The Literature and Culture concentration emphasizes the relation between text and context. In advanced courses and seminars taught by a wide range of faculty and predicated on a variety of methodological approaches, students study literature and/or film as reflecting and shaping culture. Students will learn to place texts from all genres in dialogue with visual and material culture; with the history of aesthetics; with the advancement of science and medicine; with the traditions of religious exegesis; and, of course, with literary history itself.
Course offerings have included “Literature of the Ocean,” which studied literary texts through the oceanic zones taxonomized by scientists (pelagic, neritic, littoral, and others); “Romantic Souls,” which traced the romantic tradition in a transatlantic context from William Butler Yeats to Ursula K. Le Guin; “Ekphrasis,” which interrogated and theorized the practice of representing visual art in words; and “Horror,” which examined the evolution of the horror film genre.
Here is a sample of recent MA theses in Literature and Culture:
- “‘Born of Ourselves’: Gendered Doubling and the Femme Fatale in Vernon Lee’s Ghost Stories”
- “Edith Wharton’s Dark Ecology: Representations of Nature in Three Major Novels”
- “The Accessible Chaucer” (a study of Chaucer’s presence and reception in the twenty-first century)
- “Constructing Heroic Identities: Masculinity and the Western Film”
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