Course	LIT 2002 Americans Abroad
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	90181
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am PRE 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, SRE

Post World War I was an exciting time for American artists who chose to come of age and discover their own American-ness from other shores. We will read writers of the so-called ‘ Lost Generation’ including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in our reexamination of ‘The Lost Generation’ we will also include expatriate writers best known for their participation in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset. The African-American presence in Europe which included the iconic figure Josephine Baker as well as jazz great Louis Armstrong altered this picture in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. This course looks at a period in which American culture found roots abroad.

Course	CLAS / LIT 201 Survey of Linguistics
Professor	Benjamin Stevens
CRN	90191
Schedule	Tu Th 2:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Humanities

A survey of linguistics, the formal study of language. Our goals are (1) to learn how linguistics analyzes language into various parts; (2) to acquire methods and techniques appropriate to the study of those parts, their patterns, and their interconnections; and (3) to explore the discipline’s conceptual bases, its history, and some competing or alternative approaches to language study. Our ultimate and underlying questions are: “What is ‘language’?” and “Has ‘linguistics’ got it right?” Topics include: (1 and 2) phonetics and phonology (the study of sound-patterns in language), morphology (word-formation and grammaticalization), and syntax (the arrangement of elements into meaningful utterance); sociolinguistics (the covariation of language with social and cultural factors); and comparative and historical linguistics (linguistic patterns across space and time, including syntactic typology and language ‘death’). We also survey (3) key trends, moments, and thinkers in the history of linguistic thought, both Western and non-Western.

Prerequisite: completed or concurrent coursework in a foreign language, or consent of instructor.

Course	LIT 2019 Reading Poetic Texts
Professor	Jeffrey Katz
CRN	90185
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 -5:20 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

It has been said that the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure are like the reasons for anything else in that we can and should reason about them. The aim of this course is to develop close reading & reasoning skills; attention to the sound system of prosody; to grammar and rhetoric; to prominent uses of figurative language; & to the lyric speaker, all toward answering the following questions: *How do we make sense of a poem? *What is the poem designed to do? *What systems and characteristic features are put in place to get this work done? *How is the poem an object of thought, and how an instrument of thinking, and, more generally, ‘What is poetic knowledge?’ ‘What is the knowledge not obtainable by any other means which is poetical?’ ‘What do we call upon when we call upon poetry?’ Presentations and assignments will orient students toward making interpretations of poems based on analysis of the poetic line via detailed scansions and other appropriate notations; discussion of the relationship between meaning and metrical structure; analysis of line openings and endings; the work of metaphor and other figurative language. Readings will include a broad survey of short poems including work of: Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins, Pound, Auden, Oppen, Niedecker, Hejinian, Ashbery. Additional readings in rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics may also be included.

Course	LIT 2020 Literature, Language & Lies
Professor	Francine Prose
CRN	90183
Schedule	Fr 2:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 201
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Throughout history, written language has been used to create masterpieces and to pump out propaganda, to delight and delude, to reveal and obscure the truth. But unless we read closely--word by word, line by line, sentence by sentence--it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference. In this class, we will close-read the short stories of great writers (James and Joyce, Cheever and Chekov, Mansfield and O'Connor, Beckett and Bowles, etc.) as well as this week's issue of The New Yorker and today's copy of the New York Times as we look at the ways in which words are used to convey information and insight, to transmit truth and beauty, and to form and transform our vision of the world.

Course	LIT 2022 The Making of Modern Theatre
Professor	Florian Becker
CRN	90197
Schedule	Wed Fri 3:00 -4:20 pm OLINLC 120
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Theater

This introductory course traces the emergence of distinctively ‘modern’ forms of theatre in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe. We shall engage closely with a number of major dramatic texts, whose importance in this process is widely recognized. At the same time, we shall try to do justice to the fact that theatre is not itself a textual genre, but an embodied practice’something that is played out in ‘real time’ and in a concrete space. How do playwrights such as Wilde, Brecht or Beckett exploit this fundamental fact? To what problems or concerns do their formal strategies respond? Why do the performance practices of avantgarde movements such as Futurism or Dada seek to break down the boundaries between theatre and other art forms? We shall take up some theoretical readings to help us think about these questions in connection with the larger problem of characterizing social ‘modernity’ itself. Readings (in translation) will include plays by Büchner, Jarry, Strindberg, Pirandello, Handke and Müller. Conducted in English. Open to all interested students.

Course	LIT 2060 Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
Professor	Youssef Yacoubi
CRN	90438
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00 – 10:20 am OLIN 107
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Middle Eastern Studies

This course will survey the history and texts of diverse and polycentric literary and artistic traditions of the Middle East and North Africa during the last two centuries. Our exploration will include works of fiction, poetry, visual art, autobiography, memoir, film and historiography. It will review some of the major literary, cultural and at times philosophical currents that shaped the Modern Arab world. Our analysis and reading will be informed by the recent developments in cultural and critical theory. Major authors will include Naguib Mahfouz, Idris Yusuf, Mahmoud Darwish, Hanan Al-shaykh and Hoda Barakat. The aim of the course is twofold: to introduce students to the diversity of aesthetic responses in Arab literary and cultural practice, and to examine questions of nation and identity formation, religion, tradition, colonial, postcolonial history, and diaspora. The course is usually organized around four themes/ topics: historical and social background to Modern Arabic Literature; the interface between tradition and modernity;

representation of women and gender; the re-writing of political repressions.

Course	LIT 2152 Francophone African Literature
Professor	Emmanuel Dongala
CRN	90209
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLINLC 206
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

Even though African literature from francophone Africa is not yet a century old , it has already produced many important and enduring works. In this course, we will read and discuss some of the books which are now considered classics of that literature. The reading list will include among other, writers such as Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mariama Bâ. The course will be given in English and the books will be read in translation. However, those who want to take it as part of the French program will read the texts in the original French and will have special tutoring.

Course	LIT 2156 Romantic Literature in English
Professor	Cole Heinowitz
CRN	90172
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 305
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. The term traditionally used to categorize this literature, “romantic,” is interestingly problematic: throughout the course we will question the assumptions built into this term instead of assuming that we know what it means or taking for granted a series of supposed characteristics of “romantic” literature and art. We will also explore the extent to which key conflicts in British culture during the “romantic period,” including the founding of the United States, independence movements in the Americas, the development of free trade ideology, and the debates over slavery and colonialism, are still at issue today. The centerpiece of this course is the close reading of poetry. There will also be a strong emphasis on the historical and social contexts of the works we are reading, and on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether “romantic” writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include canonical and non-canonical authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare.

Course	LIT 2157 Enduring Short Stories and Novellas
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	90899
Schedule	Mon Wed 9:00- 1-:20 OLIN 305
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

An in-depth study of the difference between the short story, built on figurative techniques closely allied to those employed in poetry which allows the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning in the space of a few pages, and the novella that demands the economy and exactness of a short work while at the same time allowing a fuller concentration and development of both character and plot. We explore the range and scale of the artistic accomplishments of such masters in these genres as Voltaire, de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholem Aleichem, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, 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.

Course	LIT 2164 Spiritual Crises
Professor	Karen Sullivan
CRN	90032
Schedule	Tu Th 4:00 -5:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Theology

In this course, we will explore narratives of spiritual crisis in the Christian and, especially, Catholic traditions. What is the relationship between spiritual crisis and the development of the modern self? Why is it that, throughout much (though by no means all) of Western history, those people who have most explored the Other that God represents are also the people who have most explored the self? What role has ‘God’ played in the construction of the self as we know it? How do the authors of these narratives conceive of God, and what do they mean when they refer to ‘believing’ in him? Is it possible to find meaning in these narratives if one is not a Christian or even a religious believer, and, if so, what would that meaning be? What is left out of these narratives when one leaves out ‘God’? Authors to be read include St. Paul, Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John Donne, George Herbert, Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, Thérèse de Lisieux, Georges Bernanos, and Simone Weil.

Course	LIT 2165 Literary Theory
Professor	Thomas Keenan
CRN	90180
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

An intensive introduction to recent theories of literature and culture, against the background of questions about identity and difference in the Western tradition. What links the recurrent theoretical preoccupation with language to questions about the ethico-political stakes of literature? We will not try to "apply" this theoretical work in order to read literary texts, nor seek to read it "politically," but rather to ask why it tends to articulate the relation between literature and politics in terms of language. We will examine a range of answers to the questions of how meaning is produced or ascribed, why it happens, and who or what decides on it. We will also pay attention to emerging debates about democracy, publicity, justice, and transnational or global cultural exchanges. Readings from Saussure, Jakobson, Barthes, Austin, Derrida, de Man, Lacan, Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Haraway, Ronell, Spivak, Foucault, Zizek, Virilio, Benjamin, Heidegger, as well as Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.

Course	LIT 2182 Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Science
Professor	Elizabeth Frank
CRN	90177
Schedule	Wed 3:00 -4:20 pm OLIN 309 Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 307
Distribution	OLD: F	NEW: Practicing Arts

This is a course for both science and humanities students who share a fundamental belief in the importance of science literacy. To laypersons, contemporary science is often impenetrable. They need clear, informative, and engaging explanations of contemporary work in science, particularly as these affect ethical and political decisions at every level of society. Students in the class will write about science in a number of formats: for example, essays, editorials, feature articles and book reviews, all of varying length and complexity. We will try to solve the problems that must inevitably arise when the search for voice confronts subject matter that is hard to simplify or explain. Limited to 15 students who have each passed a lab and/or quantitative science course at Bard. (Applicants submit email indicating that they have passed a lab and/or quantitative science course.)

Course	LIT 223 Cultural Reportage
Professor	Peter Sourian
CRN	90056
Schedule	Tu 4:00 -6:20 pm PRE 101
Distribution	OLD: B/F	NEW: Practicing Arts

For the self motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. The course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, but not restricted to majors.

Course	LIT 2233 Philosophical Pedagogy from Plato to Humboldt
Professor	Robert Weston
CRN	90575
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 – 4:20 pm OLIN 204
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Humanities

This course is designed to offer students an in-depth historical survey of the development of pedagogical thought from antiquity through the late Enlightenment. Ever since Plato’s Republic, the problem of education has been at the center of a host of philosophical issues ranging from anthropological questions concerning the nature and purpose of human existence to political questions concerning the organization of society. Through a rigorous, critical engagement with the classic works of philosophical pedagogy, this course focuses on the following four questions: 1) What is the function of education in the development of the individual and what are the proper goals of the pedagogical process? 2) What are the most effective methods for attaining these goals? 3) What sort of knowledge is to be imparted by education and to whom? and 4) What is the function of education in the reproduction (or transformation) of existing social relations? Readings for the course will include works by Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, Herder, Kant, Pestalozzi and Humboldt.

Course	LIT 2401 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Professor	Mark Lambert
CRN	90171
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 308
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

The unities and contrasts, pleasure, and meanings of this rich collection. Study of Chaucer's language and some background readings (e.g. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), but primarily an examination of a great poem. No previous knowledge of Middle English required.

Course	LIT 2404 Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	90213
Schedule	Tu 7:00 -9:20 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian Studies

The modern world has been characterized in many ways, as a time of unimaginable freedom, as well as existential angst, exile, loss of the idea of home, loss of the idea of positive heroes; a triumphant embracing of the “new” and the future, as well as the troubling encounter with machines and the menace of totalitarianism. It was a time when barriers of all sorts began to crumble—barriers between past and present, foreground and background, high and low culture, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Artists and writers responded in many different ways across the world. The writers we will read in this class represent the fulcrum of creativity in America, Central or Eastern Europe and Russia. Each lived at a different axis of modernity—where East met West, where the Russian Revolution provided a vibrant but terrifying image of liberation, where modern technological innovation produced endless possibilities of satirization of both the old world and the new, where ethnic and genocidal violence was developing under the surface of this innovation into the foreseeable European Holocaust. These writers have something powerful and unique to say about the advent of the modern period in the fantastic parallel worlds they created where machines take on lives of their own, grotesque transformations violate the laws of science, and inversions of normality become the norm. Through their fantastic conceptions a vision of modernity emerges which questions the most basic presumptions of western civilization—in art, morality, politics, the psyche and social life—a vision for which the West still has no satisfying response. All readings are in English. We will read The Marvelous Land of Oz (L. Frank Baum), The Metamorphosis (Kafka), RUR (Capek), War with the Newts (Capek), Street of Crocodiles (Schulz), Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass (Schulz), Envy (Olesha) The Bedbug (Mayakovsky). There will be 4 short papers for the course & one final paper.

Course	LIT 246 African Women Writers
Professor	Chinua Achebe
CRN	90121
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, SRE

The dramatic emergence of modern African literature midway through the twentieth century was quickly amplified within a decade by the distinct voices of a remarkable band of women writers whose work is now established as a significant part of Africa’s revolutionary literature. The course will study novels and short stories by some of the leading practitioners from the 1960s to the present, in English originals or translations from French and Arabic. Among the writers to be considered are Flora Nwapa, Marianna Ba, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Alifa Rifaat, Bessie Head, and Ama Ata Aidoo.

Course	LIT 2501 Shakespeare
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	90051
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English / Rethinking Difference

An intensive exploration of a range of Shakespeare’s plays, which represent the human, continually surprise with every reading, and engage us seriously with the forms of experience Shakespeare did so much to shape: comedy, tragedy, and romance. This semester the plays will include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. We will sometimes watch a Shakespeare film or work with a play as performers, but primarily this is a literature course. Topics will include contemporary issues like race and ethnicity, gender, the body, and ethical conflicts between the excessively rigid and the all-too-relaxed. Plays will be often tied to their period and to new perceptions by scholars. Open to all.

Course	LIT 261 Growing Up Victorian
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	90417
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 - 2:50 pm OLIN 303
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

Victorian children come in a variety of forms: urchins, prigs, bullies, grinds. They are demonstration models in numerous educational and social projects intended to create a braver future. The 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.

Course	LIT 264 19th-Century Continental Novel
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	90189
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am PRE 128
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: French, German and Russian Studies

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with representative examples of novels by distinguished French, Russian, German and Central European authors. Their works are analyzed for style, themes, ideological commitment, and social and political setting. Taken together they should provide an accurate account of the major artistic, philosophical and intellectual trends and developments on the Continent during the 19th century. Readings include Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Balzac’s Cousine Bette, Hamsun’s Hunger, T. Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

Course	LIT 2703 An Exalted Plainness: The Art of Nonfiction Prose
Professor	Verlyn Klinkenborg
CRN	90186
Schedule	Th 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: F	NEW: Practicing Arts

It’s always tempting to pretend that nonfiction prose is simply the echo of today—a formalized version of the speaking voice. But it has deep antecedents in literary history, often more expansive in form, emotional content, and the power of the sentence itself than what we see today. This course cuts across generic boundaries and historical periods—from Elizabethan England forward and from the essay outward—in search of useful literary examples of nonfiction prose. Above all this is a practical seminar, intended to amplify and extend the imaginative tools and the grammar a student already possesses. Don’t fear the word “grammar!” It is just the name of the language we speak about sentences.

Course	LIT 272 The Irish Renaissance
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	90175
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 304
Distribution	OLD: B/C	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies

The Irish Renaissance of the first few decades of the twentieth century was the creation of those cultural leaders who founded the Abbey Theatre to nourish a specifically Irish (not British, not European) imagination. The revival exploited three sources: the mythical Ireland of Celtic legend where Cuchulain, Maeve, Finn, and Fergus waged epic battles over cows and birthrights with the aid and interference of magic; western Ireland, poetry and story; and a political history that is a persistent record of invasion, oppression, and faction, and of heroic gestures accompanied by a mood of tragic failure. The course begins with a brief history of Ireland, concentrating on three discrete moments: the end of the seventeenth century and the battles of Boyne and Aughrim, the abortive rising of 1798, and the 1890s spirit of nationalistic renewal. Then we consider the Abbey Theatre and its reconstruction of the legends of the past and the use of idioms and characters of the west of Ireland, chiefly in the drama of Yeats and Synge. We will look at the development of these themes in the literature associated with the troubles of 1916‑22 and in later writings, which continue or challenge the themes of the Renaissance, including works by Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Flann O'Brien, and Brendan Behan.