Sometime after 1492, the concept of the New World or America came into being, and this concept appeared differently — as an experience or an idea — for different people and in different places. This semester, we will read three groups of texts: first, participant accounts of contact between native Americans and French or English speaking Europeans, both in North America and in the Caribbean and Brazil; second, transformations of these documents into literary works by contemporaries; third, modern texts which take these earlier materials as a point of departure for rethinking the experience and aftermath of contact. The reading will allow us to compare perspectives across time and space, across the cultural geographies of religion, nation and ethnicity, and finally across a range of genres — reports, captivity narratives, essays, novels, poetry, drama, and film. Some of the earlier authors we will read are Michel Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Jean de Léry, Daniel Defoe and Mary Rowlandson; more recent authors include Derek Walcott, and J. M. Coetzee.

This course looks at comedy in drama, novels, and films from Classical Greece to the twentieth century. Focusing on examples from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Wilde, Chaplin, and Billy Wilder, along with theoretical contexts, the class examines comedy as a transgressive mode with revolutionary social and political implications. This is a Communications Intensive (CI) class with emphasis on discussion, and frequent, short essays.

This is course is a study of the major comedies, histories, and tragedies in the context of Renaissance thought, Elizabethan theatre, and the political and social setting of Shakespeare's age. Lectures and class discussions each week, supplemented by occasional reading of scenes and attendance at live or filmed performances. Three hundred and eighty years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the central author of the English-speaking world; he is the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright — and now among the most popular screenwriters as well. Why is that, and who "is" he? Why do so many people think his writing is so great? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do we read, speak, or listen to his words now? What should we watch for when viewing his plays in performance? Whose plays are we watching, anyway? We'll consider these questions as we carefully examine a sampling of Shakespeare's plays from a variety of critical perspectives.

Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.