This course is a comparative study of German, French, and English projects of literary experimentation, philosophical reflection, and political critique grouped under the term romanticism, with a dual focus on the original historical contexts around 1800 and subsequent theoretical accounts. (4 credits)
FORE E-143 Masterpieces of German Literature: From Goethe to Nietzsche
Fall term (13755)
Markus Wilczek, PhD, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.
This course introduces students to masterpieces of German literature and philosophy from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Readings include Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heine, and Nietzsche. Through paradigmatic close readings of canonical texts, the course traces the German literary and cultural history of the long nineteenth century. (4 credits)
FORE E-144 False Gods: Psychic Transformations in Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald
The "coming of age" story was a conventional kind of novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Europe and America. The hero or heroine discovers that adult life requires them to engage the ungovernable forces of love, money, and worldly power. The four novels in this course, Great Expectations, Old Goriot, Crime and Punishment, and The Great Gatsby, are all coming of age stories driven by devotional mistakes, wrong loves and wrong beliefs, and desperate struggles to make those mistakes right, to find—in the place of false gods—goodness, truth, and beauty. (4 credits)
FORE E-155 Culture and Society in Modern Arabic Fiction
Spring term (23608)
William Granara, PhD, Professor of the Practice of Arabic on the Gordon Gray Endowment, Harvard University.
This course is a survey of the contemporary Arab world as envisioned and construed by Arab writers of fiction. The novels and short stories at its heart deal with major political, social, religious, and cultural aspects of modern Arab society, and represent a wide range of geographical, ideological, cultural, and aesthetic stances. The course considers both the historical contexts for the works as well as the major schools and trends of contemporary Arabic fiction. Themes such as family, religion, gender, childhood, education, poverty, war, emigration, and freedom of expression are explored. (4 credits)