Courses

An intensive study of representative works by the famous Inklings-associated authors—the five twentieth-century British writers C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Dorothy L. Sayers, and their two earlier mentors George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton. Students will evaluate and articulate the legacy of their diverse literary art and its contribution to Christianity and culture.

Designed to orient students to the crucial transition from modernist to postmodernist and post-postmodernist models of texts and interpretation, models that depend on changing philosophical views of truth and reality. It examines the main interpretive paradigms in literary studies in order to show how views of reason, language, and textuality continue to shape one's life horizons.

Topics may vary. Courses to date include: - Foundations of Ethical Being - James Baldwin: The Dialectic of Race and Religion - Kierkegaard's Postscript - Life Writing as a Literary Genre: Biography as Identification of Self and Subjectivity - The Poetics of Resistance, Affirmation and Immigrant Voices and the Poetry of Trauma - Studies in George MacDonald - German Romanticism - Gothic Fiction - Poetics of American Literature - Merton and the Solitary Tradition - The Eighteenth-Century Novel - Jane Austen - Identity and Ethics in Communication - Milton and the Romantics - Shakespearean Trauma and the Early- Modern Suffering Self - Studies in the Late-Victorian Fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Under the direction of the student's approved thesis or major research paper advisor, a course of reading and study which leads to the development of both a significant bibliographical essay (or annotated bibliography) and a thesis proposal. The latter includes at least the following: major question(s) to be addressed; significance of the issue(s); methodologies to be used; theories to be addressed and primary sources to be examined.

Under the direction of a supervisor, students not writing a thesis will research and write a major paper of approximately 10,000-15,000 words in length.

The study of the literary expression of religious desire, doubt, and despair in early-modern British literature. The aesthetic shaping of spiritual belief and sentiment within specific historical and cultural contexts is investigated in a selection of early-modern works, including those by Anne Vaughan Lock, Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Donne, Elizabeth Melville, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, An Collins, Thomas Traherne, John Bunyan, George Fox, and Margaret Fell Fox. Their works are read alongside religious texts central to the Catholic and Protestant traditions, including the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Joseph Hall's The Art of Divine Meditation.

Examines (auto)biographies as literary artifacts, responses to culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. Examines current theories of (auto)biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the literary order has its origins in intellectual and cultural spheres. Explores how life writing participates in the construction of identity and engages subjectivity as a narrative strategy. Theorists including Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, Richard Kearney, and Eva Hoffman are foundational to this study. The reading list includes (auto)biographical writings from authors such as Elie Wiesel, Victor Frankl, Eva Hoffman, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Foster, Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, and other significant (auto)biographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course seeks to recover humanism as a central ethos of western culture and its Christian roots in two ways: first, by tracing, as much as possible, the story of humanism and its development from Christian roots to the Renaissance and to Postmodernity and its current “overcoming.” This historical exercise requires a counter narrative to the secularist master narrative that dominates both contemporary secular and Christian ideas of humanism. Secondly, students are encouraged to consider recovering Christian humanism as a possible philosophy of culture that could address the main malaise of our present cultural predicament. For this purpose the course draws on works from eastern and western theologians to establish theologically the theme of humanism as it arises from the Christology of the early church and persists into works of modern Catholic, Protestant, and eastern theology. All of this study provides the student with a deep sense that studying in the humanities may indeed be linked directly to Christology and ecclesiology.

This course provides an intensive study of how the writers of influential nineteenth-century British literary texts (including short and long poems, a novella, novels, and prose non-fiction) chose to portray the intersection of religious faith and gender. This course not only familiarizes students with the most significant nineteenth-century British authors, but also enables a thorough exploration of two of the most prevalent areas of debate in the nineteenth century: gender roles and questions of faith. The course focuses on these texts as literature, taking into consideration genre, literary techniques, and audience, but the course as a whole crosses disciplinary boundaries as students read philosophical and historical writers such as John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin. Students also become familiar with the major theoretical approaches applied to these texts by contemporary literary critics.