2017-2018 Catalog 
    
    May 20, 2024  
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2017-2018 Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Courses

Browse the entire list of course offerings below, or use the course filter search to view a course or selection of courses.
 

Literature
  

  • LIT034 CM - Creative Journalism

    An intensive hands-on course in feature writing styles and journalistic ethics; a primer for writing in today’s urban America. Essentially, journalism, like all art, tells a story. How that story is told is as critical to the success of a piece as the importance of its theme. A series of writing exercises and reporting “assignments” will give both inexperienced and more advanced writers the tools to explore their writerly “voice.” Special attention will be devoted to discussions of the role of the journalist in society. All registered students must attend the first class.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 034 CM
  

  • LIT036 CM - Screenwriting

    A seminar-workshop on the theory and practice of writing screenplays. We will view films and read scripts in a variety of genres, examine the roles of art, craft, and commerce in writing for film, and discuss in general the enterprise of being a writer. Each student will make substantial progress in the writing of an original screenplay. All registered students must attend the first class.

    Prerequisite: written permission of department chair.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 036 CM
  

  • LIT038 CM - Fiction Writing

    This course, which will be conducted as a workshop, will deal with both short and long forms of fiction. Participants, who may choose either form, will present their original manuscripts and will discuss those submitted by their fellow writers. All registered students must attend the first class.

    Prerequisite: written permission of instructor.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 038 CM
  

  • LIT057 CM - British Writers I

    A survey of the major British writers from the medieval and Renaissance periods. Throughout the course we will pay attention to how this literature reflects political, religious, and philosophical influences, as well as particular aspects of the early development of the English language.

    Offered: Every fall

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 057 CM
  

  • LIT058 CM - British Writers II

    A survey of representative major themes and texts from the Restoration through the early 20th century. The course, which emphasizes poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose, addresses the transitions between Neoclassic, Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist trends in British literature.

    Offered: Every spring

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 058 CM
  

  • LIT060 CM - American Writers to 1900

    A survey of major American writing (excluding novels) illustrating the development of a national literature from the Colonial period through the 19th century. Readings will be chosen from the works of such representative writers as Edwards, Franklin, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and Henry James. Considerable attention will also be paid to the social and philosophical forces which influenced the literature.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 060 CM
  

  • LIT060B CM - American Writers 1900-Present

    This course is an introduction to modern American literature in different genres: though our emphasis will be on the novel, we will also be looking at short stories, poems, plays, essays, and films. We will study the evolution of American literature within the changing social, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts and conventions of the last hundred or so years by tracing shifting mythologies and perceptions of Americanness in authors such as Cather, Hemingway, W.C. Williams, Faulkner, O’Neill, Ellison, Kerouac, and McCarthy. Our reading will emphasize the variety of narrative strategies and formal experiments authors developed and undertook in order to capture local color or distinct voices, to respond to or register changes in the modern world, or to shape discourses of nationhood, democracy, liberty, race, and gender.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 060B CM
  

  • LIT061 CM - The Bible

    This course focuses on intensive reading in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, with special attention to the complexities of interpreting a sacred text. The problems of authorship, historical and religious context, canon formation, and translation will be considered in light of the history of interpretation from midrash, St. Augustine, and Origen through modern literary criticism, especially Robert Lowth, Eric Auerbach, Northrop Frye, and Robert Alter. Special attention will be given to the use of the Bible by modern writers.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 061 CM
  

  • LIT062 CM - Shakespeare’s Tragedies

    This course will treat the development of Shakespeare’s tragic dramas and explore the nature of tragedy. We will read seven works by Shakespeare and three by his contemporaries Marlowe, Tourneur, and Webster. Shakespeare’s contribution to tragedy will be studied partly in the context of ancient and medieval as well as Renaissance conceptions of tragedy.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 062 CM
  

  • LIT063 CM - Chaucer

    This course introduces students to the major works of the 14th-century English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. We read seven of the major tales from The Canterbury Tales; two of the longer dream vision poems, The House of Fame and The Book of Duchess, and Chaucer’s epic poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Students will learn to read all Chaucerian works in their original Middle English.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 063 CM
  

  • LIT064 CM - Shakespeare’s Histories and Romances

    This course studies representative plays from each of the major phases of Shakespeare’s evolution, from the histories, the comedies, the tragedies, to the last plays, or romances. Designed for literature majors and non-majors alike, this course enables the latter, in particular, to proceed to other plays in the Shakespearean canon. While focusing on different stages in his development, it also looks to the more enduring thematic patterns and personal myths present in Shakespeare’s work.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 064 CM
  

  • LIT065 CM - Love Poetry of the English Renaissance

    The ages agree that love is among the most powerful and significant human experiences. Love is the most urgent of poetic messages, and has inspired the greatest variety of expressive forms. This course will explore the depiction of love in English poetry from the early 16th to the late 17th centuries, in courtly sonnets, erotic narratives, marriage poems, devotional meditations, metaphysical lyrics and satire. Authors will include Skelton, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Marvell, Rochester, and Swift.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 065 CM
  

  • LIT066 CM - Shakespeare’s Comedies

    Shakespeare’s comedies have entertained audiences for four centuries; they are also complex works of art which reward detailed study. In this course we will read eight of Shakespeare’s comedies, from the lighthearted play The Taming of the Shrew to the darker Measure for Measure, and supplement our readings with film. We will discuss topics such as love, sex, marriage, gender roles, parents and children, figurative language, jokes, scansion, performance in Shakespeare’s time and ours, the nature of comedy, happy endings and those excluded from them.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 066 CM
  

  • LIT067 CM - Milton

    England’s greatest epic poet was also a political and controversial religious thinker whose life and work had an enormous influence on British and American writers from Blake to Melville. This course will examine Milton’s major epic poems - Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes - as well as his great early poems Lycidas, and Comus, in the context of biblical and classical literary traditions as well as the religious and political crises of his time. Milton’s controversial prose writings on education, kingship, marriage, and freedom of the press will also be considered.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 067 CM
  

  • LIT069 CM - Shakespeare’s Sonnets

    This course is focused on a single volume of poems which are among the most famous and canonical in English. We will read them closely, with particular sensitivity to their syntax and sonic structure. This will be a course not only in love poetry but in poetic style. We will consider diverse thematic readings and address arguments by Shakespeare’s recent critics. We will often be studying the ways in which interpretability provides new life to old poems. And we will consider what other poets since Shakespeare have made of the sonnet form. We will be constantly studying very great verbal art.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 069 CM
  

  • LIT070 CM - The Rise of the English Novel

    In a famous phrase, D. H. Lawrence called the novel “the one bright book of life.” This course examines the rise of the novel in England from its emergence in the early 1700s to its establishment as a dominant, if controversial, genre just over a century later. Key issues to be studied will be plot, characterization, the perspectives of satire vs. sentiment, social class, gender roles, courtship and marriage, and fiction’s ethical powers and responsibilities. Readings include novels by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Radcliffe, Austen, and Scott, as well as background readings in criticism and theory.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 070 CM
  

  • LIT071 CM - 19th-Century British Novel

    The novel is the crowning achievement of 19th-century British literature, a form which fully retains its immense popularity, critical interest and critical acclaim today. The accomplishment of such masters as Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot and Hardy will be seen through a close reading of major works. Discussions and lectures will focus both on concerns and issues of the period as well as on ways in which Victorian masterworks like Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, and Jude the Obscure reflect the growth and change of the novel form itself.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 071 CM
  

  • LIT072 CM - Jane Austen

    One of the greatest and most beloved English writers, Jane Austen played a major role in the development of the novel as a genre. This course will cover the six published novels, her letters, and unpublished works. We will study Austen’s role within a tradition of women’s writing, with attention to both her predecessors and successors. We will examine her works in relation to the cultural context of the late 18th and early 19th century and will also survey the growing body of scholarship on Austen.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 072 CM
  

  • LIT073 CM - The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

    In this course we will read closely some Hopkins poems and study this great Victorian as a devotional poet and a stylistic innovator, especially at the level of prosody and diction. We will consider the significance of diction in poetry and investigate Hopkins’ prosodic innovations as a return to Anglo-Saxon models of accentual versification. T. S. Eliot saw a divide in English poetry between the native, Anglo-Saxon style of Dryden and the Latinate style of Milton. We will investigate nativism in English poetry from Dryden to Basil Bunting in order to establish a context for Hopkins’ innovations.
     

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 073 CM
  

  • LIT074 CM - The Gothic Novel: Producing Monsters

    Francisco Goya famously declared that “the sleep of reason produces monsters.” In this course we will examine the Gothic novel, a literary genre that attempts to obscure the line between the real and the fantastic. We will consider the relationship between the language of terror and the age of enlightenment, the social upheavals and political revolutions that shaped the Gothic novel, as well as the ways in which the individual came to be represented by the Gothic imagination. Readings will include, but are not limited to: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, The Italian, Zofloya, Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, and Dracula.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 074 CM
  

  • LIT075 CM - Vladimir Nabokov

    This seminar will examine the depth and breadth of the works of Vladimir Nabokov. Special attention paid to those works originally written in English. Special consideration will be accorded to Nabokov’s irreverent and idiosyncratic opinions on the task of the critic. Readings will include: Lolita; Speak, Memory; Pale Fire; Pnin; Ada, or Ardor; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; The Gift; Strong Opinions; and Lectures on Literature.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 075 CM
  

  • LIT078 CM - Travel and The Literary Imagination

    The Travel Narrative is essentially an account of a conquest, sometimes in the service of the Divine, sometimes in the service of Empire, sometimes in the service of private enterprise, sometimes in the service of personal satisfaction and private revelations. The readings start with the book of Exodus and go on to the voyage of Ibn Battuta, the voyage of Christopher Columbus, the travels of William Bartram, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, the conquest of the Himalayan region by Europeans, and the journal of the poet Louise Bogan, among others.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 078 CM
  

  • LIT080 CM - 19th-Century American Fiction

    A study of the short stories and novels of selected authors, including Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Melville, and James. Particular attention will be given to the tension in these works between domesticity and the adventure far from home. We will also explore the various ways in which the past intrudes upon characters’ new worlds.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 080 CM
  

  • LIT081 CM - Melville

    This seminar will examine the work and life of Herman Melville, one of the most complex and influential of American writers. After attention to several of the early novels, particularly Typee and Redburn, the focus will turn to the major novels, Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd, as well as the stories of The Piazza Tales. Melville’s poetry, including the epic pilgrimage Clarel, will be considered in depth in the context of the Civil War and in relation to its ongoing spiritual occupations. Literary, religious, scientific, and political contexts will structure readings and discussions. Students are encouraged, though not required, to have taken a course in Shakespeare, the Bible, or Milton prior to enrollment.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 081 CM
  

  • LIT084 CM - Lyric Voice & Vision in Modern American Literature and Film

    This course examines currents in American literature and film from World War II to the present. Though the course surveys key trends over this period – especially against the backgrounds of modernism and post-modernism – we will concentrate in particular on the “lyric” impulse in American culture, studying works concerned with ideas of epiphany, meditation, contemplation, transcendence, a general conception of the “poetic” and the role of feeling and the emotions in modern life. With a primary focus on short forms, we will pay special attention to work that confronts the question of how to maintain “lyric” artistic standpoints amid cultural and social developments often inimical to them.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 084 CM
  

  • LIT085 CM - Contemporary American Fiction

    This class will explore major American novels and short fiction since 1945. We will examine the work of various authors in terms of their art and personal vision as well as their relation to particular literary movements and social and political circumstances. Texts will include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Don Delillo’s White Noise, Jessica Hagendorn’s Dogeaters, Sandra Cisnero’s Women Hollering Creek, Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, Leslie Marmon’s Silk’s Ceremony, among others.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 085 CM
  

  • LIT089 CM - The English Enlightenment: Dryden, Pope, and Johnson

    The course will focus on poets whose poems display many of the virtues of memorable prose-clarity, vigor, sense, civility. These poets were engaged by the events of their time and wrote for literate readers who prized the sense of what they read-a general audience. The course will represent these poets’ literary achievements, with special attention given to Pope’s Essay on Man and Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” All three poets left their mark, too, on the history of literary criticism. We will discuss Dryden’s essays and prefaces, Pope’s Essay on Criticism, and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 089 CM
  

  • LIT090 CM - Emily Dickinson

    Emily Dickinson wrote more than 1,500 short poems, but not a single long poem, nor an essay. Her poems were unknown by nearly all her contemporaries. The poems have had immense impact, however, on later poets, and she has reached a very broad readership. She and Walt Whitman-altogether different from one another-are the most canonical of American poets. Her poems have come to stand for privacy, intensity, compression, and intellectuality. She wrote in a meter familiar to all those who have sung hymns in Christian churches. Her syntax and diction, though, are often peculiar, like that of no other English-language poet.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 090 CM
  

  • LIT091 CM - American Poetry: Tradition and Experiment

    An introduction to major American poets including Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Lowell, and others. Emphasis will be on basic concepts of metaphor, prosody, and myth and their relation to American thought.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 091 CM
  

  • LIT092 CM - Close Reading

    Close reading is what students and scholars of literature do, and have always done. This course will present an overview of the history of textual interpretation, from its roots in Biblical study and ancient philosophy to more modern approaches such as Marxist literary criticism, psychoanalytic literary criticism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. To this end we will read theoretical texts by Erich Auerbach, Roland Barthes, William Empson, I. A. Richards, Jacques Derrida and others. The main focus of the class, however, will be individual readings of poetic texts. Poets studied include, but are not limited to, Shakespeare, Keats, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Yeats.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 092 CM
  

  • LIT093 CM - Postwar American Poetry

    This course is an introduction to major American poets of the last half century, from Lowell and Olson to Rich and Howe. We will consider poets and poems both individually and in their literary and socio-historical contexts, examining poetic movements (New York School, Beats, Black Mountain, Language), the relationship of poetry to the other arts, and the role of poetry in late-20th- and 21st-century culture. We will explore the formal experimentalism of postwar American poetry, its major thematic concerns (relations between art and politics, modernity and history, public and private), and its treatment of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 093 CM
  

  • LIT094 CM - American Women Poets

    The history of American poetry is unthinkable without the contribution of a central lineage of female poets. This course offers an in-depth examination of their work; we will open with the beginnings of the American literary tradition (Anne Bradstreet) and the nineteenth century (Emily Dickinson), then focus on twentieth-century poetry (from modernists Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore to postwar poets Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath), and conclude by looking at exciting contemporary voices. We will consider poets and poems both individually and in their literary and socio-historical contexts, examining poetic movements (Imagism, Objectivism, the New York School, Confessionalism, Black Mountain, Language), the relationship of poetry to the other arts, and the role of poetry in American culture. While we will home in on gender poetics and politics, we will also explore broader questions of poetic form, the relations between modernity and history, and America and the world, as well as the poetic treatment of race, class, sexuality, and nation.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 094 CM
  

  • LIT095 CM - Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Marianne Moore

    This course will explore the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and that of her two most important literary influences: the modernist poet and editor, Marianne Moore, who was her mentor; and her close literary peer, and fellow New Englander, Robert Lowell. While still a student at Vassar in the early thirties, Bishop met Moore and their friendship began. She and Lowell met in the mid-forties when they were both already established writers. Through close readings of the poems of these major American poets, students will open an inquiry into how friendship, in addition to artistic and temperamental differences, can influence and shape style.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 095 CM
  

  • LIT097 CM - T.S. Eliot and His Circle

    This course offers an examination of T.S. Eliot, one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. We will consider the entirety of Eliot’s small output of poems and plays and many of his seminal critical essays, studying his relation to traditions of British, European, and classical poetry and his engagement with philosophical, moral, metaphysical, and religious questions. We will pay special attention to issues of modernism, poetic form, and intertextuality, to the idea of a poetic canon, and to the links between poetry and the other arts (music, painting, sculpture). We will also situate Eliot’s work in the context of the broader sociocultural crisis of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in its contemporary literary context, spending time on other poets whom Eliot admired and was influenced by, such as Pound and Yeats, but also on poets who rebelled against his influence, such as William Carlos Williams. 

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 097 CM
  

  • LIT098 CM - News from the Delphic Oracle: Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

    In this course we will examine ancient Greek literature in the context of its culture, starting with the traditional foundations of Greek religion and heroic ideals embodied in epic, lyric, comedy, and tragedy. Then we will progress to the great period of questioning that followed, exemplified by the figure of Socrates, and expressed in the writings of philosophers and historians. Authors will include Homer, Simonides, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 098 CM
  

  • LIT099 CM - Special Topics in Literature

    Selected topics in Literature.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 099 CM
  

  • LIT100 CM - Literary Theory Since Plato

    What is a good book? How do we decide whether a work of literature is worth reading? What is the basis of literary judgment? How do we bring history, religion, and myth to bear on our understanding of literary texts? How does imaginative literature differ from other forms of discourse? These are among the fundamental questions explored in this course through the eyes of major literary thinkers. The course examines literary criticism as a discipline with unique traditions of inquiry beginning with classical debates about form and reality and the tensions between the moral and aesthetic dimensions of literature as they have been engaged by such writers as Plato and Aristotle, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Arnold and Pater, Woolf, and Eliot.

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 100 CM
  

  • LIT101 CM - Translation in Theory and Practice

    “Every allegedly great age is an age of translations”: In this course we will test Ezra Pound’s dictum by examining the history, theory, and practice of translation. What do translators-and translations-do? What is translation’s role in the formation and transmission of culture? What is lost in translation and what may be gained? Bringing together readings from linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology, we will focus on case studies from ancient languages (the Bible, Greek classics) and pay special attention to literary translation in the 20th and 21st centuries. By also working on translations of their own, students will explore hands-on the interpretive and creative nature of the translator’s task and the specific challenges that different types of translation pose; familiarity with a foreign language is welcome but not required.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 101 CM
  

  • LIT102 CM - Exploring Poetry

    This course is designed to introduce students to the thorough, systematic study of poetry, thus increasing students’ enjoyment of poetry and preparing them for advanced study of poetry in other courses. We will examine such issues as theories of poetry, form, poetic voice, symbolism and metaphorical language, irony, meter, and recurring themes as treated by poets of different backgrounds, in different cultural and historical contexts. The course will be organized thematically, but will include work by poets from the middle ages to the present.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 102 CM
  

  • LIT104 CM - The Tragedies of Sophocles

    Sophocles is regarded as the greatest of the Greek tragedians, in part because he could evoke such powerful tragic figures–Oedipus, Ajax, Antigone, Heracles, Philoctetes. Based on the plays that have come down to us we will follow the arc of his career, comparing him with his great model, Aeschylus, and his chief rival, Euripides. The plays will be our window onto Athenian culture and the Dionysian festival for which they were written. They will lead us to consider the “paradox of tragedy”–that we derive the most intense aesthetic pleasure from seeing the worst things happen to the best people.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 104 CM
  

  • LIT105 CM - Gender and Family in Medieval Literature

    The family was in flux in the Middle Ages: cities were growing, women were working in greater numbers, and people were starting to enjoy the benefits of privacy in domestic space. This course explores family dynamics and the household in a wide range of medieval literary texts and visual sources including cycle drama, illustrated books of hours, The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Over the course of the semester, we’ll consider questions related to gender, labor, housing, and the changing household economy.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 105 CM
  

  • LIT107 CM - Modern Drama

    This course is a survey of modern dramatic literature beginning with the late-19th century plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, and continuing to the present day. Students will be introduced to works from a variety of avant-garde movements including Symbolism (Maeterlinck), Dadaism (Jarry), Expressionism (Treadwell), Surrealism (Artaud), Epic Theatre (Brecht), and Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett). We will also become familiar with dramatists of the post-1945 period, including Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Wole Soyinka, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 107 CM
  

  • LIT107B CM - Medieval Drama

    This course provides a survey of medieval dramatic literature including liturgical drama, morality plays, the drama of saints and conversion, the raucous tavern plays of Arras, France, and the epic cycles performed in York, Chester, and Wakefield. Questions related to theatricality and performance will be central to our examination of these plays: how, where, and in what contexts were they performed, and who were the actors? Readings will be supplemented with a wide range of interdisciplinary materials including visual media, financial accounts, props lists, anti-theatrical treatises, and modern performances.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 107B CM
  

  • LIT108 CM - Medieval Women Writers

    This survey of women writers begins in the 12th century with Marie de France, who famously claimed that “anyone who has received from God the gift of knowledge and true eloquence has a duty not to remain silent.” The work of medieval women writers is wide-ranging and diverse, from chivalric romance and visionary poetry to utopian fiction. In addition to work by such authors as Christine de Pisan, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Angela of Foligno, and Hildegard of Bingen, we’ll read the letters of Abelard and Héloise, and the trial of Joan of Arc.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 108 CM
  

  • LIT110 CM - The Age of Chivalry

    The chivalric ideal was a complex social and behavioral code that governed the life of the medieval court, from the battlefield to the bedroom. In addition to the early legends of Tristan, Parzival, and Lancelot, we’ll examine late medieval practical guides for aspiring knights written by Raymon Lull, Geoffrey de Charny, and Andreas Capellanus. Other readings will include Marie de France’s fanciful Arthurian Lais, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and Malory’s Mort D’Arthur. Key issues to be examined include the chivalric ethos, changing definitions of medieval masculinity, representations of women in chivalric texts, medieval identity performance in tournaments and pageants, and contemporary medievalisms, from Camelot to Monty Python.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 110 CM
  

  • LIT111 CM - Dante

    This course introduces students to one of the most influential authors of medieval Europe. We’ll explore themes related to sin and punishment, love and lust, commerce and trade, and the complicated relationship between author and text. We’ll also meet corrupt friars, lusty nuns, shady merchants, and even a person described as “the worst man in the world.” In addition to reading Dante’s Vita Nuova, Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), and excerpts from the Convivio and Monarchia, students will also read Giovanni Boccaccio’s riotous Life of Dante, written just decades after Dante’s death. At the end of the course, we’ll emerge from the depths of hell onto the bustling streets of Florence with selected stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron. All readings will be in English translation.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 111 CM
  

  • LIT114 CM - Politics, Violence, and Early Modern Literature

    What constitutes the ideal state? The ideal ruler? These questions lie at the center of the extraordinary flourishing of political thought in Europe between 1500 and 1700. At the same time, they deeply engaged the literary imagination of the period, as authors held the mirror up to their own societies, reconstructed societies of the past, and described societies of their own imaginative making. In this course we will explore the complex and compelling intersection between early modern politics and literature, paying particular attention to the uses and representations of violence. Our readings will include works by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Montaigne, Milton, Hobbes, and others.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 114 CM
  

  • LIT115 CM - Shakespeare and His Rivals

    The longstanding tradition of bardolatry, or Shakespeare worship, has given us a mythical figure that bestrides the narrow world like a colossus. But the historical Shakespeare was once a young writer trying to make a name for himself in the bustling world of London theater. There he had not only contemporaries but also competitors. In this course we will read a group of Shakespeare’s plays next to and against those of his rivals, including Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. We will carefully consider such matters as style, stagecraft, genre, history, moral philosophy, and the representation of difference.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 115 CM
  

  • LIT116 CM - Autobiography and Literary Imagination

    In this seminar we will explore the ways in which individuals take possession of and authority over their lives through the act of writing. The impulse behind this act varies: sometimes it might be to justify the life that has been lived so far; sometimes it might be to explore the life not lived at all, an expression of regret; sometimes it might be an attempt to conceal events consciously or not, from both the reader and the author.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 116 CM
  

  • LIT117 CM - Literature of Late Medieval England

    From the plague to the peasants’ revolt, this course examines critical moments in the cultural history of England by looking at the literature of the court, the city, the church, and the countryside. Key topics addressed over the course of the semester will include urbanization, lay piety, anticlericalism, literacy, cosmopolitanism, gender politics, labor, and national identity. Students will read a wide range of genres including epic poetry, fabliau, sermons, saints’ lives, dream visions, and drama Readings will include Pearl, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and excerpts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and shorter poems.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 117 CM
  

  • LIT118 CM - The Romantic Revolution

    A study of the revolution in human consciousness known as Romanticism. The course concentrates on the British Romantics, but also studies Romanticism as an international phenomenon. Writers studied include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Emerson, Thoreau, Lermontov.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 118 CM
  

  • LIT119 CM - 19th-Century Russian Novel

    This course examines the explosive growth of the Russian novel. Students will read major works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and will become familiar with such themes as Slavophilism, realism, revolution versus tradition, and national identity.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 119 CM
  

  • LIT121 CM - British Modernism

    Modernism was characterized by radical experiments in form that altered the conventions of what we think of as literature. Inseparable from these technical innovations were the cultural forces that shaped writers of the period, including the trauma of war, the rise of mass culture, new technologies such as radio, cinema, and photography, and changed patterns of mobility, urban experience, and sexual freedom. But modernism’s relentless quest for the new was accompanied by an attraction to the very old, as writers turned to Greek antiquity and the Celtic past to forge their aesthetics. This course approaches the modernist movement through some of its most prominent figures (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot) and examines distinctive techniques including Imagism, stream-of-consciousness, and the mythic method.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 121 CM
  

  • LIT122 CM - European Modernist Fiction

    The first half of the 20th century produced an exceptional body of powerful and innovative fiction. Modernist fiction is notable for its stylistic originality, formal experimentation, psychological depth, sensuality, wit, nostalgia, and irony. Authors will include Conrad, Joyce, Ford, Woolf, Lawrence, Kafka, Proust, Gide, Mann, and others.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 122 CM
  

  • LIT123 CM - Fugitives From Utopia: The Writers of Post-War Poland

    This course will consider the great literature of post-war Poland in the context of the major historical and social forces that have contributed to its development. Among the authors read will be Herbert, Milosz, Gombrowicz, Szymborska, Kolakowski, Lem, Baranczak, Swir, Singer, and Zagajewski. Because of the immense popularity and influence of many of these authors, almost all are available in very fine English translations. All major genres will be included with particular attention to the stunning body of poetry, some of the 20th century’s very best.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 123 CM
  

  • LIT124 CM - Literature and War

    War pervades literature as thoroughly as it has pervaded human history. This course studies the depiction of war from the American Civil War to the recent past in selected works of literature and film. While the course examines the many-sided nature of war, its main emphasis is on the following three areas: ethics in war; military leadership; and the tension between idealism and disillusionment. Texts to be studied include Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Babel’s Red Cavalry, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Jones’s The Thin Red Line, as well as the work of various poets and essayists.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 124 CM
  

  • LIT125 CM - 20th-Century English and Irish Poetry

    This course will introduce English and Irish poetry of the 20th century, with special attention to the central figures of Hardy, Yeats, and Auden, but also including, among others, Houseman, Hopkins, the poets of World War One, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, Hughes, and Heaney.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 125 CM
  

  • LIT126 CM - Poetry and Painting

    The course will explore the thematic and structural affinities between poetry and painting from classical antiquity to the present day. Each class will be structured around the study and discussion of a single painting or poem selected from among the materials for that week. The class will cultivate the practice of careful, slow reading and seeing. Readings for the course will discuss the relationship between the two arts, the notion of arts being connected, and notions of what role art might play in life.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 126 CM
  

  • LIT127 CM - The Novel Since World War II

    Since 1945 the novel has increasingly become an international genre, with a reading public and lines of influence between writers that transcend the boundaries of language and nation. This course will consider a selection of the most important and influential works written in this period in America and abroad. Texts will include Invisible Man, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Go Down, Moses, On a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, A Clockwork Orange, Labyrinths, Beloved, V., Midnight’s Children, and Pale Fire.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 127 CM
  

  • LIT130 CM - Introduction to Film

    We will begin with a close analysis of a contemporary popular film, in an effort to determine typical conventions of cinematic expression, and then proceed through a study of multiple movements and genres in the history of film, from German Expressionism to the French New Wave, from Hollywood to documentary to avant-garde and independent film-making. Overall, the course is intended to provide students with a broad introduction to film analysis and to the field of Film Studies.

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 130 CM
  

  • LIT131 CM - Film History I (1925-1965)

    This course surveys the history of cinema as art and mass medium, from the introduction of sound to the rise of the “New Hollywood.” Topics such as cinematic response to World War II, the decline of the studio system, and “new waves” of European film-making are studied in social, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 131 CM
  

  • LIT132 CM - Film History II (1965-Present)

    This course surveys the history of cinema as art and mass medium, from 1965 to the present. Topics such as the rise of independent filmmaking in America, the conglomeration of the studios, and European resistance to Hollywood’s domination on the world market are considered in social, cultural, and aesthetic terms.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 132 CM
  

  • LIT133 CM - Film and Literature

    This course examines correspondences and affinities between literature and film in aesthetic, cultural, and social contexts. Throughout, we will look not only at specific case studies of literary adaptation or cross-reference, but consider the larger questions of cultural value implied in these transactions.Writers and film-makers to be considered include Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, and Robert Altman.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 133 CM
  

  • LIT134 CM - Special Studies in Film

    A seminar designed to explore the aesthetic achievement and social impact of film as an art form. Subjects for study include such topics as specific film genres, the work of individual film-makers, and recurring themes in film. Each year the seminar concentrates on a different area - for example, “Film and Politics,” “The Director as Author,” or “Violence and the Hero in American Films.”

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 134 CM
  

  • LIT135 CM - Alfred Hitchcock

    This course examines the work and legacy of Alfred Hitchcock from cultural, social, historical and artistic perspectives. Special attention will be paid to Hitchcock’s work in relation to cultural modernism and social modernity, and to his influence on both avant-garde and commercial cinemas, including the French New Wave (1959-1968) and the New Hollywood (1967-1975).

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 135 CM
  

  • LIT137 CM - Gay and Lesbian Cinema in the U.S.

    This is a survey of gay and lesbian cinema in the U.S. from the early 20th century to the present. The course examines depictions of gay/lesbian themes in Classical Hollywood cinema of the 20s-60s, as well as more recent examples including Sylvia Scarlett, Tea and Sympathy, The Children’s Hour, The Killing of Sister George, Poison, Swoon, Watermelon Woman, and Brokeback Mountain.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 137 CM
  

  • LIT138 CM - Film and Mass Culture

    This course will examine film as art and as medium in the context of the rise of 20th-century “mass culture.” We will take up such topics as the role of film in producing the ideas of “mass culture”, the cinematic representation of the “masses”, film as an instrument of the standardization of culture and as a mode of resistance to it, film and modernism, film and postmodernism, representations of fascism in cinema, and “subculture” considered as an effect of mass culture.

    Offered: Every third year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 138 CM
  

  • LIT139 CM - Film Theory

    This course investigates the major film theories from the beginnings of cinema to the present. We begin with a study of classical film theory (1900-1960) that attempts to define the essence of the form, its relation to reality, and its status as mass medium and/or art. We then move on to more recent work that examines film from ideological, sociological, or psychological perspectives, or considers the changing nature of cinema in the digital age.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 139 CM
  

  • LIT144 CM - W.B. Yeats

    The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, one of the “last romantics,” as he called himself, was considered by T. S. Eliot to be “the greatest poet of our time — certainly the greatest in this language, and as far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Love, art, history, politics, and the supernatural are his central themes. Yeats is a central figure of High Modernism, but among modernists his poetry remains distinctively personal. In this course we will trace Yeats’ fifty-year career, from the early days of the Celtic Twilight in the 1890s to the great poems of old age written on the brink of World War II and including Yeats’s contribution to the Irish national theater.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 144 CM
  

  • LIT146 CM - The Domestic Life of Empire

    A look at Domestic Life, as it is portrayed in the writing of Women in the Centre (Europe) and in the writing of women living in the Periphery (Africa and the Caribbean) and ways in which they were an influence, through literary culture in particular, on each other. Among the authors to be read: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jean Rhys, Phyllis Alfrey, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Conde, Rosa Guy, Mary Prince, Merle Hodge, Tsitsi Dangarembga.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 146 CM
  

  • LIT147 CM - The Word and the Garden

    In the Beginning was The Word and through the word we got creation of the world and that world began in the garden: the man, the woman who were placed in the position of its caretakers; and the garden itself arranged in quadrants and planted in an earthly, not celestial, order: Tree of Life and then Tree of Knowledge. The garden has for a long time been a way to assert political and other forms of power (Jefferson, Bacon, The Medicis); it has also been a way for people (the Shakers, for example) to distance themselves from expressions of overt power.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 147 CM
  

  • LIT160 AF - Caribbean Literature

    Reading and analysis of novels, poetry, and essays representing the most important trends in modern Caribbean literature.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 160 AF
  

  • LIT160 CM - Science and Faith in Modern Literature

    A study of the origins and impact of nihilism in modern literature. Beginning with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and James, the course will look at major 20th-century authors as a battleground between scientific realism and faith. T. S. Eliot, Frost, Hardy, Auden, Camus, Mann, Milosz, and Simone Weil will be among the major authors considered against the background of biology, psychology, and physical science.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 160 CM
  

  • LIT162 AF - African Literature

    Reading and analysis of novels, poetry, and essays representing the most important trends in modern African literature.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 162 AF
  

  • LIT163 AF - North African Literature and Culture in Text, Film, and Music

    This course is an introduction to North African Studies which offers an overview of North African literature and culture, through a selection of the works of some of the most important North African authors from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Arab, Berber, French, and Jewish). In addition, we will consider a selection of films, photographs, and other visual culture which will provide further insights into the complex social political and religious fabric of each country and the region as a whole. And, of course, we will consider music, which, along with poetry, is a cultural practice and form which is oral and an essential aspect of the everyday life in North Africa.

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 163 AF
  

  • LIT163 CM - Leadership in Literature and Film

    This course examines different aspects of the leadership theme in literature, with special attention to such topics as ethical dilemmas confronting leaders, different styles and models of leadership, the competing loyalties and pressures felt by leaders, as well as the questions that literature raises about the very nature and validity of leadership’s various forms. Authors to be studied include Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. Additional readings by Carlyle, Byron, and Emerson may be assigned as needed. We will also study several films dealing with the leadership theme.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 163 CM
  

  • LIT165 AF - Caribbean Women Writers: Writing Between Borders

    Examination of works by women writers from the Caribbean. Seeks to uncover the complex nature of cross-cultural encounters. Explores the strategies used by these writers to define themselves both inside and outside the body politic of two societies. Attention given to questions of identity, exile, history, memory, and language. Authors include Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Maryse Conde, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Michelle Cliff

    Prerequisite: Upper-division literature course or permission of instructor.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 165 AF
  

  • LIT165 CM - Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud

    Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud have exerted a dominant influence not only upon literary criticism but upon the entire intellectual culture of advanced modernity. We will study a selection of their works in a broad cultural context, beginning with Enlightenment precursors like Voltaire and Rousseau, taking account of important contemporaries like Darwin, and ending with postmodernist disciples like Thomas Pynchon and Michel Foucault.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 165 CM
  

  • LIT166 CM - Feminist Theory

    This course will focus on a selection of theoretical perspectives that have informed feminist thought and movements. We will examine how various feminist “frameworks” have sought to explain oppressive social relations and have laid the groundwork for social change. We will begin with foundational texts from the history of Western feminism and will address the variety of approaches that emerged in the last decades of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. Attention will be paid to ethnic, minority, international, and queer perspectives on feminism and gender theory.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 166 CM
  

  • LIT167 CM - Gay and Lesbian Writers

    This course examines the role of gay and lesbian writers in shaping important currents of 20th-century culture. We will study early definitions of homosexuality in its relation to cultural issues, shifting conceptions of gay and lesbian identity in literature of the 20th century, competing claims of “positive” versus “negative” images, and how literary and aesthetic issues influence the cultural understanding of identity. Authors will include Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Leslie Feinberg, and Cherrie Moraga.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 167 CM
  

  • LIT168 CM - Postmodernism and Postmodern Fiction

    This course will examine the question of postmodernism through the lens of its fictions, giving particular attention to relationship between literary form and such postmodern conditions as cyberspace, multiculturalism, globalization, and the end of history. Our texts will include short stories and novels—from Borges, Barth, Pynchon, Delillo, Morrison, Hong Kingston, Carter, Gibson, Rushdie, and others—as well as films, visual arts, hypertext, and theory.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 168 CM
  

  • LIT169 CM - Freud, Kafka and Musil

    In the writings of the psychologist Sigmund Freud, the fabulist Franz Kafka, and the novelist Robert Musil, twentieth century German-language culture produced three of the most significant expressions of modernity in crisis. We will study each of these challenging modernists in their historical context, paying special attention to the different forms in which they work and the different modes of interpretation they foster. 

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 169 CM
  

  • LIT177 CM - The Art of Oratory

    Great speeches have changed history. This course will explore the art of oratory from ancient Greece to modern America. Examination of speeches of Demosthenes, Pericles, Cicero, Burke, Webster, Lincoln, Churchill, Martin Luther King, and others will be combined with study of theories of oratory and rhetoric from Aristotle to Wayne Booth. Major speeches from classical and modern drama and epic including Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville will also be studied along with films and recordings of 20th-century political oratory. Speech writing and performance will form a practical component of this course.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 177 CM
  

  • LIT181 CM - Advanced Creative Writing

    This is a class for the student who is serious about writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. There will be frequent short assignments for workshop discussion and a longer final one.

    Prerequisites: Writing sample and instructor permission

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 181 CM
  

  • LIT182 CM - James Joyce

    In this seminar we will read the major writings of the Irish author James Joyce, whose work was immensely influential on all 20th-century literature, in English and in other languages. We will begin with his collection of short stories, Dubliners, and with his quasi-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The greater part of our class will be devoted to a detailed reading of Ulysses, his epic of the modern world. Time permitting, we will study excerpts of Finnegans Wake to establish strategies for reading this compendium of language and history.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 182 CM
  

  • LIT183 CM - Advanced Fiction Writing

    This advanced fiction workshop is intended for people who have taken at least one semester of Fiction Writing (LIT 038 CM ). Each student will submit two stories or novel excerpts for workshop, where they will be carefully critiqued by the class. We’ll also read short fiction by well-known contemporary writers, with an eye toward what makes these stories original, entertaining, and complex. In class, we’ll look beyond basic elements of craft and address issues of concern for the experienced writer. How do we avoid cliché? Create narrative drive? Take risks with form, language, and subject matter? Written exercises will focus on these issues while challenging students to push their writing in unexpected directions.

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 183 CM
  

  • LIT195 CM - Robert Frost

    An examination of the poetry and prose of Robert Frost, one of the preeminent American poets. Consideration will be given to Frost’s work in relation to traditions of pastoral poetry and classical authors, his innovations in blank verse and English metrics, his dialogue with science and pragmatism, and his thinking about the nature of metaphor and poetic drama. Careful attention will be given to Frost’s ambivalent relationship to literary modernism, American predecessors, especially Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson, his reaction to the New Deal and the Cold War, and the complex history of Frost biography.

    Offered: Every other year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: LIT 195 CM
  

  • LIT199 CM - Independent Study in Literature

    Students who have the necessary qualifications and who wish to investigate an area of study not covered in regularly scheduled courses may arrange for independent study under the direction of a faculty reader.

    Offered: Every semester

    Credit: 0.5 or 1

    Course Number: LIT 199 CM

Master of Arts in Finance
  

  • FIN300 CM - Seminar in Finance and Accounting Practices

    This is a two-week lab course taken prior to the start of the fall semester that provides an intensive review of key practices in finance and accounting. The sessions include networking opportunities and workshops to help students improve their professional conduct and develop their networking, communication and career management skills. In the event that students are unable to complete FIN 300 during the usual fall pre-session due to a conflict with athletics or another similar obligation, the Robert Day School may offer the second part of this course to those students during a special January pre-session term that takes place prior to the spring semester. Credit/No-Credit grading only.

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 0.5

    Course Number: FIN 300 CM
  

  • FIN301A CM - Leadership Development in Finance and Accounting

    Throughout the semester, students will enhance their leadership skills by participating in a series of leadership activities. By combining experiental leadership training with workshops emphasizing ethics, entrepreneurship, and oral and wirtten communication, students develop a foundation for future success in leadership positions in finance and accounting. Credit/No-Credit grading only.

    Offered: Every Fall

    Credit: 0.25

    Course Number: FIN 301A CM
  
  

  • FIN309 CM - Introduction to the Mathematics of Finance

    This is a first course in Mathematical Finance sequence. This course introduces the concepts of arbitrage and risk-neutral pricing within the context of single- and multi-period financial models. Key elements of stochastic calculus such as Markov processes, martingales, filtration and stopping times will be developed within this context. Pricing by replication is studied in a multi-period binomial model. Within this model, the replicating strategies for European and American options are determined.

    Prerequisite: MATH 060 CM  or permission of instructor.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 309 CM
  

  • FIN310 CM - Financial Economics

    This course leverages the basic economic tools of market and company analysis and focuses on applications to finance. Topics covered include capital theory, risk and uncertainty, information economics, game theory, and auctions.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 310 CM
  

  • FIN320 CM - Financial Econometrics

    This is an advanced course in econometrics that focuses on statistical tools for undertaking empirical research in finance. Topics include asset pricing model tests, event-study methodology, tests of long-run predictability, and high-frequency data analysis.

    Offered: Occasionally

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 320 CM
  

  • FIN330 CM - Corporate Financial Management

    This course helps students build the foundational knowledge and skills critical to making prudent business decisions in areas ranging from investments to valuations to risk management. The class uses both case studies and lectures, and coursework includes team projects and writing assignments.

    Offered: Every fall

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 330 CM
  

  • FIN340 CM - Investments

    This course develops the financial economic basis of investment and portfolio management, including portfolio theory, asset pricing theory, bond pricing, and portfolio performance evaluation.

    Offered: Every fall

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 340 CM
  

  • FIN350 CM - Global Finance

    This course examines the theoretical and applied approach to international financial management or an individual or firm exposed to global competition. Topics include the basics of foreign exchange and global markets; foreign exchange exposure management; financing and investment decisions in multi-national corporations; institutions and finance.
     

    Offered: Every year

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 350 CM
  

  • FIN360 CM - Corporate Governance and Ethics

    This course will equip students with the tools and analytical frameworks to understand the roles, responsibilities, reporting obligations, liabilities and effectiveness of boards of directors, managers, advisors (e.g., lawyers, auditors, compensation consultants, etc.), shareholders, regulators and other corporate stakeholders (e.g., labor, consumers, creditors, local communities and the environment). The course will prepare students for leadership roles in firms as entrepreneurs, CEOs or senior managers, venture capital and private equity investors as well as senior positions in consultancy, regulatory, and non-profit sectors.

    Offered: Every fall

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 360 CM
  

  • FIN386 CM - Financial Reporting and Communication

    This course will introduce students to the language of business and finance (accounting). Financial accounting is concerned with how firms report the results of their operations to outsiders such as investors, analysts, and regulatory agencies. An appreciation of the role of financial reporting in our economic system and insights into how financial accounting information is used by decision-makers both inside and outside the firm are essential for those who are seeking careers in finance. The emphasis is more on concepts than on procedures. The course will discuss some of the recent accounting scandals, the reasons behind them and how we can eliminate such problems. The course will also introduce the students to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as well as the debate about the role of accounting in the financial crisis.

    Offered: Every fall

    Credit: 1

    Course Number: FIN 386 CM
  

  • FIN398 CM - Independent Study and Research

    Students who have the necessary qualifications and who wish to investigate an area of study not covered in regularly scheduled courses may arrange for independent study under the direction of a faculty reader. See General Education Requirements  for details.

    Offered: As Needed

    Credit: 0.5 - 1.0

    Course Number: FIN 398 CM
 

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