Literature

DIRECTOR

Associate Professor Osborn

 

The philosophic character of literary study within the Institute is reflected in a concentration upon major authors whose work can claim philosophical scope and penetration. The approach to these works is also philosophic. Students inquire into the issues treated by great writers considering the literary treatment as one voice in a conversation within which philosophers, theologians and political thinkers also participate. The poet seeks to supplant opinion with knowledge by means of constructing a coherent vision of reality just as the philosopher seeks the same end through dialectic. The aim of study therefore is to share in the poet’s wisdom concerning a reality already constituted before imagination sets to work on it but imperfectly known until illuminated and ordered by art. Courses focus upon literature as a distinct way of knowing irreducible to other modes of knowledge but best understood and assessed when studied in company with other modes of discourse directed to common subjects. Institute students join teachers dedicated to grasping in what manner poetic art can provide knowledge of reality and to discerning what that knowledge may be.

Students learn to apprehend the form of literary art by attending to the qualities of poetic speech and by studying the kinds of poetry. They investigate such constants of the arts as myth, symbol, analogy and figure, image, prosody and style. In the process they come to appreciate the notable congruence of particularity with generality that characterizes the poetic mode of being and that has led thinkers to define a poem as a "concrete universal." The kinds of poetry — the perennial genres — need not be taken as prescriptions arbitrarily imposed, for they can be understood as the natural shapes literature displays when it envisions different human actions.

Neither the constants of poetic speech nor the continuities of genre sufficiently specify the particular purchase upon human issues offered by any great poem. To bring this meaning into sharper resolution requires the final act of literary understanding, interpretation of individual poems, an undertaking in which the comparison of poem with poem has its instructive part. Critical interpretation entails the most careful and sustained attentiveness to elucidating meaning and culminates in critical judgment of the contribution of that meaning to one’s grasp of the truth.

The interpretive dimension of the program is reflected in courses that find their formal object sometimes in a genre (Epic, Lyric, Tragedy/Comedy, Menippean Satire, or Russian Novel), sometimes in a literary movement (Renaissance Drama, Romantic/Victorian Literature, Augustan Literature, American Literature, Southern Literature, Twentieth Century Literature), sometimes in major authors (Dante, Chaucer, Spenser/Milton, Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Faulkner, Hawthorne/Melville/James). Students confront the claims of classical, Christian and modern poets. They thereby enter into the issues that cause the Western tradition to be a tradition of controversies.

Courses in Literature

ENG 5312English Renaissance

3

ENG 5313Thomas More

3

ENG 5315Introduction to Literary Study

3

ENG 5316Argumentation

3

ENG 5317Advanced Creative Writing

3

ENG 5318Hopkins and Newman

3

ENG 5319Postmodernism and Contemporary Literature

3

ENG 5320Arthurian Romance

3

ENG 5321Modern Irish Literature

3

ENG 5322Menippean Satire

3

ENG 5323Modern Southern Literature

3

ENG 5324Dante

3

ENG 5325Augustan Literature

3

ENG 5326Waugh and the Post-War West

3

ENG 5328Joyce

3

ENG 5329Theory and Philosophy of Literature

3

ENG 5357Poetry by the Book

3

ENG 6313Chaucer I: Early Works to Troilus

3

ENG 6314Chaucer II: The Canterbury Tales

3

ENG 6315Classical Rhetorical Theory

3

ENG 6316Pastoral Poetry

3

ENG 6323Shakespeare's Tragedies

3

ENG 6325Special Topics in Shakespeare

3

ENG 6326Shakespeare's Comedies

3

ENG 6327Shakespeare's Histories

3

ENG 6330The Gawain Poet

3

ENG 6331George Eliot

3

ENG 6332Spenser

3

ENG 6333Milton

3

ENG 6334Jonson and the Tribe of Ben

3

ENG 6336Thomas More

3

ENG 6337Pope, Swift, and Their Circle

3

ENG 6338The Age of Johnson

3

ENG 6342T.S. Eliot

3

ENG 6354Jane Austen

3

ENG 6355Russian Novel

3

ENG 6357Victorian Literature

3

ENG 6360Literary Criticism and Theory

3

ENG 6361Faulkner

3

ENG 6362Hawthorne and Melville

3

ENG 6364Liberty in Literature

3

ENG 6369Henry James

3

ENG 6369Conrad

3

ENG 6377Special Studies

3

ENG 6378Special Studies

3

ENG 6379Special Studies

3

ENG 6395Studies in the Novel

3

ENG 6V99Graduate Reading

1-9

ENG 7095Masters Comprehensive Exam

0

ENG 7312The English Renaissance

3

ENG 7317Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems

3

ENG 7335Seventeenth-Century Lyric

3

ENG 7351Directed Readings

3

ENG 7352English Romanticism

3

ENG 7365Modern Poetry

3

ENG 7366Modern Fiction

3

ENG 8310Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8311Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8312Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8313Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8314Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8315Special Topic Seminar

3

ENG 8310-15: Special Topic Seminars. Focused, intense examination of a subject in a small seminar setting for advanced doctoral students. Courses might be organized by author, subject, theme, history, or other structure, and may involve intense research, writing, and presentation. IPS students only.