98157

LIT 3021 An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov

Marina Kostalevsky

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLINLC 118

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies 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.

98152

LIT 311 Anglo-American Modernism

Deirdre d'Albertis

. . . Th .

9:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies “The proper stuff of fiction does not exist,” observed Virginia Woolf, “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 and The Golden Bowl, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, Forster's Howard's End, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, selected short stories by Mansfield, Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!. Upper College standing assumed.

98422

LIT 3145 The Politics of Form

Ann Lauterbach

. T . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

Cross-listed: Integrated Arts Connections between political ideology, public advocacy, cultural theory and aesthetic form are, at best, vexed.  “Innovative”, “experimental”, and “avant-garde”, often used interchangeably, have been affiliated with a progressive/left politics. Lyricism (“self-expression”) as well as the use of conventional prosody has been assigned conservative value. In this course we will briefly trace the origins of avant-garde ideas in early European modernism (Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Vorticism) and then look at the evolution of experimental/progressive ideas in American art, critical theory, and poetics. Readings from various influential critics (Clement Greenberg, Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, Terry Eagleton, Benjamin Buchloh, John Berger, Jerome McGann) as well as poet-critics ( Charles Bernstein, Joan Retallack, David Levi Strauss). Poets included: Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, George Oppen, Laura Riding, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino, Barrett Watten, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe. Related visual artists. Weekly readings and short papers; one term project.

98149

LIT 3208 Faulkner: Race, Text, and Southern History

Donna Grover

M . . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 306

ELIT

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.

98247

LIT 330 Innovative Novellas and Short Stories

Justus Rosenberg

. T . . .

4:00 -6:20 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

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.

98164

LIT 3310 Middle Eastern Literature and Post-Colonial Theory

Youssef Yacoubi

. T . Th .

9:00 - 10:20 am

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies, SRE This course will focus on developments in recent cultural and literary theory, which are primarily concerned with the relationships between cultural power, colonialism and different forms of representation. Surveying a wide range of issues, literary texts and theorists, this course will consider the impact of colonialism; it will examine the relationship between empire and writing; it will consider forms of resistance to the process of domination, and will look in particular at the ways literary and artistic representations from the Middle East have been crucial to this “writing back” and “writing beyond” by unsettling or undermining the ideologies at the core of imperialism, colonialism and internal structures of oppression. As well as drawing upon concepts associated with colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial/ critical theory, this course will consider works of fiction, autobiography, paintings and film, and will relate these representations to approaches which have emerged out of Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and cultural materialism.

98202

LIT 3322 Freud, Lacan, and Zizek

Nancy Leonard

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

How does a human being become a cultural subject? How does the body organize its sensations, and how does the mind render its relation to the body and to other people? Answers to these questions have been proposed and contested in the developing dialogues of psychoanalysis, which originally was both a science derived from clinical observation and an interpretative practice explored in essays and discussions. We will read classic texts by Sigmund Freud such as Introductory Lectures, The Ego and the Id, and his work on narcissism, femininity and melancholia. Then we will explore a range of Jacques Lacan’s essays drawn from his seminars published in Ecrits, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. What is the current usefulness of psychoanalysis now that the humanities and arts have taken it over from psychology? How does knowing about the unconscious, the way dreams work, the mirror stage, the objet a, the Real, or the Symbolic change the way we see subjects in patterns of active and unconscious self-resemblance? How do contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zizek—whose work will occupy a good part of the course—and Judith Butler employ psychoanalysis today?

98003

LIT 333 New Directions in Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M . . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT

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.

98210

LIT 3410 Hawthorne, Melville, and Literary Friendship

Geoffrey Sanborn

. . W . F

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies 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. Upper College students.

98158

LIT 3431 Satire

Terence Dewsnap

. . . Th .

4:00 -6:20 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

The origins of satire in folk culture and in classical writings (Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Petronius); medieval, renaissance and eighteenth century examples;  and twentieth-century revival  of  satiric traditions in Waugh, Auden, Huxley and others.

98243

LIT 3500 Advanced Fiction: The Novella

Mona Simpson

TBA

.

PART

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 Francine Prose, 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. 14-15, Oct. 26-27 and Dec. 14-15.