COLLEGE READING COMPREHENSION – LITR 099: A course in which students with special needs—including especially, but not exclusively, reading comprehension, crafting of sentences, grammar usage, problems of perception and comprehension—have the opportunity to work with a tutor. LITR 099 is a non-credit, supplemental course, available to students with disabilities or special needs, and applicable to any course within the humanities curriculum that requires reading and composition

INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH COMPOSITION – This course aims to strengthen and improve student writers through a twofold emphasis. First, the course will begin with a substantive yet accessible refresher of standard formal English grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Second, we will proceed to a rhetorical study of effective essay writing principles. Thus, LITR 100 aims to help students improve at two levels: writing clear, succinct, and graceful individual sentences and writing logical, ordered, and effective essays. We will also closely study the art of revising, so that students come to understand writing as a recursive habit instead of a one-time event (zero credit, pass/fail. Students who fail LITR 100 must retake and pass the course; a failure in LITR 100 results in an automatic failure in the corresponding Literary Tradition course).
Prerequisites: LITR 103 and LITR 104 are necessary prerequisites for upper level courses in literature.

LITERARY TRADITION I – This course will introduce students to the foundational epics of the West, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. These works involve worlds of strife wherein the hero must find his correct relation to family, nation, and the divine through agon and quest. Aeschylus’ Oresteia or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex will present the same struggles in a more compressed world, where fate and human responsibility are intricately examined.

LITERARY TRADITION II – A continuation of 103 in which many of the same themes are re-examined in light of later Christian and modern concerns. Readings are from major works of the medieval, Renaissance, and Modern periods, and shall include Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s plays or verse, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and some modern narrative.

MEDIEVAL LITERATURE – The object of the course is to familiarize students with the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages as expressed through the literature, visual arts, and philosophical considerations of the times.

SHAKESPEARE – This course studies the plays and poems of possibly the most significant poet of the English language. The class may consider Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives, including the influence of medieval dramas; Renaissance humanism and Reformation controversy; or Shakespeare’s contribution to psychological realism and the development of a modern consciousness.

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE – This course includes a focus on the lyrical modes of English poetry from the Renaissance to the Restoration. As part of the emphasis upon appreciating lyrical poetry, attention will be given to the study of meter, scansion, syntax and identifying figures of speech. The careful examination of the lyric will culminate in the junior poet project: an essay on an exemplary poem from a poet of the student’s choice, including a classroom presentation of the paper. The purpose of the project is to develop poise, critical judgment, and authority in students, along with an ability to discuss matters of style, theme, and technique in the poetry of their chosen authors.

ROMANTICISM – The study of the poets of the Romantic era and their Victorian successors. Topics may include Romanticism as a reaction against and development of the Enlightenment; new ideas about the self, the imagination, experience, nature, and the supernatural; the poet in relation to society.

THE NOVEL – Consideration of the novel as a reflection of changing conceptions of human consciousness, of changing attitudes toward society and of the individual’s participation in community. Although the course may consider novels from any region or time period, it begins with a focus on British authors, including Swift or Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Eliot or Thackery.

AMERICAN LITERATURE – The study of major American writers primarily of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics may include the tension in the American experience between the religion and culture of the Puritans and emerging deist and agnostic trends growing in the wake of modern science and the Industrial Revolution; the development of a democratic sensibility; the tensions and fruitfulness generated by the meeting of the New World with the Old; the Southern Renaissance.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE – The study of twentieth century literature, particularly of modernism, including developments from and reactions against it. The course covers such authors as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Mann, Franz
Kafka, and G.K. Chesterton.

SPECIAL TOPICS – This course may be dedicated to particular themes, authors, genres or time periods appropriate to the advanced study of literature.

SENIOR SEMINAR: LITERARY THEORY – An examination of the tradition of Western literary theory. Students will familiarize themselves with ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to literary criticism so as to prepare themselves for a senior thesis which will demand of them not only a mastery of one work of literature of their choosing but also an ability to converse with the relevant critical literature on their subject. The senior thesis project—a documented critical essay and a public oral presentation—represents the culmination of four years of literary study at Ave Maria University.