Stephen Massimilla - Sample Courses


		Reinventing Literary History: Legacy of the Mediterranean This course emphasizes reading, writing, classroom discussion, critical thinking, and research. These endeavors will help you to develop your powers of perception and persuasion and to build your own understanding of the cultural, critical, ethical, political, and spiritual dimensions of major works of Western literature. I want you to think about the role these works can play in your own thinking about issues of abiding importance. These issues include the development and nature of genres, ideas, and values. For instance, the course affords an opportunity to challenge canonical assumptions as they relate to what Rich calls “the marginalization of female subjectivity in literature and culture.” We will discuss such far-reaching topics as (for example) how myth functions, how we can relate cultural values to one another, what motivates political decisions and wars, the interplay between human motivation and fate or historical forces, the nature of justice, the struggle for self-realization, and what it means to be human. These issues and many more will come up in specific, interrelated ways in the course of the term. We will supplement these discussions with cultural field trips to museums, the theater, and the opera, experiences that only New York City can provide. PART I (Fall Semester) Cervantes, Don Quixote Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales Dante, Inferno Euripides, The Bacchae Foley, Helene. ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter Hacker, Diana. Rules for Writers: A Brief Handbook Homer, Odyssey The Homeric Hymn to Demeter Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe Shakespeare, Hamlet Shakespeare, The Tempest de Lafayette, Madame. La Princesse de Cleves Virgil, Aeneid PART II (Spring Semester): Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land Hacker, Diana. Rules for Writers: A Brief Handbook Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto Milton, Paradise Lost Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein Voltaire, Candide Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse Course Packet: Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy” Rene Descartes, from Meditations on the First Philosophy Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, from Discourse on Metaphysics Alexander Pope, from Essay on Man William Wordsworth, poems, including “The Two-Part Prelude” and selections from the first edition of the twelve book Prelude Alfred Tennyson, from In Memoriam Charles Darwin, from The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, The Descent of Man, and Autobiography Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality” The ‘Uncanny’” The Ego and the Id The Interpretation of Dreams Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Gwendolyn Bennett, Lillian Byrnes, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer—selected poetry <--- Return to List of Courses
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