CRN |
93364 |
Distribution |
B |
Course
No. |
LIT 3020 |
||
Title |
Poe |
||
Professor |
Geoffrey Sanborn |
||
Schedule |
Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN
305 |
Cross-listed: American Studies
In this course, we will read Edgar Allan Poe’s
entire output of tales and poems, along with many of his essays, reviews, and
letters. The emphasis will be 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 that love-objects
tend to “turn,” or go bad, like milk. Related topics: perversity, race, death,
mourning, evidence, gradation, angels, and the divine.
CRN |
93435 |
Distribution |
B/D |
Course
No. |
LIT 3030 |
||
Title |
French
Society |
||
Professor |
Justus Rosenberg |
||
Schedule |
Tu 10:30 am – 12:50 pm LC 206 |
Cross-listed: French Studies
The political, intellectual and spiritual values
associated for a long time with “La France” have undergone considerable changes
these past seventy years. The nature and depth of these changes are being
traced in this course through a close reading of French philosophers
(Finkielkraut, Sartre, Foucault), social scientists (Barthes, Lacan, Derrida,
Bourdieu), poets, novelists, playwrights (Michaux, Queneau, Le Clezio,
Mondiano, Ionesco, Quignard, Pennac, Agnant) who are thought to have brought
about new and different esthetic, social and ethical attitudes, by raising such
issues as immigration and identity, of what is French and who is French,
whether cultural knowledge defines one’s nationality, the role of women in
society and of the individual in the political process, the renewed appeal of
anarchism, the relationship between life, artistry and style. The literature is
supplemented by viewing paintings, documentary and feature films that
contributed in graphically portraying the new trends and developments.
CRN |
93005 |
Distribution |
B |
Course
No. |
LIT 308 |
||
Title |
Major
American Poets |
||
Professor |
Benjamin La Farge |
||
Schedule |
Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN
309 |
American poetry found its
own voice in the first half of the 19th century when Emerson challenged American “scholars” to free
themselves from tradition. Emerson
himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and Poe, were the first to
achieve international fame, but it was in Whitman’s poems that a distinctively
American voice was heard, a voice that was both oracular and plain-spoken. At the same time, the quirky, introspective
poems of Emily Dickinson, mostly unpublished during her lifetime, spoke in a
New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American. Then, thirty years after her death, the
powerful modern voices of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams,
Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, and Robinson Jeffers began to be heard. We will read poems and essays by each of
these, and we will also give equal time to Robert Frost, the great contrarian
poet who was dismissed by some as anti-modern but is now acknowledged by most
as one of the greatest.
CRN |
93293 |
Distribution |
B |
Course
No. |
LIT 3191 |
||
Title |
Contemporary
Masters: Cynthia Ozick and Edna O’Brien |
||
Professor |
Norman Manea |
||
Schedule |
Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN
308 |
In the series Contemporary
Masters Bard’s students are offered, in the fall 2003, the opportunity to
meet two of the most important contemporary writers in English: Edna O’Brien and Cynthia Ozick. Following
the previous guests included, since 1999, in this course (Philip Roth, Saul
Bellow, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi), Ms. O’Brien and Ms. Ozick bring to
Bard two extraordinary literary personalities and a body of work of exceptional
quality.
Edna O’Brien’s books deal with the family drama in
modern time (love, betrayal, abuse, incest, abortion, and murder). These powerful topics are scrutinized and
framed in profound, passionate and masterful prose, by an artist of highest
easthetical and ethical values. “Among
all the major fiction writers in English on both sides of the Atlantic, O’Brien
is the leading cardiologist of broken hearts” wrote The Washington Post. Cynthia
Ozick’s work focuses on the conflicts between faith and reality, individuality
and community, tradition and modernity, the “rights of history” and the “rights
of imagination.” Cynthia Ozick’s
acuteness and originality, her uncommon, brilliant wordsmith and her subtle
moral questioning have established her narrative as a “triumph for the
idiosyncrasy that animates all art.” Both writers will provide Bard students
the chance to debate essential cultural and social contemporary issues
(creativity, morality, religion, British-Irish and American-Jewish identity,
gender and politics, etc).
CRN |
93149 |
Distribution |
B/F |
Course
No. |
LIT 3202 / FILM 362 |
||
Title |
Electronic
Discourses: Theories and Practices of New Media |
||
Professor |
Jacqueline Goss / Thomas Keenan |
||
Schedule |
Tu Wed 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm HDR 106 |
This course will examine the electronic networks of
our contemporary digital culture, and its recent past, by exploring a variety
of information systems, virtual communities, and on-line art projects. These
various worlds, each distinct interactive models, will be examined critically
in readings from cultural theory, policy, history, and aesthetics. How have
virtual technologies transformed our experiences of language, reality, space,
time, publicity and privacy, memory, and knowledge? To answer these questions, we will produce a number of projects
and do extensive reading in new media history and theory, studying things like:
the World Wide Web, MOOs and MUDs, listservs, email and newsgroups, mobile
phones, PDAs, pagers, and the Global Positioning System, among others. Each
student will be expected to spend significant amounts of time on-line, to
tackle several technologies as they apply toactivities on the net and to design
and mount an on-line project. No
special expertise with computers is required, but all work for the seminar will
be produced using the digital media we study.
CRN |
93308 |
Distribution |
B/D |
Course
No. |
LIT 3203 |
||
Title |
Doctors
and Writers: Perceptions of Hysteria in 19th Century French
Literary and Medical Writings |
||
Professor |
Marina van Zuylen |
||
Schedule |
Th 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN
107 |
Cross-listed: French Studies, Human Rights
This
course will examine ways in which literary and medical texts represented
hysteria in the second half of nineteenth-century France. The class will read
closely from medical documents – Pinel, Janet, Charcot, Esquirol – and from
literary texts – Balzac’s Mémoires de
deux jeunes maries, Louise Colet’s Correspondence
with Flaubert, Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, and Zola’s Le Docteur Pascal.
The friction between literary and medical representations of hysteria brings to
the fore fundamental questions about nineteenth-century Realism. How can the
dream of mimetic omniscience, of objectivity (i.e., Flaubert) be reconciled
with the fluid, vaporous, and ever changing face of the so-called hysteric
subject? Could it not be argued that the very nature of literature, with its
silences and its dealings with the unsayable, cautions against any single
definition of a condition? Concurrent with these literary tensions, the texts
of the first aliénistes are also
fraught with “unscientific” ambiguities. It would seem that their desire to
control their patients with secure medical labels often went astray, leading
them into narratives they could no longer control. This course will explore the
unintentional slips within these texts, slips that demonstrate the remarkable
and unexpected degree in which the medical and literary are bridged. Taught in English with special research
projects for French speakers.
CRN |
93172 |
Distribution |
B/D |
Course
No. |
LIT 331 |
||
Title |
Translation
Workshop |
||
Professor |
Susan Bernofsky |
||
Schedule |
Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN
308 |
This course is devoted to translation not as a
utilitarian activity but as an art. We
will be discussing (and practicing) many aspects of translation as well as
studying and critiquing translations by others, from the staid to the
experimental. Students will work on
projects of their own devising, which will be workshopped and revised. Special guests to include William Weaver,
initiator of the Translation Workshop at Bard.
Prerequisites: Mastery of a foreign language at the
intermediate level or better, and a love of English. Candidates must submit
samples of their work (original writing is fine - but if submitting a
translation, please include the original!) with optional cover letter via
campus mail to Prof. Bernofsky by noon on Saturday, August 29th.
CRN |
93428 |
Distribution |
A/B |
Course
No. |
LIT 333 |
||
Title |
New
Directions: Contemporary Fiction |
||
Professor |
Bradford Morrow |
||
Schedule |
Mon 1:30 pm – 3:50 pm OLIN 201 |
The diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed
by innovative contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range
of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. In this course we
will closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last
quarter century in order to begin to define the state of the art for this
historical period. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of work by
some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we
will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Don DeLillo,
Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro,
William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, and others.
One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books
and read from recent work.
CRN |
93292 |
Distribution |
B/D |
Course
No. |
LIT 358 |
||
Title |
Exile
and Estrangement in Modern Fiction |
||
Professor |
Norman Manea |
||
Schedule |
Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN
304 |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights
Reading and discussion of selected fiction by such writers as Mann, Kafka, Nabokov, Camus, Singer, Kundera, Naipaul, etc. examining the work for its literary value and as a reflection of the issue of exile – estrangement as a fact of biography and a way of life. The complex topics of foreignness and identity, (ethnic, political, sexual) of rejection and loss, of estrangement and challenge, and also of protean mutability, are discussed in connection to relevant social-historical situations (war, expulsion, migration) and as major literary themes. Upper College Seminar. Preference given to students moderated in Language and Literature.
CRN |
93138 |
Distribution |
B |
Course
No. |
LIT 3591 |
||
Title |
Urban
Shakespeare |
||
Professor |
Nancy Leonard |
||
Schedule |
Mon 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN
310 |
Shakespeare writes of the jostling London of l600
where the doubling of population, the intrigues of court and civic officials,
the uncertainties of class, social and sexual arrangements, and the challenging
material realities of the city pressed young playwrights, young lawyers, and
young women, among others, into risks of reputation. Particularly dangerous was
the invention of a powerful, if fateful, domain of privacy in resistance to
urban reality. This seminar will read some plays by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries which address this urban world: by Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; The Merchant of Venice;
Measure for Measure; Troilus and Cressida; and Coriolanus; by Christopher Marlowe, Edward II; by Ben Jonson, Volpone;
by John Webster, The Duchess of
Malfi; by John Marston, The
Malcontent; and by John Ford, ‘Tis
Pity She’s a Whore. There will be some additional readings in criticism and
in social and theatrical history.
CRN |
93330 |
Distribution |
B |
Course
No. |
LIT 3692 |
||
Title |
The
Catastrophe of Knowledge: An Exploration of the Faust Legend |
||
Professor |
Mark Danner |
||
Schedule |
Mon 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN
107 |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights
To learn,
to acquire knowledge, our society treats as an unadulterated good, and
nowhere is this attitude more thoroughgoing and unquestioned than in the
university. Western culture has been less arrogant, recognizing clearly, since
at least the time of Genesis that the goods of knowledge come tightly tethered
to the risks. Eve's apple is only the first in a succession of symbols the
weight of which warns us that to learn is to court danger, that the enlightened
mind is vulnerable, threatened, naked before the retribution of an
unsentimental, wrathful world. This idea, in its modern form, is encapsulated
in the Faust legend. In this course we
will explore the roots of that legend and its modern elaboration. Readings will
include, among others, Gilgamesh, Genesis, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound,
Marlowe's Faustus, Goethe's Faust, Mann's Doktor Faustus and the operatic
treatments by Boito and Busoni.