English

This course focuses on identifying key images in the Victorian imagination and analyzing the process through which these figures became loaded with meaning. It considers how, in an age of growing class conflict, gender (re)definition, technological progress, and scientific enquiry, symbolic figures aggregated hypotheses emanating from various fields of interest. Oral presentations are supported by visual material and explore the complexities and contradictions crystallized in iconic images considered in a Barthesian perspective as products of the Victorian cultural history.

This course offers a study of the principal literary movements in the second half of the 19th century: realism and naturalism. It examines the fundamental characteristics of each movement including the works of representative authors.

Conventional histories of French literature usually begin with the Chanson de Roland (c.1100), which is viewed as an inaugural text for a great tradition of national literature that runs smoothly through to the present and fosters a timeless ideal of France. However, this vision does not stand up to scrutiny – the “idea of France” turns out to be retroactive and fluid from the outset, then heavily contingent, in the post-medieval period, on changes of regime, on differences of class, gender, education or ethnicity, and on general cultural and political trends such as (to name but a few examples) Jacobinism, Romanticism, Republicanism, Fascism, Communism. This course examines how “France” and French national identity is constructed by studying a selection of key French literary texts from a variety of periods, including a postcolonial reflection on what it means to be “French.” 

This course examines how our place in the world is defined by gender. It introduces students to questions of gender in the culture and literature of Spanish America. The topic is studied through a number of cultural expressions, including prose, poetry, theatre and film, from a variety of countries and across various historical periods.

This course provides a basic study of Old English grammar, including phonetics, morphology, and syntax (pronunciation, noun/adj. declension, verb conjugation, basic rules of syntax). Readings include Bede's History of the English Church, Asser's Life of Alfred, and Old English poetry in translation.

This introductory course offers students the opportunity to study Shakespeare's plays in their original theatrical and historical contexts. Lectures combine close reading of the texts with video clips of productions, to encourage the students to read the plays not just as words on the page but as live events in the theater. Small-group seminars concentrate on close reading. The assessments asks students to analyze and contextualize selected passages from the plays and to write essays based on analysis of particular scenes.