Catalog Entries |
Fall 2018
Jan 26,2025 |
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 | Select the Course Number to get further detail on the course. Select the desired Schedule Type to find available classes for the course. |
| LITR 100 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LITERATURE |
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Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the current Schedule of Classes for policies concerning Independent Study.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Literature Department |
| LITR 101 - THE STORY OF LITERATURE |
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History and literature are intimately connected: every piece of literature is a product of history, and history itself is nothing less than storytelling. This introductory course examines literature’s relationship with history and is intended for general education students as well as those considering the Literature major. Students will be trained in historical approaches to the study of literature. Students will survey an historically and culturally broad body of literature in order to explore how literary texts, as primary sources, reflect and respond to historical change. This course draws upon the work of cultural historians to examine how literary forms and contents change along with political, economic, and technological changes. Students in this course will engage in historiography, which interrogates, equally, the history of writing and the writing of history. History and literature, perhaps more than any other disciplines, require students to be attentive to problems and to ask: which citizens have been authorized to tell stories, about whom are these stories told, whose stories have been preserved, and what factors (economic, political, technological, epistemological) determine how such stories are narrated oriented, and received?
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Historical Prspctve, WRITING INTENSIVE |
| LITR 198 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation describes a transfer course from another institution where an equivalency to a Ramapo College course has not been determined. Upon convener evaluation, this course ID may be changed to an equivalent of a Ramapo College course or may fulfill a requirement.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 199 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this course number has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 200 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LITERATURE |
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Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the current Schedule of Classes for policies concerning Independent Study.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Literature Department |
| LITR 201 - READINGS IN POETRY |
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(Formerly LITR 215) Out of all of the art forms, poetry is the closest to music. Its intricate rhythm and melody often move and influence us on an unconscious level. As readers of poetry, the key is to pay close attention to the way language is used to evoke images and dreams. The purpose of this course is to give you an overview of the development of poetry throughout differing artistic and literary movements. We will always emphasize the close reading of poetry. By the end of the course, you should feel comfortable coming up with a reading of a poem that analyzes both its form and content.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department |
| LITR 202 - MAGAZINE WORKSHOP |
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(Formerly LITR 233) A workshop in magazine production. This course will produce the College literary magazine, Trillium, from start to finish. Areas covered include: soliciting stories, poems, and art work; evaluating the material; the lay-out of the magazine; proofreading for the printer; and distribution. Critical and professional skills will be emphasized. Permission of Instructor.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department |
| LITR 203 - METHODS OF LITERARY STUDY |
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Literature crosses borders. It doesn‘t need a passport. Literature? that human urge to endlessly invent and tell stories—emerged thousands ofyears ago and
continues its travels today across the globe: an international, intercultural, and interlinguistic exchange, posing questions about wisdom, humor, philosophy, and every other kind of human impulse. Methods ofLiterary Study invites students on the journey, exploring a broad selection ofliterary texts, produced across the world and across eras. Students come to understand something ofthe aesthetics, genres, and periods that define literature as they hone their writing and perform literary research. Discovering literary theory, they encounter new ideas about what literature is, what it does, and why it has endured for so long and in so many cultural guises.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, WRITING INTENSIVE |
| LITR 210 - LITERATURE AND FILM |
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This class will examine the treatment of narrative as practiced in both literature and film. Students will explore the relationship between the two forms and consider which narrative devices and techniques are common to both and which are exclusive to one form or the other. Our literary and cinematic texts are produced across the world, across eras, and across genres. Students develop critical skills enabling necessary to explore,both literary and cinematic narratives. The specific topic of this course (which genres, regions, periods, etc. covered) as well as which readings and screenings will be considered will change from semester-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 212 - DETECTIVE FICTION AND FILM |
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(Formerly LITR 243) An attempt to trace the evolution of this varied genre, and of its dominant character, the detective and its counterpart, the "killer." Born of the Gothic tradition, the detective story asks basic questions: not just "whodunit?" but what is right and what is wrong? Where can justice be found? While we may read some European texts (Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon) the course will focus on American writers (Poe, Twain, Raymond Chandler, Himes, Highsmith, others), exploring why the form has enjoyed such relentless fascination cross cultures and for modernist and post-modernist alike. Much of our attention will be taken up with hard-boiled fiction and film noir (two well documented genres of crime stories). Thus, the course will also consider the role of the detective story in film. Americans usually consider film a commodity, but will treat it as an art form. To become discerning viewers we will acquaint ourselves with the terminology and methods of the film critic, and develop a refined appreciation for a medium we may often take for granted.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selec-Am.Li |
| LITR 220 - SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: PRE-COLUMBIAN TO ROMANTIC |
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In this class we will examine American literature from the early European colonization of the Americas to the late 19th century. From the legal, religious, and historical works of Puritan writers to the Romantic works of the American Renaissance, we will consider what kinds of stories Americans wrote about themselves and we will seek to interpret these texts. We will read at least one novel, as well as poetry, short fiction, and works from other genres. We want to consider these texts as works of art in their own right and as products of a grander American literary tradition that we can trace from the 17th century to the present.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 221 - SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: ROMANTIC TO CONTEMPORARY |
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In this class we will examine American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beginning roughly from the Romantic writers ofthe mid nineteenth century and then moving on to the Realistic and Naturalistic writers ofthe post#Civil War period up through the Modern era, we consider what kinds ofstories Americans wrote about themselves and how we should interpret these texts. We want to consider these texts in their own right and as products ofa grander American literary tradition that we can trace back to the nineteenth century and beyond. This class will also encourage students to hone their reading and writing skills. Students will be asked to read and annotate the literature with an analytical eye. Since students will be writing literary analysis papers, they will want to write these papers using the MLA (Modern Language Association) format.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 223 - SURVEY OF AMERICAN POETRY |
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(Formerly LITR 221) A survey of American poetry from Colonial to contemporary times. We will consider the range of ideologies and styles that have determined the history of poetry in American culture, as well as the sociocultural circumstances that inform this history. Students will be expected to develop a critical understanding of how to interpret a poem and write a lucid analysis of its significance.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 224 - AMERICAN DRAMA |
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(Formerly LITR 287) A study of the text and performances of characteristic American plays including 19th century melodrama, ethnic productions, musical comedy, and drama. The relationship between drama and society and between text and performance will be explored through the study of representative dramatists such as Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, August Wilson, David Mamet, and others.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 226 - AMERICAN SHORT STORY |
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(Formerly LITR 204) An in-depth study of the development of the American short story as an indigenous art form. Authors will include Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Twain, Crane, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Barthelme, Vonnegut, Oates, and others. Particular attention will be given to the evaluation of technique and the development of critical awareness.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 228 - COLONIAL AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 242) Colonial American Literature focuses on major Puritan and Colonial writers including Bradford, Winthrop, Williams, Wigglesworth, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Mather, Edwards, Crevecoeur, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Wheatley, Native American writers, and others. We may think of Colonial literature as uniform and staid; however, these writers work in a variety of genres, including poems, sermons, histories, and narrative accounts. Nor do these writers speak with one voice. Perspectives range from Puritan patriarchs to dissenters to entrepreneurs to revolutionaries. Our writers include slaves and kidnap victims as well as wealthy Virginia landowners. From this medley, we hope to understand the tensions and paradoxes that produce our contemporary understanding of who we are as Americans and where it is we came from. From discovery to conquest to Puritanism to Revolution, we will chart the early evolution of American literary expression.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 230 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 227) This course offers a reading of fiction (the novel and short story), poetry, and drama as it was practiced in the United States in the 19th century. This century saw not only the birth of an American literary identity with Romantic fiction by James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving, but a later explosion of literary talent with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. This is also the century when civil war threatened the new nation's identity and survival. Slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobson, fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and non-fiction by Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau challenged Americans' fundamental notions of freedom and identity. Later, responding to a rapidly changing world, writers like Mark Twain, Paul Dunbar, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin turned to Realism and Naturalism. While the reading list will frequently change, students will encounter a wide variety of literary voices of the era.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 231 - 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN AUTHORS |
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(Formerly LITR 225) America's 19th century saw the emergence of a growing number of "damned scribbling" women writers who moved at times boldly, at times hesitantly, into the public space through publication. A period of enormous increase in population, of mesmerists, spiritualists, and social reform, the century's female authors participated in this ferment of new ways of thinking. The turbulence of the relatively new country emerging and dealing with abolition, the eventual Civil War and its aftermath, fostered a sisterhood of women writers working both with and against the American Transcendentalists and other well-known period authors to form a "literature of their own." Journals, letters and essays in the mass market magazines created what is often termed domestic, sentimental literature which we will analyze through a discussion of literary criticism and merit.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Gender & Sexuality, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Gender Issues, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 232 - 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL |
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(Formerly LITR 240) A survey of the modern American novel as it developed over the past century. Once considered a frivolous form of entertainment, the novel has supplanted poetry as perhaps the premier literary form of the 20th Century. At the same time, some say the novel is dying. How can both be true? Is either? What is it about long prose works of fiction that speaks to us? How have the various literary, philosophical, intellectual, social, and political events of the century changed this durable genre? The course will consider a variety of novels, but will focus on how the novelists created and responded to literary movements over the 20th century, from the Progressive age to Modernism, Postmodernism, and beyond. While the reading list will frequently change, students will encounter a variety of writers, including William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 233 - HARLEM RENAISSANCE |
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(Formerly LITR 280) The birth of the modern African American literary consciousness movement was forged by writers in the early 20th century. Centered in New York and Harlem of the 1920s, a group of talented writers and activists initiated a movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. The course will explore the works of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, George Schyler, Countee Cullen, Dorothy West, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, and many others whose themes and ideologies have influenced contemporary American writing.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-AFR AMR STD-Hum & Culture, MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-African-Amer Stds., MJ-Amer-Amer Regionalism, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER- African-Amer Studies, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 234 - CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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An exploration and discussion of selected contemporary American prose, poetry, and drama, with a special emphasis on the crucial themes which emerge from this writing. The reading list will likely change regularly and will feature work from visiting writers in the Readings at Ramapo series. We will try to confine our reading to literature produced in the past 10-20 years, so the reading list will change semester to semester.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 235 - AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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(Fomerly LITR 230) A study of the development of the thematic, symbolic, and mythical strains in African American literature since 1940. The importance of literature as an art form to the African American writer and as a reflection of the Black experience in America will be stressed.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-African-Amer Stds., MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER- African-Amer Studies, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 236 - MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 252) Multicultural literature examines the many, varied voices of American minorities whose visions extend from pre-colonial to contemporary periods. Poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction form the core of the course. The purpose of the course is to define the dynamism of American culture through American literature.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-AFR AMR STD-Hum & Culture, MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-Amer-Race & Ethnicity, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Multicultural Studies, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 237 - IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 235) A survey of Irish-American literature (fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography, short fiction). The course begins with early immigrant fiction, written before the famine of the 1840's. Then, we will consider the effect of the famine on Irish-American fiction later in the century. We will also read work by well-known Irish-American literary figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, like Fitzgerald, O'Connor, Kennedy, and others. Irish-Americans have produced significant works of drama and film as well. We may also consider popular entertainers like George Carlin and George McManus. Ultimately, the course is an attempt to understand how forces of history and culture like the famine, the Catholic Church, and the Irish Diaspora have shaped and reshaped the Irish-American experience.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 240 - SURVEY OF BRITISH LITERATURE: ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURY |
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(Formerly LITR 203) A chronological study of some of the poetry, essays, fiction and drama of the English speaking peoples of the British Isles. The course will survey a representative sample of texts and writers from the Anglo-Saxon period to about 1780. The course seeks to provide students with an overview of the historical epochs in which writers worked and the variety of traditions and genres which shaped their artistry. Recommended for students with liberal arts interest in the humanities and for students planning further study in language and literature.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, WRITING INTENSIVE |
| LITR 242 - SURVEY OF BRITISH LITERATURE: ROMANTIC TO CONTEMPORARY |
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Survey of British Literature: Romantic to Contemporary looks at a broad selection ofprimary and secondary literary texts, produced principally by British authors within the national and international context of colonial and posteolonial Britain during this long period. We will read these texts closely, attending to issues of genre, figurative language, national and international historical context, literary periods, British ethnocentrism/ eurocentrism, literary influences, including the interconnectedness of authors geographically and temporally. The art and music of the periods will also occasionally be reviewed to add to an understanding ofthe cultural background of the literary texts, and the breadth of influence(s).
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West |
| LITR 244 - SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS |
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Open to all students who wish to develop greater understanding and critical appreciation of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater practices, Shakespeare's development as a dramatist, and his contributions to the development of the western imagination. Lectures and discussions will emphasize the treatment of Shakespeare's plays as text and script. The course will include the viewing and discussion of key 20“ and 215' century expositions of Shakespeare's plays through cinematic and video media. This course aims to familiarize students with the works of Shakespeare and his inheritors through an exploration of five plays (Titus Andronicus, Othello, Coriolunus, Midsummer Night ’s Dream, and Richard I1) and their varied afterlives. The focus of the course will be “Shakespeare with a Difference," meaning that we will examine l) how cultural difference is represented in these plays and 2) how various cultures have interacted with early modern texts that differ quite radically (historically and geographically) from their own. We will begin the course by reading Titus Ahdronicus, looking at early modern notions of authorship as they relate to performance and printing practices. Next, we will
read Othello as we interrogate how its stage history has variously performed its
characters’ national, racial and gendered identities. We will read and discuss the
complicated nature of using Shakespeare on pages, stages. and screens in order to
“perform identity." Are these performed identities Shakespeare‘s? Are they ours? Are they attempts to represent (and thereby domesticate) selves radically other than ourselves? After surveying some of Shakespeare’s sources, we will consider the play’s afterlife, particularly as it was performed in the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. After Othello, we will read another tragedy, Coriulanus. In particular, we will examine what it means to approach the play through a Marxist lens. Next we will read A Midsummer Night ’.s' Dream as we discuss the cultural uses of comedy as a genre and humor as a vehicle for critique. Finally, we will read one of Shakespeare’s greatest history plays, Richard II. We will examine how Shakespeare stages England’s transitionfrom the feudalism ofthe Middle Ages into the liberal capitalism of the Enlightenment.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800 |
| LITR 246 - SHAKESPEARE ON FILM |
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The use of Shakespeare‘s plays as celluloid “scripts” dates from the earliest stages of cinema history. Cinema has been a major vehicle through which the 20"‘ and 21“ centuries have “reinvented” Shakespeare for a global audience. In this course, we will study a select body of plays which have received multiple treatments in film, video and "new media” formats, acrosshistorical periods and national borders. We will examine films from Australia, China, Finland, India, Italy. Japan, Russia, Syria/Iraq/Lebanon/Kuwait, the UK, and the US. We will also survey
writings in the global history offilm theory, including essays by international authors such as Andre Bazin (France), Bela Balazs (Hungary), Hugo Milnsterberg (Germany), and Sergei Eisenstein (former Soviet Union). Particular attention will be given to how the formal qualities of poetic drama and cinema, in different ways, challenge, structure, and/or reinforce our collective perceptions of past and present cultures.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness |
| LITR 250 - THE ENGLISH NOVEL |
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(Formerly LITR 205) A study of the rise and development of the modern English novel, from its 18th-century origins in popular journalism through the serious social realism of the Victorian era. Such major authors as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and the Brontes will be read and discussed within the context of British and European social history. (This course is also offered as a Study Abroad course)
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West |
| LITR 252 - MODERN IRISH LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 281) This course will examine the works of modern Irish writers from William Butler Yeats, Sean O'Casey, and James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle and Maeve Binchy. Focus will be given to the interaction of history, culture and literature in the development of modern Ireland.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 260 - WORLD MYTHOLOGY |
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(Formerly LITR 244) This course will explore the meaning of mythology by examining a great variety of myths drawn from many different cultures. Although it will focus on three broad types of myth -- cosmological, fertility and hero narratives -- it will highlight the socio-historical circumstances that give each myth its particular meaning, as well as those aspects of the human condition that provide a common ground for this intricate web of meaning.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 263 - SURVEY OF SCIENCE FICTION |
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Science fiction reflects our most fantastic dreams and hopes of technological and social change. Our fears and anxieties too. Sci-Fi’s thought experiments dramatize social, political and historical concerns. Critic Darko Suvin calls it a literature of “cognitive estrangement” that requires us to learn how to read actively to comprehend the fictional universes of Sci-Fi. This course will explore, in broad strokes, the emergence of science fiction as a distinct genre. Readings will vary, but we will consider authors as diverse as Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler. Through selected literary works, films, television, music, art and other materials representing diverse voices from around the world, we will discuss the role of science and the implications of new scientific knowledge and technologies on human society, all living beings and the planet itself. How do biotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence change our understanding of what constitutes the “human?” Is our notion of “humanity” itself constructed, like other categories of identity such as gender and race? How do math and theories such as relativity or quantum physics transform how we understand our world? If reality is stranger than fiction, as they say, this course is guaranteed to stretch your concept of reality! Cross-listed course: SCIN-263 and LITR-263.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Lecture/Online, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection, TS-Sch Core- SCP Category |
| LITR 264 - SURVEY OF WORLD DRAMA |
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The course will examine the history of global theater and dramatic literature; selected plays from several different regions of the world will be read in English translation. Taking a global perspective, we will study connections and divergences among many types of drama from around the world: Greek and Roman tragedy, Japan's Noh drama, India's kathakali, Chinese opera, Italy's commedia dell'arte, Spanish Golden Age, Medieval, Renaissance and Modern European drama, the negritude movement, Latin American, and/or North American drama. The course will engage students as critical audience members and will help them develop their critical and analytical skills. While it will be impossible to cover global theater in one semester, readings for the course will cover at least three historical periods and/or aesthetic movements from around the world. The course will also consider theoretical approaches to drama from around the world.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 265 - THE HEBREW BIBLE |
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(Formerly LITR 219) An explanation of Biblical literature, its metaphors and literary forms, its theological constructions, and religious insights. The meaning of the Bible as a literary and religious document will be examined through a series of readings and discussions.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 266 - THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE |
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(Formerly LITR 220) An explanation of Biblical literature, its metaphors and literary forms, its theological constructions, and religious insights. The meaning of the Bible as a literary and religious document will be examined through a series of readings and discussions.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selec-Am.Li, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 268 - SURVEY OF GREEK DRAMA |
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The earliest traceable influence on the development of western drama is that exerted by the plays performed in the amphitheater at Athens, most of which may now be lost, as are the plays of those early traditions that lead to the construction of such a theater. We do possess, however, several works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, all of which developed out of Athenian culture and were recognized for greatness in ancient texts of the period. These works were known to western dramatists since the time of their composition, and have helped to shape the development of that art. The course will provide a general familiarity with the authors listed above by reading representative works of each. We will try to see these works in the context of Greek myth, the culture of fifth century Athens, and the hints and fragments of earlier ceremony and drama. Modern, global versions/rewritings of several plays as well, will also be part of our study and discussions. In addition, we will study some theoretical responses to Greek plays by Foucault, Irigaray, Butler and others,
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 269 - LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES |
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(Formerly LITR 210) In this course we will explore some of the literature produced during the Middle Ages, focusing on the Western tradition. As we read the major works introduced here we will examine various critical and interpretive issues relevant to the period including genre, content, convention, and the meaning of the label "medieval literature" itself. What does it mean to talk about medieval literature or culture in terms of religious, social, and philosophical ideals and/or realities? We will consider these and other questions primarily through class discussion and close reading, supplemented by occasional lectures to provide cultural and literary contexts. All works will be read in translation.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 270 - SURVEY OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 223) An overview of the main periods and movements of Western European literature from the Middle Ages to modern times, stressing the concept of genres, the development of ideas, and the relationship of literature to the development of Western culture. The class will hold in-depth discussions on representative works selected from the masterpieces of each period.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 271 - EUROPEAN SHORT STORY |
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(Formerly LITR 211) The course is a survey of the short story genre as practiced by the European masters of the form from Boccaccio to Solzhenitsyn. The chronological approach is hoped to provide students with a firm sense of a logical development of the genre's form. Much attention will be given to the moral, aesthetic, and other concerns of cornerstone authors and works.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 272 - MODERN EUROPEAN DRAMA |
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A survey of modern trends in dramatic literature from realism and naturalism to the Theater of the Absurd and post~modern theater. We will read and discuss play by such major authors as Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Ionesco, Stoppard and Churchill. Students learn to interpret and critically analyze the development of drama and performance in Europe through the 20"‘ century and study the historical, cultural, social and political contexts of this development.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 273 - MODERN NOVEL IN FRANCE |
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(Formerly LITR 253) A study of the development of the French novel into a major art form in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nineteenth century novelists such as Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola powerfully illuminate psycho-social problems and the new social conditions that created them. In the 20th century, writers like Proust, Gide, Malraux, and Camus have proposed new formulations of these problems.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 274 - RUSSIAN LITERATURE & CULTURE |
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(Formerly LITR 258) The course suggests an acquaintance with National Riches of Russia both in literature and art. A study of famous Pushkin's verse and a poem, Chekhov's stories; a survey of modern Russian literature (K. Paustovskly, A. Akhmatova). The second part introduces students to folk art: painting, music, decorative, trades. The students will discuss Russia, its people, traditions, past and contemporary life.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-INTL-Intl Comparative 'West, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 275 - SURVEY OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 268) This course will be an interpretation of the Spanish-American Literature. The material will introduce us to its social-economic and political situation through the exploration of masterpieces of Hispanic letters in English translations, considered comparatively as contributions for the main currents of thought and expression in the Americas.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 276 - LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAS |
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This course is designed introduce students to the many historic, thematic, and stylistic concerns
common throughout the literatures of the Americas. From the colonization that disrupted Native
populations, to settlement, slavery, revolution, immigration, and many other issues, New World
nations share a common heritage that we will explore. We will, therefore, read works from
throughout the Americas: Canada, the United States, Central and South America, and the
Caribbean, and our readings will represent different genres, from pre-Columbian times through
the present. We will engage with these texts by reading and writing about them, and by
discussing them during our class time.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 277 - SURVEY OF AFRICAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 228) This course is designed to provide an introduction to the literatures of the African continent. Over the course of the semester, we will read and discuss works from several different African nations, including Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, and others. These works will represent different literary genres: essays, a play, poetry, short stories, and novels. They will also include, albeit in written form, works from the oral literatures fundamental to the African canon. Of course, in a single semester, we cannot possibly do justice to the rich literary tradition of all of Africa. However, I hope that this course will give you a sense of some of Africa's most noteworthy authors, literary forms, and concerns.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-AFR AMR STD-Hist & Pol Tht, MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Africa, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 279 - THE GRAPHIC NOVEL |
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The Graphic Novel studies the rise and development of what some consider a "new" literary form: the graphic novel (or graphic narrative, or sequential art, or comic book). Of course, this "new" art form is at least a century old. In this course, we will consider the graphic narratives primarily as literary texts. Of course, graphic narratives are also works of visual art. Comics are filled with pictures, but these are not illustrations in the traditional sense--they are part of the language of the form. Students will need to negotiate two symbol systems--cartooning and language--and determine how they work together to create meaning. While many think of the graphic novel as an American form, it is an international phenomenon. We will read comics from around the globe and consider them in cultural, historical, and literary contexts. To help us with this analysis, students will also read works in theory and criticism, as well as traditional literary texts.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Global Awareness, OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 280 - INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING |
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This course is an introductory course to issues of craft and aesthetics as they apply to the writing of short stories and poetry. The class will be devoted to student work and critiquing skills as well as to the analysis of literary texts.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity |
| LITR 282 - FICTION WRITING WORKSHOP |
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(Formerly LITR 229) This course focuses on the craft and production of student fiction and on the problems of craft and aesthetics as they apply to the writing of short stories. The class will be devoted to student work and critiquing skills as well as to the analysis of literary and craft texts.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department |
| LITR 283 - POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP |
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(Formerly LITR 236) An analysis of the theories and visions of modern poetry.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department |
| LITR 284 - PERSONAL ESSAY: CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP |
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(Formerly LITR 222) If you want to get serious about your writing, this course is a great place to begin. We will be concentrating on personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism. Through a variety of exercises, writing assignments, reading assignments--and through participating in the workshop aspect of the course, as an editor/critic and as a recipient of writing suggestions--your writing is bound to improve. Keep in mind that the purpose of this class is to give you the structure to work creatively on your writing and be productive. How much your writing ultimately blossoms will depend on the time and commitment you put into the course.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department |
| LITR 290 - TOPICS: |
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The descriptions and topics of this course change from semester-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor. Prerequisite: varies with the topic offered.
This course will focus on the evolution of Contemporary American Poetry.
From Performance Poetry to The New Sincerity to Conceptual Poetics, we will look at the varied and diverse kinds of poetry in the current literary scene and discuss how these poets converse with 20th century American poetry. We will familiarize ourselves with the different groups and “schools” of poetry. Both poems and commentary regarding the theory and practice of poetry will be covered. Additionally, the course will work to illuminate the role poetry has in our society and how it may relate to our own lives in powerful and transformative ways. The course works in tandem with the Readings at Ramapo Visiting Writers Series and works of visiting writers will also be covered in this course
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department |
| LITR 291 - CREATIVE WRITING TOPICS |
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A “Topics Course” in creative writing allows a student to pursue their own writing within a focused study of a particular theme, content or genre area. Topics courses in creative writing offers an opportunity to concentrate the attention of the class on specific material that helps develop the writer as a student of that material as well as a practitioner of the material. This course counts toward the Creative Writing concentration or minor.
WRITING FICTION WITH FOLKLORE, MYTHOLOGY AND FAIRY TALES: In this Creative Writing Topics course, we will study the form and content of the traditional stories known as fairy tales and myths. We will read essays, short stories, a novella, and a novel belonging to those storytelling traditions, and we will explore both how contemporary writers write using traditional material and what it means to do so. Students will produce a portfolio consisting of five major assignments—a reflection on their experiences with traditional literature, three short stories adapted from the traditional stories of their choice, and a craft essay describing how they have adapted traditional materials to their modern aims—and many writing exercises completed in class throughout the semester. Portfolios must include all drafts of the five major assignments for full credit. Midway through the semester, the class will convert to a traditional creative writing workshop. Each student will submit two short stories for peer critique.
FAIRY TALE: In this Creative Writing Topics course, we will study the form and content of the traditional stories known as fairy tales and myths. We will read essays, short stories, a novella, and a novel belonging to those storytelling traditions, and we will explore both how contemporary writers write using traditional material and what it means to do so. Students will produce a portfolio consisting of five major assignments--a reflection on their experiences with traditional literature, three short stories adapted from the traditional stories of their choice, and a craft essay describing how they have adapted traditional materials to their modern aims--and many writing exercises completed in class throughout the semester. Portfolios must include all drafts of the five major assignments for full credit. Midway through the semester, the class will convert to a traditional creative writing workshop. Each student will submit two short stories for peer critique.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Lecture/Online, Online Course Literature Department |
| LITR 292 - TOPICS IN AMERICAN POETRY |
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This course focuses on the evolution of American Poetry. We will discuss how American poets converse with and within the poetic traditions and schools developed in the United States. The course illuminates the role poetry plays in our culture and how it relates to our own lives in powerful and transformative ways. The course will often work in tandem with the Readings at Ramapo Visiting Writers Series and works of visiting writers will often be covered in this course.This course will rotate its focus, allowing each semester to choose a theme or time period, allowing students to explore different aspects of poetry in new contexts , in different historical or thematic settings.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Lecture/Online, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity |
| LITR 293 - STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION |
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This course allows students to study the art of fiction as it has been practiced in the United States. The short story and the novel were long the main modes of narrative storytelling, and both have undergone sea changes in their development. Once considered a frivolous form of entertainment, the novel became perhaps one of the world's premier literary forms. At the same time, some say the novel is dying. l-low can both be true? ls either? Somehow, prose fiction uniquely explore literary, philosophical. intellectual, social, and political events —allowing readers to step into and out of the Lives of others. This course will rotate its focus, allowing each semester to choose a theme or time period, allowing students to explore different aspects of the novel in new contexts. Some semesters we will focus on the short story, some on the novel, in different historical or thematic contexts.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Lecture/Online, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity |
| LITR 295 - TOPICS IN POPULAR LITERATURE |
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This course offers a study in less traditional literary forms and themes that reflect popular culture and tastes. The course will consider various popular literary forms: such as cult books, extended & on-going fictional series, fanfiction, transient popular genres. Texts will be read within a broader cultural context. Focus may be on a particular genre (i.e., “Chick Lit”; war literature; horror fiction) or an era (i.e., “the sixties”). Students will grapple with aesthetic and cultural judgments on popular forms and explore issues of high and low culture. May be repeated for credit when topics vary. Description for Spring 2024
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Lecture/Online, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity |
| LITR 298 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation describes a transfer course from another institution where an equivalency to a Ramapo College course has not been determined. Upon convener evaluation, this course ID may be changed to an equivalent of a Ramapo College course or may fulfill a requirement.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 299 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this course number has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 300 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LITERATURE |
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Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the current Schedule of Classes for policies concerning Independent Study.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Literature Department |
| LITR 302 - GRAMMAR: THEORY AND PEDAGOGY |
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(Formerly LITR 314) This course is designed to introduce you to the study of grammar and to provide you with an overview and detailed analysis of the structure of the English language. It is also designed to introduce you to concepts of language change, regional and social dialects--both standard and nonstandard, and the makeup of Standard American English. We will distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive grammars and examine their implications for the teaching of grammar and usage. Throughout this course, we will use the tools of linguists to critically approach and analyze the structure of Standard American English. Topics covered will include a brief examination of varieties of English; constituent structure and syntax; the morphology of English, both derivational and inflectional; the major parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and qualifiers, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) We will also study ways that clauses can be combined into sentences using coordination and subordination.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department |
| LITR 304 - HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE |
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(Formerly LITR 344) This course traces the development of the English language from its Indo-European roots through the major stages of English, including Old English (the language of Beowulf), Middle English (Chaucer's English), and early modern English (Shakespeare's English), through present day English. We will begin by establishing grammatical and linguistic categories and examining some principles of historical linguistics, focusing on the mechanisms and causes of language change. Our study will include etymology (particularly work with the OED) and developments in American English, including dialectical variety. The course seeks to make students aware of the structure of their language and help them become sensitive to linguistic change and difference.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800 |
| LITR 306 - LITERARY THEORY |
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In this course, students will survey a series of methodological approaches used, historically, to analyze literary representation. We will begin in the classical world, with Platonic (essentialist) and Sophistic (contextualist) theories of representation. From there, we move on to study the theories oflanguage and narrative developed during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the 19th Century. Most the course, however, examines 20"‘ and 21“ literary theories (Saussurean
semiotics, Russian Formalism, French structuralism, cultural materialism, along with feminist, queer, Marxist, psychoanalytic, ecocritical, ecofeminist, and deconstructive approaches to literary texts). The course surveys texts written by those for whom writing, narrative, and literature—--or representation more broadly conceived—are always, already situated within (and therefore best
understood within) political, historical, cultural, and ideological contexts. Students in the course will analyze the shifting values historically attached to literature, as well as the ethical dimensions of linguistic and narrative traditions and practices; in other words, students will examine the way in which heterogeneous bodies, cultures, nations and eras have used literature and language to negotiate power.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Values and Ethics, OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES |
| LITR 308 - CHILDREN'S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE |
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This course will examine the genre of children‘s and young adult literature from a
literary, psychological and historical perspective. Children's literature has a rich tradition which reflects changing perceptions and constructions of childhood and young adulthood. We will examine the history of children‘s literature, including the 1860-1920 "golden age" period. Learning to analyze the illustrations that appear in much of children’s literature will be an integral part of the course. The course will challenge the ideas that strict borders exist among children's, young adult, and adult literature, and that only "adult" books can be great literature. We will read one or more examples from each of these major categories of children‘s literature: fairy tales, picture books, Fantasy, classics, non-fiction, information books, historical fiction and young adult books.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Culture & Creativity |
| LITR 310 - EXISTENTIALISM |
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(Formerly LITR 315) The course will establish the theoretical background of Existentialism; survey existentialist themes in the Bible and Greek tragedy; study in-depth, selected works of French Existentialists, such as Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the "dramatists of the absurd"; and analyze how form and techniques reflect philosophical assumptions.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 312 - FEMINIST THEORIES |
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This course is designed to ground students in the historical foundations of feminist theory and to introduce them to some of the Wide range of current feminist thinking. As no course can claim to cover all of feminist thought in a single semester, priority has been given here to texts and concepts considered truly fundamental in the development of a feminist criticism. Using these texts, we will consider questions such.as: What does it mean to be a feminist, or to read texts in a feminist way? Is there a universal reality to being a particular gender (e. g., a ‘woman‘)? How do our experiences of gender intersect with our experiences of race, class, sexuality, nation, and other social locations? What is the relationship between academic feminist theories and feminist activism? This course is taught by multiple instructors from diverse academic backgrounds, all of which employ an interdisciplinary focus. A common focus will be to examine the mutually influential relationship between feminist thinkers and literary texts. This is a required course for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor. This course is cross-listed as SOSC312.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 314 - TRANSATLANTIC 19TH CENTURY POETRY |
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(Formerly LITR 305) We will read preeminent American poets of the 19th century in tandem with the British Romantic and Victorian poets that influenced their work. Concentrating on the major figures of Emerson, Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman, the course will explore how they both borrowed from and challenged such poets as Coleridge, Byron, E. B. Browning, and Wordsworth. By identifying the concerns these poets shared, we will get a sense of the crosscurrents of thought that shaped the Transatlantic literary scene at a time when America still looked to England for cultural guidance. The course emphasizes close-reading techniques that will enable students to improve their ability to speak and write about poetry.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express, MJ-AMER-Advanced Cat Elective |
| LITR 319 - AUTHOR STUDIES |
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AUTHOR STUDIES. Each section focuses on one or two individual authors whose work has had a sustained impact on literary culture. Authors studied vary from semester-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor. Students should expect to engage in sophisticated discussion of literary topics ranging from contemporary criticism to literary biography, including the global contest of an author's work. The course requires substantial writing and research.
AUTHOR STUDIES: Margaret Atwood -- This course will provide an in-depth look at the writings of a contemporary author from Canada who has established a truly international reputation for herself. Although Atwood began her writing career as a poet, she is best known as a novelist and Canadian nationalist. In this course, we will examine the range of Atwood’s literary production, studying several of her novels, selections of her poetry, and one of her collections of short fiction. We will also explore Atwood’s contributions to the field of literary criticism. This course should help you to appreciate the depth and breadth of Atwood’s work, to recognize and understand some of the recurring themes and motifs that characterize her oeuvre, and to trace their development over the course of her career to date. We will also discuss how Atwood’s “Canadianness” is a shaping and defining feature of her literary production. Furthermore, this class will help you to develop your own skills in researching and analyzing literary texts. We’ll read some of Atwood’s novels, including The Edible Woman, Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Alias Grace. We’ll also read some of her essays, poetry, and Wilderness Tips, a book of short stories. This course can fulfill either the Major Author or
International Literature requirement of the Literature Major. At the same time, it can fulfill the European/International requirement for secondary education English certification.
AUTHOR STUDIES: Dante -- This course aims at introducing students to late medieval culture, using Dante, its foremost literary artist, as a focus. Attention is directed at medieval poetics, historiography, art and music in addition to political
theory, religious, and social development of the time. The course emphasizes the continuity of Western tradition, especially the classical background of medieval culture, and its transmission to the modern world. Students study the Divine Comedy both as a mirror of high medieval culture and as a unique text that
breaks out of its cultural bounds. Students will be engaged in close reading and discussion of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy and will search for answers as to why after seven centuries the Commedia remains central to the European literary tradition.
AUTHOR STUDIES: Mark Twain -- In this class we will examine the work of one author in detail. Our goal is to understand the work of this author in a variety of contexts. While we want to be able to appreciate the works for their individual merits, we also want to approach the work in historical and biographical contexts. Through intensive study of one author, we hope to gain insight into his artistic project, and to become “experts” on a major literary figure. The writer whose work we will examine is virtually synonymous with American for much of the world. Mark Twain was one of first American literary celebrities nationwide and abroad. A southerner who went west, and later settled in Connecticut, Twain could represent the nation in a way that few other writers could. He was also perceived abroad as, in Twain’s words “Not an American,” but “the American.” Through a reading of Twain’s fiction and non-fiction, we will grapple with a writer whose savage wit and literary daring still shocks and delights readers almost a century after his death. This course fulfills either the Author Studies requirement, or the American Literature requirement of the Literature Major. It also counts as one of the three 300-level courses Literature Majors must take. At the same time, it can fulfill the American Literature requirement for secondary Teacher Education Content Area Requirements (Literature).
AUTHOR STUDIES: FRANZ KAFKA -- Kafka, a Central European author, is internationally known and of influence, especially in the early 20th century. His novels, prose, and short stories are widely taught and shared, most commonly “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial. Not only does his creative form contribute to the literary world, but his narrative art captivates Central European society, history, and political tension during his lifetime. His thematic elements of isolation, personification, methodology, and allegory create a background for his German heritage and hometown in the Czech Republic, Prague. Required course readings will cover some of the most well-known writings of Franz Kafka as well as writings on Kafka major literary critics have produced. This course fulfills either the Author Studies requirement, or the International Literature requirement of the Literature Major. It also counts as one of the three 300-level courses Literature Majors must take. At the same time, it can fulfill the International / Multicultural Literature requirement for secondary Teacher Education Content Area Requirements (Literature).
AUTHOR STUDIES: JANE AUSTEN -- Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) reputation as a novelist of manners in the British tradition is robust and continues to grow in the 21st century. Austen created a richly detailed fictional world in which she invested with importance the largely female concerns of family life, courtship and marriage. Her characters do venture to the city but it was the often brutal social and economic milieu of the English countryside which especially interested Austen. We will read five of her major novels–Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Her life and the issues related to gender and publication that it raises will be examined, and her life and works will be placed within the context of British history and the British literary canon. We will also place Austen in the framework of a specific British female literary tradition and read some of the scholars who have created Austen’s place in that tradition. The course will further examine issues of film adaptation of her literary works.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: WRITING INTENSIVE |
| LITR 320 - COMIC AMERICAN NOVEL |
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(Formerly LITR 308) We will read a series of comic novels written in the United States, mostly in the 20th century. We will examine the varieties of comic expression. We will begin with Twain's Huckleberry Finn. This class will be an examination of the comic spirit as seen in selected American novels. Sometimes these books will not seem "funny." They feature murder, slavery, child abuse, drug addiction, and war. So how can we call them "comic"? But there will certainly be some laughs along the way. We will try to come to a deeper understanding of the term "comic" by the time the class is done. During the course not only do many of the characters reveal themselves, but American society itself: We will try to answer the question: What do we laugh at when we laugh at ourselves?
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 332 - SOUTHERN AMERICAN WRITERS |
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(Formerly LITR 333) This course will examine the rich diversity of literature by writers of the American south from the 1800s to the present in prose, short and long fiction, poetry, and drama. Themes such as racial conflict, attitudes towards women, nature as a defining force, and others will form a basis for exploring such authors as Faulkner, Welty, Warren, Gaines, Hurston, O'Connor, and others.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-Amer-Amer Regionalism, MJ-AMER-Amer. Regionalism, MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express, MJ-AMER-Advanced Cat Elective, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 334 - AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS |
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This course will explore the writings of African American women, also including African women of the Diaspora. We will explore works in a range of genres, starting in the 1700s with Phillis Wheatley's poetry, then moving into 19th century slave narratives, fiction, and essays. We will devote particular attention to the remarkable productivity of women writers from the African Diaspora in the 20th and 21st centuries, including authors such as Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Edwidge Danticat, Zora Neale Hurston, and Natasha Trethewey. We will also read samples from the growing tradition of African American feminist literary criticism. Students will be encouraged to consider these texts in the context of the American literary canon, and in the larger context of African Diaspora literature.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-AFR AMR STD-Hum & Culture, MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-Gender & Sexuality, MJ-AMER-African-Amer Stds., MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express, MJ-AMER-Advanced Cat Elective, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 338 - LATINO LITERATURE OF THE USA |
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(Formerly LITR 341) The course offers an in-depth study of some outstanding fiction and non-fiction works of the extensive Latino literature written in English in the U.S.A. This course will focus on the importance of understanding Latino culture; the choice of language, themes, and style of writing; cultural differences; literary techniques as well as the social and political aspects reproduced in these creations. Fiction and non-fiction works have been chosen representing the Cuban-, Colombian-, Dominican-, Chicano- and Puerto Rican-American writers.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-Amer-Race & Ethnicity, MJ-AMER-Amer Artistic Express, MJ-AMER-Advanced Cat Elective, OLD GE-INTERCULT NORTH AMERICA, MJ-LITR-American Literature |
| LITR 340 - BRITISH MEDIEVAL LITERATURE |
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This course surveys the earliest literature of England, from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon past through the medieval period. In it, we will examine some canonical texts (Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer) as well as some less well-known works. While the specific thematic emphasis may vary, we will be reading a wide variety of genres (epic, elegy, lyric, chronicle, riddle, romance, etc.) and authors. We will trace developments of significant ideas and consider the relationship of the texts to the social, cultural, and historical environments that produce them. Some of the earliest works will be read in translation, but the majority of the later material will be read in the original Middle English.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800 |
| LITR 346 - ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS |
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(Formerly LITR 354) A study of Romantic poetry concepts. In the 50 years stretching from 1780 to 1830, writers in Germany and England made the concept of a creative imagination basic to aesthetics, and developed a theory of the interconnection between mind and nature that made a fundamental contribution to western cultural attitudes. The course will examine works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, and Keats.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 348 - VICTORIAN SECRETS:POETRY AND PROSE |
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(Formerly LITR 342) Britain under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), transformed itself into the first urban, industrial, technological, democratic, and imperial modern state. Writers -- men and women alike -- understood the revolutionary character of the times and confronted newly the full range of social realities that continue to beset us now: the alienated workplace, the degraded environment, mass culture, changing sex roles, race, colonialism, and the endangered child. This course will explore the achievement of such writers in all its variety of form, content, and self-expression, from poetry to fiction to journalism to autobiography, to see it not only as a literature but, in its own terms, as a "culture."
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 354 - THE MEDIEVAL AND MODERN IN TOLKIEN'S MIDDLE-EARTH |
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In medieval England the Anglo-Saxons referred to the world as "middengeard", or Middle-earth, a term better understood today as referencing J.R.R. Tolkien's creation. The equivalence is not a coincidence, as Tolkien drew on Old English conceptions while infusing them with his own 20th century sensibility in creating his fictionalized world. This hybridized sense of Middle-earth as an intersection of the medieval and the modern is the subject of this course. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and well-versed in medieval literature--one could say immersed in it, and his creation of Middle-earth is a direct response to both his love for and intimate knowledge of medieval literature, and a response to what he saw as lacking in both the Old English corpus and the modern world. This course proposes to explore his created world of Middle-earth, primarily his novels THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE SILMARILLION through the lens of intertextuality. Drawing in particular on Julia Kristeva's notion of the intertext (and through her, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogue), we will examine the Old English poetry that is in dialogue with Tolkien's modern works, primarily BEOWULF as well as poems such as THE WANDERER and THE BATTLE OF MALDON, along with Old Norse works such as VOLSUNGSSAGA, and early Middle Englsih texts like SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT and PEARL. Tolkien was a medievalist said to describe his task in creating the world of Middle-earth as "creating a mythology for English" and we will explore that world through the medieval works that infuse it.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-TOPICS ARTS&HUMANATIES, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800 |
| LITR 362 - INTERNATIONAL 19TH CENTURY NOVEL |
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(Formerly LITR 338) The 19th century is generally considered as the era during which the novel became a dominant literary genre. In this course, we will examine the development of the novel in an international context. We will explore how different literary movements (such as romanticism, realism, and sentimentalism) were articulated in different geographic and cultural contexts, and how these movements interacted with and were influenced by political and social concerns of the day. The primary objective of this course is thus to better understand both the novel as genre, and its development over this crucial time period.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 363 - INTERNATIONAL 20TH & 21ST CENTURY NOVEL |
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(Formerly LITR 310) The 19th century is often seen as the era in which the novel established itself, taking on a certain form and a certain prominence. While its importance as a genre only continued to increase over the 20th and 21st centuries, that genre has changed in many important ways. This course is designed to explore some of the novel's most striking changes in form and in content over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Such changes are best studied from a comparative perspective; accordingly, we will examine how writers from several countries manipulate the structure of the novel to accommodate their thematic concerns and their artistic visions. We will acquaint ourselves with some of the important literary movements of the 20th century as they are exemplified in the works listed in the syllabus. And we will consider how these novels reflect the cultural concerns of their times. (The book list will be subject to change; we may study other, equally important and/or representative works in other semesters.) This course will help students to further develop their critical and close reading skills, and their research skills. By participating in class discussions, preparing and giving presentations, and writing papers, students will also learn to express themselves more clearly and precisely.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 366 - LITERATURE OF THE HOLOCAUST |
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This course will examine how literature--memoirs, short stories, poetry, cinema, and novels from Africa, the Balkans, and Europe--responded to the Holocaust and other acts of 20th century genocide. The primary focus is how creative literature and films--in contrast to documentary writing--portray the most horrific and
recurrent development of the last century--genocide, These writings are unique and they raise uniquely literary questions. Theodor Adorno wrote in 195 1, “No poetry after Auschwitz." Students in Literature ofthe Holocaust must decide for themselves [through writing, discussion, conversation, and debate) the ethical implications ofcreating poetry and fiction that grapple with this existential wound. ls any poetry about Auschwitz an ethical lapse?
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: Gen Ed 2018, Gen Ed 18-Values and Ethics, OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 368 - ITALIAN RENAISSANCE STUDY |
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(Formerly LITR 363) A survey of Italian Renaissance literature through consideration of major authors such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, and Castiglione. The course will explore the changing significance of the role of human love, the relations between intellectual and civic life, and the role of literature itself.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-INTL-Area Studies-Europe, MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 370 - CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE |
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(Formerly LITR 357) The course will be organized around the various literary movements from the turn of the century to the present (from relativists, futurists, and "crepuscolari" to the neo-realists and neo-experimentalists). The course will cover texts by Pirandello, Svevo, Marinetti, Moravia, Calvino and Eco. This course is also designed to introduce students to the rich and often overlooked body of works by Italian women writers and theorists. We will focus on a range of texts from political manifestos to the fiction of Aleramo, Maraini and Durante, to movies by controversial directors such as Liliana Cavani and Lina Wertmuller.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 372 - SPANISH LITERATURE OF THE GOLDEN AGE |
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(Formerly: Spanish Renaissance Literature) Through historical, sociological, religious and cultural approaches, this course analyzes some of the best literary works of the 16th and 17th centuries produced in Spain. Selections "in translation," from Garcilaso de la Vega, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de Leon, El Lazarillo, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Quevedo and Gongora will provide the students with a clear understanding of the ideology of the Renaissance and Baroque literature of Spain. In addition to critical discussions of texts, this course includes development of research topics for a term paper.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MJ-LITR-Litr Prior To 1800, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 374 - WORLD LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT |
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This course will encourage students to think in global, environmental, and literary terms. It will offer students an opportunity to witness ways in which literature engages with pressing issues in today's world, and it will also offer students some non-fiction reading to help them better understand those environmental issues.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection, TS-Sch Core- SCP Category |
| LITR 376 - BRAZILIAN LITERATURE & CULTURE |
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(Formerly LITR 330) This course will provide students with an introduction to Brazilian literary production within the context of major historical periods. They will also explore the diverse social and political movements and cultural practices that coincide with them. Ideally, students will identify, despite the diversity and transnational character of many of its people, the search for and development of a distinctly Brazilian national identity. Selected major literary works in translation will be studied alongside other Brazilian cultural products, such as film, music, visual and plastic arts, architecture, historical documents and non-fiction writing in order to gain a critical understanding of this Latin American "invisible giant" and its people. A central objective here is to interpret cultural products and practices with a critical awareness of identity, economy and power. This advanced course fulfills the international focus requirement for the Literature Major. As the only course that focuses entirely on Brazil, it is an excellent option for the Latin American Studies Minor.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 378 - BLACK ODYSSEY |
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(Formerly LITR 320) The course will examine literary and critical writings of the African Diaspora. We will study major writers of Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates, Maryse Conde, Adrienne Kennedy, and others, representative of the literary movements and critical concepts of Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. While offering crucial insights into the dynamics of modern and contemporary criticism, the post-colonial vision of these writers traces a quest for new identities.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course Literature Department Course Attributes: MN-AFR AMR STD-Hum & Culture, MJ-Africana Studies, MN-Africana Studies, MJ-AMER-Amer Literature, MJ-AMER-African-Amer Stds., OLD GE-INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, MJ-LITR-Int'l Litr Selection |
| LITR 381 - CREATIVE WRITING CAPSTONE |
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(Formerly LITR 395) This course fulfills the capstone requirement for the concentration in creative writing in the Literature major. This course focuses on the craft and production of a collection of student writing in fiction or creative non-fiction or poetry. Notions of what makes a book, a collection, and the shaping of a manuscript will be explored and adopted. Prerequisites: LITR 216, LITR 229, LITR 236, LITR 222, LITR 349 or permission of instructor.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department |
| LITR 388 - CO-OP/INTERNSHIP LITERATURE |
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An academic program in which students are placed in work positions relevant to their academic majors and career goals. The program integrates academic work on-campus with supervised off-campus work experience in both the public and private sectors. Students may take up to two Co-ops in their academic career at Ramapo College. Students must be at least a Sophomore and have a 2.0 or better average to be eligible. Transfer students must have completed at least 16 credits at Ramapo.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Co-Op Literature Department |
| LITR 390 - TOPICS: |
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The descriptions and topics of this course change from semester-to-semester as well as instructor-to-instructor. Prerequisites: varies with the topic offered. LITR 390 IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN WRITERS. Most of the course will be conducted via video camera linking Ramapo students and Russian students and their professor from Volgograd State Pedagogical University in Russia. This will be an unusual opportunity for Ramapo students to discuss selected texts of Russian and American literature and receive the cultural perspectives of Russian students. In this way, both Russian and American students and professors will learn from each other. Selected writers will include Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Leo Tolstoy, and modern Russian and American short story writers.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Hybrid, Lecture, Online Course, Seminar Literature Department |
| LITR 398 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation describes a transfer course from another institution where an equivalency to a Ramapo College course has not been determined. Upon convener evaluation, this course ID may be changed to an equivalent of a Ramapo College course or may fulfill a requirement.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 399 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this course number has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 400 - INDEPENDENT STUDY: LITERATURE |
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Limited opportunities to enroll for course work on an Independent Study basis are available. A student interested in this option should obtain an Independent Study Registration Form from the Registrar, have it completed by the instructor and school dean involved, and return it to the Registrar's Office. Consult the current Schedule of Classes for policies concerning Independent Study.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Independent Study Literature Department |
| LITR 414 - SEMINAR: |
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LITERATURE SEMINAR: The topics studied in this course vary from semeser-to-semester, as well as from instructor-to-instructor. This course is the capstone of the Literature Major. Students should expect to engage in sophisticated discussion, to work independently, and to participate in--and lead--seminar discussions. The couse will require students to call on the experience of their previous coursework in the major to produce polished writing informed by reseach.
LITR 414: Arthurian Literature -- During the semester we will be looking at Arthurian literature. The first half of the course will focus on the origins of the Arthurian legend and its medieval developments; in the second half we will consider retellings of the legend in later centuries. Through a series of linked assignments culminating in a research paper, students will explore how the legend changes as it is taken up by different authors and cultures. This course fulfills either the SEMINAR requirement OR the pre-1800 Literature requirement. At the same time, it can fulfill the British Literature requirement for secondary Teacher Education Content Area Requirements (Literature).
LITR 414: International Modernism -- This course will look at modernism—the artistic period taking place between the two world wars—from an international perspective. We will look closely at both the form and content of literary texts as we analyze how different writers contributed to this movement. The effects of World War I, as well as the discoveries of Freud and Einstein, radically changed how people responded to the world around them. We will examine how artists, particularly writers, reacted to the great upheavals of the early twentieth century.
LITR 414: POSTMODERNISM -- In the preface to Postmodern Literary Theory, Niall Lucy states: “Literature today is a very different concept from that of only a generation ago, and this difference is usually attributed to ‘postmodernism’ as a powerful signifier of the radically new and challenging.” This seminar will trace the notion of the postmodern in theory and fiction after World War II. After a brief historical overview of the development of the concepts of postmodernism and postmodernity, we will focus on texts by literary theorists such as Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Cixous that celebrate difference and experimental fiction by Blanchot, Barth, Calvino and Lispector that defy literary conventions and question our assumption of reality. Through the in-depth examination of a variety of literary, critical and visual texts, the course will enable students to analyze contemporary art forms and discuss their social, economic and political implications.
LITR 414: PERFORMANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE -- Prior to the twentieth century, most people assumed that “great art” was defined by its ability to transcend the concerns and constraints of popular, everyday life. However, the twentieth century welcomed a number of artists, philosophers and activists who challenged the sacred line separating “art” from “real life.” These vanguard artists and scholars challenged traditional definitions of art by asking: What happens if we apply what we know about literary interpretation to the world outside of the book? If all the world is truly a stage, can we analyze that stage the way we analyze dramatic performances? What props and what settings shape the variety of characters we perform in our daily routines? How are theatrical rituals related to other social rituals, and how are these related to quotidian habits (e.g. ordering food, making jokes, puttering, or walking through the city)? How is the line separating art from everyday life constructed and maintained by institutions such as schools, churches, museums, galleries, and courts? This course will introduce students to an interdisciplinary field known as “everyday life studies,” a growing field that combines the methods and insights of literary studies with those of theatre and performance studies, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political theory, cartography, architecture, the visual arts, and sociology. The main text in the class will be the everyday life and world of the students, but we will also read essays by writers who have blurred the distinction between the “aesthetic” and the “everyday.” Such writers may include Walter Benjamin, Bertol Brecht, Michel de Certeau, Siegfried Kracauer, Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Erving Goffman, Richard Scheckner, Guy Debord, J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek.
LITR 414: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND LAW: A senior Literature seminar, this is an interdisciplinary course examining fictional and non-fictional literature on American law. Much of American philosophy and culture are embedded in its literature, and the literature of the law is a particularly rich site for studying American life and its legal culture. The field of literature and law recognizes how essentially stories shape the field of law, how an understanding of the ambiguity inherent in studying literature can assist anyone examining the law, and how such literary acts as character analysis and inference, among others, span the two disciplines. This movement includes law as literature, which we will also examine but which will not be our principal focus.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Seminar Literature Department Course Attributes: WRITING INTENSIVE |
| LITR 498 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation describes a transfer course from another institution where an equivalency to a Ramapo College course has not been determined. Upon convener evaluation, this course ID may be changed to an equivalent of a Ramapo College course or may fulfill a requirement.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
| LITR 499 - TRANSFER ELECTIVE |
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This course designation is used to describe a transfer course from another institution which has been evaluated by the convener. A course with this course number has no equivalent Ramapo course. It may fulfill a requirement or may count as a free elective.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours 0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours Levels: Undergraduate Schedule Types: Lecture Literature Department |
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