RESEARCH SEMINAR. This seminar stipulates the following issues as underlying problems of Western civilization: pederasty, slavery, censorship, heresy, witch-hunting, androcentrism and misogyny, violence against children, and war. It studies literary treatments of these issues as well as some nonliterary texts. Emphasis is on how literature (and our responses to it) dealing with these problems reaches forms of understanding that are distinct from what is given by critical and historical accounts. The seminar addresses how the different problems overlap and continue in contemporary societies. We will ask how they are rationalized and treated as normal or as strange aberrations, though rarely as practices that constitute civilization. The seminar proceeds in two phases. The first part, of seven or eight weeks, articulates the themes. Modern readings come from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, Kafka, Morrison, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Freud's commentaries on the problems of civilization. Classical readings will likely include: Plato's Symposium and Republic, Aristotle's biology, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. The second part of the course asks members to present research proposals related to one or more of the stipulated problems. Readings and discussions in this part of the course are determined by the students' research projects.

This course will examine the ways in which writers and artists in the centuries on both sides of 1492 imagined the "contact zone," that cultural ground on which Same and Other meet. We will begin with medieval authors' attempts to define "Europe" against its others. The travels and conquests of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan and India and Gerald of Wales' account of Ireland will set the initial extremities of East and West. The Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela, the Venetian Christian Marco Polo's Asia, and the African Muslim Ibn Battuta will provide fact checks for the most popular of all voyage accounts, Mandeville's Travels. We will then examine the import and impact of the numerous printed travels, including those by Columbus and Vespucci to the West, and Vasco da Gama and others to the "East" Indies, with particular attention to the first book in English to name America. Finally we will look at both sober and celebratory accounts of globalization in Las Casas' Destruction of the Indies and Camoens' Lusiads, alongside other "first accounts" in English. Throughout the semester we will also study an extensive archive of images, manuscript illuminations, paintings, woodcuts, broad sheets, pamphlets, charts, and maps that created and enforced a vivid presence for non-Europeans within European consciousness. The course will require a half dozen short response papers during the semester, and a final longer research or analysis essay.

We will read and discuss a rich sampling of the works of Ernest Hemingway, including the short stories, several novels, and some journalism and memoirs. We will also examine the author's life, his relationship to modernism, and his impact on American and world literature.

This course will provide an opportunity to sample an exciting body of contemporary literature, some written by authors already widely acclaimed at the time they received the Nobel Prize and some by writers suddenly catapulted into fame and international recognition. While a central focus of the course will be the reading and discussion of the literature itself, we will also consider how receipt of the prize changed the writers' lives and literary reputations. Since its inception, moreover, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been a site of controversy and debate over aesthetics and politics, and over how literature speaks to both local and global audiences. In the U.S., where less than 5% of the literature published each year is literature in translation, Nobel prize-winning literature (when not originally written in English) is often the only modern literature Americans read in translation. In reading this literature, then, we will consider the question of translation, and the role of the Nobel Prize in creating and promoting an international literature. We will also consider the special challenges this literature poses for us as readers. While the awarding of the prize has often been a source of national pride for the writer's home country, some winners have been censured at home and the criteria for the prize heatedly questioned. Finally, then, we will consider how the prize is awarded, and we will look at some of the particular controversies and debates it has generated.

Two masters of narration, searching to perfect the prose narrative form, yet working different corners of the American canon. Though markedly different in their uses of character, plot, and setting, their works are even more fascinating in juxtaposition, thanks to thematic similarities (travel, confidence men, and the dramas of masculine development) and stylistic ones (the use of comic modes, experiments with narrative irony, instability, and unreliability). And let's face it: a rare treat to spend a semester reading these books. Readings may include, by Melville: Typee (1846); Moby-Dick (1851); The Confidence-Man (1857); "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and other selections from The Piazza Tales (1856); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) [1891]. By Twain: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867); The Innocents Abroad (1869); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).