Bard College Catalogue 2009-2010
2009-2010

Literature

http://literature.bard.edu

Faculty

Overview

Requirements

Courses

Most writing-intensive courses and workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are listed under the Written Arts Program, beginning on page 125.

Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle
Literature 199 / German 199
See German 199 for a full course description.

Americans Abroad
Literature 2002
cross-listed: africana studies, sre
The period after World War I was an exciting time for American artists who came of age and discovered their own Americanness from other shores. Students read writers of the so-called Lost Generation, including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The course also includes expatriate writers, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Jessie Fauset, who are best known for their participation in the Harlem Renaissance.

Asian Canons and Cultures
Literature 2004
cross-listed: asian studies
This course introduces conceptions of self, society, and the universe, as they were formulated in Asia, through an intensive engagement with canonical literary, philosophical, and religious texts such as the Analects, Bhagavad Gita, Lotus Sutra, Ramayana, Tale of Genji, and Tao Te Ching. Students read these works in translation and are introduced to the characteristics of the different classical Asian languages that enabled the works’ distinctive forms of rhetoric and thought.

Imagining the Environment in East Asia
Literature 2007
cross-listed: asian studies, eus, sts
This course begins with the basic question of what it is to imagine environment and one’s relation to it. In response, the environmental writing and thought of East Asia are introduced, with a specific focus on Japan. Topics considered include moral and religious attitudes toward nature, literary responses to the natural and urban environment, the formation of a modern environmental ethics, the social impact of industrial pollution, the rise of overcrowded megacities, and the imagining of East Asia’s environmental future(s).

Survey of Linguistics
Literature 201
cross-listed: cognitive science
A survey of linguistics, the formal study of language. Goals are to learn how linguistics analyzes language into component parts; acquire methods and techniques appropriate to the study of those parts, their patterns, and their interconnections; and examine the discipline’s conceptual bases, its rich history, and some competing or complementary approaches to language study. In general, the class asks, what is “language” and has “linguistics” got it right? Prerequisite: course work in a foreign language or permission of the instructor.

Aesthetics of Narrative
Literature 2011
An examination of the varieties of modern narrative and the aesthetic questions that shape the reader’s attention and involvement. Works read include Dickens’s Great Expectations, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Beckett’s Molloy, Duras’s The Lover, Morrison’s Beloved, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Film adaptations of Great Expectations and The Big Sleep are screened.

The Novel in English
Literature 2013
cross-listed: victorian studies
This course constitutes an investigation of the realist tradition in English fiction, beginning with Victorian multiplot construction and working toward the formal innovation of the modernist novel. Central texts include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s Bleak House, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, James’s The Ambassadors, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Lawrence’s Women in Love, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

American Indian Fictions
Literature 2015
cross-listed: american studies, human rights, sre
This course examines the tradition of fiction through works by and about Indians. Authors include Sherman Alexie, Black Elk, Charles Brockden Brown, Willa Cather, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Helen Hunt Jackson, Herman Melville, D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Mary Rowlandson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch.

Articulate Sounds: Reading Poetic Texts
Literature 2019
In this course, designed to develop close reading and reasoning skills, students pay attention to the sound system of prosody, grammar, and rhetoric, and the uses of figurative language. In addition to readings in rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics, authors studied include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins, Pound, Auden, Oppen, Niedecker, Hejinian, and Ashbery.

Metrical Verse
Literature 202
Students learn how to read and write metrical verse by writing exercises in the principal meters (accentual/syllabic, accentual, syllabic, Anglo-Saxon alliterative, haiku, etc.) and principal forms (ballad, sonnet, blank verse, nonsense verse, ode, dramatic monologue, villanelle, sestina) that make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world. Particular concerns are the relationship between meter and the speaking voice, and the kinds of tropes that distinguish classical (figurative) from modernist (elliptical) poetry.

Literature, Language, and Lies: Reading Word by Word
Literature 2020
Students read the short stories of great writers (James, Cheever, Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield, O’Connor, Beckett, Bowles) and current issues of the New Yorker and New York Times, looking at the ways in which words are used to convey information and insight, transmit truth and beauty, and form and transform our vision of the world.

Mark Twain
Literature 2021
Students research and make class presentations on Mark Twain’s major works, including Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, “The Mysterious Stranger,” and Letters from the Earth. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor and one U.S. literature course or a course in American studies or American history.

The Making of Modern Theater
Literature 2022
cross-listed: theater
This introductory course traces the emergence of distinctively “modern” forms of theater in late 19th- and 20-century Europe. Students engage closely with a number of major dramatic texts whose importance in this process is widely recognized. Attention is paid to the fact that theater is not a textual genre, but an embodied “practice” played out in “real time” and in a concrete space. Readings include plays by Büchner, Jarry, Strindberg, Pirandello, Handke, and Müller.

The Gift of Literature
Literature 2023
The theory of the gift has been approached from philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and poststructuralist perspectives that embrace the gift as an alternative to the economics of scarcity and self-interest. This course draws on such contemporary discussions to construct a theoretical model for analyzing literary representations of financial, moral, aesthetic, and libidinal exchange. Readings include theoretical texts by Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Levi-Strauss, Sahlins, and Derrida, alongside literary works by Defoe, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Goethe, Nietzsche, and James.

Sentimental Traditions in American Literature and Culture
Literature 2024
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
This course examines “sentimentalism” as a philosophical concept that is less about welling tears than about the role emotion plays in how we organize our political, economic, and cultural lives. Drawing on literature, philosophy, film, and art, the class explores the intersections of gender, race, class, urbanism, nationalism, and internationalism to explore the key concept underling sentimentalism: sympathy. Among the many works considered are those by Smith, Hume, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Lincoln, Agee, Wright, Baldwin, Morrison, and Sontag.

Comparative Literature I, II, III
Literature 204A, 204B, 204C
cross-listed: classical studies
This three-semester sequence examines literature from the time of its emergence and first developments in the West. Each course may be taken independently. The first semester explores the interactions of two crucial terms: “text” and “reader.” Course readings, all in English translation, include whole texts and excerpts from authors writing originally in Greek (Sappho, Plato, the gospels); Latin (Cicero, Virgil, Augustine); and Biblical Hebrew (Genesis, Song of Songs, Job). The second semester explores two currents of Enlightenment thought and how their competing visions of human nature inform representative literary texts of the period. Readings include works by La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Addison and Steele, Molière, Voltaire, Mendelssohn, Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. The third semester examines the peculiar and perplexing European literary transformation from Romanticism to modernity. Authors studied include Apollinaire, Balzac, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Gogol, Hofmannsthal, James, Kafka, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Rilke, Schlegel, Schiller, Wilde, and Woolf.

“The Storm Cloud of the 19th Century”: Imagining the Environment in English Literature and Culture
Literature 206
cross-listed: eus, sts
A consideration of the ways in which ideas of the environment were contested and consolidated in the 19th-century literary imagination. Beginning with the Romantics, the class investigates the impact of industrialization on the English countryside. With the advent of Victorianism, representations of the natural environment became even more laden with political and ethical values. Early 20th-century texts by Forster, Lawrence, and Ballard dramatize the “end of nature.”

Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
Literature 2060
cross-listed: middle eastern studies
A survey of the history and texts of diverse and polycentric literary and artistic traditions of the Middle East and North Africa during the last two centuries. Works of fiction, poetry, visual art, autobiography, memoir, film, and historiography are explored, and the major literary, cultural, and philosophical currents that shaped the modern Arab world are considered. Analysis and reading are informed by recent developments in cultural and critical theory. Authors studied include Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Mahmoud Darwish, and Hanan al-Shaykh.

Arab American Literature
Literature 2061
cross-listed: american studies, middle eastern studies
A survey of over one hundred years of Arab American literature, thought, art, and film. Writers include Gibran Khalil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Nuayma, Samuel John Hazo, Etel Adnan, Abinader Elmaz, and Edward Said. The course is organized around four themes: representations of the Middle East in early American literature; key pioneers of Arab-American exchange; forms and modes of inscribing Arab-ness/Muslim-ness, diaspora, and worldliness; and pre- and post- 9/11 images and imaginings.

America in the 1950s
Literature 2063
This course pursues a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and political issues of the 1950s, as it tracks the formal experiments in which its authors increasingly engaged. Topics include the constraints of suburban life, Cold War paranoia, counterculturalism, race, and gender. Authors include Salinger, Ellison, Bradbury, Miller, Nabokov, McCarthy, Wilson, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Hansberry, and Bellow. The literature is supplemented with occasional film screenings, including All That Heaven Allows and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Modern American Poets
Literature 210
The triumph of the first great modernist pioneers in English (Yeats, Pound, Eliot) created a schism in American poetry, dividing poets and their readers into distinctive camps. Soon a modernist canon emerged, and it is now generally accepted that the greatest of these, in addition to the pioneers, are Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. All three share a concern with visual art, and many of their best poems prefigure a fixation on painting, film, and photography in American poetry today. Readings include Stein, Crane, Auden, Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Roethke, Plath, Hughes, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and O’Hara.

Myth / Tale / Story
Literature 2101
This course demonstrates the ways in which myths that were once sacred are secularized when they are recycled as literary art, and how many of the greatest modern stories have tapped into the great myths of the past. Between those myths and the modern short story lies the tale—the oral tradition of storytelling. The class explores these mysterious waters by reading Ovid, Apuleius, and classic fairy tales, and then traces the residual presence of myth in the work of modern masters.

Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
Literature 2102
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
An examination of the Harlem Renaissance from a variety of perspectives that interrogate and reveal the complexity of the period’s monolithic terms and contexts. The class considers how black writers of the interwar period connected with broader American modernist, nativist, and pluralist trends; how pragmatist and Marxist philosophies influenced a formidable reconsideration of political and aesthetic representation; how various musical forms, as well as European and African art forms, provided rich and varied cultural resources for emerging literary production.

African American Traditions I and II
Literature 2137, 2139
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
This two-semester survey explores African American literature from the Colonial era to the Harlem Renaissance and examines the various forms—including poetry, autobiography, essay, novel, and play—and voices that African Americans have used to achieve literary and, consequently, social authority. Authors include Douglass, Chesnutt, DuBois, Hopkins, Toomer, Hughes, McKay, Hurston, Locke, Schuyler, Thurman, Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, Baraka, Sanchez, Reed, and Morrison.

Domesticity and Power
Literature 2140
cross-listed: american studies, gss, sre
Many American women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries used domestic novels as insightful critiques of U.S. society and politics. Students read a range of work, including Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869), and the novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Frances E. W. Harper, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.

Medieval Dream Visions
Literature 2144
cross-listed: medieval studies
Students read (in modern English translations) some of the best poems about love, religion, society, and politics that were presented to their audiences as accounts of things observed in dreams. Works studied include Dream of Scipio, Dream of the Rood, Dream of Rhonabwy, Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Winner and Waster, Pearl, Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, and The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.

Victorian Essays and Detectives
Literature 215
cross-listed: victorian studies
Students consider essays by Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, Mayhew, and Wilde that address Victorian issues such as crime, art, and science; and detective stories and novels by Collins, Conan Doyle, and other inventors of the detective genre. The syllabus emphasizes such pairings as Thomas Henry Huxley writing on the scientific method and Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Pater’s The Renaissance and Doyle’s “The Sign of Four,” and Wilde’s “De Profundis” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Murdered Cousin.”

St. Petersburg: City as Text
Literature 2151
cross-listed: res
This course, conducted in English, examines the “myth” of St. Petersburg in Russian literature and culture, with consideration of the ways in which the city has been constructed as a literary, artistic, and folkloric text. Special attention is paid to the nature of the city as a “sign,” with appropriate strategies for “reading” the city. Readings range from the classic texts of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to 20th-century prose, poetry, memoir, and the carnival performances associated with the city’s 300th anniversary.

Classics of Francophone African Literature
Literature 2152
cross-listed: africana studies, french studies
Even though literature from francophone Africa is not yet a century old, it has already produced many important and enduring works. Students read, in translation, books written in the postcolonial period (up to the 1990s) and explore how this literature has evolved in its themes and aesthetics. Students who wish to take the course as part of French studies read texts in the original and participate in tutorials.

Myth and Variation in Russian Modernism
Literature 2153
cross-listed: res
This course traces the interrelationship between various Russian art forms of the Modernist period, including literature, theater and film, visual arts, and architecture, from the turn of the 20th century to 1940. The links between art, gender, and politics are considered, as prerevolutionary mythologies of “life into art” evolve into their postrevolutionary versions. Reading includes Sologub, Bely, Blok, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Zamiatin, Babel, Olesha, Platonov, and Bulgakov; Modernist group manifestos; and recent critical analysis. Conducted in English.

Dark Comedy: Humor in African American Literature
Literature 2154
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies, sre
Students explore the use, in African American literature, of humor, particularly satire, as a tool for identifying and deconstructing the absurdities of race, assimilation, and historic memory. Authors include George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman of the Harlem Renaissance, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, and Percival Everett. All reveal why a disproportionate percentage of black America’s strongest writers continue to be drawn to the satiric form.

African American Autobiographical Narrative
Literature 2155
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies, human rights, sre
Autobiography was the core medium of black American literature for its first two centuries and a vehicle of artistic and political power through the civil rights movement. Students begin with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through works by Jacobs and Douglass. Using Washington’s Up From Slavery as a bridge, students examine work by Hughes, Wright, Brown, Shakur, Angelou, and Wideman.

Romantic Literature in English
Literature 2156
cross-listed: human rights
A critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial and French Revolutions, and Napoleonic wars. Emphasis is placed on the historical and social contexts of the works and specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape the formal features of literary texts. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.

Enduring Short Stories and Novellas
Literature 2157
An in-depth study of the difference between the short story (built on figurative techniques closely allied to those employed in poetry, which allow the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning) and the novella (which demands the economy and exactness of a short work yet allows a fuller concentration and development of character and plot). Students explore the artistic accomplishments of Voltaire, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Chekhov, Aleichem, Babel, France, Kafka, Colette, and Borges.

Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule
Literature 2159
cross-listed: res
This course examines the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the time of the Revolution to the Brezhnev period. Students look at the imaginative liberation in writers such as Babel, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the terror of the 1930s in the works of Olesha, Akhmatova, and Pilnyak, among others; and the hesitant thaw as reflected in Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Readings conclude with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line.

Powers of Horror: Sublimity, Exoticism, and Monstrosity
Literature 2160
cross-listed: human rights
This seminar focuses on the gothic genre as a response to such historical developments as the slave trade, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Cold War, and imperialism. Readings include Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Peacock’s Nightmare Alley, Stoker’s Dracula, and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, as well as critical works by Marx, Freud, Foucault, Huyssen, and Jameson.

Postcolonial African Fiction: Political and Spiritual Centers
Literature 2161
Students examine the ways in which modern African literature responds to the alienation it experienced as a consequence of European colonialism. The course takes a historical and biographical approach, in order to show differing emphases and themes in 20th-century African fiction. Authors include Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe), Bessie Head (South Africa / Botswana), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria), Helon Habila (Nigeria), and Moses Isegawa (Uganda).

Fictional Writers and the Russian Metatext
Literature 2162
cross-listed: res
What does it mean to write about writing? What can a fictional text whose subject is fictional texts tell us about the potential of language as a self-shaping tool, or about the role of art in a given cultural context? This course employs such metatextual questions in its study of fiction by major Russian authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. Authors include Bulgakov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, and Nabokov.

Innuendo
Literature 2163
This course consists of studies in the “not-quite-said” of fiction, poetry, drama, and theory. Students learn to distinguish the contexts and purposes of different kinds of innuendo by the analysis of speech acts, poetic statements, philosophical claims, and social prohibitions. Readings are drawn from Ferdinand de Saussure and other linguists, Deborah Tannen, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Miss Manners, Proust, Chekhov, Wilde, Beckett, and Derrida.

Spiritual Crises
Literature 2164
cross-listed: theology
Students explore narratives of spiritual crisis in the Christian (especially Catholic) traditions. How do the authors of these narratives conceive of God, and what do they mean when they refer to “believing” in him? Is it possible to find meaning in these narratives if one is not a Christian or a religious believer? Authors studied include St. Paul, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Donne, Herbert, Pascal, Newman, Thérèse de Lisieux, Bernanos, and Weil.

Literary Theory
Literature 2165
An intensive introduction to recent theories of literature and culture, set against the background of questions about identity and difference in the Western tradition. Students examine a range of answers to the questions of how meaning is produced or ascribed, why it happens, and who or what decides on it. Readings include Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes, Austin, Derrida, de Man, Lacan, Butler, Haraway, Ronell, Spivak, Foucault, ˇZiˇzek, Virilio, Benjamin, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, among others.

Poetries of Philosophy from Dada

to the Present
Literature 2167
This course continues “Philosophies of Poetry from Plato to Dada” but is open to students of all levels and backgrounds. The class investigates how, subsequent to the rise of the historical avant-garde in the 20th century, a truce may have been called in the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Primary readings are poems with philosophical content, but selected manifestoes and short philosophical texts are also read, as are “anti-philosophical” polemics. Readings include selections from Wittgenstein, Rilke, Tzara, Eliot, Stein, and others.

The European Novel 1700–1800
Literature 2168
Exploring the rise of the novel in England, France, and Germany, this course provides a forum for rigorous critical engagement with major novels of the Enlightenment period. Readings are informed by 18th-century theories of the emergent genre and by more contemporary literary theory. Authors read include Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Rousseau, Sade, Diderot, Goethe, Moritz, and Hölderlin, in addition to short theoretical texts ranging from Blanckenburg to Watt, McKeon, and Moretti.

Richard Wright
Literature 2169
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
This course places Richard Wright on a world stage and examines his contributions to philosophy, psychology, and world politics. Aspects of Wright’s life and literature considered include his interest in and contributions to the psychology of deviance, his friendships with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and his involvement in the Pan-African movement. Readings include Black Boy and Native Son, Pagan Spain (a travelogue), and A Father’s Law, a posthumously published novel.

Madness, Melancholy, and Psychoanalysis in Romantic Literature
Literature 2170
An exploration of the ways in which Romanticism, particularly English and German Romantic-era literature, invented what is now known as psychoanalysis. By studying authors such as Coleridge, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, Kleist, Hoffman, Hölderlin, and Schlegel, the class examines the shifting and unresolved relationships between modern subjectivity and language and between fantasy and literature. These primary texts are supplemented with non-Romantic theoretical works by thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Blanchot, de Man, and Laplanche.

The 20th-Century American Short Story
Literature 2173
This course traces the development of the 20th-century American short story via rigorous readings of texts and careful attention to literary, historical, and market-based contexts. Formative Russian, French, and British influences are considered, and American modernist approaches to narration, the form’s association with national and personal identity, and the radical transformation of the short story in the postwar period are explored. Authors include Chekhov, Gogol, Flaubert, Joyce, Mansfield, Welty, Salinger, Malamud, Baldwin, Oates, Carver, and Beattie.

The Development of Lesbian Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Literature 2174
cross-listed: gss
An exploration of the ways in which early 20th-century lesbian writers prepared the ground for the current flowering of lesbian narratives. Readings are drawn from authors who include Stein, Woolf, Hall, Cather, McCullers, Brown, Rich, Winterson, Acker, Gottlieb, Levin, Cooper, Avery, and Bechdel. Admission by permission of the instructor.

Medieval Ireland
Literature 2175
cross-listed: ics, medieval studies
This course considers what, if anything, is “Irish,” and how the country’s medieval past continues to define the present. Texts include The Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Acallam na Senórach (Tales of the Elders of Ireland), lives of St. Patrick and St. Bridget, The Voyage of Saint Brendan, lays of Marie de France, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, poetry of W. B. Yeats, and diaries of the hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Free Speech
Literature 218 / Human Rights 218
See Human Rights 218 for a course description.

Queer Theory
Literature 2192
cross-listed: gss
To engage in queer theory is to challenge the conventional practices and assumptions of a sexuality-blind discipline or practice and to enlist a wide variety of languages and forms to shed light on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender culture and history.

Philosophical Pedagogy from Plato to Humboldt
Literature 2233  
An in-depth survey of the development of pedagogical thought from antiquity through the late Enlightenment. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Rousseau, Comenius, Locke, Herder, Kant, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt.

Philosophies of Poetry from Plato to Dada
Literature 2235
An exploration of the place of poetry in culture and in philosophy from classical Greece to the avant-garde. Students examine the nature of poetry and poetics, and literary criticism as it relates to poetry. Readings include selections from Aristotle, Longinus, Milton, Pope, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Hegel, Blake, Rimbaud, Shelley, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Marinetti, Pound, Tzara, Loy, and Wittgenstein.

Ideology and Political Commitment in Modern Literature
Literature 227
An examination of the ways in which political issues and beliefs, be they of the left, right, or center, are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Eliot, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Neruda, and others are analyzed for their ideological content, depth of conviction, method of presentation, and artistry in synthesizing politics and literature into a permanent aesthetic experience.

Political Theologies
Literature 2270
cross-listed: human rights, theology
This course considers the identity of the other and the ethics of our engagement with that other. These concepts seek a language that represents law, community, and event in more meaningful kinds of human action. Debates are drawn from a variety of thinkers, from Paul, Augustine, and the Hebrew Bible to contemporary works of ethical and political philosophy by Zˇizˇek, Levinas, Agamben, Badiou, Milbank, Negri, Schwartz, and others.

Louisiana
Literature 2312
cross-listed: french studies
This course considers Louisiana not just as a place but as an idea. What does Louisiana (and New Orleans, in particular) mean in the American imagination? How did the various populations distinctive to this region—the Creoles, Cajuns, “Americans,” and free people of color, among others—help define this meaning? Students read the first French accounts of Louisiana, then turn to works by George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, and Walker Percy.

Rise of the Russian Novel
Literature 2314 / Russian 2314
cross-listed: res
The novel, itself still a fairly new literary form in Europe, was imported into Russia in the 19th century, where it happened to coincide with the beginnings of a national literature that in many ways modeled itself on the West but also constantly questioned that modeling. The novel’s generic associations with identity and individuality thus undergo a double twist in the Russian version. But what constitutes a specifically “Russian” novel? Authors studied include Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Tolstoy.

Influence, Connection, and Correspondence in Russian and American Literature
Literature 2315
cross-listed: american studies, res
This course examines pairs of Russian and American works and authors whose relationship to each other illuminates a number of important critical issues: for example, the “little” man in a monolithic social system; the rise of the industrial city and urban experience; crises of identity, consciousness, and selfhood; and the possibility and the loss of spiritual and religious consolations in an increasingly secular world. Authors include Pushkin and Irving, Gogol and Poe, Dostoevsky and Melville, Nabokov in relation to himself, and Tolstoy and Roth.

In the Wild: Reading and Writing the Natural World
Literature 2316
Students read and write narratives that use the natural world as both subject and source of inspiration. The course begins with works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Contemporary writers, such as Hoagland, Dillard, Ehrlich, Matthiessen, Wilson, and Abbey are next considered. Students write weekly on the readings, keep a nature journal, and produce one longer creative essay that results from both experience and research.

American Gothic
Literature 2331
This course examines ways in which American authors have used the gothic genre to engage with social, political, and cultural concerns. The gothic novel—the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses, and heroines in distress—uses melodrama and the macabre to disguise horrifying psychological, sexual, and emotional issues. In America the genre has often confronted topics pertinent to national identity and history. Readings include novels and short stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Jacobs, James, Alcott, Gilman, Wharton, Faulkner, Jackson, and Baldwin.

Gothic Tradition in Romantic Literature
Literature 2332
cross-listed: gss
This class explores the gothic revival in British literature, and its debts to French and German literary traditions. Readings include Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Dacre, Godwin, Maturin, and Hogg. Students also examine poems by Coleridge and Keats; plays by Shelley and Inchbald; and French and German works with which British texts were in dialogue, including writings by de Sade, de Staël, Diderot, Goethe, Hoffman, and Schiller. The impact of the gothic across the disciplines (aesthetic theory, political commentary) is also explored.

Literature of the Crusades
Literature 234
cross-listed: human rights, medieval studies
An examination of the considerable literature produced around the Crusades, which includes epics, lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons. While the course primarily considers the Catholic perspective, it also pays attention to the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish points of view on these conflicts.

Modern African Fiction
Literature 238
cross-listed: africana studies, human rights, sre
An introduction, through key texts, to the modern African literature that emerged during the second half of the 20th century. Works written originally in French or Arabic are read in English translation. Wherever appropriate, the course relates the literature to Africa’s past traditions as well as its contemporary reality. Authors studied include Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, Ferdinand Oyono, Amos Tutuola, Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Tayeb Salih.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Literature 2401
cross-listed: medieval studies
Students examine the unities, contrasts, pleasures, and meanings of this rich collection. A study of Chaucer’s language is conducted using background reading (for example, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy), but the course is primarily an examination of a great poem.

Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World
Literature 2404
The modern period has been characterized as a time of unimaginable freedom, as well as existential angst, exile, and loss. This course examines the response of writers from America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia. In their fantastic parallel worlds, machines take on lives of their own, grotesque transformations violate the laws of science, and inversions of normality become the norm. Authors include L. Frank Baum, Kafka, ˇCapek, Schulz, Olesha, and Mayakovsky.

Nothing Sacred: 20th-Century French Literature and the Reign of Terror
Literature 2405 / French 2405
Much of 20th-century French literature was given to the experience of “terror”: a constant state of revolutionary crisis, severe distrust of language, and profound hatred of literature, which ultimately led, wrote Jean Paulhan, to madness and silence. How did such a “terroristic” imperative become central to 20th-century French poetics? This course, taught in English, examines essays, poetry, and fiction by Aragon, Artaud, Blanchot, Breton, Céline, Duras, Genet, Michaux, Paulhan, Sartre, Tzara, and Valéry.

Quarrel of Reason and Faith
Literature 2430
cross-listed: human rights, theology
What does it mean to say “I believe,” as opposed to “I think”? Is it possible to be both a rational person and a believer in God? Students in this course attempt to answer these and other questions through close readings of classic texts, primarily from the Christian and post-Christian traditions, including works by Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, Averroës, Aquinas, Dante, Erasmus, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Joyce, Sartre, Russell, Benedict XVI, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

From Gutenberg to Google: Literature, Media, Information Systems
Literature 2431
cross-listed: sts
A survey of the influence of technology on the production and dissemination of literature. It begins by studying the history of the printed book, then considers the book as an aesthetic object, and finally looks at the influence of electronic media on literary production. Readings include Febvre and Martin, Chartier, Darnton, Dickinson, Benjamin, McLuhan, Queneau, Bernstein, Philips, Drucker, Hejinian, McGann, Lessig, Kittler, and Haraway.

African Women Writers
Literature 246
cross-listed: africana studies, gss, human rights, sre
The dramatic emergence of modern African literature was amplified by the distinct voices of a remarkable band of women writers whose work is now established as a part of Africa’s revolutionary literature. This course considers novels and short stories by some of the leading women writers from the 1960s to the present. Readings are in English originals or translations from French and Arabic. Among the writers considered are Flora Nwapa, Mariama Bâ, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Alifa Rifaat, Bessie Head, and Ama Ata Aidoo.

Secularization and Its Discontents: Goethe, Schiller, Heine
Literature 248
Against the backdrop of the intellectual climate of the time between the “storm-and-stress” movement of the 1760s and the radical trends leading up to the revolution of 1848, the class accompanies Germany’s greatest writers on their journey toward modernity and explores with them the tensions and contradictions of the “Age of Secularization” as manifested in their poetry, prose, and plays. In English.

Narratives of Suffering
Literature 2482
cross-listed: american studies, human rights
Suffering is at the heart of many of the world’s great stories and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying, and it often raises more questions than it answers. Readings include the Book of Job, King Lear, Moby-Dick, poetry by Emily Dickinson, The Sound and the Fury, Beloved, Maus, and The Road.

Arthurian Romance
Literature 249
cross-listed: medieval studies
This course examines the variety of concerns, meanings, and pleasures in medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights. Texts include the Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Layamon’s Brut, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Tale of the Death of King Arthur, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

English Literature I, II, III
Literature 250, 251, 252
Major writers, genres, and issues in the history of English literature are explored, from the medieval period through the mid-20th century, in a regularly offered sequence of three independent but related units. In general, Literature 250 considers medieval and 16th-century poetry and drama, with some attention to prose. Writers include Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Sidney, More, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Literature 251 explores poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries by Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Wroth, Milton, Congreve, Fielding, Pope, and Swift. Literature 252 concentrates primarily on the novel and poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries, with some attention to criticism and drama; writers include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, Arnold, Joyce, Shaw, Lawrence, and Woolf. Any course in the sequence may be taken independently, but all students interested in English literature, especially those considering graduate studies, are encouraged to take two or more parts.

Shakespeare
Literature 2501
Students engage in an intensive exploration of a range of Shakespeare’s plays, including Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. Topics include contemporary issues such as race and ethnicity, gender, the body, and ethical conflicts.

Shakespearean Tragedy
Literature 2502
cross-listed: theater
Students explore all of Shakespeare’s important tragedies—together with readings from theatrical history and criticism—and watch films, or work (as performers) with a play. The reading list includes Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.

Shakespeare’s Comedies
Literature 2504
This course starts with readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, the four essential, normative, Shakespearean comedies. Students then examine the sometimes disturbing dramas (The Merchant of Venice; Measure for Measure; The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest; Henry IV, Part I ) in order to consider the meanings and values of comedy and the comic in Shakespeare’s work.

Literature of the United States I, II, III, IV
Literature 257, 258, 259, 260
cross-listed: american studies, victorian studies
This regularly repeating sequence of four independent but related units explores major authors and issues in American literature, from its Puritan origins to the 21st century. Literature 257 examines writings from the first three generations of Puritan settlement in 17th-century Massachusetts, in relation to one another and also to later American texts bearing traces of Puritan concerns. Authors include notable Puritan divines, poets, historians and citizens, and later writers such as Edwards, Irving, Emerson, Dickinson, Twain, and Lowell. Literature 258 includes Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and other writers of the American Renaissance. Literature 259 studies works written from the post–Civil War period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism, and emergent modernism. Authors include James, Twain, Dreiser, Wharton, Frost, Bogan, Powell, and Fitzgerald. Emerson began his essay “Experience” by asking: “Where do we find ourselves?” Literature 260 asks this question of American literature in the wake of World War II and September 11. Authors include Mailer, Baldwin, Williams, Ginsberg, Updike, Roth, Carver, and Cisneros, among others.

Twentieth-Century American Literature and the Visual Arts
Literature 2606
cross-listed: american studies
An investigation of the relationship of literature to the visual arts, with primary emphasis placed on poetry. Students read art criticism and examine overlapping generic developments in literature and the arts. Some attention is paid to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Readings include Stein, Pound, Williams, Duchamp, Stieglitz, Loy, O’Hara, Ashbery, Brainard, Creeley, Coolidge, Howe, McGann, and Drucker.

Growing Up Victorian
Literature 261
cross-listed: victorian studies
Children in Victorian literature come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, and grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. Readings include nursery rhymes, fairy and folk tales, didactic stories, autobiography, and at least two novels: Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

Irish Fiction
Literature 2650
cross-listed: ics
Irish stories, novels, and plays of the past 300 years have been divided between two traditions: the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers who were English by descent and the Catholic tradition of modern Ireland. Readings, in addition to a brief history of Ireland, include Gulliver’s Travels, Castle Rackrent, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dubliners, At Swim-Two-Birds, plays by Synge and Yeats, and fiction by Bowen Trevor, O’Connor, O’Flaherty, and Doyle.

The Irish Big House
Literature 2651
Focusing on 20th-century fiction and plays, this course explores the ironic situation of the Anglo-Irish gentry who live in prestigious manors on large estates and wield social power amid a majority population with alien codes and beliefs. By concentrating on the symbol of the Big House, the class comes to an understanding of the contrasting ceremonies of life inside and outside the manor. Autobiographical and historical selections document the problems—decadence, alienation, violence—of the Big House under siege.

Women Writing the Caribbean
Literature 2670
cross-listed: africana studies, gss, sre
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes creolization as “nowhere purely African, but . . . a mosaic of African, European, and indigenous responses to a truly novel reality.” This course is concerned with how women, through fiction, interpreted that reality. Students begin by reading The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Other writers studied include Gellhorn, Rhys, Allfrey, Kincaid, Cliff, and Danticat.

Rebels With(out) a Cause: Great Works of German Literature
Literature 270
This course surveys representative works of German literature from the 18th century to the present. Readings include Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774); Mother Tongue (1990), a collection of stories by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish-German woman writer; and works by Schiller, Eichendorff, Heine, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Jelinek. The course is conducted in English, but students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the works in the original.

Generation “P,” the Invention of the 21st Century
Literature 2701 / Russian 2701
cross-listed: res
Generation “P” is a term coined by Viktor Pelevin, one of the most provocative Russian writers today. Does “P” stand for postmodern, post-Soviet, Pelevin, Putin, or just for pun? This course examines all kind of “p”ossibilities and “p”aradoxes in the works of Pelevin and other authors. In English.

An Exalted Plainness: The Art of Nonfiction Prose
Literature 2703
Nonfiction prose has deep antecedents in literary history, often more expansive in form, emotional content, and the power of the sentence than that which exists today. This course cuts across generic boundaries and historical periods—from the essay outward and from Elizabethan England forward—in search of useful literary examples of nonfiction prose. This is a practical seminar, intended to amplify and extend the imaginative tools and the grammar a student already possesses.

The Irish Renaissance
Literature 272
cross-listed: ics
The course begins with a brief history of Ireland; next is a consideration of the Abbey Theatre and its reconstruction of legends and use of western Ireland’s idioms and characters, chiefly in the dramas of Yeats and Synge. These themes were further developed in the literature associated with the “troubles” of 1916–22 and in later writings that continue or challenge the themes of the Renaissance. Authors studied include Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Brendan Behan.

Ten Plays that Shook the World
Literature 2733
The course begins in the classical period, with Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripedes’ The Trojan Women, and moves on to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Goethe’s Faust. Continuing along the axis of a pan-European modernism, students read Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, and then examine more radical currents in Brecht’s Mother Courage, Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The Holocaust and Literature
Literature 276
cross-listed: human rights, jewish studies
This course discusses major writers such as Kafka, Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Sebald, Tiˇsma, Kis, Singer, and Kertész. The Holocaust is considered in comparison with other 20th-century genocides, such as those that occurred in the Gulag, communist China, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Students debate questions about the boundaries of art and the literature of extreme situations and examine post-Holocaust reality—the trivialization of tragedy in the mass media and political-ideological manipulation.

Chosen Voices: Major Jewish Authors
Literature 276B
cross-listed: jewish studies
The course surveys the contribution of European and North American Jewish writing to 20th-century literature. Students examine questions of Jewish identity, stereotypes, mythology, folk wisdom, humor, history, culture, relation to language, and literary modernism. Authors studied include Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley.

The Heroic Age
Literature 280
cross-listed: medieval studies
Major works of the early Middle Ages are studied, with an emphasis on those written in what are today France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia. The course considers society-shaping historical events, such as the Viking invasions, rise of feudalism, and spread of Christianity, and the literary works that developed in those contexts. Texts include Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and the plays of Hrotswitha of Gandersheim.

Different Voices, Different Views
Literature 2882
A close reading of selected plays, poems, and short stories by contemporary authors from Africa, Egypt, India, and China. Students analyze the works for their intrinsic literary merits and verisimilitude and examine the extent to which the writers have drawn on native traditions or been affected by belief systems such as Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and democratic socialism. Authors include Assia Djebar, Sembène Ousmane, Nawal Saadawi, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, R. K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie.

History of the English Language
Literature 290
cross-listed: medieval studies
Students are introduced to the facts about the evolution of our language during the last 1,000 years or so and the ways in which linguistic changes can be discovered, described, explained, assessed, and grouped.

Reading for Writers
Literature 301
A joyous, rigorous exploration of what constitutes writing style, and what makes one writer a stylist and another not. The aim is to help students focus on this feature of their own creative work; numerous creative exercises facilitate this goal, along with critical papers involving stylistic analysis and possible presentations.

Wittgenstein’s Lion: The Question of the Animal
Literature 3012
cross-listed: philosophy
Toward the end of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” This course raises and puzzles out questions about the language, ethical implications, and symbolic character of the man/animal boundary. Primary readings are drawn from Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, and Hearne, with some literary interventions by Tolstoy, Kafka, Rilke, and Coetze. Prerequisite: a prior course in philosophy or theory.

In Praise of Idleness: Literature and the Art of Conversation
Literature 3013
The useful, Schiller wrote in The Aesthetic Education of Man, divorces leisure from labor and turns life into a series of utilitarian dead ends. Yet the impulse to play has often been condemned as dangerously close to the decadent and the idle. Readings include critiques of “pure” work, texts that expose the vanity of conversation, novels that explore the tensions between work and conversation, and texts that offer aesthetic theories of conversation.

Avant-Garde American Poetry and Poetics, 1978 to Present: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Literature 3014
This seminar begins with a study of the 20th-century influences that helped to shape the Language School, paying particular attention to works by Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Clark Coolidge. Students then consider the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–81), which featured important work by emerging experimental writers such as Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Leslie Scalapino. The class ends with an investigation of the newer generation of poets, for whom Language Poetry remains a seminal, if problematic, force.

An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov
Literature 3021 / Russian 3021
While studying to become a doctor at Moscow University, Anton Chekhov began writing in order to earn money. “There is no doubt that my study of medicine strongly affected my work in literature,” said Chekov. Students analyze how Dr. Chekhov’s “general theory of objectivity” had an impact on his writing and how his “treatment” of human nature and social issues brought an entirely new dimension to Russian literature and culture. Readings include Chekhov’s prose, plays, and letters.

Promiscuity, Fidelity, and Love: In Search of Don Juan
Literature 3022
What could be more “natural” than love? We have all lived it, chased its pleasures, been driven by its mandates, and suffered from its pain. In this course, students trace the literary construction of love and fidelity and the elaborations of betrayal. Readings include works by Molière, Casanova, Tirso de Molina, Choderlos de Laclos, Mozart / Da Ponte, Byron, and Shaw.

Poetry and Society
Literature 3023
cross-listed: human rights
This course looks at examples of poetry and related writing with sociopolitical implications from around the world and from several historical contexts. Writers studied include Whitman, García Lorca, Akhmatova, Pound, Tom Raworth, Juliana Spahr, Abba Kovner. In this practice-based seminar, students experiment with poetic forms, write essays, and research areas of contemporary social concern. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Poetics Seminar: Experimental Composition
Literature 3025
Both seminar and laboratory, this course pays particular attention to cross-pollinating traditions of experimentation in poetry, music, philosophy, and science. Authors studied include Mallarmé, Duchamp, Stein, Dewey, Cage, Bohr, Wittgenstein, Reich, Lucier, Mac Low, Skinner, and Bergvall. The presence of the John Cage Trust at Bard allows students to examine Cage’s varied and original approaches to composition. Prerequisites: at least one advanced course in poetry and/or music and one theory course in any area (or an independent interest in theory).

Polylingual Poetics
Literature 3026
In this seminar, students read, write, and translate a variety of texts. The class draws on the language proficiencies of the students and invited consultants. Authors include Sappho, Catullus, Chaucer, Rimbaud, Eliot, Mallarmé, Valéry, Vícente Huidobro, Velimir Khlebnikov, Stein, Mina Loy, García Lorca, Stevens, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Schwitters, Wittgenstein, Niedecker, Tardos, and Mac Low. Along with weekly writing assignments, students are encouraged to experiment with bi- and polylingual writing.

Empire, Sexuality, and the Making of Romantic Travel
Literature 3032
This course begins with the study of 1768, the year that Captain Cook set sail for Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, and ends with the study of 1833, the year Britain moved to ban colonial slavery. Students examine the complex relationship between the traditions of literary travel, political journalism, and imperial exploration during the era that saw the rise of Britain as the world’s preeminent imperial power. Authors include Lord Byron,Wordsworth, von Humboldt, De Quincey, Sterne, and Southey.

Toward (a) Moral Fiction
Literature 3033
cross-listed: human rights
Each text in this course grapples with ethical issues through fictive means. Students assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas—or eschew morality altogether. The course also attends to craft, investigating how authors’ concerns may be furthered by formal considerations. Works studied include Frankenstein, The Heart of the Matter, Disgrace, Crash, Continental Drift, Mating, Blood Meridian, and The Fifth Child, among others. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Homer
Literature 3034
In taking the measure of The Iliad and The Odyssey students scrutinize short passages, comparing a range of English translations, and become acquainted with the metrical and linguistics properties of the original Greek. They study the Homeric poems as oral traditions passed on by bards for generations before being written, fit the poems into the larger context of Indo-European epic, and ponder the archetypes of combat trauma traced in the poems by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America.

“Ideology” in Aesthetic Theory
Literature 3035
What is ideology? How can one distinguish between ideological and nonideological forms of consciousness? In attempting to answer these and other questions, students follow a central strand in German aesthetic thought that runs from Hegel to Habermas, and engage with recent non-Marxist thought about social norms and communicative action. Core readings include Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein. Prerequisite: limited to juniors and seniors.

African Short Stories
Literature 3102
cross-listed: africana studies
The course introduces students to the African literary experience from a wide selection of short fiction written in the last 50 years by major practitioners of the genre. Works from North, West, Central, East, and Southern Africa are studied in light of the diverse colonial experiences of the continent. Works in French, Arabic, or Portuguese are studied in English translations. Writers include Tayeb Salih (Sudan); Bessie Head (Botswana); Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe); and Luis Bernardo Honwana (Mozambique).

Modern Tragedy
Literature 3104
The complex history of tragedy is viewed in the light of major theories of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others. Study includes the disappearance and revival of the chorus, as well as works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Buchner, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller.

Anglo-American Modernist Fiction: Form, History, and Gender
Literature 311
cross-listed: gss
This course examines Anglo-American modernist narrative as it was fashioned by writers who fractured realist conventions of narration and championed formal innovation in the representation of human consciousness. Authors include James, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence, and Faulkner.

James Joyce’s Ulysses
Literature 3110
cross-listed: ics
Participants in this seminar pool their ideas about the novel’s text and context. Recent Joyce criticism is emphasized. Prerequisite: prior knowledge of Joyce and his early writings, notably Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

William Blake and His World
Literature 3114
William Blake was one of the most remarkable artists in the Western tradition: an exquisite lyricist, composer of fantastically difficult philosophical poems, recoverer of the tradition of illuminated manuscript, superb engraver, visionary painter, technical innovator, political radical, subject of hallucinatory-mystical experiences, and utter commercial failure. This course considers his life and work as a whole, and as played out in relation to the Enlightenment, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and rise of capitalism.

The Literature of Private Life
Literature 3120
cross-listed: french studies, gss, human rights
Using influential writings on everyday life, students examine topics previously considered too private or too personal to be viewed as literature. In order to situate texts within a tradition that rethinks the self, the class discusses works by Locke, Descartes, Shaftesbury, Kant, Marx, Hegel, and Foucault. Students read excerpts from the recent anthology History of Private Life, a research tool that helps connect literature, philosophy, social history, and anthropology.

The Pursuit of Happiness
Literature 3127
How have writers over the last 200 years represented the desire for happiness? This seminar focuses on the “optative” or “wishing mood,” as Samuel Johnson described it in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. The claims of political theorists and philosophers are explored, as are the imaginings of novelists and poets, but most often, the gap between the longing for and attainment of this elusive object is investigated.

Saints, Sinners, and Lunatics
Literature 3128
cross-listed: gss, lais
Nuns, visionaries, cross-dressers, clerics, wild men, neurotics, con artists, and poets receive attention in a range of Spanish historical and literary discourses. This course examines the values attached to these figures and the way in which these discourses—and other artistic representations—call into question our own assumptions regarding conformity and transgression. Readings include texts from Spain and Spanish America by authors such as Rojas, Cervantes, Molina, St. Teresa, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Shelley and His Circle
Literature 3133
Students read all of Shelley’s major poetry and prose. In order to situate these texts in their historical and intellectual context, students also read works by Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Students also explore British empirical philosophy, Platonic idealism, the skeptical tradition of David Hume, and the foundational and cutting-edge works of Shelley scholarship.

Ovid
Literature 314 / Classics 314
See Classics 314 for a full course description.

History and Novel: Scott, Eliot, Hardy
Literature 3142
In this seminar, students read three major figures who defined the novel—both in form and content—as deeply indebted to the historical imagination. Texts include Walter Scott’s Waverley, Old Mortality, and Heart of Midlothian; George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda; Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Well-Beloved.

The Politics of Form
Literature 3145
This course traces the origins of avant-garde ideas in early European modernism (Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Vorticism) and then looks at the evolution of experimental/progressive ideas in American art, critical theory, and poetics. Readings come from various influential critics (Greenberg, Vendler, Perloff, Eagleton, Berger, and others) as well as poet-critics (Bernstein, Retallack, Lévi-Strauss). Poets include Pound, Stevens, Oppen, Riding, Ginsberg, Lowell, Olson, Scalapino, Watten, and Mackey, along with related visual artists.

Literature and Politics
Literature 3204
Students read recent texts in critical theory with special attention to the ways in which political questions are articulated with literary or aesthetic ones. The class is guided by Jacques Rancière's suggestion that “humans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things.” Readings from Derrida, Foucault, Rancière, Balibar, Butler, Spivak, and others.

Dante
Literature 3205
cross-listed: italian studies, medieval studies
This course examines the span of literary influences underlying the poetic innovations in the Divine Comedy. Students also explore Dante’s early works (Vita Nuova, Convivio, Letters), reading the texts against the general backdrop of medieval Christian culture and exploring themes such as human vs. divine knowledge; linear history vs. circular time; revelation and faith; virtue and sin (contrappasso); and allegory and the responsibilities of authorship.

Responsibility and Cultural Memory
Literature 3207
cross-listed: human rights
This seminar explores how personal narrative, monuments, memorials, and photography produce and document the memory of trauma. Readings include theoretical texts by Benjamin, Agamben, Blanchot, Caruth, Baer, and LaCapra. Case studies include narratives by Holocaust survivors and from surviving desaparecidos of Latin America. The complexity of response to a variety of visually powerful material—photo-graphs of Civil War battlegrounds, Holocaust sites, and public monuments—is explored.

Faulkner: Race, Text, and Southern History
Literature 3208
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies, sre
Unlike other writers of his generation, who viewed America from distant shores, William Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region. From this intensely intimate vantage point, he was able to portray the American South in all of its glory and shame. In this course, students read Faulkner’s major novels, poetry, short stories, and film scripts. Students also read biographical material and examine the breadth of current Faulkner literary criticism.

Media and Conflict
Literature 3209
cross-listed: human rights
This seminar examines the role of representation and mediation in the experience of war and conflict. Students explore the shifting line between violence and politics, in order to construct an analysis of the media in conflict. Topics include propaganda, censorship, photo opportunities, compassion fatigue, digital video, testimony, the mobilization of shame, Internet jihad, and torture. Students consider the works of Michael Ignatieff, Rony Brauman, David Rieff, Samuel Weber, Stanley Cohen, and George Lakoff, among others, and examine readings and footage from recent and contemporary conflicts.

Modern French Plays: The Theater of Contestation
Literature 3211
cross-listed: french studies
A study of plays, “revolutionary” in their own right, which are misleadingly referred to as the Theater of the Absurd (or of Cruelty). The class reads Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame; Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and The Bald Soprano; Genet’s The Maids; Adamov’s Professor Taranne; and Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. Students with an adequate command of French are encouraged to read texts in the original and discuss them (in French) during a weekly tutorial, for two extra credits.

The Tragic Heroine in the Western Imagination: From Euripides to Tennessee Williams
Literature 3217
cross-listed: gss
The figure of the tragic heroine—abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, alluring—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly 30 centuries. Why do male authors focus so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? Through a series of close readings of representative texts in a number of genres (epic, tragedy, lyric, fiction, opera), students explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.

Investigative Poetics
Literature 3224
This seminar explores a range of forms, constraints, and experiences. Compositional strategies are taught that entail an acute level of observation of words and their consequences. Investigative methods from a variety of fields are studied, along with the works of an international selection of contemporary poets. Projects may involve visual and electronic media and performance dimensions. Prerequisites: Upper College standing and a writing sample.

Postmodern Narrative
Literature 3241
This course looks closely at eight novels that, in various ways, play with, undermine, frustrate, or redefine “traditional” expectations of narrative. The aim is to examine these books as intelligent readers and intelligent writers, asking in what ways they comment on the nature of the project of fiction and in what ways they further it.

Contemporary Women Writers
Literature 3242
cross-listed: gss
Male and female authors stand on equal footing in the literary world today, yet in study, the balance remains shifted slightly toward male authors. This course addresses this imbalance by devoting a semester to reading a wide variety of U.S. women fiction writers, including Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Hempel, Edwidge Danticat, Rishi Reddi, Kelly Link, Judy Budnitz, Marilynne Robinson, Allegra Goodman, Aoibheann Sweeney, and Marly Youmans.

The Danger of Romance
Literature 3252
cross-listed: medieval studies
The alternate world presented by romance can seem more attractive than our own mundane existence and can threaten to distract us from our real-life responsibilities within it. In reading the major works of romance literature, students consider the uncertain moral status of this genre. Texts include classical epics, medieval Arthurian romances and lays, Renaissance romance epics, and some modern descendants of the romance tradition.

Ideology and Politics in Modern Literature
Literature 328
cross-listed: human rights
An examination of the ways in which political ideas and beliefs are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Neruda, and others are analyzed for ideological content, depth of conception, method of presentation, and synthesis of politics and literature. The class also explores the borderline between art and propaganda. Discussions are supplemented with examples drawn from other art forms.

Innovative Novellas and Short Stories
Literature 330
An in-depth study of the difference between the short story, in which the writer achieves intimacy and depth of meaning in a few pages, and the novella, which also demands economy and precision even as it allows for fuller concentration and development of character and plot. The class reads masters in these genres such as Voltaire, de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Aleichem, Mann, Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, and Borges.

Writing as Reading as Writing
Literature 3303-3304
This course is a variant on a writing workshop. Instead of writing poems and then reading and critiquing them in class, participants conflate and combine reading and writing with the aim of developing skills in both. The course focuses on forms and processes, a vocabulary of making and response, and the potential reciprocity between them: imitation, instant replay, comments as poems, poems as comments. Prerequsite: permission of the instructor. Limited to 15 students.

Scholasticism versus Humanism
Literature 3306
cross-listed: human rights, medieval studies, theology
Students in this seminar explore the tension between scholastic and humanist thought, the rise of the university, the shift from gothic to Renaissance architecture, the discovery of the New World, and the Protestant Reformation. Authors studied include Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.

Middle Eastern Literature and Postcolonial Theory
Literature 3310
cross-listed: middle eastern studies
Surveying a range of issues and literary texts, students explore the impact of colonialism, examine the relationship between empire and writing, consider forms of resistance to the process of domination, and look at the ways literary and artistic representations from the Middle East have been crucial in unsettling or undermining the ideologies at the core of imperialism, colonialism, and oppression.

Freud, Lacan, and Zˇizˇek
Literature 3322
Psychoanalysis was originally a science derived from clinical observation and an interpretative practice explored in essays and discussions. This course considers classic texts by Sigmund Freud, explores essays by Jacques Lacan, and then asks how contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zˇizˇek—whose work occupies a good part of the course—employ psychoanalysis today.

New Directions in Contemporary Fiction
Literature 333
Students closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last quarter century in order to define the state of the art for this historical period. Particular emphasis is placed on analysis of work by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, and Jamaica Kincaid. Several writers visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

Poetics of Modernity: Art and Politics 1945–75
Literature 3352
This course explores the ways in which a utopian desire to accommodate the present and invent the future, by finding new aesthetic forms, began to fray, as writers and artists responded to challenges brought on by postwar politics and the new media age. Readings include poetry and poetics; cultural, literary, and art criticism; and prose fiction and narrative. Authors may include Celan, Jabès, Auden, Oppen, Ginsberg, Rich, Burroughs, Mailer, Baldwin, Beckett, Bowles, Nabokov, Borges, Adorno, Arendt, Barthes, Trilling, and Sontag.

Faulkner and Morrison
Literature 3354
In the first half of the course, students read four Faulkner novels—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!— together with some of his short fiction and a range of essays, interviews, and critical studies. In the second half, they read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, The Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Topics include race, violence, prophecy, motherhood, ancestry, ecstasy, the effort to speak the unspeakable, and the pleasures of words.

Race, Gender, and Poetic Form
Literature 3355
cross-listed: sre
This course examines how poetic forms were “racialized” and “gendered” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Students examine issues of rhythm, dialect, and allusiveness in a range of primary and secondary Anglo-American modernist literary texts, and in selected contemporaneous scientific (or quasi-scientific) writings about race and gender. Readings include selections from Whitman, Dickinson, Dunbar, Hughes, Cullen, Johnson, Yeats, Loy, H.D., Eliot, Pound, Stein, Crane, and Tolson.

The Essay
Literature 3362
This course considers the form and style of the essay, with a particular focus on voice, viewpoint, and rhetorical technique. Intensive study is devoted to word choice, cadence, and punctuation, in the belief that even the most minute aspects of writing affect the impact of the whole. The goal is to equip students with a strong but supple command of their instrument, a prerequisite for personal expression.

Biography and Autobiography
Literature 3363
Students read excerpts from critical studies such as Clifford’s Biography as an Art, Gusdorf’s “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” and Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Students also read excerpts from Renan’s The Life of Jesus, Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Nin’s diaries, Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Cocteau’s Opium, and Middlebrook’s Anne Sexton: A Biography. Each week, students write a chapter of an autobiography and discuss problems of memory, choice, spontaneity, and the postmodern skepticism about self and identity.

The Slave Narrative
Literature 3364
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies, sre
Students explore the role the slave narrative has played in American letters through the firsthand accounts of former slaves. Readings begin with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through the works of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, and Booker T. Washington. Students also consider lesser-known voices, such as those recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project.

Hawthorne, Melville, and Literary Friendship
Literature 3410
During a mountain picnic in the summer of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville struck up a private conversation. That talk issued into an intense, relatively brief friendship that was mediated by writing, given expression in writing, and is approachable only by way of writing. After acquainting themselves with the two writers’ careers before 1850, students read everything Hawthorne and Melville wrote between the summer of 1850 and the fall of 1852, the period of their intimacy.

Satire
Literature 3431
A study of the origins of satire in folk culture and classical writings (Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Petronius); of medieval, Renaissance, and 18th-century examples of satire; and of the 20th-century revival of satiric traditions in Waugh, Auden, Huxley, and others.

Victorian Bodies
Literature 349
cross-listed: gss, sts, victorian studies
This course examines Victorian texts in conjunction with theories of the construction of sexuality. Students trace the origins of “natural” categories such as male/female, child/adult, heterosexual/homosexual, and normal/perverse. Readings include Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hughes, Richard Burton, Robert Baden-Powell, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, John Ruskin, Rudyard Kipling, and Lewis Carroll.

Exile and Estrangement in Modern Fiction
Literature 358
cross-listed: res
Selected short fiction and novels by such writers as Mann, Kafka, Nabokov, Camus, Singer, Kundera, and Naipaul are read and discussed, with an eye toward the issue of exile—estrangement as a biographical fact and a way of life. Topics of foreignness and identity (ethnic, political, sexual), rejection and loss, estrangement and challenge, and protean mutability are discussed in connection with social-historical situations and as major literary themes.

Urban Shakespeare
Literature 364
Shakespeare is a very urban dramatist, reflecting the vital life of the city of London in the early 17th century. Students read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and The Tempest, along with relevant texts, to explore how this burgeoning capital of Europe registered in urban terms the issues of ethnicity, gender, identity, empire, sexuality, and class difference.

Enduring Novels of the 19th Century
Literature 3640
cross-listed: french and german studies
This course acquaints students with representative novels by distinguished French, Russian, German, and Central European authors. The works are analyzed for style, themes, ideological commitment, and social and political setting. Taken together, they provide an accurate account of the major artistic, philosophical, and intellectual trends and developments on the continent during the 19th century. Readings include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Balzac’s Cousin Bette, Hamsun’s Hunger, and Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

Virginia Woolf
Literature 3741
cross-listed: gss
Students read Woolf’s novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941), in the context of two distinct periods of innovation and conflict in 20th-century literary culture. The first was the formation of the Bloomsbury circle and English modernism. What makes Woolf a modernist? The second, following the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, saw the introduction of feminist literary criticism. Why did Woolf’s novels and essays become canonical texts of late 20th-century feminism?

Gertrude Stein and Arts of Composing
Literature 3742
This practice-based seminar looks at Gertrude Stein’s experimental and performative practices of language composition in relation to the arts, science, philosophy, and popular media of her contemporary moment and ours. Though Stein died in 1946, she has—for reasons the class explores—remained a perennial contemporary, whose work continues to challenge, puzzle, and stimulate. The seminar includes extensive reading, viewing, listening, performing, collaborative composing, writing (short essays and poetic compositions); it culminates in the presentation of individual and/or collaborative projects.

Poetics of the Experimental Attitude: Gertrude Stein and John Cage
Literature 3743
This course looks at work by the mom and pop of modernist and postmodernist experimental arts, with an emphasis on their respective interarts contexts and their relation to investigative methods in the sciences. The class also explores the artists’ collaborations and conversations with other artists. In this practice-based seminar, students experiment with forms and study texts and music through performance. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Indian Fiction
Literature 3801
cross-listed: asian studies, sre
Indian fiction of the modern period is of three kinds: works written by English authors during the last 100 years of the empire; those written by Indian authors during the first 60 years of independence; and those written by Indians in the diaspora. Students read Kipling’s Kim, Forster’s A Passage to India, Narayan’s The Guide, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Roy’s The God of Small Things, Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, and Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.

Henry James
Literature 3812
cross-listed: american studies
In this in-depth study of Henry James, particular attention is paid to questions of genre, narrative technique, and the representation of consciousness, and to James’s engagement with social issues such as gender and sexuality, transatlantic cultural clashes, and the transformation of American political and economic structures. Texts include The Americans, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, and The Golden Bowl.

Joyce and Beckett
Literature 382
cross-listed: ics
A seminar on the art and ideas of two of the 20th century’s most significant experimenters. The class uses biographical materials to illuminate the association, and sometimes collaboration, of Joyce and Beckett. Readings include Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses; and Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, and Watt, as well as the plays Waiting for Godot, All That Fall, and Cascando.

Contemporary Critical Theory
Literature 390
During the last century, major changes in the ways works of art and culture were conceived took place under the influence of modernism and poststructuralism. This seminar engages key texts in this transformation. Through the reading of full-length studies or significant excerpts of major theorists, students are introduced to the aesthetics and ethics of modernist and postmodernist debates about representation. Prerequisite: college-level course in philosophy; literature; or cultural, political, or arts theory.

The Mask and Its Metaphors
Literature 3902
cross-listed: africana studies
American modernism’s push to “make it new” meant a break with the past and convention. For many writers this was facilitated by use of an “other.” This course examines how seeing oneself through a mask affects modernist narratives and how the mask subverts conventional definitions of race and gender. Texts include Stein’s Three Lives; Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal; Wright’s Savage Holiday; Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; and Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

Kafka and His Neighbors
Literature 420
The course begins with some of Kafka’s letters, diaries, and fiction, and carries on with the diffusion of the Kafkaesque into the absurdity and cruelty of our times. To explore the literary heritage of Central and Eastern Europe, Kafka’s “neighborhood,” students read the work of such writers as Musil, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Ionesco, Kundera, Canetti, and Danilo Kis.

Narrative Strategies
Literature 425
With emphasis on postgenre fabulism and the New Gothic, this workshop is intended for writers interested in engaging the theory that reading is a primary function of creating fiction.  Students explore, through selected readings and responsive writing, the ways a literary narrative best finds its expression. Students read contemporary fiction by Wallace, Kincaid, Carter, Moody, Banks, Crowley, and others.

Contemporary Masters
Literature 427
An opportunity to converse with some of the world’s greatest living authors. In recent years this course has been taught by such authors as Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and the celebrated Latin American writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The authors debate, together and with the class, such topics as the relationship between art and history, literature’s capacity to affect moral value, and the literature of extreme situations.

Serial Fiction
Literature 433
Fiction writers often generate a world larger than one book, with characters returning again and again, sometimes maturing, sometimes fading into relative insignificance, sometimes seeming to die and be reborn. This seminar focuses on multinovels, including several of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels; Ford Maddox Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End; and three novels by Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; and You Can’t Go Home Again.