ENROLL

Pierre Hecker

1st 5 weeks

Constance Walker

What can and should be the role of literature in times of bitter political conflict? Caught in partisan strife, Irish writers have grappled personally and painfully with the question. We will read works by Joyce, Yeats, and Heaney, among others, and watch films (Bloody Sunday, Hunger) that confront the deep and ongoing divisions in Irish political life.

Pierre Hecker

Prerequisite: One English Foundations course and English 144 or 244

Susan Jaret McKinstry

Living in an era of rapid progress and profound doubt, Victorian poets are prolific, challenging, inventive, and insistent that poetry address contemporary questions of social inequity, science, gender, nation, self, race, and knowledge itself. Readings will include works by Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Matthew Arnold, Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others, as well as cultural images and documents.

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course

Chérif Keïta

Through discussion of book-length literary and cultural texts (film, graphic novel, theater), and including in-depth grammar review, this course aims to help students acquire greater skill and confidence in both oral and written expression. Taught three days a week in French.

Prerequisite: French 103 or equivalent

Seth E Peabody

Over the past few years, Germany has been touted as the new leader of Europe, or even of the “free world,” and at the same time has seen a surge of bitter political division within its borders. The Berlin Wall fell thirty years ago, yet tensions between East and West remain stark. Chancellor Angela Merkel implemented an open-arms policy toward refugees, yet the extremist AfD party has orchestrated a troubling rise to power based on xenophobic sentiments. And while Germany has emerged as a global environmental leader, it has simultaneously faced passionate protest from its own youth regarding failure to meet the challenges of climate change. In this class, we examine the complexities behind these seeming contradictions in contemporary Germany by analyzing diverse texts ranging from political speeches to poetry slams. Taught in German; advanced grammar review supports analytical tasks.

Prerequisite: German 204 or equivalent

David G Tompkins

Dev Gupta

Diane M Nemec Ignashev

Rejected by every major publisher, first released in France in 1955 by a press known for pornographic trash, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel about a middle-aged immigrant college professor obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl continues to feed controversy as well as to challenge and delight readers with its labyrinthian narrative, endless wordplay, innumerable intertextual allusions, and troublesome eroticism. In addition to reading the novel, we will focus on critical approaches that address the cultural clash underlying the ostensible plot, changing reception, and reception of the novel outside the US. Thus warned, you are invited to join the jury in deliberating the designs and delights of this twentieth-century literary classic.

Anna M Dotlibova

In this course students use authentic materials to learn about selected aspects of Russian culture in global context, while continuing to develop their speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills. For students who have completed the language requirement in Russian.  

Prerequisite: Russian 204 or instructor consent