136 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 1025Live Lit4
Witness literature come alive! Students read work by well-known authors visiting Purchase in the Durst lecture series and read plays staged by the Theatre Program. Students meet independently with authors and attend their public lectures. Directors visit the class and students receive free tickets to all plays. Classwork analyzes material before and after students meet authors and attend plays.
LIT 1065Only Connect: Difference and Otherness in Literature4
Students trace the development of non-Western identity as it is formulated within the West by examining marginalized characters who are shaped by their powerlessness. Topics include educating the native, victimage, Orientalism, backwardness, and gender. Authors include William Shakespeare, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, William Beckford, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mayo, and Rukeya Sakhawat Hossein.
Social borders are examined through literature that explores immigration, assimilation, and the experience of those who exist “between” cultures. A major focus is on the “hybridizing” of cultures and the way that literature expresses the blending of cultures through language and narrative structure.
An introduction to the principles and practice of close reading and literary criticism. Readings include a variety of literary modes, including fiction, poetry, and drama.
The rise of the novel and its continued relevance today. In addition to close readings of novels from a variety of time periods and countries, students read about the conditions that gave rise to the novel as a genre and various theoretical interpretations of the form and its functions.
An examination of a wide array of poems from classical antiquity to the 21st century. In this course, students consider the multiple ways that poetry works to create meaning and emotion and investigate techniques of close analysis. Particularly recommended for students interested in the study of literature, creative writing, and language.
Read multi-genre literature and social histories and identify and analyze the distinctions and similarities that have shaped the experiences and the cultural imagination among different Latinx communities. Topics include identity formation and negotiation in terms of language, race, gender, sexuality, and class; discuss diaspora and emigration. Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa and Piri Thomas. Taught in English.
LIT 2100Freedom Dreams: Introduction to African American Literature3
Examines black literary and performance culture from the 18th century to the present. Students explore the self-making and resistance of black authors and activists through literary culture. Discussions focus on the intersections of identity formation (race, gender, sexuality, class) to enhance an understanding of the broader tradition of American letters and black culture. Readings include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston.
LIT 2115Loneliness, Environment, and the Modern Mind4
The Zoom Age has prompted many to reflect on feelings of detachment, burnout, and loneliness. These reflections draw from theories of individual autonomy explored by Enlightenment authors and thinkers. Starting with writings on solitude and external nature by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, students explore early novels by Defoe, Sterne, and others before turning to recent works by Marquez and Robinson.
This course examines Caribbean literature from the 20th and 21st century to understand the creativity and vitality of the region. Course participants study how artists across the Caribbean challenge colonial narratives to assert the complexity of their community, their negotiation of home and their resistance to colonialism.
LIT 2235Animals and the Environment in Global Literature4
Readings explore postcolonial and other contemporary global literary representations of animals and the environment, specifically their engagement with narratives of colonization and development, human-centeredness, and the posthuman. Students will consider how these representations invite readers to re-think hierarchical and human-centered visions of our world.
LIT 2305Introduction to Contemporary Global Literature4
Examines how literature is shaped by intersections of the local and the global in examples drawn from five regions: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Short stories by important U.S. writers of fiction, from the beginnings of the literary tradition in the earlier 19th century (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) to current authors. As the sequence of stories unfolds, the development of American issues unfolds as well.
Students read about South Asians dislocated from their homeland, focusing on issues of cultural displacement, alienation, assimilation, and construction as they follow narratives of South Asians who attempt to preserve the traces of their ethnic, cultural, and religious identities. Authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, V.S. Naipaul, and Amitav Ghosh, among others.
Readings include literature by 21st century writers of African descent living around the globe, with special focus on the Black Atlantic region. Students consider the texts’ engagement with issues of modernity, postmodernity, identity, belonging, and citizenship. Authors include Zadie Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Teju Cole, and Taiye Selasi.
An introduction to literary study for current and prospective literature majors. Readings are divided among three areas: primary texts, secondary texts that offer contexts for the primary texts, and works that define the study of literature. Each course section addresses its own topic.
Readings illustrate the range of issues, styles, and contexts in the Bible, including Genesis and Exodus, Deuteronomic Histories, prophets major and minor, Job and Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, and Apocalypse. This is not a course in religion, but in a literary and cultural tradition deeply concerned with human action in relation to divinity.
Covers the diverse literary voices addressing empire, genocide, and enslavement from the 15th-century European invasion of North America through the founding of the United States and the beginning of the Civil War. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between identity, justice, and writing.
An examination of literature written in the U.S. between the 1830s and the beginning of the 20th century. Careful attention is paid to the context of western expansion, slavery and its legacy, industrialization, immigration, and other historical developments. While much of the course is devoted to the “American Renaissance,” students also consider several contemporaneous literary traditions and their interrelationships.
LIT 2635Introduction to China: Literature, History, and Thought4
Through studying modern Chinese literature, this course offers students an opportunity to approach China in depth in its social, historical, cultural, and political aspects. The stories of people and land, revolutions and traumas, and dream and utopia make it possible to comprehend this vast and seemingly impenetrable entity in an intimate and critical way.
LIT 2645Gender, Revolution, Livelihood: Modern Chinese Women Writers4
This course both surveys representative works of modern Chinese women writers and examines general problems such as equality and liberation, desire and subjectivity.
Examines literary depictions of dystopia, from classics of the genre such as Huxley’s and Orwell’s, to contemporary examples from Atwood and others. Topics to be explored include homogenization of humanity in the name of progress; the strategies by which tyranny operates; and social, political, and environmental catastrophe.
Read a broad cross-section of writings by international authors to facilitate discussion of global and local values that emerge from and respond to disruptive events, such as 9/11 and global pandemics that disorient cultural arrangements and reset social formations. Topics include terror, isolation and alienation, fragility, silence, nostalgia, and the human capacity for recovery and resilience.
Examines the intertwined histories of race and the American police state, with a specific focus on the relationship between US policing practices and crime fiction. Students read literature by Poe, Doyle, Hammett, Christie, Wright, Himes, and others, as well as histories and theoretical texts about race, policing, and the different types of crime fiction (detective fiction, police procedurals, mysteries, etc.).
We will examine Baldwin’s moving fictional and nonfictional works to understand his enduring legacy up through our contemporary moment. Students read Baldwin’s work through the lens of literary history, civil rights, transnational black activism, the arts, and queer theory. Major texts include The Fire Next Time, Another Country, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Giovanni’s Room.
An exploration of Toni Morrison’s generous literary career as a playwright, fiction writer, and essayist. Students read a collection of Morrison’s most popular works ( Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved ) alongside her more recent publications ( A Mercy, God Help the Child ). Discussions place Morrison in conversation with her literary interlocutors (Hurston, Woolf, Faulkner) and some of her most cherished contemporaries (James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara).
LIT 308219th-Century British Literature and Empire4
Examines the representation of colonized places and people in the British literary imagination during the 19th century. Topics include otherness, difference, exoticism, transculturation, assimilation, and hybridity. Authors include Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Thomas de Quincey, Rider Haggard, William Jones, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Moore, Olive Schreiner, and Robert Southey.
LIT 3093Immigration and Ethnicity in U.S. Literature4
We are “a nation of immigrants,” wrote John F. Kennedy. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing to the present, this course explores issues surrounding immigration, ethnicity, and nationality through the lens of immigrant writing. Students look at shifts and continuities over time and among diverse ethnic groups and explore how America creates ethnicity and immigrants create America.
Students evaluate the intersections of race and human rights in contemporary global novels, memoirs, and film, considering the narrative strategies and genres that writers have used to publicize discrepancies between Western discourses of freedom and liberality and the realities of genocide, apartheid, and neocolonialism. Students read works by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Indra Sinha, Véronique Tadjo, and Antjie Krog.
Explore a global tradition of premodern adventure writing ranging from the Chinese legend of Mulan, to Somalian tales about were-hyenas, to European Arthurian romances, to ancient Inca creation myths. Throughout this survey, students read excerpts from modern fantasy literature drawing on these premodern traditions, including works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Marlon James, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Examines the literature of England written in French, English, and Latin from the Norman Conquest of 1066 (when England was taken over by a Francophone elite) to the 15th century. Epic, romance, history, and the literature of spiritual devotion are read in their literary relations and social contexts. All readings are in translation.
Covers the literary genre of romance in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. Examines the genre’s roots in classical tales of epic travels, adventure, and fantasy. Includes chivalry, heroism, questing, hospitality, and courtliness and attends to the genre’s place in the periods’ cross-cultural and cross-class encounters. Texts include Arthurian legends, Gawain, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare, Orlando Furioso, Gerusalemme liberata, and Don Quixote.
A study of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for students who want an introduction to medieval studies and for those who wish to extend their knowledge of the Middle Ages.
Literature from the songs of the troubadours and the rise of romance to the work of Dante is examined in connection with movements in European intellectual life and social history. Readings are in translation.
LIT 321620th Century South Asian History and Literature4
In this interdisciplinary course students explore the disciplines of history and literature in order to study South Asia, one of the most significant sites of English-language literary production in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course takes a historicist approach to South Asian literature of the last two centuries. Topics covered: Empire; Nationalism; Religion; Modernity; Independence; Development; and Diaspora.
Was Shakespeare a rebel? Was he a reactionary? To address these complex questions, students explore Shakespeare’s varied depictions of characters rebelling against patriarchal gender norms, tyrannical leaders, and corrupt governments. In addition to reading plays including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Richard II, 2 Henry VI, Coriolanus, and Macbeth, students analyze various modern adaptations of these and related works.
LIT 3226Literature of Decolonization in South Asia4
Explores the process of decolonization in the context of the emergence of India and Pakistan in South Asia and traces the origin of fundamentalism in this region. Students examine the impact that fundamentalism has on religious, regional, and class identity through the works of both literary and nonliterary writers (e.g., Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Nandy, Adiga, Sidhwa, Desai).
LIT 3227Revolutionary Havana: The Cuban Revolution and the Havana Imaginary4
“Havana is a city that has been constructed with bricks and words.” In this course, students explore the extent to which Havana has been constructed as a foundational idea of the Cuban Revolution, from 1959 until today. Students study literary, visual, and sonic texts that have contributed to the formulation of this post-revolutionary Havana imaginary.
Study LGBTQ identities via novels, short fiction, and films, by queer-identified authors who interrogate heteropatriarchy within a postcolonial framework. Texts include Queer Africa (eds. Martin and Xaba), Leche by R. Zamora Linmark, Walking with Shadows by Jude Bidia, Fire (film by Deepa Mehta), Same-Sex Love in India (eds. Vanita and Kidwai), and Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo.
One of the greatest English writers and the central poetic influence in the language, Milton is read in the context of the classical literary, political, and religious traditions that he inherited, disputed, and transcended. Special focus is on the relationship of “prophesy” and mythmaking to the radical and dissenting imagination.
Examines the emergence of the Romantic imagination, the concept of the subject or self, and the plural nature of Romantic discourse in Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Wordsworth, among others. Topics explored include the writers’ diverse concepts of creativity and originality, sense of their place in society, notions of political identity, and relation to British literary traditions.
Traces the evolution of Romanticism in the aftermath of the radical promise of the first generation of Romantic poets, through the prose writers who self-consciously documented their literary and cultural heritage, to the full flowering of such writers as Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Emily Brontë.
Explores Romanticism through a Transatlantic framework, focusing on the Atlantic Ocean as a locus of crossings, encounters, and currents in Britain and the Americas, particularly the United States. Primary readings span the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries and chart Romanticism’s influences on and responses to revolution, war, industrialization, abolitionism, Native American displacement, women’s rights, Transcendentalism, ecological awareness, and more.
From Adam and Eve to the present, numerous authors have written about love. In this course, students examine forms and expressions of both romantic and erotic love in Western literature, from the Bible and ancient Greeks to Bob Dylan. Writers studied include Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nabokov, in addition to love poems, recent American short stories, and more.
Victorian poetry against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world during a period that marked the high point of England’s global power. Writers include Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins.
Examines racial pride, racial origins, and urban blacks through an exploration of essays, poems, short stories, and novels by writers of the period (1915-1930). Authors include Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston. Emphasis is on students’ written analysis of in-class and outside readings.
An examination of the “middle genre,” encompassing the novella and the short novel. Readings provide ample opportunity to sample works embodying the intensity of short fiction and some of the expanded characterization and plot development of the novel. Readings include works by several significant 19th- and 20th-century authors from many countries.
Students consider world literature of the 20th and 21st century as it reflects and questions national and international boundaries, politics, religion, freedom, nationalism, sexuality, gender, and identity. Readings include a broad cross-section of contemporary writings by international authors.
Helping others to read and write better improves one’s own reading and writing dramatically. In this course, advanced students improve their own writing and gain tutoring experience by serving as peer tutors in first-year courses. In addition to meeting once weekly to study writing pedagogy, each student is attached to a College Writing section and serves as a peer mentor/tutor, attending classes and working closely with the instructor (approx. 2 to 4 hours weekly).
In this Art History and Literature course, the first wave of Gothic novels from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century is examined in relation to visual representations of the themes that dominate Gothic discourse. Topics include horror, imprisonment, madness, gender, ghosts and vampires. Authors and artists studied include Austen, the Brontë sisters, Radcliffe, Collins, Blake, Fuseli, and Turner.
How does embodiment reveal shifting notions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability? Students read performance theory and explore contemporary representations of bodies as sites of display, resistance, and re-construction in literature, performance, and everyday practices in transnational and intersectional contexts. Authors include Ntozake Shange, NourbeSe Philip, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, and David Henry Hwang.
LIT 3572Imagining America’s Yiddish World: Writings and Performance4
Focuses on a variety of writings (memoirs, letters, fiction, poetry), theatre, and films depicting the Yiddish world of the Lower East Side, home to more than two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1920. Readings include selections from the work of a variety of authors, from Yiddish newspapers, films, and other cultural materials.
Explores constructions and representations of childhood and adolescence in post-Civil War U.S. culture and fiction, focusing particularly on ideological linkages between nation and family and how these connections shape the experiences and writings of authors and educators across cultures. Readings may include works by Alger, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Dewey, Adams, Riis, Yezierska, Fauset, Cisneros, and Rita Mae Brown.
From hip-hop to Kerouac, jazz has influenced American culture through its improvisatory nature and capacious style. This course traces the jazz aesthetic (its early developments, definitions, and evolutions) across a range of novels, poems, and musical performances by writers and artists, including Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Billie Holiday, Gayl Jones, Louis Armstrong, Ralph Ellison, Thelonious Monk, and James Baldwin.
Explores the plays in which Shakespeare most explicitly portrays, solicits, and theorizes the emotion wonder, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Through a variety of theoretical lenses, students explore aesthetic and ethical questions concerning how and why Shakespeare capitalizes on wonder so differently at various moments throughout his career.
The development of U.S. poetry. The course examines its major figures (Dickinson and Whitman from the 19th century; Stevens, Frost, and Williams from the 20th century) and surveys the “minor” poets. Provides an overview of contemporary poetry, as well as much practice in the close reading of poetic texts.
An introduction to the contemporary novel and the art and practice of book reviewing. Students read exemplary novels (e.g., Cloud Atlas and Netherland ); they read exemplary book critics (e.g., Zadie Smith and James Wood); and they write their own exemplary reviews of contemporary fiction. Writing assignments range from blog posts to newspaper-style reviews and magazine-style essays.
Examines several texts written by American women, including works by Radstreet, Wheatley, Rowson, Stowe, Dickinson, Jewett, Cather, Wharton, Hurston, Bishop, and Naylor. The question of whether there is a traceable female tradition during the past 350 years is addressed. Readings include feminist literary criticism and theory.
An examination of the novels of Jane Austen. Topics include gender and authorship; irony, sympathy, and point of view; the marriage plot; and filmic adaptation.
Concise and focused, the short story has been a lens through which Americans have explored their identities. Stories written in the last 25 years examine the changing sense of what being an American means.
Surrealist literature, films, and art in France, Spain, and Latin America. Artists include Aragon, Breton, Buñuel, Césaire, Char, Dali, Eluard, and Lorca. Works are read in translation and lectures given in English; students with French and/or Spanish are encouraged to read in the original language.
Major works of the most celebrated Latin American novelists, such as Cortàzar, García Márquez, Carpentier, and Guiraldes, emphasizing the cultural and social contexts from which these novels spring. Although this is a literature course taught in English, students with competent Spanish language skills are encouraged to read the works in the original and write their papers in Spanish.
The notion of the “new” in poetry and art is examined. Students read a range of poetry written in the late 19th century through the 1940s in France, Germany, Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., and explore ways in which expressive novelty is linked to particular cultural and social situations. Along with the poems and some visual art, some contemporary texts that advance theories of the “avant-garde” are considered.
An in-depth examination of the life and work of Flannery O’Connor, with a consideration of how later writers like Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, and Kelly Link respond to her legacy.
LIT 3823Anxiety and Monstrosity in Early British Literature4
Explore representations of monstrosity in a variety of early British literature in order to unearth the social anxieties (about gender, class, race, and religion) that animate them. Readings include Beowulf, the Lais of Marie de France, Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale and Clerk’s Tale, Mandeville’s Travels, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Examines Hurston’s novels, short stories, plays, and essays alongside archival recordings and visual media. Discussions cover Hurston’s influential role in shaping conversations around race, class, and gender in the 20th century and her impact on other writers, including Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
Magic and mythology meet modernity in this unique form of postcolonial narrative critique. What happens when the old gods reemerge in our hyper-rational globalized world? Students read works by Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Amos Tutuola, and Salman Rushdie.
This course is designed for students interested in pursuing a career in teaching literature. Topics include how to teach different genres (poetry, prose, and drama), how to sustain classroom conversation, and how to design syllabi and writing assignments.
A survey of science fiction in literature and film, with particular focus on the genre’s ability to investigate large-scale social, political, philosophical, and narratological questions. Works by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and China Miéville, among others.
LIT 4450Colloquium II: Advanced Studies in Literature4
A culminating course that draws together the work of the major and prepares students for and complements the senior project. Each course section addresses its own topic; in every section, readings include primary texts, secondary texts that illuminate the primary texts, and works that define the discipline of literature or its interdisciplinary extensions, including theory and cultural studies.
Here are poets who epitomize trends, possibilities, or radical departures-poets like Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and James Merrill, among others-interesting not only in their context within the tradition, but for their manifold intrinsic excellences as well.
In this seminar, students are guided through the steps required to complete a senior project. Students refine their topic, create a list of secondary sources, write an annotated bibliography, and workshop their first chapter. Required for literature majors in conjunction with the first semester of their senior project. PREREQ: LIT2450
This course provides continued structure in the form of writing deadlines for those students who have successfully completed Senior Project Seminar in the fall. Students workshop completed chapters and share, annotate, and incorporate secondary sources. PREREQ: LIT4885
