What Books Might I Have To Read In These College Classes?

There are really only about five or ten to choose from

 

You cannot predict. Each professor is different, has a different theoretical approach and/or different themes that they wish to build on, different regions/countries of expertise, etc.

As far as Romanticism, it depends on how far back they want to go. Critics nowadays view Romanticism more as an evolution of the Enlightenment, not a revolution. You could easily start off such a course w/ late French Enlightenment and segue into the German and English resistance to France's hegemony in Europe letters and culture.

The prof could focus on "cultural studies" and look at this through popular art forms, such as the commedia dell arte, opera, music, popular ballads, gardens (yes... gardens), etc. Although I doubt it. Those courses still tend towards "dead, old white men", although at least ppl try to engage them from the point of view of marginalized ppl.


Re: Contemporary Euro Lit...

Abso-fooking NO WAY to predict THAT class. I'd imagine you'll go through all the 'isms' of the teens and 20's and 30's, but who knows...

 

In the unlikely event that the prof is a hardcore Hegelian and has read and absorbed both volumes of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, s/he might go back even farther: Hegel argues that Romanticism, in contrast to classicism, actually begins with Christianity. So you could conceivably wind up reading one of the Gospels or Augustine's Confessions.

But even limiting it the late 18th, early 19th century, there's no way, Evan, that you're going to get anything more than random guesses from an internet message board. You'd be better off, for reasons already mentioned by other posters, E-mailing the professors and asking if they'd settled on the reading list yet.

 

Keep up the discussion, guys. I actually enjoy reading this stuff. How sad is that?

 

Sorry, 26, but this thread is pretty much over. Once you drop the H(egel)-bomb, there's nowhere left to go.

 

Crap, I was hoping we could parlay this discussion into a analysis of phenomenology and the work of Husserl.

 

My GOD I loved that!! I don't remember anything about it... at all... just that I loved it.

One of my fondest memories of grad school was a day when the professor went OFF on a complete tangent and gave a powerful feminist reading of Frankenstein. Even though it was completely unrelated to the course, we were all taking notes feverishly b/c she was going to town.

 

I've never been really stirred by the feminist interpretations of Frankenstein - as far as childbirth w/ links between creator and creation. I am, however, still relatively captivated by the connection between Shelley's characters and her real-life acquaintances, friends, and family.

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I've currently read Voltaire's Candide, Sherman Alexie's Flight, and Rowson's Charlotte Temple. I liked 2 out of 3.

 

carlos is right that it would have been tough to predict with any accuracy beforehand, but gotta say, the first text that came to mind for me re: that Romanticism class was Werther. Calvino in the Contemp Euro Lit class would have been an early guess too.

 

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler wears very thin after a couple of chapters. Shame you weren't assigned the superior Invisible Cities.

 

Yeah, but course readings really depend on the themes the prof wants to develop. (I haven't read either texts from Calvino.)

 

Havent' done Invisible Cities yet, but I didn't have that experience with Traveler. I think it kept me pretty engaged throughout. Plus, it's pretty short, no?

 

I went to university 40 years ago, so Contemporary Euro Lit was a bit different then. It's funny how the passage of time would shape course content. My major was Comparative Lit, with a creative writing emphasis, which meant that I didn't have to take 2 period lit classes and was allowed to take Aesthetics and Literary Criticism.

I hated English Lit from 1660-1735. Maybe it was the professor. She was particularly enamored of Pepys. I wasn't. My loss probably.

It would be so different taking European Lit today, following the political changes in Eastern Europe especially. I don't know whether anyone reads Kundera now, but ...Lightness... had not been published when I was in school.

 

Kundera, unfortunately for him, is now a DWM. No self respecting Pomolicri Prof would assign his books to be read. Another reminder of the unbearable lightness of Being.

 

Wouldn't it be easier just to read it for yourself?

 

"Inivisible Cities" is excellent. A drawback is that to this day I cannot hear the Khan, or Marco Polo, mentioned without thinking of chess or of those phantasmogorical cities of Calvino's construction.

 

DWM is the acronym for the infamous object of current PC loathing, the Dead White Male.

 

Current? Maybe if by current you mean 1985. The myth of PC canon destruction has long been put to rest, and the DWMs are thriving, thanks.

 

NO, by current I mean 2007. The reality of "canon destruction", as you phrase it, or "deconstruction" as usually phrased by its proponents , in English/Lit departments [but not only these] at the "elite" universities and colleges may have started to gather steam back in 1985 [you tell me] but today it is in full power steaming down the tracks of the PC express. Anyone, who is remotely honest, and has had the dubious pleasure of engaging in higher education at "top" schools in the past robust decade, private or state, knows that the insistence on Political Correctness is a brute reality. In the narrower context of the world of "litcrit", one quickly learns that open engagement in, admiration of, and justification of the great writers and thinkers of the Western tradition, is an effort to a good deed that will go swifty punished. Oh, my bad, there is one caveat. Spanning our nation, from Columbia to Berkeley, one CAN openly engage in, admire, and justify those "dead white males" whose thought prepared the ground for PCness and whose will is to impose an historical memory that can best be summarized as "We have come to bury Caesar, not praise him".
DWMs "are thriving"? About as much as the life of the mind at Harvard on a Summer's Last Day.

 

Nice cut-n-paste job. Seriously, this reads like a US News and World Report editorial, circa... well, 1985.

 

Nice mindless non-sequitur, even for a Wanker in search of his El. Seriously, this reads like Clooney using his pseudonym of "3PuppetKings" on the Daily Kos, circa....well, today