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.