Course Catalog

The intellectual anti-heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels, novellas, and short stories from the period beginning in 1864 have left a more decisive and enduring mark on Western culture than those of any other Russian writer. The author’s struggles with poverty, poor health, imprisonment, epilepsy, and gambling led him to question the existence of any social, moral, or metaphysical order. His underground characters, divided between reason and will, confront lust, despair, schizophrenia, and insanity, sometimes descending into sado-masochism, rape, murder, and suicide. We will read this powerful fiction with an eye first to its Russian context and then to a sampling of its international repercussions (Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky; Faulkner, Sartre, Bernhard …).

Approaches Western political discourses through major texts of 19th-century literature. Provides an introduction to socialism, anarchism, liberalism, and communism, and relates them to questions of literary production, arguing that the literary and the political imaginations are intimately related. Literary texts studied include fiction by Zola, Gaskell, Dickens, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Conrad, and poetry by French and British writers.

Traumatic reaction in the aftermath of WWI, the rapid evolution of cinema and photography, emerging trends of psychoanalytic thought, all contributed to a disturbing, often volatile, re-examination of the aesthetics of literature in the wake of a culture of ruin characterizing early 20th century Europe. Trends in mass consumption, such as the popularity of crime fiction and its existential outgrowth film noir, are largely rooted in this struggle to come to terms with cultural transitions taking place between the two wars. This course will examine the origins and aesthetics of crime fiction and film, notably, the evolution of film noir and the série noire, and other developments in Europe and America just before and after WWII. Students will analyze some of the canonical writers whose works influenced a second generation of crime fiction writers as well as the works of film directors who presided over these crucial moments of transition.

Reads Joyce's Ulysses in depth, and in the context of British modernist culture. Supporting readings include works by Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf, and documents from contemporary periodicals. Articulates the relationships between stylistic creativity and the imagination of new possibilities for living, arguing that stylistic innovation attempts seriously and productively to grasp the emerging difficulties and opportunities of late capitalism.