CRN	94184	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT / RUS 3021
Title	An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 101

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov began writing simply to earn much needed money while studying to become a doctor at Moscow University. His connection to the medical profession, and the natural sciences, is not mere biographical fact. As Chekhov himself later admitted, "there is no doubt that my study of medicine strongly affected my work in literature." Moreover, he claimed that "the writer must be as objective as the chemist." This course will give students the opportunity to analyse how Dr. Chekhov's "general theory of objectivity" impacted his writing and how his "treatment" of human nature and social issues, of love and family, all the big and “little things in life,” has brought an entirely new dimension to Russian literature and culture. Readings include Chekhov's prose, plays, and letters. Also, attention will be given to contemporary interpretations of his work, new biographical research, and productions of his plays on stage and screen. Conducted in English.
 

CRN	94153	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 309
Title	Modern American Poets I
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 309

The first American modernists (Pound, Eliot, and H.D.) were driven by cultural anxiety—the longing for a tradition they didn't have—to invent a new kind of poetry. Others went in different directions: Gertrude Stein, by radically severing her language from syntactical and narrative meaning; Wallace Stevens, by writing poems of linguistic event and philosophical meditation; Marianne Moore, by depersonalizing the lyric subject in syllabic prose poems. Last but not least, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams—one a traditionalist, the other a modernist—found new ways of speaking in a "home-made" American voice. In this course, our main concern will be to identify what is distinctive about each of these poets, taking into account some of the traditions from which their work derives (English romanticism, French symbolism, Japanese haiku, etc.) while also acknowledging the lasting influence of Emerson's call for intellectual independence in American letters. Some attention will also be given to lesser voices such as Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, E.E. Cummings. 
 

CRN	94432	Distribution	A/B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 311
Title	Anglo-American Modernist Fiction: Form, History and Gender
Professor	Deirdre d'Albertis
Schedule	Th 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Commenting on the literature of her day, Gertrude Stein remarked "To the Twentieth Century, events are not important. You must know that. Events are not exciting. Events have lost their interest for people." In Stein's writing, and in the writing of her contemporaries, external events have surrendered to the imperious flow of inner life; the search for a way of capturing waywardness, urgency and irreducibility of subjective experience was producing radical experiments in narrative form. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss." This course sets out to examine Anglo-American modernist narrative as it was fashioned by writers who fractured realist conventions of narration and championed formal innovation in the representation of human consciousness. We will investigate the ways in which the modernist project both did and did not encompass an awareness of history, paying close attention to gender in particular and to revisions of what Wallace Stevens referred to as "the sexual myth." Works under consideration will include James's The Ambassadors, Ford's The Good Soldier, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Forster's Howard's End, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf's The Waves, selected short stories by Mansfield, Lawrence's Women in Love, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Barnes's Nightwood and Stein's Three Lives. Upper College standing assumed.
 

CRN	94130	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 3110
Title	James Joyce's Ulysses
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
Schedule	Wed 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies

Participants in this seminar pool their ideas about text and context. Recent Joyce criticism will be emphasized. Prior knowledge of Joyce and his early writings, notably Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is required.

CRN	94180	Distribution	B/D / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT / RUS 312
Title	Nabokov: Puzzle, Pattern, Game
Professor	Jennifer Day
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 309

As poet, master fiction writer, translator, chess enthusiast, and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov made it his life’s work to cultivate a creative understanding able to recognize hidden patterns and sleights-of-hand, and to play along in his own art. In this course, structured as a seminar, we will approach our selection of Nabokov’s works as “players” and treasure-seekers, training our senses to discern what has been so carefully and lovingly hidden. As we search, we will consider such major interpretive strategies as: life as design and variants on (auto)biography; memory and its role in art; varieties of translation; aesthetic and ethical implications of patterns and their manipulation; and the usefulness of categories such as modern and postmodern in reading Nabokov. Significant attention will be given to the Russian cultural and literary context that underlies Nabokov’s sense of design in both his life and art. Students will read, in addition to poems, short stories, and critical articles, The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and Pale Fire, as well as Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. Conducted in English.

CRN	94158	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 3191
Title	Contemporary Masters: Terror and Beauty
Professor	Norman Manea
Schedule	Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 107

Cross-listed: Human Rights

In the series "Contemporary Masters," Bard's students are offered, in the fall 2004, the opportunity to meet two extraordinary writers of world literature: Orhan Pamuk and Ismail Kadare. They come from a troubled region of South-Eastern Europe, where Christianity, Islam and Communism have often clashed in bloody conflicts and their body of work, reflecting the mixed culture and the tense past and present of their countries, is of exceptional quality. John Updike put Pamuk's hypnotic prose set in the splendor and religious intrigue of Istanbul in the literary vicinity of Proust and Mann, Calvino and Borges and concluded that his eminence "looms singularly." Ismail Kadare, a well-known candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature is considered "one of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language" (Wall Street Journal). Discussing the writing of these brilliant authors, the important social-political issues with which they engage and their impact in the daily reality of the world today is a special chance and challenge for our entire academic community.

CRN	94185	Distribution	B/D / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	SPAN / LIT 323
Title	Twentieth Century Latin-American Novel
Professor	Melanie Nicholson
Schedule	Tu 1:30 pm – 4:10 pm OLIN 205

With the publication of works such as Julio Cortázar's Rayuela [Hopscotch, 1963] and Gabriel García Márquez´s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967], the Latin American novel achieved an international reputation and readership. This course begins by analyzing several novels of the "Boom" period to determine the reasons behind their critical acclaim and popular appeal. In particular, the phenomenon of magical realism is examined as a key element in the "globalization" of Latin American prose. We will also read novels from the "post-Boom," examining the relationship of these works to theoretical articulations of postmodernism and feminism. Authors may include Allende, Arenas, Asturias, Carpentier, Cortázar, Ferré, Fuentes, García Márquez, Peri Rossi, Puig, Skármeta, and Valenzuela. Conducted in English, with concurrent reading tutorial in Spanish.

CRN	94467	Distribution	B/C / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 328
Title	Ideology and Politics in Modern Literature
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
Schedule	Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 305

Cross-listed: Human Rights
We examine how political issues and beliefs, be they of the left, right, or center, are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Neruda, and others are analyzed for their ideological content, depth of conviction, method of presentation, and the artistry with which these writers sythesize politics and literature into a permanent aesthetic experience. We also try to determine what constitutes the borderline between art and propaganda and address the question of whether it is possible to genuinely enjoy a work of literature whose political thrust and orientation is at odds with our own convictions. The discussions are supplemented by examples drawn from other art forms such as music, painting, and film.

CRN	94310	Distribution	A/B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 333
Title	Innovative 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, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and others. One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

CRN	94144	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 3351
Title	The Poetics of Modernity
Professor	Ann Lauterbach
Schedule	Th 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 307

As modernity became conscious of itself, writers and other artists took up the challenge of describing and defending new forms. Charles Baudelaire, one of the first writers to consider the construction of modern life, began an essay, “A literature of decadence!--- empty words we often hear fall with a pompous yawn from the lips of sphinxes without a riddle that guard the holy portals of classical aesthetics.” This course will look at some of the writings that characterized the “new” position of artists, writers, and poets, in relation to the concept of “the modern”. Readings will include: Albert Camus “Surrealism and Revolution”; Evgeni Zamyatin “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy”; J-P Sartre “Baudelaire”; Kasimir Malevich “Suprematist Manifesto”; T.S. Eliot ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet”; Gertrude Stein: “Composition as Explanation” “Portraits and Repetition”; Ezra Pound “ABC of Reading”; Wallace Stevens “Poetry and Painting” “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”, William Carlos Williams “In the American Grain.”, “Spring and All”. We will consider how these various figures thought about the significance of art forms in relation to world event and locale, and how such formal ideas as abstraction, fragmentation and estrangement contributed to the work of modernism. Weekly written response papers, and one term project.

CRN	94304	Distribution	B / * (Lit in English)
Course No.	LIT 372
Title	Charles Dickens
Professor	Mark Lambert
Schedule	Mon 10:30 am – 12:50 pm OLIN 308

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

A study of change, of growth, and especially of continuity in the works of a master novelist. Recurring patterns of action, setting, characterization, and language in six books (Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend) are considered from a variety of perspectives: psychological, biographical, historical, formalist.

CRN	94188	Distribution	B / * Humanities
Course No.	LIT 390
Title	Contemporary Critical Theory
Professor	Nancy Leonard
Schedule	Wed 1:30 pm - 3:50 pm OLIN 308

Cross listed: Integrated Arts, Philosophy and the Arts

During the last century major changes in the ways works of art and culture were conceived took place under the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism. This course engages key texts in this transformation of our knowledge of language and representation, texts either in vigorous dialogue with the current moment or contemporary texts of poststructuralism. Reading full texts by major theorists and emphasizing student writing and exchange, the seminar will introduce students to semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian history, feminist and postcolonial theory, rhetorical and ideological critique, and postmodernism. Students will learn key terms and concerns, analyze arguments, and create convincing responses. Theorists to be read include Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Butler, Kristeva, Williams, Deleuze, Spivak, Zizek, Baudrillard and Lyotard. Students should contact Prof. Leonard for an interview prior to registration.