Bard College Catalogue

Bard College Catalogue 2012-13

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.

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
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.

Imagining the Environment in English Literature and Culture
Literature 2006
cross-listed: eus, sts
In his 1884 lecture “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” social critic John Ruskin sounded an apocalyptic note when he described a “plague-wind” hovering over Great Britain that looks as if “it were made of dead men’s souls.” This course considers how ideas of environment were contested and consolidated in the 19th-century literary imagination. Readings: Ruskin, Malthus, Dickens, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Darwin, Hardy, and Lawrence.

American Indian Fictions
Literature 2015
cross-listed: american studies, human rights
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.

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.

Mark Twain
Literature 2021
Students in this seminar do individual research and make class presentations on 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, Letters from the Earth, and The Mysterious Stranger. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor and one U.S. literature sequence course or a course in either American studies or American history.

The Culture of Humanitarianism
Literature 2025
cross-listed: american studies, human rights
The class studies the creative artifacts of humanitarian aid to Africa by looking at novels and films that explore the complex relationship between American aid workers and African aid recipients. How do nationality, race, religious difference, and the legacy of colonialism inflect the politics of these representations? Authors include Paul Theroux, Maria Thomas, Dave Eggers, Russell Banks, and Uzodinma Iweala; films screened include Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and Blood Diamond.

Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Literature 2026
What makes a work of children’s literature a classic? Who are these texts really for? In this course, students explore questions about what children can, do, and should read, and consider how the notion of childhood is constructed and reproduced through texts and images. Authors: Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and J. K. Rowling, among others.

Poe
Literature 2028
cross-listed: american studies
Students read Edgar Allan Poe’s entire output of tales and poems, along with many of his essays, reviews, and letters. The emphasis is on the tension between Poe’s aesthetic idealism and his cadaverous materialism, his aspirations toward the absolute oneness represented by the love object and his obsession with the way love objects tend to go bad. Related topics: perversity, race, death, mourning, evidence, gradation, angels, and the divine.

The Medium and the Message: Focus on Language
Literature 2029
cross-listed: sts
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that “the medium is the message.” How should we read electronic literature, the digital humanities, or a Sn00ki tweet in light of this concept? This course examines the uses of language in traditional and new media, and considers areas of sociolinguistics such as race, class, and gender. Texts by McLuhan, Deborah Cameron, David Crystal, Lynda Mugglestone, and Peter Trudgill. Students also maintain a course blog.

Religion and the Secular in American and British Modernism
Literature 2035
cross-listed: american studies, religion, theology
Can literature become a substitute for religion? Is poetic consciousness connected to religious consciousness? How does secularism impact the way writers think about the nature of language or the experience of pain? This course examines the intricate relationship between religion and literature in modern culture. Texts: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Jean Toomer’s Cane, stories by Flannery O’Connor, and poems by Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats.

Rise of the Black Novel
Literature 2036
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
The main task of this course is to articulate the special role that the novel plays in the development of a radical black literary tradition and of a nation headed toward civil war. Likely writers include Stowe, Douglass, Emerson, Melville, Jacobs, Delany, Brown, Wilson, and Webb. Narratives of both black and white writers are considered in the context of abolitionism, radical theology and moral theory, the Haitian Revolution and slave rebellion, and mid-19th-century theories of the imagination.

Childhood and Children’s Literature in Japan
Literature 2037
cross-listed: asian studies
This course examines the ubiquity of the child figure in literary and cultural production in modern Japan. Texts considered include short fiction, fairy tales, animated films, manga, and other forms of media such as Japanese kamishibai (paper theater). Writers studied include Higuchi Ichiyo, Kawabata Yasunari, Oe Kenzaburo, and Yoshimoto Banana.

Ethical Life in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy
Literature 2038
cross-listed: philosophy
Ethical life, as presented and analyzed in ancient Greek texts, is the object of inquiry in this course. Particular attention is paid to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the epics (Homer and Hesiod), tragedy and comedy, and Plato. Students also consult scholars such as Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, who draw ­liberally from the whole spectrum of classical genres to argue for the urgent contemporary significance of ancient ethics.

Comparative Literature I, II, III
Literature 204A, 204B, 204C
cross-listed: classical studies, french studies, german studies
In the first course of a three-semester sequence, students consider the ways in which ancient authors (or their characters) configured the relationship between poetic production and theoretical inquiry, and therewith gave birth to the practice of literary criticism in the West. Readings from Greek literature include works by Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Aristophanes, and Euripides; readings from the Latin corpus include selections by Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Plautus, and Seneca. The second semester examines literature from the late 14th century through the 17th century, focusing on the emergence of the self as a concept fraught with tensions as well as possibilities, nature and civilization, history and literature, hero and antihero, believer and heretic. Authors include Boccaccio, Rojas, Cervantes, Calderón, Molière, and Inés de la Cruz. The third installment explores key issues in 19th- and early 20th-century poetics, with readings from Kant, Schlegel, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Woolf, Bergson, and Proust.

Representations of Tibet
Literature 205
cross-listed: asian studies, human rights
The popular image of Tibet has been shaped in large measure by missionaries’ accounts, European explorers’ travelogues, Hollywood movies, and the Tibetan exile community, including the Dalai Lama. This course is designed to examine the ways in which texts and images are created and interpreted about a land with geographical, historical, cultural, and legal ambiguities. Readings include works by early explorers, Tibetans in exile and inside Tibet, contemporary Chinese writers, historians, and religion scholars.

Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
Literature 2060
cross-listed: mes
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, mes
A survey of Arab American literature, thought, art, and film. Writers include Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Naima, Samuel John Hazo, Etel Adnan,  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 Arabness/ Muslimness, 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.

Other Romanticisms
Literature 2064
It is only in recent decades that studies of Romantic poetry have looked beyond the Big Six: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Yet between the 1780s and the 1830s, Britain witnessed an explosion of writing by figures generally excluded from the canon, including women, proletarians, people of color, peasants, and those deemed insane. This course explores the works of this “other” Romantic tradition. Authors include George Crabbe, Robert Burns, Mary Prince, Thomas Beddoes, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Isaac d’Israeli, and William Hazlitt.

Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics
Literature 2085
cross-listed: asian studies
This course introduces students to major works of modern Japanese literature, while considering the question of aesthetic value and its evolving definition. Readings are organized around major themes and movements of 20th-century literary production, including realism and the confessional novel, literary modernism, women writers, proletarian literature, life writing, war literature, and testimony. Writers studied include Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Kobayashi Takiji, Miyamoto Yuriko, Oe Kenzaburo, and Murakami Haruki. All readings in English.

Modern American Poets
Literature 209
cross-listed: american studies
The first great modernist pioneers in English (Yeats, Pound, Eliot) created a schism in American poetry, dividing poets into two camps loosely characterized as “Mandarin” and “Demotic.” This course traces the Mandarin strain through works by Stevens, Moore, Williams, Stein, Crane, Auden, Robert Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Roethke, Duncan, Merrill, and Plath; and the Demotic tradition through Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay, Hughes, Ginsberg, Kerouac, O’Hara, and Dylan.

Major American Poets
Literature 210
cross-listed: american studies
American poetry found its voice in the first half of the 19th century when Emerson challenged American scholars to free themselves from tradition. For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt Whitman—in whose poems a distinctly American voice was first heard—to Robert Frost acknowledged Emerson as a crucial inspiration. Readings: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, H. D., Wallace Stevens, and Frost.

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
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 varied cultural resources for emerging literary production.

Russian Laughter
Literature 2117
cross-listed: res
The class examines how authors as distinct as Dostoevsky and Bulgakov create comic effects and utilize laughter for various artistic purposes. Also examined are some of the major theories of laughter developed by Hobbs, Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin, and others. Readings begin with an 18th-century satirical play by Denis Fonvisin and end with Venedikt Erofeev's contemplation on the life of a perpetually drunk philosopher in the former Soviet Union.

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, Du Bois, Hopkins, Toomer, Hughes, McKay, Hurston, Locke, Schuyler, Thurman, Wright, Baldwin, Ellison, Baraka, Sanchez, Reed, and Morrison.

Cairo through Its Novels
Literature 214
cross-listed: eus, human rights, mes
Cairo, the “City Victorious,” has long captivated the literary imagination. This survey of the modern Egyptian novel maps the changing cityscape of Egypt’s bulging metropolis over the course of the 20th century. From Naguib Mahfouz’s iconic alley to Sonallah Ibrahim’s apartment building to Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s multifamily tenement, readings provide a range of literary representations by Cairo’s writers. Literary texts are supplemented by theoretical and historical material, and the course is accompanied by a film series.

Domesticity and Power
Literature 2140
cross-listed: american studies, gss
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.

Infernal Paradises: Literature of Russian Modernism
Literature 2153
cross-listed: res
An exploration of utopia as an intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual concept. The course aims to demonstrate the continuity of the Russian literary tradition while revealing how innovative creative forms and resonant new voices contributed to an artistic revival in the 20th century, one that flourished under the harsh conditions of censorship, totalitarian oppression, and cultural isolation. Readings include works by Chekhov, Bely, Blok, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Zamyatin, Pasternak, Bunin, Nabokov, and Akhmatova.

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.

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.

Victorian Myth, Fantasy, and the Art of Detection
Literature 216
cross-listed: victorian studies
Extensive reading includes poems by Browning and Tennyson; and fiction by Benjamin Disraeli, George MacDonald, Wilkie Collins, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

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.

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, as are 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. 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.

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.

The Revenge Tragedy
Literature 2176
Clandestine murders, otherworldly revenants, disguise, and madness all characterize the revenge tragedy, a form of play popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Revenge tragedies function as social critique and speak to the anxieties that accompanied new modes of understanding the physical world and human emotion. Readings include The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Broken Heart. Films considered: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and A History of Violence.

Literary Networks and New Writing Out of Africa
Literature 2178
cross-listed: africana studies, human rights
In the late 1990s, soon after Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa, writers, artists, and thinkers were drawn to Cape Town by the promise of a new kind of society. After more than 20 years of stasis, there has been an explosion of literary activity throughout the continent. This course looks at short fiction, essays, reportage, and creative nonfiction produced between 2002 and 2009, with particular focus on texts from Lagos, Nigeria; Cape Town; and Nairobi, Kenya.

The African American Novel
Literature 2179
cross-listed: africana studies
A survey of the African American novel from 1853 to the present. Works include The Marrow of Tradition, Passing, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, Invisible Man, Giovanni’s Room, Sula, The White Boy Shuffle, and The Known World.

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

Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction
Literature 2183
This course examines how Kundera’s idiosyncratic textual strategies unsettle the boundaries between fictional and factual, totalitarian and democratic, Eastern and Western. Readings include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Immortality, as well as Kundera’s writings about fiction. Supplemental texts by Nietzsche, Broch, Calvino, Fuentes, Rorty, Havel, Brodsky, Benjamin, and Huyssen, among others.

The Politics and Practice of Cultural Production in the Middle East and North Africa
Literature 2185
This course draws upon a series of case studies to illustrate how cultural production can be read as a form of documentation, resistance, and potential intervention to prevailing narratives. Topics include tradition and modernity, the rise (and fall) of nationalism, and narrating war. Interdisciplinary in nature, the course considers a range of texts, including novels (Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia Djebar), films (Jackie Salloum, Lamia Joreige, Tahani Rached), video works (Walid Raad, Wael Shawky), paintings (Mahmud Said, Jewad Selim), and blogs.

Persia and the Western Imaginary
Literature 219
cross-listed: medieval studies
For centuries, Persia’s shahs inspired Western political thinkers, its Zoroastrian sages influenced Western philosophers, and its Sufi poets affected Western writers. How did the homeland of the three Magi come to be viewed as a member of the Axis of Evil? This course tries to make sense of the complicated relationship between these cultures. Texts include Aeschylus’s The Persians, Herodotus’s Histories, Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, Jean Chardin’s Travels in Persia, Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, among others.

Truth and Consequences: The Uses of Persona
Literature 2214
What are fiction writers not allowed to make up? This course looks at works that use literary persona to transgress what we think of as the boundaries of fiction. The class reads authors who have falsified their identities, relied on imaginary sources, allowed philosophical concerns to intrude blatantly into the world of their stories, and in other ways called into question the merit of their work as fiction. Authors include Gertrude Stein, Fernando Pessoa, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, Michael Chabon, and Philip K. Dick, among others.

Strange Books and the Human Condition
Literature 225
This class involves the close reading of books so peculiar as to verge on “outsider” literature. Authors include Jane Bowles, Felisberto Hernández, Robert Walser, and Hans Christian Andersen. Students are expected to have read enough “not strange” literature to understand why the books on the list are so unusual.

Political Theology
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 Zizek, Levinas, Agamben, Badiou, Milbank, Negri, Schwartz, and others.

Innovative Novellas and Short Stories
Literature 230
This course explores the range and scale of such masters in these genres as Voltaire, de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholem Aleichem, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, and Borges. In addition to writing several analytical papers, students are asked to present a short story or novella of their own by the end of the semester.

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.

Duels, Doubles, Dualities: 19th-Century Russian Classics
Literature 2317
While dramatic duels do play out in the lives and works of many 19th-century Russian authors, this course focuses on literary and critical confrontations between writers, their writings, and how they were read. The class considers various classic works, as well as their reflections in film, music, and other arts. Texts by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pavlova, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. In English.

Toward the Condition of Music: Poetry and Aesthetics in Victorian England
Literature 2318
cross-listed: victorian studies
John Ruskin announced in Modern Painters (1843) that the greatest art must contain “the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” Fifty years later, Oscar Wilde declared with equal assurance that “all art is quite useless.” What happened in that intervening half-century? This course follows the evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the accompanying Victorian debate about the status of art in relation to society. Readings: Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy, and Yeats, as well as criticism by Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde.

Global Victorians
Literature 2319 / History 2319
See History 2319 for a full course description.

American Gothic
Literature 2331
cross-listed: american studies, gss
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.

Romantic Women Writers
Literature 2333
cross-listed: gss
Women writers were extremely influential in the Romantic period, but their contributions to the tradition of British literature have, until recently, been largely ignored. This course seeks to redefine conventional ideas about Romanticism by examining the work of the period’s most ­eminent women writers: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Literature of the Crusades
Literature 234
cross-listed: human rights, medieval studies, religion
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.

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,Capek, Schulz, Olesha, and Mayakovsky.

Nothing Sacred: 20th-Century French Literature and the Reign of Terror
Literature 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.

The Monstrous Writer and the Moral World, The Moral Writer and the Monstrous World
Literature 2406
How do we read the work of writers whose legacy is complicated by political or personal history? Is an artistic work a thing apart from the life that fed it, or are there instances when the acts of an author in the world must be admitted into a reading of their art? At the center of this question, and this course, is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century and one of its great fiends—an anti-Semite of impenitent ardor. Additional readings: Eliot, Pound, Brecht, Némirovsky, Gide, Roth, and Nabokov, among others.

Milton
Literature 2421
Samuel Johnson terms Milton “an acrimonious and surly republican” while T. S. Eliot laments the fact that the poet had been “withered by book-learning.” But Milton was an insightful observer of human relationships and, particularly, of man’s relationship to God. This course examines the history of mid-17th-century England alongside Milton’s important writings, with a focus on Paradise Lost. His sonnets, theatrical works, and essays and tracts are also considered.

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.

Secularization and Its Discontents: Goethe, Schiller, Heine
Literature 248 / German 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.

Urbanization in the 19th-Century Novel: Bright Lights, Big Cities
Literature 2483
cross-listed: eus
As the 19th-century metropolis became too vast for individual comprehension, it became the task of visionary writers to invent the modern city and to discover its narratives. This course examines literary constructions of the urban space, with an emphasis on Paris and London. Texts include Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend; Balzac’s Lost Illusions; selected poems by Baudelaire; Trollope’s The Way We Live Now; Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; and Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night.

19th-Century Self-Fashioning: Life Writing from Wordsworth to Joyce
Literature 2484
The class explores autobiographical narratives in various genres, beginning with Wordsworth’s Prelude and concluding with Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Also considered are the myths, tropes, and narrative strategies adopted by late Victorian writers to express the deepening alienation of literary artists from middle class culture. Texts include Mill’s Autobiography, Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Ruskin’s Praeterita, Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Gosse’s Father and Son, Wilde’s De Profundis, Darwin’s Autobiography, and Butler’s The Way of all Flesh.

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’sLancelot, 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
The first of three regularly offered but independent courses is an intensive study of Medieval and Renaissance English literature that emphasizes close readings in historical contexts, the development of a critical vocabulary and imagination, and the discovery of some of the classic works of English literature, from Beowulf and Chaucer to the major Elizabethans. Authors include the Beowulf poet, the Gawain poet, Chaucer, More, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, among others. Literature 251 explores poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism from the 17th and 18th centuries, including works by Milton, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, and Fielding. Literature 252 concentrates primarily on 19th- and 20th-century works by Austen, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Woolf.

Shakespeare
Literature 2501
A careful reading of nine masterpieces and a selection of sonnets. The plays represent the full range of Shakespeare’s genius in comedy, tragedy, romance, and royal history, and may include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Henry IV, Part 1.

The Further Adventures of the Body and Soul
Literature 2505
Students examine the literary, historical, and critical accounts of the tension between body and soul in “premodern” English literature, and take up the debate in its modern instantiations. Topics covered: the relationship between the spiritual and physical, gender performativity and cross-dressing, racial-religious identity, and the idea of the hero. Texts: the 14th-century Debate of the Body and Soul and works by Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Swift.

Barbarians at the Gate: Degeneration and the Culture Wars of the Fin de Siecle
Literature 2507
This course tracks the idea of degeneration—the nightmare offspring of Darwinian progress—from the 1857 prosecution of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil to the trials of Oscar Wilde (for gross indecency) and Alfred Dreyfus (for treason) in the mid-1890s. Using Max Nordau’s Degeneration as a focal point, the class explores the prevalent late 19th-century identification of new literary forms with madness, criminality, and perversion. Readings include works by Ibsen, Stevenson, Nietzsche, Hardy, Wilde, Huysmans, and Wells, among others.

Poets Theater
Literature 2508
Following World War II, innovative American writers took a new interest in poetry as a performative art, turning to theater as a way to expand the formal and political concerns of poetry. This course examines the development of Poets Theater over the last 65 years as well as earlier experiments in nonconventional theater. Readings: Ben Jonson, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, and Leslie Scalapino.

The Victorians: British History and Literature, 1830–1901
Literature 255
cross-listed: victorian studies
Through interdisciplinary study of culture, politics, and society in Britain, this course considers the rise and fall of Victorian values, paying particular attention to nationalism, imperialism, and domestic ideology. Consulting a variety of texts—novels, plays, essays, music, poetry, and historical works—students examine changing (and often conflicting) conceptions of crime, sexuality, race, class, the position of women, and the crisis of faith in 19th-century Great Britain.

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 examines works by 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. Literature 260 looks at American literature in the wake of World War II and 9/11. Authors include Mailer, Baldwin, Williams, Ginsberg, Updike, Roth, Carver, and Cisneros.

Scholasticism versus Humanism
Literature 2603
cross-listed: human rights, medieval studies, theology
Throughout the Middle Ages, intellectual life was dominated by scholastics who sought to integrate reason and faith, logic and revelation. During the Renaissance, intellectual discourse was taken over by humanists, who stressed empiricism over abstraction. With experience now privileged over logic, the subjective perception expressed in literature became prized over the impersonal cosmos of philosophy. This seminar explores the tension between scholastic and humanist thought against the backdrop of the rise of the university, the discovery of the New World, and the Protestant Reformation.

Twentieth-Century American Literature and the Visual Arts
Literature 2606
cross-listed: american studies
The class investigates the relationship between the visual arts and literature, with an emphasis on poetry. Students read art criticism and examine overlapping developments in literature and the arts. Some attention is paid to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Authors studied include Stein, Pound, Williams, Duchamp, Stieglitz, Loy, O’Hara, Ashbery, Brainard, Creeley, Coolidge, and Howe, among others.

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.

Women Writing the Caribbean
Literature 2670
cross-listed: africana studies, gss
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes creolization as “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). Works by Gellhorn, Rhys, Allfrey, Kincaid, Cliff, and Danticat are also studied.

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.

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.

The Holocaust and Literature
Literature 276
cross-listed: human rights, jewish studies
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—for example, the trivialization of tragedy in the mass media. Authors studied include Kafka, Levi, Borowski, Sebald, Tiˇsma, Kis, Singer, and Kertész.

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.

The Nobel Slavs
Literature 2801
cross-listed: res
This course examines the works of the Nobel Prize laureates from Russia and Eastern Europe. Authors studied include Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Jaroslav Seifert, and Ivo Andric. Significant attention is paid to the political and social impact of the Nobel Prize, particularly in the cases of Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn. In English.

Dickens Reconsidered
Literature 284
Charles Dickens crafted a public persona—as the embodiment of manly virtue, pillar of family values, genial creator of Scrooge and Little Nell—that mirrored the self-flattering myths of the Victorian middle classes. The real Dickens, obsessed with class distinctions, criminality, and sexual predation, more authentically embodied the realities of his age. Through close readings of Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations, the class explores the complex psyche of the author and his epoch.

Modern Drama in Translation: Brecht in the Global South
Literature 288
cross-listed: german studies
From the 1960s to the present, many African and Latin American dramatists have reworked Brecht’s plays and techniques to give theatrical shape to the realities of imperialism and decolonization, the emergence of new ruling classes, and the persistence of political oppression and economic exploitation. Readings include radically different adaptations of The Threepenny Opera, The Measures Taken, The Good Person of Setzuan, and Mother Courage. Students who read German are invited to enroll in a tutorial to study Brecht’s plays in the original.

Different Voices, Different Views from the Non-Western World
Literature 2882
Significant short works by some of the most distinguished contemporary writers of Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Korea,Vietnam, and the Middle East are examined for their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray the sociopolitical conditions, spiritual belief systems, and attitudes toward women in their respective countries. Authors include Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, Ousmane Sembène, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Mahmoud Darwish, Mahasveta Devi, and Tayeb Salih.

Reading for Writers
Literature 301
The course takes a close look at what makes one writer a “stylist” and another not. If “reading for the plot” is the default paradigm in fiction, what happens when we look behind the scenes of plot, to observe how cumulative linguistic, imagistic, and syntactic patterns coalesce so that sentence generates story? What is the relation of style to form and structure? Authors studied: Nabokov, Beckett, James, Tutuola, Yourcenar, Coetzee, Gass, Gaitskill, and Strout, among others.

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 On 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.

After Nature: Imagining the World without Us
Literature 3015
An examination of fictions that imagine what Alan Weisman calls “the world without us.” Readings trace the development of a distinctly modern strain of postapocalyptic literature from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) through Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) to Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2006). Also considered are works by Tarkovsky, Herzog, and Haneke, as well as readings in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

The Threshold of Modernity in European Jewish Literature
Literature 3017
cross-listed: eus, jewish studies
This course explores the meaning of modernity in the works of six of the greatest Jewish writers of the late 19th and 20th centuries: Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Franz Kafka, S. Ansky, Isaac Babel, and Bruno Schulz. Reading selections are examined against the background of Eastern European Jewish life at the end of the 19th century, a time of radical change due to the rise of fascism and communism, and the spread of avant-garde artistic theories.

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 of Pragmatism
Literature 3027
What is pragmatism, and how did it come to be central to American philosophical and poetic thought? Is it merely a matter of use, of what works, or is there more to it, as the relation between experience and experiment becomes one that tests both empiricism and transcendence, and complicates values of objectivity and subjectivity? Readings from Edwards, Emerson, James, Dewey, Cavell, Geertz, Stevens, Stein, Olson, Howe, and Ashbery.

Sentimental Politics of American Culture
Literature 3029
cross-listed: american studies
This course examines “sentimentalism” as a literary and 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, students explore the intersections of gender, race, class, urbanism, nationalism, and internationalism to explore the key concept underlying sentimentalism: sympathy. Authors studied may include Smith, Hume, Rowlandson, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Chesnutt, Crane, Agee, Wright, Morrison, Sontag, and Spielberg.

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. 

The Frankfurt School
Literature 3035
cross-listed: human rights
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. Readings include Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein. Limited to juniors and seniors.

Poetic Lineages
Literature 3036
This course traces various poetic lineages from the Romantic era to the present. Questions considered include: What is the relationship between poetic utterance and political power? What role do subjectivity and emotion play in poetic expression? How do the formal dimensions of language complicate its denotative function? Authors studied: Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emerson, Pound, Stevens, Bernstein, Prynne, and Hejinian.

A Thousand and One Nights in Comparative Perspective
Literature 3037
cross-listed: gss, mes
Stories within stories, unreliable narratives, fantastic voyages, bawdy escapades, and the ever-looming possibility that Shahrazad will meet her death with each new dawn—these hallmarks of A Thousand and One Nights have captivated readers for centuries. This course examines the structure and narrative techniques of the Nights; the history of this collection’s transmission, translation, and reception; and how it shaped, and was shaped, by the emergence of the novel form.

Sympathy and Its Discontents
Literature 3038
cross-listed: human rights
Advocates of liberal reform in the late 18th century claimed that sympathy was the primary spur to humanitarian action. Poems, novels, and essays detailing cruelty and misery encouraged readers to partake of the edifying effects of sympathy. But what if, as the Marquis de Sade suggested, we would rather increase than alleviate the pain of others to augment our own pleasure? Or what if, as Marx argued, humanitarianism merely served to disguise exploitation? Students read Smith, Goethe, de Sade, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Disraeli, Freud, Marx, Artaud, Celan, and Acker.

20th-Century Long Poems and the Invention of Narrative Structure
Literature 304
This course examines the necessity of inventing structures of narrative form that would at once accommodate a new sense of the fractured nature of history, the need for clarity, and an increasingly vexed relation of the poet’s “I” to the linguistic event. The Early Moderns are considered (Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, H. D.), but the focus is on postwar writers, including Ginsberg, Olson, Oppen, Ashbery, Schuyler, Howe, Carson, Walcott, Scalapino, and Mullen.

Literary Method: Genealogy and the Unsayable
Literature 3071
cross-listed: philosophy
A seminar in criticism intended for moderated literature majors. The class explores two ideas that have become increasingly important in thinking about texts: genealogy, a historical concept, and unsayability (what language does not and cannot say), a philosophical one. Readings include Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and selected essays; Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method; and James’s The Turn of the Screw.

Writing the Modern City
Literature 3072
This course centers on aspects of contemporary urban reportage, through a close reading of five recent works of creative nonfiction: Haruki Murakami’s Underground, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, Ivan Vladisavic’s Portrait with Keys, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s Harlem is Nowhere. Topics include alienation, crowds, nostalgia, infrastructure, the role of the observer, and literary technique.

Afro-Futurism(s): Technologies of Literature and Culture in the Black Diaspora
Literature 3081
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
This course examines how black diasporic communities have used science fiction, cosmology, fantasy, and utopianism to explore the intersections between race and technology, to redefine knowledge and subjectivity, and to imagine alternative political spaces. The syllabus draws on the work of a variety of writers, artists, and musicians, including Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Renee Cox, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sun Ra, Paul D. Miller, Rammellzee, Parliament, and Anthony Joseph.

Black Mountain College and the Invention of Contemporary American Art and Poetry
Literature 3090
cross-listed: art history
North Carolina’s Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 on John Dewey’s notion of “progressive” education, where the relationship between thinking and doing, idea and practice, was understood as a seamless continuum, and the arts as central to democratic ideals. A partial list of faculty includes Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Creeley. The class examines the premise of this utopian experiment and the historical platform that allowed radical modernist idioms to flourish.

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.

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.

Children’s Fantasy Literature in Cultural Conversation
Literature 3123
cross-listed: studio arts, theater
An intensive study of 20th-century children’s fantasy literature and the literary and cultural traditions to which they speak. The focus is on how cultural change and ideas of the child influence the manipulation of canonical source material to produce new meanings in works by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, Tamora Pierce, and Stephenie Meyer.

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.

Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo
Literature 3134
Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are two of the most important practitioners of American literary postmodernism. But what is postmodernism? How do these writers defy or push the limits of this frame? Related subjects considered include consumerism, paranoia, violence, technology, mass media, and the construction of history. Texts: Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon; and DeLillo’s White Noise, Mao II, Underworld, and Falling Man.

Russian Literary Criticism: From Belinsky to Bakhtin and Beyond
Literature 3136
This course considers various trends and theories in Russian literary criticism from the early 19th century to the present. Students examine the key methodological and theoretical concepts of the romantic, realistic, formalist, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches to literature developed by such critics and scholars as Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Iurii Tynianov (the Russian formalists), Iurii Lotman (the Tartu school), Mikhail Bakhtin, and contemporary Russian literary scholars. Conducted in English.

Women on the Edge
Literature 3143
A study of numerous experimental women authors and their predecessors, including Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Nathalie Sarraute, Clarice Lispector, Elfriede Jelinek, Marguerite Young, Kathy Acker, Jaimy Gordon, Yoko Tawada, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Patricia Eakins, Fiona Maazel, and others. Critical essays supplement the fiction.

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 studied include Pound, Stevens, Oppen, Riding, Ginsberg, Lowell, Olson, Scalapino, Watten, and Mackey, along with related visual artists.

T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens
Literature 3146
cross-listed: american studies
An in-depth study of two major American writers whose aesthetic visions represent divergent trajectories for modernist poetics. Attention is given to their relation to Romanticism, their understanding of lyric subjectivity, their juxtapositions of literature and religion, their philosophies of abstraction and the image, and their engagement with social and cultural crises.

Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Literature 315
cross-listed: french studies
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is about an elaborate internal journey, at the end of which the narrator discovers the unifying pattern of his life both as a writer and human being. Students read Swann’s Way and Time Regained in their entirety along with key excerpts from other volumes. Topics of discussion include the ways by which Proust’s masterpiece reflect the temporality and new rhythms of modernity, the narrative and stylistic function of homosexuality, and the massive social disruption brought about by the Great War.

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.

Evidence
Literature 3206
cross-listed: human rights
Evidence, etymologically, is what is exposed or obvious to the eye, and to the extent that something is evident it should help us make decisions, form conclusions, or reach judgments. In this seminar, students examine documentary materials alongside contemporary literary and political theory, in order to pose questions about decision making, bearing witness, and responsibility. Readings and screenings from Gilles Peress, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Luc Boltanski, and others.

Faulkner: Race, Text, and Southern History
Literature 3208
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
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.

Power, Violence, and Make Believe: Revealing Politics in Fiction
Literature 3215
cross-listed: human rights
Beginning with the Illiad, there has been an ongoing, centuries-long narrative investigation into the workings of power. Through close study of works by Stendhal, Trollope, Adams, James, Conrad, Chesterton, Malaparte, Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Penn Warren, Camus, Just, and DeLillo, among others, this seminar examines the development of the political novel.

Hobbyism and Professionalism
Literature 3218
This course investigates the hobbyistic impulse to write for private pleasure and considers the importance of unprofitable conscientiousness, idiosyncrasy, and self-regulation in the making of fiction and nonfiction. Writing directed by obsessions and internal priorities is contrasted with writing pressured, in part, by professional demands. Texts by Michel de Montaigne, Hubert Butler, David Foster Wallace, Charles Fort, Fernando Pessoa, Nicholson Baker, John Donne, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others.

The 20th-Century Latin American Novel
Literature 323 / Spanish 323
See Spanish 323 for a full course description.

Afterlives of Antiquity: Posthumanism and Its Classics
Literature 326 / Classics 326
cross-listed: human rights
If the classics have been used to define “humanity,” then how may “classics” be defined for a posthuman world? This seminar examines how processes of classification and canon formation may serve as material for cultural critique. Areas of interest include gender and ethnicity; anthropology and zoology; other(ed) organic biologies, including genetic, surgical, and extraterrestrial; and inorganic “biologies,” including artificial intelligence. Texts from Apuleius, Atwood, Dick, Le Guin, Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Wells, as well as critical readings and film screenings.

Culture and Breeding, and the Rise of the English Novel
Literature 3262
cross-listed: sts
What is culture? What does the notion of breeding have to do with culture, and how has the idea of culture involved protobiology, exploration, education, and even discrimination? The class considers these and other questions as it makes its way through some of the seminal literary and philosophical texts of the 18th century, including David Garrick’s version of The Winter’s Tale, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, a selection of writings by Rousseau, Tristram Shandy, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, and Emma.

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.

The American Comic Novel
Literature 3309
cross-listed: american studies
Does comedy reinforce social hierarchies by representing comic figures as social and moral inferiors, or is it intrinsically egalitarian in its attention to the shared physical body? Why has comedy been considered both conservative and an excellent medium for social protest? Is the feeling that animates comedy closer to disgust or the affirmation of life? This course explores the comic perspective in texts by Twain, Bellow, O’Connor, Heller, Barth, Toole, and Parker.

Louisiana
Literature 3312
cross-listed: american studies, french studies
What does Louisiana (and New Orleans, in particular) mean in the American imaginary? How did the various populations distinctive to the region—Creoles, Cajuns, and free people of color, among others—help define this meaning? How did the idea of Louisiana persist through a history of traumatic change, from the Civil War to Hurricane Katrina? Readings include the first French accounts of Louisiana and works by Cable, Chopin, Faulkner, Hearn, Hurston, Williams, Percy, and Toole.

The San Francisco Renaissance
Literature 3313
cross-listed: american studies
The end of World War II saw the migration of a diverse group of poets to the San Francisco area. Although their aesthetics and politics differed wildly, these writers were united by a resistance to the poetic mainstream and a desire to recreate a radical literary bohemia. This course charts the development of these writers and their communities. Readings include works by Kenneth Rexroth, Helen Adam, Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Diane DiPrima, Jack Kerouac, Joanne Kyger, and Philip Whalen.

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.

Freudian Psychoanalysis and Language
Literature 3324
The understanding that language inhabits the human subject is essential to Freud’s conception of the unconscious. It is Freud who taught us to read slips of the tongue, bungled actions, memory lapses, and dreams as a formation of the unconscious, a language in its own right. This course focuses on texts that demonstrate close attention to language, among them: The Interpretation of Dreams, Studies on Hysteria, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

National Myths, Transnational Forms: Samurai, Cowboy, Shaolin Monk
Literature 3325
cross-listed: asian studies
This course considers how certain stories and images are used to create national identity and at the same time appeal to a transnational or global audience.

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.

Faulkner and Morrison
Literature 3354
cross-listed: africana studies, american studies
In this course, students first read four Faulkner novels—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!—together with a selection of his short fiction, essays, interviews, and critical studies. Texts by Morrison include the novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, as well as Playing in the Dark, her influential monograph on American literature. Topics include race, violence, prophecy, motherhood, ancestry, ecstasy, privacy, the effort to speak the unspeakable, and the strange pleasures of words.

Modern and Contemporary Italian Women Writers
Literature 3365
cross-listed: italian studies
“The beast that speaks” is how Anna Maria Ortese ironically acknowledged her status as an Italian woman writer. From Sibilla Aleramo’s breakout feminist novel A Woman (1906) to the works of 1926 Nobel Laureate Grazia Deledda and controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci, this course investigates what it meant to be a woman writing in Italy during the last century. Theoretical works by Simone Weil, Simone De Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and others frame the discussion.

Poetry and Politics in Ireland
Literature 3401
cross-listed: ics
In their poetry, James Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, W. B. Yeats, and Austin Clarke recreated images of a Celtic past that served the cause of Irish nationalism. This course explores their poems, as well as militant songs and ballads from the late 18th century to the present, some anonymous and some by prominent patriots like Thomas Davis and Pádraic Pearse; problem poems by Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney; and diaries and memoirs illuminating specific moments in Irish history.

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.

Close-reading Evil
Literature 3413
cross-listed: human rights
A close look at the ways in which language has been used to portray and explore the mystery of evil. Texts range from the Book of Genesis and Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Denis Johnson, and Roberto Bolaño. Also studied are works of fiction and nonfiction written during and about Puritanism, the slaveholding South, colonial exploration, and the Hitler and Stalin eras, as well as news and magazine articles that address, directly or indirectly, the problem of evil.

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
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.

Plato’s Writing: Dialogue and Dialectic
Literature 362 / Classics 362
cross-listed: philosophy
Interpreters of Plato have often asked why he wrote in dialogue form, and the answers ­proposed have frequently appealed to Plato’s conception of dialectic, although the meaning of that term in his texts is itself a matter of debate. This course examines Plato’s writings from both literary and philosophical perspectives. Readings include Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, and Sophist. Primary texts are complemented by secondary scholarship that illustrates the range of modern approaches to Plato. All readings in English.

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 studies, 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.

Reading Arab Women Writers in Translation
Literature 3671
cross-listed: gss, mes
This course considers the figure of the Arab woman, both as author and literary character, in late 20th-century fiction and nonfiction from the Arab world. By investigating the politics of translation, the economics of publishing, and international feminist debates, the class explores the limits and possibilities for reading Arab women writers. Authors studied: Leila Ahmed, Nawal al-Saadawi, Hanan al-Shaykh, Assia Djebar, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Mervat Hatem, Marnia Lazreg, Miriam Cooke, Evelyne Accad, and Amal Amireh. Readings in English.

The Brontës
Literature 3691
cross-listed: gss, victorian studies
This seminar examines selected writings of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. Reception of the Brontës has varied enormously over the years, and the class discusses the impact of shifts in canon formation on the status of texts such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as well as the influence of theoretical, historical, and biographical accounts in shaping Brontëan myths of power and desire. Also considered are the ways that various cinematic adaptations inform our understanding of the texts.

Jane Austen
Literature 374
cross-listed: gss
A seminar devoted to the close study of Austen’s major novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Upper College standing is assumed; some familiarity with literary history and theory is desired.

Virginia Woolf
Literature 3741
cross-listed: gss
What makes Woolf a modernist? Why did Woolf’s novels and essays become canonical texts of late 20th-century feminism? 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. The second, following the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was the introduction of feminist literary criticism.

Gertrude Stein 
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.

Prose Poetries / Poetic Proses
Literature 3743
The history of literary forms from ancient times on is full of hybrid or “blurred” genres. This practice-based seminar looks at generic hybridities from pre-Socratic prose poems and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Anne Carson’s experiments (as translator and prose poet) with classical literatures. Also addressed are the influences of Wittgenstein and Stein on the prose poetics of contemporary poets like Waldrop and Scalapino. Students experiment with the forms encountered in the readings.

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.

Truth, Beauty, and the Market: Explorations in Literary Value
Literature 381
How is literature at once a product beholden to a specific time and place (to a “market”), and a work of art? Students explore the ways that we evaluate, judge, and consume literary works, and consider how the term “literary value” draws on developments in aesthetics, philosophy, law, economics, and sociology. Texts include writings by Hume on taste; Smith, Marx, and Simmel on value; Wordsworth and Verga on the emergence of capitalism; Zola, Manzoni, and Turgenev on class struggle; and contemporary critics such as Barthes, Foucault, and Habermas.

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
This course explores Irish experimental writing, including Joyce’s Ulysses and several Beckett stories and play.

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.

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. Readings include 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 celebrated writers as Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Nuruddin Farah. 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.

Postfantasy, Fabulism, and the New Gothic
Literature 431
Early gothicists framed their tales within metaphoric scapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, with protagonists who tested the edges of propriety and sanity. Postmodern masters such as Angela Carter, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes, while embracing a similarly dark vision, have reinvented tropes, settings, and narrative arcs. Postfantasy (or New Wave Fabulism) has taken the fantasy/horror genre in a similar revolutionary direction. Readings: Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, Jonathan Lethem, Valerie Martin, Karen Russell, John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, and Peter Straub.