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WLIT 315

Advanced Topics in World Literature

This course offers advanced, intensive examination of specific issues in World Literature, often those at the center of current critical interest. Examples may include translation issues; cross-cultural fertilizations; competing conceptions of world literature; literature in a global economy. May be repeated for credit with different topics.

Distribution Area Prerequisites Credits
Arts and Humanities- or -Global Learning 1 course

Spring Semester information

Harry Brown

315A: AdvTps:The Devil

Any good plot has its protagonist and its antagonist. This course is about The Antagonist. The Adversary. The Enemy. The Tempter. The Trickster. Satan. Lucifer. Mephistopheles. The Inflatable Demon in the ice bath in the Ninth Circle of Hell. He has many names, and we will survey the world's literary registry of them. We begin with his origins in the ancient Middle East, tracing his emergence in the biblical books of Genesis, Job, the Gospels, and Revelations. We then follow his ascendance as the celebrated and scorned supervillain of the Western literary canon, in Dante's The Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Goethe's Faust. From the nineteenth century to the present, literature reflects his face in dizzying kaleidoscope, which we will glimpse in works by William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Mikhail Bulgakov, James Baldwin, William Peter Blatty, Cormac McCarthy, Ben Okri, and Beth Underdown. We will also note his prominent role in selected historical spasms, from waves witch hunting in Europe and Salem, to blood libel conspiracy theories, to the more recent satanic panics inflamed by Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music. Finally, we will sample his many Hollywood turns, including Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Witch. Through this survey, we will see that his purpose is as plastic as his form, as we make him the dark icon of whatever troubles us then and there. In this sense, he is the worst part of us that we're always trying to exorcize.


Justin Glessner

315B: AdvTps:Cultural Studies of Satan, Then and Now

Across various times and places, the concept of "the satan"--found in texts like Job 1:6 (Hebrew: "the adversary")--has consistently proven to be a rich source of intellectual engagement: Satan, it seems, is "good to think with" (then and now). This course employs transdisciplinary approaches to investigate the contours and functions of the (sometimes-mundane, sometimes-magnificent, always-interesting) satanic imaginary as expressed in literature throughout history. Beginning with some ancient (then) expositions from Abrahamic traditions (Judaism | Christianity | Islam) and concluding with select (now) [more] contemporary expressions, we explore the host of positions and interests such voices bring to their discourses on Satan (and the satanic). How might we contextualize the diverse ways that "then and now" folk relate to the satanic? What discourses and relations of power are at work in "then and now" satanic musings? More broadly, how might we imagine our relationships with the "then and now" satanic imaginary, while growing in (self-)critical awareness of the ideological/contextual nature of engaging with the past, present, and future? Come and see!


Fall Semester information

Victoria Wiet

315A: AdvTps:The Romantic Period: Empire & Sexuality