Course	LIT 301 Reading for Writers
Professor	Mary Caponegro
CRN	97282
Schedule	Th 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 307
Distribution	Literature in English

This course is designed to be a joyous, rigorous exploration of that component of fiction which distinguishes one author from another, and which is a more prominent feature of certain authors’ works than others. We will look closely at what constitutes style, and what makes one writer a stylist and another not. The aim is to help students focus on this feature of their own creative work, and numerous creative exercises will facilitate this goal. There will also be several critical papers involving stylistic analysis. Projects or presentations may also be part of the agenda.

Course	LIT 3102 African Short Stories
Professor	Chinua Achebe
CRN	97028
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

The course will introduce students to the African literary experience from a wide selection of short fiction written in the last fifty years by major practitioners of the genre. Works from North, West, Central, East and Southern Africa will be studied in the light of the diverse colonial experiences of the continent. If they were written originally in French, Arabic, or Portuguese, they will be studied in their English translations. Writers to be encountered will include Tayeb Salih (Sudan); Bessie Head (Botswana); Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe); Luis Bernado Honwana (Mozambique); among many others, either in individual-author collections or general anthologies.

Course	LIT 3241 Postmodern Narrative
Professor	Emily Barton
CRN	97526
Schedule	Wed Fri 3:00 – 4:20 pm PRE 128
Distribution	Literature in English

This course will look closely at eight novels that, in various ways, play with, undermine, frustrate, or redefine “traditional” expectations of narrative. Some of these texts are canonical examples of postmodern writing, while others are the work of young novelists writing today. The aim will be to examine these books as both intelligent readers and intelligent writers, asking in what ways they comment on the nature of the project of fiction and in what ways they further it. The syllabus will be supplement ed with occasional reading of short stories by authors such as John Barth and Amy Hempel.

Course	HR / LIT 325 Roguery, Debauchery and War: A Thieves’ Journey through the Picaresque
Professor	Mark Danner
CRN	97539
Schedule	Tues 9:30 – 11:50 am OLIN 102
Distribution	Literature in English

The novel is a motley form and in its modern incarnation was spawned in thievery and disrepute: rogues spinning tall tales of roguery; hapless, cunning heroes conniving their way through the most violent, war-torn landscapes as they contrive the most preposterous adventures. We will trace these tales - to which we have given the broad name picaresque - back to their start in the late sixteenth century on the Iberian peninsula, in the hands of the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes. We will follow their spread, in the first great popular publishing phenomenon, northward through Europe. Finally, we will have a look at the picaresque in its modern form, peculiarly adapted as it is to telling the fragmented story of the war-torn twentieth century. Readings will include works by Petronius, Cervantes, Quevedo, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, Celine, Grass, Bellow and Kosinski, among others.

Course	LIT / RUS 325 Body, Mind, and Spirit in Dostoevsky
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	97480
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 – 2:20 OLIN LC 120
Distribution	Literature in English

See Russian section for description.

Course	LIT 3355 Race, Gender & Poetic Form
Professor	Paul Stephens
CRN	97067
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 305
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: SRE

This course examines how poetic forms were racialized as well as gendered in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Looking primarily at Anglo-American modernist texts, we will examine issues of rhythm, dialect, and allusiveness in a range of primary and secondary literary texts, as well as in selected contemporaneous scientific (or quasi-scientific) writings about race and gender. Readings to include selections from Whitman, Dickinson, Dunbar, Hughes, Cullen, Johnson, Yeats, Loy, H.D., Eliot, Pound, Stein, Crane, Tolson.

Course	LIT / SPAN 340 Cervantes' Don Quixote
Professor	Gabriela Carrion
CRN	97033
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 – 2:50 pm OLIN 303
Distribution	Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

See Spanish section for description.

Course	LIT 3500 Advanced Fiction: Reading and Writing the Novella
Professor	Mona Simpson
CRN	97538
Schedule	See below
Distribution	Practicing Arts

The first semester of a yearlong class, intended for advanced and serious writers of fiction, on the "long story" or novella form. Students will read novellas by Henry James, Flaubert, Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Allan Gurganus, Amy Hempel, and Philip Roth (and perhaps others) using these primary texts to establish a community of reference. We will discuss technical aspects of fiction writing, such as the use of time, narrative voice, openings, endings, dialogue, circularity, and editing, from the point of view of writers, focusing closely on the student's own work. The students will be expected to write and revise a novella, turning in weekly installments of their own work, and of their responses to the assigned reading.

The course will meet six times over the semester:

Sept. 10^th – 6:00-9:00 pm OLIN 201

Sept. 11^th – 9:00 am – 12 noon OLIN 302

Oct. 22^nd – 6:00 – 9:00 pm OLIN 201

Oct. 23^rd – 9:00 am – 12 noon OLIN 302

Dec. 3^rd 6:00 – 9:00 pm OLIN 201

Dec. 4^th 9:00 am – 12 noon. OLIN 302

Course	LIT 364 Urban Shakespeare
Professor	Nancy Leonard
CRN	97007
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 310
Distribution	Literature in English

Shakespeare wrote in early modern London, in the early years of the seventeenth century, when the streets were crowded with newcomers in a population that had doubled in less than a hundred years. Country folk wanted to buy the inherited titles of noblemen (the King let them: he needed their money). Aristocrats, laughing at brand-new “nobles” wearing fur, were often in serious debt for their own tastes. There was jostling, excitement, and luxury, and social changes which challenged who modern Londoners thought they were. Voyages of discovery, for instance, sometimes brought back Indians, who donned English costumes—the “Other” in disguise as the “Self.” Shakespeare in some plays is a very urban dramatist, reflecting the vital life of the city of London. The seminar will read Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and The Tempest, along with relevant texts, to explore how this burgeoning capital of Europe registered in urban terms the issues of ethnicity, gender, identity, empire, sexuality, and class difference.

Course	LIT 3640 Enduring European Novels of the Nineteenth Century
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
CRN	97371
Schedule	Tu 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 307
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: French Studies; German 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 Cousin Bette, Hamsun’s Hunger, T. Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

Course	LIT 3741 Virginia Woolf
Professor	Deirdre d’Albertis
CRN	97481
Schedule	Th 9:30 –11:50 am OLIN 301
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies

In this seminar we will study Woolf's novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941), in the context of two distinct periods of innovation and conflict in twentieth-century literary culture. The first period, beginning "on or about December 1910" as Woolf memorably suggested, was the formation of the Bloomsbury circle, in particular, and English modernism, in general. What makes Woolf a modernist? How did her interactions with other members of the literary avant-garde (Forster, Eliot, even Joyce and Mansfield), as well as artists and thinkers associated with Bloomsbury, shape her experiments in fiction? The second period, following the women's movement in England and America of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, was the introduction into the academy of feminist literary criticism. Why did Woolf's novels and essays, especially "A Room of One's Own," become canonical texts of late twentieth-century feminism? In examining the historical reception of Woolf's writings we will struggle to come to grips with that larger-than-life figure critic Brenda Silver recently referred to as "Virginia Woolf, Icon." Has Woolf’s literary reputation fared well in the wake of “post-feminism”? How are early 21^st century readers coming to terms with her difficult-to-categorize literary imagination?

Course	LIT 3902 The Mask and its Metaphors
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	97039
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 107
Distribution	Literature in English /Rethinking Difference

Cross-Listed: American Studies, Africana Studies

The push in America to “make it new” meant a break with the past, with convention.  For many writers, this break was facilitated by the use of an “Other.”  For instance, critic Michael North argues that in the work of Gertrude Stein and Picassso “the step away from conventional verisimilitude into abstraction is accomplished by a figurative change of race.”  With Stein this meant the use of the African-American voice and with Picasso his African masks.  The mask as both a literal and figurative device runs through modern  literary works.  In this course we will examine how this looking at oneself through a mask impacts modernist narratives and how the mask subverts conventional definitions of race and gender.  We will read Stein’s Three Lives, Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal, Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday,  Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Freud’s Totem and Taboo, among others and some literary theory and criticism.

Course	LIT 420 Kafka and his Neighbors
Professor	Norman Manea
CRN	97056
Schedule	Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	Literature in English

The course will start with some of Kafka's letters, diaries and fiction and will carry on with the diffusion of the kafkaesque into the absurdity and cruelty of the history of our times. The literary

heritage of Central and Eastern Europe, Kafka's "neighborhood", will be studied through the work of such writers as Musil, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Ionesco, Kundera, Canetti, Danilo Kis. An examination of these books for their literary value and as a reflection of the cultural landscape and the tumult of history, as the best introduction to Central Europe's creativity, its genius and its tragedy.

Course	LIT 427 Contemporary Masters: Pamuk and Tabucchi
Professor	Norman Manea
CRN	97055
Schedule	Tu 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 101
Distribution	Literature in English

The Contemporary Masters class 2007 will offer the Bard students the opportunity to meet, debate and converse with two of the great contemporary European writers of today. Translated in more than forty languages, the Turkish writer Orhan  Pamuk is the 2006 Nobel laureate for Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy emphasized that "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, Pamuk has discovered symbols of the clash and interlacing of cultures." John Updike put Pamuk's hypnotic prose set in the splendor and religious intrigue of Istanbul in the literary vicinity of Proust, Mann, Calvino, Borges and concluded that his eminence "looms singularly". Antonio Tabucchi is the intriguing "magician" of the current Italian and European fiction. Author of many acclaimed short novels taut with suspense, he is an elegant and irresistible story-teller, confronting the contradictions and imminent implosion of modernity, as well as the bleak invasion of brutality, corruption, injustice, terror. A distinguished scholar of Portuguese literature and of its incomparable master Fernando Pessoa and a traveler to far away places (India, among others) he displays a worldly knowledge and vision, visible among others in the books meant to be debated in class (Requiem, Pereira Declares, The Edge of Horizon), a mesmerizing fusion of morality and art.

Course	LIT 433 Serial Fiction
Professor	Terence Dewsnap
CRN	97037
Schedule	Tu 4:00 -6:20 pm OLIN 307
Distribution	Literature in English

Often fiction writers—Balzac, Galsworthy, Doyle, Joyce, Hammett, Powell, Settle, Updike, to name a few—generate a fictional world larger than one book, with characters returning again and again, sometimes maturing, sometimes fading into relative insignificance, sometimes seeming to die and be reborn. The reasons for the creation of a series of connected novels are various: the compulsions of the writer, the ambitiousness of his/her imaginative schemes, the audience's appetite, the marketability of recognition, nostalgia. In this seminar we focus on several multi-novels including two or three of Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels, Ford Maddox Ford's World War I tetralogy Parade’s End, and three novels by Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, and You Can’t Go Home Again. The point will be to recognize something of the writers' motivation and beliefs about fiction's role, and the connections between the book's structure and theme and the times they were written.