Explore Classes in This Program

Both autobiography and biography have connections with religious writing (confessions and saints’ lives) and often remain strongly religious in nature. In this course, students read selected autobiographies, biographies, and “autobiographical fictions” in order to explore opportunities, choices, and problems that authors face in composing those spiritual and ethical reflections that distinguish the effort to tell a person’s life.

This course concerns the controversial redefining of gender roles, for both women and men, that took place in the nineteenth century. In order to explore the cultural concerns about gender that perplexed and sometimes polarized society, students read a variety of literary works and cultural documents as they assess the complex matrix of cultural attitudes out of which evolved those dominant conceptions of manhood and womanhood that determine common modern constructions of gender.

This course examines literary representations of war. Although the readings are broad-ranging and begin with selections from pre-classical and classical Greece, the main focus is on texts associated with World War One. Authors include Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut. War-related subjects, such as the literature of peace advocacy, are taken up as well.