Course	LIT 3033 Toward (A) Moral Fiction
Professor	Mary Caponegro
CRN	90574
Schedule	Tu 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Human Rights

The texts in this course each grapple with ethical issues through fictive means. In navigating them, we will try to assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas—or eschew morality altogether. We will also attend to craft, investigating how these authors’ concerns are furthered by formal considerations. Students will read one novel per week, and write several short papers. The option of a final creative project will allow students to find their own fictive path to a social, ethical, or political issue. Readings will be chosen from among the following mostly contemporary novels, with a few read in translation: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Edie Medav’s Crawl Space, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times or Lust, Russel Banks’s Continental Drift, Norman Rush’s Mating, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Tournier’s The Ogre, A.M. Holmes’s The End of Alice, Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, Will Heinrich’s The King’s Evil, Sebald’s The Emigrants, Nicolson Baker’s Checkpoint. (Permission of instructor required).

Course	LIT 3114 William Blake & His World
Professor	Joel Kovel
CRN	90003
Schedule	Wed 9:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 309
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the most remarkable artists in the Western tradition. Exquisite lyricist, composer of fantastically difficult philosophical poems, recoverer of the tradition of illuminated manuscript, superb engraver, visionary painter, technical innovator, political radical, subject of hallucinatory-mystical experiences, and utter commercial failure, Blake continues to astound. In this course, we will consider the life and work as a whole, as they were played out in relation to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of capitalism. Blake will be regarded as progenitor of a coherent and transformative world-view whose implications remain as fresh as they were two centuries ago. Prerequisite: At least one upper college literature course, or consultation with the professor.

Course	LIT 3120 The Literature of Private Life
Professor	Marina van Zuylen
CRN	90208
Schedule	Th 4:00 -6:20 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: French Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights

The representation of private life in the nineteenth-century French novel coincided with the advent of Realism and culminated in Naturalism. Novelists not only started to describe the institutions that shaped private life (i.e., marriage, education, religion), but dwelled also on the discrete dramas occurring backstage--the plight of the child (Sand, Francois le champi), the torments of family life (Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet), the ambiguities of marriage (Madame Bovary), the despair of domesticity (Maupassant's A Woman's Life), the nature of obsession (Zola, Thérèse Raquin), and the thematization of decadence (Huysmans, A Rebours ). Using as a backdrop influential writings on everyday life (Debord, de Certeau, Vaneigem, Goffman, Lefebvre), this class will examine topics previously considered too private, too personal to be viewed as literature. Students will also uncover the techniques that helped dramatize these highly subjective conflicts (interior monologue, free indirect discourse, early examples of flow of consciousness). Issues of gender, sexuality, and the role of women in defining domesticity will be central. In order to situate these texts within a tradition that rethinks the self, the class will start out discussing texts by Locke, Descartes, Kant, Shaftesbury, Marx, Hegel, and Foucault. Students will also read excerpts from the recent anthology History of Private Life, an invaluable research tool to examine the connection between literature, philosophy, social history, and anthropology. Taught in English. Students with knowledge of French will read the texts in the original language.

Course	LIT 3191 Contemporary Masters
Professor	Norman Manea
CRN	90187
Schedule	Tu 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

In the series CONTEMPORARY MASTERS, Bard's students are offered, in the fall of 2006, the opportunity to meet two masters of contemporary literature of Spanish language: Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the greatest Latin-American writers of today and Antonio Muñoz Molina, one of the foremost writers of Spain. Known as ‘a modern-day Renaissance man’ (politician, art-film-literature critic, playwright) Mario Vargas Llosa is, above all, a great novelist. His extremely rich and diverse work is acute and subtle, forceful, engaged and engaging when he writes about a family scandalous affair or a dictator, a war or a landscape or political manipulations, about love or crime, about violence, betrayal or melancholy. Antonio Muñoz Molina's prose is preoccupied with uncertain identities, estrangement and migration in modern time, solitude and solidarity under tense social and political conditions. Both writers will debate with the class the relationship between art and cataclysmic history, literature's capacity to restore moral value, boundaries of art incorporating unprecedented cruelty and despair, literature of extreme situations.

Course	LIT 3208 Faulkner: Race, Text and Southern History
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	90182
Schedule	Tu 9:30 - 11:50 am PRE 128
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: American Studies, Africana Studies, SRE

One of America’s greatest novelists, William Faulkner was deeply rooted in the American South. Unlike other writers of his generation who viewed America from distant shores, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region. From this intensely intimate vantage point, he was able to portray the south and all of its glory and shame. Within Faulkner’s narratives slavery and its aftermath remain the disaster at the heart of American History. In this course we will read Faulkner’s major novels, poetry, short stories as well as film scripts. We will also read biographical material and examine the breath of current Faulkner literary criticism.

Course	CLAS 324 Odysseys from Homer to Joyce
Professor	Daniel Mendelsohn
CRN	90454
Schedule	Fri 10:30 – 12:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

This course seeks to explore the nature and cultural uses of the figure of the wandering hero, from its first major treatment in Homer’s Odyssey to its adaptation in the 20^th-century by both Nikos Kazantzakis (The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel) and James Joyce (Ulysses). Particular attention will be paid not only to the moral ambiguities that seem to inhere in the West’s representation of this prototypical wanderer (e.g., the destructive effect of cultural exploration, the moral compromises necessary to being the “trickster”), but also to the aesthetic and generic usefulness of representing such a figure. (What does Odysseus and his subsequent incarnations “do” for epic, for drama, for the novel? How does the wanderer extend the boundaries of those genres?) Readings will include: Homer, The Odyssey; Vergil, Aeneid; Sophocles Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripides Hecuba; Dante, Inferno; Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Fenelon, Télémaque; selections from the poetry of Tennyson, Cavafy, Louise Gluck, and others; Joyce, Ulysses; Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel; and Walcott, Omeros. There will also be readings for each session in the secondary literature (e. g., E. Auerbach, “The Scar of Odysseus,”; W. B. Stanford, The Odysseus Theme; H. Bloom, Odysseus/Ulysses, etc.)

Course	RUS / LIT 330 Dramatic Difference: Russia and Its Theater
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	90212
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 - 12:50 pm OLINLC 210
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, Culture

This course will examine the evolution of Russian dramaturgy in connection with parallel developments in both literature and theater. It will offer the students an opportunity to explore various aspects of Russian culture by discussing the specifics of Russian drama. Special attention with be given to issues of genre and style, tradition and innovation, dramatic criticism and theory. Readings include Fonvizin, Griboedov, Gogol, Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, Erdman, Petrushevskaia and others playwrights, as well as theoretical texts by Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Mikhail Chekhov. Also, the students will have a chance to attend a performance of a Russian play in New York. No knowledge of Russian is required. Conducted in English. .

Course	LIT 3308 Reading and Writing the Hudson: Writing the Essay of Place
Professor	Susan Rogers
CRN	90184
Schedule	Tu 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 107
Distribution	OLD: F	NEW: Practicing Art

In what ways does place influence who you are, what you write and how you write about it? What impact has the Hudson had on you? This course will explore these and other questions through reading about the Hudson and writing essays of place, which take a landscape and use it as the ‘main character.’ Whether actively engaged in the landscape, or simply observing, essays of place can alter how we read or see a landscape. In this workshop class, students will make the Hudson River and the Hudson Valley the focus of creative essays that use factual information and strong sensory detail to develop a personal story. To develop a rich understanding of this region, students will read a range of works’from history to natural history, literature to environmental policy. Each student will be required to undertake research on their own into some aspect of the river from the brick or whaling industry to gardens or villas of the valley. This research, combined with personal experience of the valley, will be used to develop extended creative nonfiction essays. Texts will include: Robert Boyle, The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History; Tom Lewis, The Hudson; The Hudson: An Illustrated Guide to the Living River by Stanne, Panetta and Forist. We will also read essays from a range of writers including Joseph Mitchell and John Burroughs, and various works of fiction from Cooper, Irving and Wharton. This course is open to all students interested in creative nonfiction writing from a researched, inter-disciplinary perspective.

Course	LIT 333 New Directions in Contemporary Fiction
Professor	Bradford Morrow
CRN	90139
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 205
Distribution	OLD: A/B	NEW: Literature in English

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.

Course	LIT 3363 Biography and Autobiography
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	90237
Schedule	Tu 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 306
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Under what genre to classify these, and the criteria for it, is the subject of our initial inquiry, our readings and discussions. In addition to pertinent excerpts from critical studies such as James Lowry Clifford’s Biography as an Art, André Maurois’ Aspects of Biography, Georges Gusdorf’s Conditions and Limits of Autobiography, Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing, we read excerpts from Ernest Renan’s The Life of Jesus, Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci, Anaïs Nin’s Diaries, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Jean Cocteau’s Opium, Bernano’s The Diary of a Cure, Diane Wood Middlebrooks’s, Anne Sexton: A Biography. Students will then be asked, to write each week a chapter of an autobiography and relate to the class problems they encountered like memory and choice, spontaneity and distantiation, the postmodern skepticism about self and identity. Those who have opted for a biography should in addition to their weekly writing, report on the methodology they are using and the reasons for having chosen their particular subject.

Course	LIT / ITAL 340 European Literature and the Making of Italy
Professor	Joseph Luzzi
CRN	90216
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Literature in English

It is no stretch to say that Italy owes its existence - both as an actual nation and ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s term - to the enormous impact of its poets and writers on the drive for political unification that finally occurred in 1861, after centuries of fragmentation stretching back to the Caesars. As part of our look at the literary construction of Italy as an ‘idea’ during the Risorgimento (unification movement), this course will address such themes as the emergence of Italy as the ‘world’s university’ and ‘mother of European art’ in Byron, de Staël, Goethe, and Wordsworth; the influence of Dante on Romantic autobiography; and the representation of the Italian body politic as a woman in Italy and abroad. We will study the works of the so-called tre corone (‘three crowns’) - Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Manzoni - the leading authors of Romantic Italy who remain to be discovered in much Anglo-American criticism, though their admirers included Goethe (Manzoni), Nietzsche (Leopardi), and some of the most influential writers of the 1800s. A focus of the course will be on Manzoni’s monumental novel, The Betrothed, which many believe is second in importance only to Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian literary history and comparable in scope and impact to such nineteenth-century historical novels as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Scott’s Ivanhoe. The course will provide an opportunity for both moderated literature students and others to study Manzoni’s fascinating novel and the myth of Italy from an international and modern perspective. Taught in English translation; option of work in Italian.

Course	LIT 3410 Hawthorne, Melville, and Literary Friendship
Professor	Geoffrey Sanborn
CRN	90168
Schedule	Wed Fr 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 104
Distribution	OLD: A/B	NEW:

During a mountain picnic in the summer of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville struck up a private conversation. That champagne-fueled talk issued into an intense, maddening, and relatively brief friendship, a friendship that was mediated by writing, that was given expression in writing, and that can only be approached by way of writing. What was it like? The aim of this course is to get as close as we can to answering that question - or, more precisely, to learn how to keep falling short of the answer. After acquainting ourselves with the shape of their careers before 1850, we will read everything they wrote between the summer of 1850 and the fall of 1852, the period of their intimacy. That will mean reading, in addition to The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, all of their letters, journals, and marginalia, plus a children’s book and a campaign biography. Early in the semester we will visit Melville’s house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Preference to moderated juniors and seniors.

Course	LIT 358 Exile and Estrangement in Modern Fiction
Professor	Norman Manea
CRN	90493
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

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. Preference given to students moderated in Language and Literature.

Course	CLAS / LIT 366 Unflinching Prose
Professor	William Mullen
CRN	90125
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 309
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, Culture

This course will explore qualities common to some of the greatest writers of non-fiction writers in a range of Western cultures: Thucydides in Greece, Tacitus in Rome, Machiavelli in Italy, Voltaire in France, Gibbon in England, the authors of The Federalist Papers in America (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), Nietzsche in Germany. All of these authors have high ideals and find humanity for the most part notably wanting in its abilities to attain them. They evince a candor and a courage we admire in the way they lay bare the crimes and follies of our species without lapsing into cynicism. Nietzsche, summing up this tradition, spoke of it as “The Great Style”. We will study, often in more than one translation, principal passages of each author, with an eye both to historical context and to the workings of the prose itself on the linguistic level. Though the entire course will be in English, preference will be given to students capable of reading one or more of these authors in the original Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German. You will write pastiches of each author as well as analytical essays about them, and towards the end of the course you will be asked to write some “unflinching prose” of your own.

Course	LIT CONF Literature / Writing Conference
Professor	Mona Simpson
CRN	90476
Schedule	To be arranged

0 credits Discussion of the problems and challenges of revision that might arise in completing one’s first major continuous work of fiction, whether it be a collection of stories, of short shorts, of connected tales, a novella or a novel. This will be a chance for seniors laboring on extensive fiction writing projects to meet each other, to discuss their work and even perhaps to form networks of readers for works-in-progress. Mona Simpson will lecture and lead the discussion.

Course	LIT CONF Master Class Workshop
Professor	Mona Simpson
CRN	90476
Schedule	To be arranged

0 credits A small seminar, run as a master class workshop, for students working with Mona Simpson on senior project. Students will share their work and offer critiques to each other.