CMLT 360 - Great Books of the 19th Century

I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better. - E. Hemingway In this course, students will match wits with Hemingway’s heavyweights of nineteenth-century literature: Turgenev, Stendhal, golden-gloved Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Hemingway in A Moveable Feast: “In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev.”) In the first half of the course, students will read War and Peace, aided by theoretical approaches of Mikhail Bakhtin, Lydia Ginzburg, and Julia Kristeva; in the second half of the course, Red and Black, Crime and Punishment, and Fathers and Sons. Course requirements include class presentation, course paper, and participation in a literary trial. (Alternate years.) (Group III) (Writing Option)