Courses in the Literature:

LIT 1341 … Epic (Ancient).  An introduction to the epic genre through a close reading of the first great epic texts of Western civilization:  Homerís Iliad and Odyssey and Virgilís Aeneid. The themes considered in the study of ancient epic include the hero and his vocation, honor and the virtues, the relation of man to the gods, the meaning of time, Christian typology in pagan literature, and the importance and meaning of myth.  This course also serves as an introduction to the study of literature and to the basic principles of literary criticism.

LIT 1342 … Epic (Medieval and Modern).  The epic genre depicts the heroic vocation of man as he responds to the eternal values that he encounters in the temporal world.  Medieval and modern epic literature is concerned with the epic theme of establishing right order in the city and the soul that has been revealed in ancient epic.  However, this theme is studied in the specifically Christian context of Danteís Divine Comedy and Miltonís Paradise Lost, in which the full epic pattern of the soulís journey toward God and the attempt to build the New Jerusalem is embodied.  This course also includes study of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Coleridgeís The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,  and T. S. Eliotís The Waste Land.

LIT 2341 … Tragedy and Comedy.   Study of the tragic and comic genres in literature reveals two related but different modes of human experience.  Tragic texts are concerned with manís confrontation with guilt and the choice he makes to accept or deny that guilt.  Comic works reveal a universe permeated with grace in which the highest virtue is receptivity or humility.  Works by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Marlowe,  Shakespeare, Jonson, Beckett, and T.S. Eliot are studied as offering paradigmatic expressions of these two possibilities of human experience.

LIT 2342 … The Novel.  This course offers study of five to six literary works of art, some originally written in English and some read in translation.  The novels read are exemplary in their depiction of man in modernity, embodying themes such as alienation from the community, a preference for the abstract over the concrete, and the failure to interpret reality according to its true character.  As the fourth course in the literature sequence, it also deepens the studentís insight into the epic, comic, and tragic genres as they are manifested in this most recent major literary form.  Works to be read are chosen from Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Lord Jim, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Light in August.

LIT JS341 … Lyric Poetry.  The lyric genre embodies themes of vision, knowledge, love, and wholeness, exploring manís memory and intuitions of an unfallen world.  As such, study of the lyric genre includes the themes of poetic intuition, love between man and woman, and love between the soul and God.  This course considers the patterns of the lyric genre from its roots in Genesis, the Song of Solomon, and Psalms and proceeds through English and American poetry to the twentieth century, with particular emphasis upon seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century British poetry.  Additional textsóshort stories, novelsóthat embody the pattern of the lyric genre may also be studied.

LIT JS342 … Literary Criticism and the Creative Process.  This course focuses on literature and the other arts as modes of knowledge through examining the origin of works of art in creative intuition; the process of embodying creative intuition in the work; mimesis; the organic form and unity of works of art (particularly literary works of art); the analogical imagination and levels of analogy in the literary work of art; the eschatological nature of works of art; the telos of the work of art; the transmission of creative intuition through the work to the reader; and the proper critical approach to explicating literary works of art.  Readings include literary criticism, poetry, a novel and short story, and essays on the creative process.

LIT JS343 … The Russian Novel.  As with all true literary works of art, the novels of the great Russian writers embody insights into the most profound questions of mankind: the meaning of existence and of suffering, the relationship of man to God and to his fellow man, the reality of human freedom and responsibility, and manís calling to a life of active love (as Father Zosima puts it in The Brothers Karamazov).  Their works, like Shakespeareís, are worth studying for this reason alone.  There are also, however, particular insights into the meaning of human experience to be gained from the specific sensibility of the Russian peopleófrom their understanding, for instance, of the relationship of man to the earth, to culture, and to community.  Works read in this course are chosen from Gogolís Dead Souls; Turgenevís Fathers and Sons; Tolstoyís Anna Karenina; and Dostoyevskyís The Brothers Karamasov, The Idiot, and The Possessed.

LIT JS344 … Faulkner.  Almost fifty years after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Faulkner continues to be one of the least understood of the truly great writers, although he has been called by those who have come to understand him the "Dante of the twentieth century." Faulkner has said that it is the "eternal verities" which are the subject  of great literature and that "the human heart in conflict with itself" is the only thing worth writing about, and a close study of his work reveals that indeed it is the perennial human condition which is his subject. This course examines the full scope of Faulkner's vision, from the earlier novels embodying a tragic view of the world through the later works which reveal his deepening insight into man's experience as fundamentally comic, permeated by grace, love and hope, and issuing in glory. Works read include: Absalom, Absalom; The Sound of Fury; Go Down, Moses; The Hamlet; The Town; The Mansion; and The Rivers.

LIT JS345 … Topics in Literature. Topics outside the courses that make up the required curriculum and are approved by the Fellows are offered from time to time. These courses do not fulfill degree requirements unless approved for this purpose by the Dean of registration.