense realism of the 19th century “problem” play to avant garde innovations in Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, Expressionism, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Brechtian Epic Theatre, and Existentialist Drama, playwrights explored the modern concept that all the constructs we rely on to establish our identities—class, nationality, gender, family etc.—are not solid realities but a grand illusion in constant flux, a chance function of time and place. Students attend at least one play in performance. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 384 — The Theatre of the Absurd
This course examines themes, theories and techniques relevant to the Theatre of the Absurd, the culmination of the 20th century modernist eruption in European theatre and an influence on the nontonal languages of composers such as Feldman, Berio, and Glass. Characters caught in the relentless, abstract circularity of the Theatre of the Absurd find themselves in a constant state of restlessness, overwhelmed by an intense need to do something but with no clear sense of what or why. Ultimately they must come to grips with the fact that they have no reality beyond the illusion that is their lives—that they are merely fictional characters playing their parts in an absurd, ‘tragicomic’ play. Students will read and attend plays by Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter and will have the opportunity to collaborate with students in the Music Theory course, Order and Chaos in Music Since 1945 (THYU 329). (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 387 — The Revolutionary Musical Theatre of Bertolt Brecht
This course will examine the life and work of one of the most complex 20th Century artists, focusing specifically on: Brecht’s early expressionist influences, the formulation of the ‘epic theatre,’ the contrast with ‘Aristotelian’ drama, the ‘alienation’ effect, the innovative incorporation of multimedia effects, his musical collaborations with Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, epic theatre acting and stage design, and audience and political responses (in Brecht’s time and now). Throughout the study of his landmark plays, we will place Brecht’s remarkable dramatic contributions in his changing socio-historical contexts. Students will also have the opportunity to set Brecht’s poems to music. (2 credits) Keppel

LARTS 445 — Contemporary Literature
Analysis and discussion of contemporary novels and stories chosen for their technical variety and representation of cultural aspects of modern life. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 446 — Reading, Writing, and Race: Contemporary American Ethnic Literature
This course explores the cultural and literary politics of reading, writing, and race, with a focus on recent Native American, Mexican American, Asian American, and African American literature. We will examine what readers (including ourselves) expect of “ethnic” writers, what writers expect of their readers, and what writers expect of other authors. We will also ask how race impacts reading, how authors address cultural “insiders” and “outsiders,” and why “ethnic literature” is given a distinct category in American literature. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 448 — Ethics and the Environment in American Literature
This course examines how social categories of race, class, and gender shape encounters with the environment. Reading American literature from industrialism to the present, students will consider the unique ways that poets and fiction writers protest urban and workplace pollution, or express feelings of vulnerability in nature, while they also raise questions about national belonging. Although we will discuss difficult problems, including worker oppression, lynching, and pesticide poisoning, we will also look at writing as a powerful tool of hope and resistance. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 455 — The Animal in Literature
This course investigates the power and the limitations of literary depictions of nonhuman animals. Students will explore the insights and misunderstandings literature communicates regarding the perspectives of animals, the ways our ideas about animals shape ideas about humanity (and vice versa), and the roles animals play in our creation of fiction and poetry. Students will read literature from different historical periods and cultures, and they will consider the ways that writers engage multiple disciplines—the physical sciences, psychology, sociology, ethics, and philosophy—to describe animals. (2 credits) Gatlin

LARTS 463 — Beyond Reality: Postmodernist American Fiction
This course examines problems of authenticity and inauthenticity raised in postmodernist American fiction and criticism written from 1965 to the present. Students will explore what it means when postmodernists declare that nothing is “authentic”—true, valuable, or real. They will consider the role of literature in a world where texts may supersede reality; ponder what it means to think of the world and our identities as representations or cultural myths; and reflect on ways to find—or make—meaning when all foundations of knowledge are challenged. (2 credits) Gatlin