Academics

Literature

 

Gloria Biamonte (see Writing)
Heather Clark
Geraldine Pittman de Batlle
John Sheehy (see Clear Writing)
T. Wilson (see Writing)

Advanced work in literature at Marlboro can take many forms. Readers may study literature from a technical, thematic, historical, or theoretical perspective. They may read literature for its philosophical or social content. Those doing Plans with Literature as one component may find it their primary interest, with supporting work in history or philosophy or anthropology or biology, or with related work in any of the arts. Or they may find literature itself a supporting context for work in writing or in other fields in the Humanities or even in other areas.

Students intending to do a substantial part of their Plan in literature should take the Seminar in Religion, Literature, and Philosophy (RLP) during their sophomore year. As soon as they have met the Writing Requirement, they should take more advanced courses in literature, while also establishing a broad range of courses in other fields, preparatory to the concentration that will fit into their Plans.

Students intending to do graduate work in Literature should take a broad historical range of literature courses, at least one course with a strong component of literary theory, and preferably some course or courses that provide historical context. Those working with literature in other languages should ideally acquire at least a reading fluency in those languages; even work with literature in translation should be supported by some work in the relevant language whenever possible.

World Studies: Literature can be a valuable component of a World Studies Plan. Students interested in World Studies Plans in literature might consider Chinese, Italian, Arabic or Spanish.

Cross-disciplinary Plans may be done and Plans in women's studies are especially suitable in the field of literature. Students should be careful, however, to fulfill the prerequisites for the literature Plan.

Starting Points (Basic and Introductory Courses)

Romantic and Victorian Poetry (HUM994)
This year-long survey course provides introductions to the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rosetti, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats. We will situate these works in their historical contexts, paying particular attention to the Industrial Revolution, the Pre-Raphaeliate Movement, the notion of the sublime, Darwinian concepts of evolution, utilitarianism, the Gothic, Victorian social codes, and the rise of the British Empire. Issues of class and gender will also be explored. (Clark, Introductory)

Twentieth Century British & Irish Poetry (HUM1023)
This year-long survey course provides introductions to several twnetieth century poets from the British Isles, among them Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Stevie Smith, Keith Douglas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Eavan Boland. We will situate the poems in their historical and cultural contexts, then focus intensely on the language. Issues to consider include WWI, WWII, modernism, the "Movement," feminism, and the Northern Ireland "Troubles." By the end of the course, you should be able to analyze poetry with confidence; you should also have a good understanding of the political and aesthetic debates which have helped shape modern poetry in Britain and Ireland. (Clark, Introductory)

Introduction to Shakespeare (HUM807)
An introduction to form and theme in Shakespeare through two history plays, two comedies, two tragedies, and two romances. Themes to be explored include kingship and authority, identity and history, gender, and love. This is a literature, not an acting course; short weekly papers required. (Pittman de Batlle, Introductory)

Women on Women (HUM652)
This course will examine heroines in selected novels by Marguerite Duras, Keri Hulme, Gordimer, Wharton, Eliot and Bronte. Our focus will be on women: the social mores, economic structures and legal contexts of their worlds; the relationship between self and other and their moments of choice. (Pittman de Batlle, Introductory)

Fiction of the American South (HUM633)
Selected works from Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. (Introductory)

Russian Novel (HUM806)
Selected Novels of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Some outside reading in history and biography. Research paper. (Pittman de Batlle, Introductory)

Health, Disease, and Culture (CDS521)
For many centuries, human beings considered life and death mainly in the context of the cosmos - the stars, rivers, spirits, ancestors, demons; healing systems were based on the need for the individual to be readjusted to society and the world. Increasingly, however, the West has come to think of illness and cure as a matter of the body, and Western medicine has probed deeper and deeper beneath human flesh, studying systems, tissues, cells, DNA. One result of this development has been the creation of a powerful Western medical establishment whose cultural importance exceeds its ability to cure the sick. This course is concerned with the development of Western medicine; we will cover ideals of disease and cure, the effect of disease on human history, and the cultural effects of assumptions about sex, heredity, and childbearing. Readings will include a history of medical thinking, a study of the effects of the Black Plague of 1348, and the diary of a midwife at the time of the American Revolution. Three 5-7 page papers, term paper, miscellaneous exercises. (Stevenson, Introductory)

Classics in Children’s Literature (HUM63)
The course will cover important children’s books written between 1850 and 1990 in England and America. Works covered will include MacDonald: The Princess & the Goblin; Carroll: Alice Through the Looking Glass ; Stevenson: Kidnapped ; Kipling: Jungle Books ; Burnett: Secret Garden, Graham: The Wind in the Willows ; Baum: The Wizard of Oz, Alcott: Eight Cousins ; C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ; J.R.R. Tokien: The Hobbit ; L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time. Two books a week, plus criticism; two 10-15 page papers, midterm, final. A fair amount of research will be done online. (Stevenson, Introductory)

Modern American Poetry (HUM199)
An examination in some detail of such poets as William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost. Three critical papers. (Wilson, Introductory)

Chaucer (HUM87)
A close reading, in Middle English, of selected stories from the Canterbury Tales, "The Book of the Duchesse," and "Troilus and Criseyde." (Introductory)

Buddhism & Poetry (HUM666)
An exploration of the presence of Buddhist ideas and practices in poetry, including some reflection on concepts of the mind, nature, contemplation, language, and the self. Readings of selected Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation and poetry in English including work by Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, W.S. Merwin, Robert Hass, and Mark Strand. (Wilson, Introductory)

Pursuing Interests (Intermediate and Thematic Courses)

Apocalyptic Hope: the Literature of the American Renaissance (HUM979)
This course centers on the American Renaissance -- that period between, roughly, 1830 and 1870 that witnessed the burst of intense intellectual and artistic energy that produced some of the most memorable and enduring American literature. We will examine as much of that literature as we can, in a range of genres: slave narratives from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, essays from Emerson and Thoreau, novels from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, poetry from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Our goal in examining these works will always be double: on the simplest level, we will be interested in how these writers interpreted and responded to the places and times in which they lived; on a deeper level, though, we will consider how each of these works -- and all of them together -- helps to create something we might call now an "American consciousness," as it attempts to invent, or to re-invent, America. (Sheehy, Biamonte, Intermediate)

What Will Suffice: Twentieth Century American Literature (HUM1262)
This course picks up, roughly, where Apocalyptic Hope left off last year: out of the American Renaissance, into the Gilded Age, the Modernist period, and through the two world wars, tracing the development of the "American" as it faces, often reluctantly and anyway never without a fight, the inevitability of the modern. We will begin with Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – a book Hemingway once famously called the beginning of all American literature; from there we’ll go on to consider the works of writers and poets as various as Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison and others.

The point of this course -- like that of its sister course, Apocalyptic Hope -- is to read as much as we can; to develop as broad an understanding as possible of both canonical and non-canonical twentieth century literature, and to consider how that literature has helped to shape not just the literature that followed it, but who we are in the twnety-first century. (Sheehy, Intermediate)

For Once, Then, Something: American Literature from Twain to Morrison (HUM1135)
Beginning with Huck and Jim’s geographic and moral journey down the Mississippi and ending with Milkman Dead’s flight into the unknown, we will read an array of richly diverse, original and, at times, radically experimental narratives. Central to our discussion will be the writers’ attempts to respond to the major social, economic and political events that shaped their lives. And we will, of course, examine the novels, stories and poems as works of art. Particular attention will be given to the metaphor of the journey—the journey out into the world of the twentieth century and the journey into often embattled individual psyches. Though thematic topics will be important to our class discussions, our close textual readings will also help us to examine the subtleties of character development, the creation of multiple storylines, and the inventive narrative devices that each writer uses in creating stories of an "American" experience. (Biamonte, Intermediate)

"Not Somewhere Else, But Here": American Literature from Kesey to Erdrich (HUM1170)
Beginning with Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we will examine a selection of contemporary American fiction in historic, aesthetic and social contexts. We will read the works of authors as various as Maxine Hong Kingston, John Wideman, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner and Louise Erdrich. In considering the influence of social and historical conditions on narrative style, we will explore the relationship between contemporary American literature and the world we live in. (Biamonte, Intermediate)

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (HUM995)
This class provides an introduction to the colonial and postcolonial literature of Africa, India and the Caribbean. We will read these literatures in relation to one another in order to establish a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized, then ask ourselves the following questions: How did Europeans writers living in colonized nations use the native population to define themselves? In what ways did they help define and limit modern conceptions of race? How did African, Indian and Caribbean writers write back as they challenged these colonial texts? Texts we will examine in dialogue include Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Achebe's Things Fall Apart; Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee's Foe; Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Kincaid's Annie John, and Walcott's Collected Poems; Forster's A Passage to India, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Roy's The God of Small Things. We will also read parts of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark and Edward Said's Orientalism. (Clark, Intermediate)

Yeats and Eliot (HUM1051)
In this class we will read the entire body of Yeats's and Eliot's poetry, and pay close attention to how each poet helped define the modernist aesthetic. Though we will focus intensively on Yeats's and Eliot's work, students will gain a broad understanding of literary culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. No prior knowledge of Yeats or Eliot is required; the class will appeal to those interested in modernism, contemporary poetry or Irish history and literature. (Clark, Intermediate)

Seminar in Religion, Literature & Philosophy (HUM5)
A year-long course, reading and discussing some of the major works of Western culture from Homer to Shakespeare. Heavy reading schedule, regular discussions, papers required. (Intermediate; two-semester course team-taught by different pairs of faculty each year.)

Nineteenth Century American Poetry (HUM64)
An exploration through close reading of the poetry of nineteenth century America, including Emerson, Thoreau, Poe and Crane but concentrating on the work of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. (Intermediate)

James Joyce (HUM996)
A chance to explore three twentieth-century masterpieces--Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses – in great detail. Themes we will consider include exile, paralysis, nationalism, modernism, memory, style, race, empire, gender, the Irish Literary Revival, and Irish identity. (Clark, Advanced)

The Other Side of Silence (HUM1231)
Using material from Ovid, Euripedes, and G. Eliot's Middlemarch, we will examine examples of what G. Eliot calls "the other side of silence". We will then explore these concepts in selected works from Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee, Morrison and Charlotte Bronte. (Pittman de Batlle)

Senior Seminar in Literature (HUM370)
A review of basic literary techniques (irony, metaphor, plot, characterization, setting) using selections from both literary works and selected critical writings. Students will present portions of their Plan work in progress; discussion, analysis, revision of Plan material in a seminar situation. (Advanced)

Areas Of Interest For Plan-Level Work

Gloria Biamonte

Heather Clark

Geraldine Pittman de Batlle

John Sheehy

T. Wilson

Sample Tutorial Topics

Gloria Biamonte

Heather Clark

Geraldine Pittman de Batlle

John Sheehy

T. Wilson