18 courses with the subject LIT, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
LIT 4600Modern Drama
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits This is a survey of Western drama from the late nineteenth century to the present day. We'll study representative works of major dramatists of this period such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, O'Neill, Pirandello, Beckett, O'Casey, Soyinka, Churchill, Wilson, Stoppard, Mamet, Kushner, and Parks. You'll research and report on theatre movements such as symbolism, expressionism, realism, naturalism, epic theatre, and theatre of the absurd. We'll consider the play as both text and performance, making use of theatre reviews, director's notes, interviews, photographs, videos, and, when possible, live performances. Grades will be determined by two papers, a midterm and a final exam, a group performance project, and a thoroughly researched oral presentation.
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Subversive texts written by a Roman poet in exile during the first century CE. Postcards sent anonymously under pain of death in Germany’s Third Reich. Codes used by sci-fi anti-imperial insurgency groups. The content of resistance plots so often depends on innovative rebellious communication. Literary form, however, is equally if not more important than content. And form, when ethically and experimentally achieved, might be said to be an innately resistive force. This course examines art that stages defiance, enacts resistance, promotes resilience and even admits failure against narratives of oppression. Our materials will come from literature in several genres, as well as from critical theory, comics journalism, and film. Our search will be motivated by the counter-hegemonic expressive efforts of writing and art—personal, historical, international, moral. Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 advanced liberal arts credits Can attention to a single word or phrase enhance our understanding of entire works by Shakespeare? Which words “matter” most in Shakespeare’s poems and plays, how do we identify them, and how can we analyze them in ways that illuminate broader questions, issues, and relations essential to the work at hand? In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare encourages us to think at the level of the word, as well as how thinking at the level of the word can help us approach and better understand his canonical works. To do so, we will read four major plays: As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo & Juliet, and Richard III, and, along with selections from the Sonnets. To enhance our appreciation of these works, we will also routinely review modern film and stage adaptions of the plays we read, as well as relevant works of literary criticism. Throughout, we will discuss the relevance of these works to our understanding of how words accrue meanings in various contexts; how and whether such meanings can be contested, by whom, and what ends; and how the stage drama allows us to think in unique ways about the various processes through which bodies become meaningful in language. No prior experience with Shakespeare is necessary to enroll. Arts (HSS, LTA, CSP) Credits 4 236
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits How do contemporary poets engage their work with what’s real in the world? How can poetry describe, define, explain, and/or challenge the information, the facts, the multitude of voices that surround and at times overwhelm us? Documentary poetry, an increasingly popular poetic form, engages as its subject matter real events from history, and may apply data from a range of realms: science, economics, literature, politics, psychology, current events, personal life. While documentary poets use this form as a way to think, research, explore, and satisfy curiosity, they are also potentially engaged in modes of inquiry, even skepticism. Thus documentary poems may result in the discovery of alternative approaches to meaning, new ways of understanding and telling stories, even sites of social change and activism. In addition, documentary poets tend to go beyond the traditionally poetic by applying to their poems mixed genres and media, including direct quotations, letters, diaries, court transcripts, medical records, images, testimonials, even embedded graphics. In this course, we will examine the origins of this form and study pivotal poems and poets in its development using work from a recent anthology of documentary poems as well as from several single-author poetry collections by poets Patricia Smith, Claudia Rankine, Tarfia Faizullah, Maggie Nelson, C.D. Wright, and Martha Collins. Students will write short analytical responses and an essay, but they will also craft and share their own original documentary poems as a way of understanding the form and its potential in their own lives for inquiry and discovery.
LIT 4605Contemporary World Literature: The Writing of
the Unreal 4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Students who have taken VA2036 are not permitted to take LIT4605 This course examines contemporary world literature through the specific prism of _the unreal_. Writers from Latin America, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East will be examined in their rich experiments with surrealism, anti-realism, and hyper- realism. Moreover, this course will explore the enigmatic conceptual territories of the dream, the nightmare, the fantasy, the illusion, the hallucination, the mirage, the vision, and the simulation as breakaway zones of the global literary imagination. To achieve this task, we will evaluate authors as diverse as Franz Kafka, Ghada Samman, Haruki Murakami, Clarice Lispector, Jose Saramago, Naguib Mahfouz, Kobo Abe, Juan Rulfo, Vi Khi Nao, and Reinaldo Arenas, interrogating their different approaches to the creation of phantasmatic, strange, and unknown spaces.
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits This 4-credit course employs gamified pedagogy to explore the multifarious ways that social class functions. Students will read texts that explore the issues of class consciousness, class performance, classism, and cross- class communication; act in in-class simulations of events that reveal the ways that social class operates; and write character biographies, scripts and analytical reflections. Simulations will include school events, job interviews, holiday celebrations, and more. Readings will be drawn from both nonfiction (from fields such as sociology, economics and cultural studies) and fiction (primarily short stories and excerpts from novels and plays). The overarching objective will be for students to become aware of the often-invisible ways that social class . operates in daily life. In a global society that is marked by increasing socioeconomic disparity, it is especially important for students to become critical thinkers about social class.
4 advanced liberal arts credits What is the relationship between language and sexuality? What role does language play in shaping what we know about sexuality, as well as the various identities, desires, and practices that inform our sexual lives? In this course, we will explore these and related questions by examining some of the many terms, categories, metaphors, and narratives through which sex and its meanings have been shaped and contested in discrete historical contexts. Reading foundational texts in the history of sexuality (Freud, Foucault, Rubin) alongside theories of metaphor, narrative, and sexual citizenship, we will examine how thinking about language helps us understand sex, and how thinking about sex helps us understand language. Readings will focus on primary texts. Assignments will include weekly reading responses, a short essay, and final exam. Interested students will be allowed to compose an analytical essay in lieu of the final exam. No prior experience or knowledge is necessary to enroll. liberal arts (CSP, HSS or LTA) Credits 4 223
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Shakespeare’s works have long held a privileged position in the histories of sex, gender, and eroticism. In this course, we will consider how Shakespeare helps us “think sex” in its various bodily, psychological, political, textual and historical dimensions. What counts as “sex” in Shakespeare’s world(s)? What desires, relations, and practices are rendered perceptible—and/or imaginable—through his poetry and plays? Which categories, identities, and emotions mattered when Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined sex and its meanings, and how do these align with, and diverge from, those which inform our present lives and erotic relations? To explore these and related questions, we will read four major plays and two works of poetry: Romeo & Juliet, Othello, As You Like It, Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece, and selections from The Sonnets. Drawn from across the Shakespearean canon, such works will allow us to consider how differences of genre and literary form shape erotic possibilities, as well as how issues of race, gender, status, religion, reputation, and ethnicity intersect with sexual meanings, both in that era and our own. To enhance our appreciation of these works and their erotic possibilities, we will routinely consider modern, cinematic adaptions of the plays we read, as well as select screen biographies (Shakespeare in Love, All Is True). Finally, we will attend to the curious case of Shakespeare’s sex: not only what we know—and don’t know—about the playwright’s (sexual) biography, but why his erotic relations continue to arouse interest and speculation, some four hundred years after his death.
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits This course engages the question of madness from a variety of angles. On the one hand, it considers the major , theorists of insanity (Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze); and on the other, it considers the equally crucial works of supposedly “insane” writers themselves (Antonin Artaud, Unica Zurn, Vaslav Nijinsky). In doing so, we will trouble the many definitions and assumptions surrounding the category of madness and its problematic history of oppression. Ultimately, through this remarkable exchange across literary-philosophical frontiers, we will explore an immense world of visions and symptoms, including those of mania, schizophrenia, delusion, paranoia, melancholia, and obsession.
LIT 4693Play, Performance, Politics: The London Stage
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Program fee is paid to Glavin Office – program fee includes accommodations, breakfast, tube pass in London, airport transport, theatre tickets, program planned meals, and cultural excursions. Not included: tuition, international flight, visa costs, additional meals and personal expenses. The course aims to develop an appreciation for and deeper understanding of the theatre as an art form through an immersive experience of play-text study, play attendance, performance workshops, and class discussion. While we will see a variety of types of plays on a variety of subjects, our approach to these plays will particularly emphasize the social and political context and issues raised implicitly or explicitly by the plays we read and see. We will also place the issues raised in a number of the plays into a wider discussion of social and political issues occurring in the world today – be they around matters of inequality at local, national and global levels, the role of government, the meaning of freedom in daily life and as a legal and political concept, and the effort of people to shape their collective futures through political action and argument. Success in this class is dependent upon students’ ability and willingness to participate fully in all class discussions as well as work outside of class, both individually and in teams, and to contribute their independent insights and observations to the learning community of the class. Participation is imperative. The course will involve a combination of close reading of the play-texts and contextual readings, careful and critical analysis of the performances, and engaged participation in acting workshops, tours, and class discussions.
