Course Catalog

Considers closely three moments when the practice of writing changed radically in response to historical and cultural processes, from Ancient Greece to 1800 (specific contents change each year). Investigates the forces that inform creative imagination and cultural production. Places those moments and those forces within a geographical and historical map of literary production, and introduces the tools of literary analysis.

This team-taught course opens up a historical panorama of European literature stretching from the 18th to the 21st century. It does not pretend to provide a survey of this period but rather showcases a selection of significant moments and locations when literary genres changed or new genres appeared. The idea is to open as many doors as possible onto the rich complexity of comparative literary history. In order to help students orient themselves within various histories of generic mutations and emergences, the professors have put together a vocabulary of key literary critical terms in the fields of narrative structure, style, and rhetoric.

A series of topic-centered courses, introducing themes in Comparative Literature.

Examines how experiences of Paris have been committed to the page from the first century to the present. Considers the uses and effects of overviews, street-level accounts, and underground approaches to describing the city and its inhabitants. Includes visits to the sewers and museums, revolutionary sites and archives, with multiple members of the comparative literature faculty speaking on their areas of expertise.
http://www.aup.edu/paris-through-its-books

The presence of Ancient Greece and Rome in our world cannot be overestimated. The Greeks taught us demokratia, our computers have a Latin name. Through Ancient Greece and Rome Western civilization has assimilated Near Eastern achievements like the alphabet. Presenting striking show cases, this course enables you to recognize how your life and thought have been shaped by ancient influences and to acquire a basic overview of more than 2000 years of Greco-Roman civilization - from the time of Troy to the many ends of Rome in late antiquity.

In Art of Screenwriting students consider the elements necessary for successful screenwriting practices, with close attention to the theory of screenwriting as influenced by other arts. In particular, a close emphasis of the course is on the art of narrative and the central role played by adaptation of novels in screenwriting practice. Character development, structure, dialogue and conflict are analyzed through exemplary scripting such as in the works of Jane Campion, Roman Polanski and others. The course culminates in a hands-on guided approach to scriptwriting by students.

Surveys American fiction from 1845-1970, with a particular focus on compassion as an intersection for literary, political, and racial discourses and practices. Considers how fictions are positioned as objects of compassion, and how fiction addresses compassion as a social, moral, and political phenomenon. Texts may include works by Frederic Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes Smedley, Richard Wright, and Joyce Carol Oates.

By promoting careful analysis of two landmarks of French literature while building skills in language and cultural semantics, oral and written communications, this course aims at helping students weave together literary meaning and cross-cultural belonging. By becoming more familiar with French literary language and mindscapes, students will further their understanding of L’Esprit français, the special relationship between literature and culture, writers and intellectual history in France.
The choice of works and pairings will differ every year according to the instructor’s interests.

Begins with Old English literary texts, then examines selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the conventions of Middle English drama and lyrics, earlier Renaissance styles of lyric poetry (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney), and then Shakespeare's sonnets and a major Shakespeare play. Reviews the dominant styles of Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry (Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Crashaw, Suckling, Waller, Milton).

From the Romantic period, covers major examples of: prose - the transition from the 19th century models to Modernist experimentation; poetry - the development of modern poetic form and the fortunes of European hermetic influence in an increasingly politicized century; and drama - examples of absurdist and left-wing drama which have dominated the British stage since the 1950s.