99009

LIT/ GER 199 Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin-de Siecle

Franz Kempf

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLINLC 118

FLLC

See German section for description. Taught in English.

99476

LIT 202 Metrical Verse

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Students will learn how to read and write metrical verse by writing exercises in the principal meters (Accentual/Syllabic, Accentual, Syllabic, Anglo-Saxon Alliterative , Haiku, etc.) and the principal forms (the ballad, the sonnet, blank verse, nonsense verse, the ode, the dramatic monologue, the villanelle, the sestina, the pantoum) that make poetry in the English language one of the richest traditions in the world. A particular concern will be the relation between meter and the speaking voice; an additional concern will be the kinds of trope that distinguish classical (figurative) from modernist (elliptical) poetry.

99082

LIT 2020 Literature, Language & Lies

Francine Prose

. . . . F

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

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.

99062

LIT 2025 The Culture of Humanitarianism

Elizabeth Antrim

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights What moral responsibility comes with American affluence?  How is this responsibility enacted via humanitarian aid work, and how is this work represented in our cultural products?  In this course we will study the creative artifacts of humanitarian aid to Africa by looking at novels and films that explore the complex relationship between American aid workers and their African targets.  What complications are brought to light by translating the suffering of another into an aesthetic object? How do nationality, race, religious difference, and the legacy of colonialism inflect the politics of these representations?  Authors include Paul Theroux, Maria Thomas, Dave Eggers, Russell Banks, and Uzodinma Iweala;  films to be screened include Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and Blood Diamond.

99406

LIT 2061 Arab-American Literature

Youssef Yacoubi

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies Surveying over one hundred years of Arab-American literature, thought, art and film, this course will examine important moments in the formation and consolidation of cultural connections between the United States and the Arab world. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the early and later works of influential Arab-American thinkers, writers, artists and public intellectuals. We will explore issues of intertextuality; stylistic appropriations of romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, post-modernism, and themes related to diasporic expression, cultural metamorphosis and imaginative portrayals of Arab-Americans before and after the event of “9/11”. Major writers will include Gibran Khalil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Nuayma, Samuel John Hazo, Etel Adnan, Abinader Elmaz and Edward Said. Our analysis and discussions will be informed by the recent developments in critical/ literary theories and cultural studies. The course will be organized around four themes/ topics: Representations of the Middle East in Early American literature; Key pioneers of Arab-American exchange; Forms and modes of inscribing Arabness/ Muslimness, diaspora and worldliness; pre and post “9/11” images and imaginings.

99202

LIT 2102 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

Charles Walls

. T . Th .

2:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, EUS The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most recognized and dynamic periods in African-American literary history, but its actual historical, cultural, racial, and geographical contexts are less understood. This course will examine the Harlem Renaissance from a variety of perspectives that will interrogate and reveal the complexity of the period’s monolithic terms and contexts: Harlem, Black, and the1920s. Along this line of inquiry, we will consider, for example, how black writers of the interwar period connected with broader American modernist, nativist, and pluralist trends; how pragmatist and Marxist philosophies influenced a formidable reconsideration of political and aesthetic representation; how various musical forms, as well as European and African art forms, provided rich and varied cultural resources for emerging literary production. Other themes and questions will concern black internationalism, primitivism, ethnography, the New Negro, and Négritude. Writers will include Locke, William James, Dewey, Du Bois, van Vechten, Cunard, Maran, Senghor, Schuyler, Thurman, McKay, Padmore, Kandinsky, Larsen, Fauset, Toomer, Freud, Boas, Hurston, Spencer, Grimké, Brown, Cullen, and Hughes.

99834

GER / LIT 213 German Operas & Ideas

Franz Kempf Screening:

. T . . . . . . . F . . . . F

2:30 - 3:50 pm 10:30 - 11:50 am 1:00 – 4:00 pm

OLINLC 118 OLINLC 120 Weis Cinema

FLLC

See German section for description.

99201

LIT 2137 African-American Tradition

Charles Walls

M . W . .

12:00 -1:20 pm

OLIN 203

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE; related interest: Human Rights What special problems arise when the presentation of ourselves into literary culture contributes to or challenges an already diminished social presence and power? In what ways would we want to create and imagine ourselves, remember our history, and construct our future? In this course, we will explore African-American literature from the Colonial era to the Harlem Renaissance and examine the various forms and voices that African-Americans have used to achieve literary and, consequently, social authority. We will interrogate the degree to which this body of literature forms a coherent tradition and complicates notions of race, nation, gender, citizenship, and diaspora. We will also consider its relationship to traditional literary modes like sentimentalism, realism, naturalism, and modernism. Readings will include autobiography, essays, novels, poetry, and plays; writers will likely include Wheatly, Douglass, Jacobs, Chesnutt, Du Bois, Hopkins, Toomer, Larsen, Hughes, McKay, and Hurston.

99857

LIT 2140 Domesticity and Power

Donna Grover

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 101

ELIT

Related interest: Africana Studies Many American women writers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries used the domestic novel to make insightful critiques of American society and politics. These women who wrote of the home and of marriage and detailed the chatter of the drawing room were not merely recording the trivial events of what was deemed to be their “place.” The course begins with Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). We will also read the novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fausett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and others.

99066

LIT 215 Victorian Essays & Detectives

Terence Dewsnap

M . W . .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies, Related interest: STS Essays long and short  by Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry Mayhew and Oscar Wilde addressing Victorian issues such as crime, art and science. Detective stories and novels by Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and other inventors of the detective genre. The syllabus will emphasize such pairings as Thomas Henry Huxley writing on the scientific method, and Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, Pater’s The Renaissance and Doyle’s “The Sign of Four,” Wilde’s De Profundis and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Murdered Cousin.”

99549

LIT 2160 Powers of Horror

Cole Heinowitz

. T . Th .

4:00 – 5:20 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

This seminar will examine how notions of horror and terror construct the modern western subject by focusing on the gothic genre as a response to such historical developments as the French Revolution, European imperialism, the Cold War, and the so-called “epistemological crisis” of postmodernity. We will examine stock gothic characters including the medieval tyrant, the evil priest, the vampire, the sexual deviant, the doppelgänger, the madman, and the cyborg in order to ascertain why such figures emerge at the precise moments when western culture seems so confidently to assert its orderliness, rationality, and humanitarianism. Readings will include Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, as well as critical works by Marx, Freud, Foucault, Jameson, Butler, Blanchot, and Haraway. Screenings will include Murnau’s Nosferatu, Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls, Fuller’s Shock Corridor, and Rivera’s Why Cybraceros.

99508

LIT 2176 The Revenge Tragedy

Lianne Habinek

. T . Th .

1:00 – 2:20 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

Clandestine murders, otherworldly revenants, disguise, madness, and a final scene of brutal bloodshed: these characterize the revenge tragedy, a form of play extremely popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.  Revenge tragedies not only function as a form of social critique, they also speak to the anxieties and wonder that accompanied new modes of understanding the physical world and human emotion.  In this course we will begin by investigating the early modern revenge tragedy’s antecedent, Senecan tragedy; we will then move to considering the emergence of the revenge tragedy in its own context.  Plays we’ll look at will include The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi, The Maiden’s Tragedy, and The Broken Heart.  Finally, we will use our understanding to analyze three modern ‘surviving’ examples of revenge tragedy: Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, David Cronenberg’s film A History of Violence, and Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49.

99068

LIT 2182 Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Science

Elizabeth Frank

. . W Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 303

PART

Cross-listed: STS 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.)

99142

LIT 2207 Reading as Writing as Reading: Exploring the Contemporary

Ann Lauterbach

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLIN 310

PART

We will read a variety of poets working today, asking the questions: what kinds of forms are necessary to address the changing present, and how do contemporary poets draw on ideas and methods in disciplines other than poetics? Our core texts will be Conjunctions: 35 American Poetry and the recently published American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. In the second of the two weekly classes, students will write poems and prose responses in relation to our readings.

99007

LIT 221 Writers Workshop:Prose Fiction

Peter Sourian

. T . . .

10:30 - 12:50 pm

ASP 302

PART

Practice in imaginative writing. Students will present their own work for group response, analysis, and evaluation. Also reading of selected writers. Permission of the instructor is required. Candidates must submit samples of their work, by noon Wednesday, April 22nd, with cover letter, to Professor Sourian, via campus mail. A list of accepted students will be posted, and students notified via email by Wed. April 29^th.

99008

LIT 223 Cultural Reportage

Peter Sourian

. T . . .

4:00 -6:20 pm

HEG 200

PART

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.

99509

LIT 2262 Culture and Breeding in the Eighteenth Century

Lianne Habinek

. . W . F

12:00:- 1:20 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT

What is culture?  This is the first question we will ask in this course – and the one we will strive to answer throughout as we make our way through some of the seminal literary and philosophical texts of the eighteenth century. We will consider, as we do, what the notion of breeding had to do with culture, and how the idea of culture involved proto-biology, exploration, education, and even discrimination.  As such, this course seeks to intertwine philosophical and scientific work with its contemporary literature; thus, alongside each main text we will consider eighteenth-century theoretical research.  We begin with David Garrick's remarkably “altered” version of The Winter's Tale, turning then to Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, a selection of Rousseau, Tristram Shandy, and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ending with Emma.

99072

LIT 2331 Classic American Gothic

Donna Grover

M . W . .

12:00 -1:20 pm

OLIN 305

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies The gothic novel is considered to be the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses and heroines in distress.  Its use of melodrama and the macabre often disguise the psychological, sexual, and emotional issues that are in fact more horrifying than the contents of a haunted house.  The gothic novel in America has often confronted topics pertinent to American identity and history.  In this course we will examine how many American authors used the gothic genre to actually engage with social, political and cultural concerns.   We will read novels and short stories that span the 19^th and 20^th century by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,  Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,  Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson and James Baldwin. 

99121

LIT 2404 Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World

Jonathan Brent

. . W . .

4:30 – 6:50 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian & Eurasian Studies; Related interest: STS 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.

99090

LIT 2482 Narratives of Suffering

Geoffrey Sanborn

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 203

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the heart of many of the world’s great stories and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of one’s life?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirtsleeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers’ stories. Why? Our investigations will begin at this point. Texts will include the book of Job, King Lear, Moby-Dick, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, The Sound and the Fury, Beloved, Maus, and The Road.

99059

LIT 2501 Shakespeare

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 309

ELIT

A careful reading of nine masterpieces, plus a selection of his sonnets, by the greatest writer of the English language. The plays, representing the full range of his genius in comedy, tragedy, romance, and royal history, will be chosen from among the following: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.

99058

LIT 2650 Irish Fiction

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

10:30 - 11:50 am

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies Irish fiction of the modern period--the stories, novels, and plays of the past 300 years--has been divided between two traditions: the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers who were English by descent but deeply identified with Ireland; and the Catholic tradition of modern Ireland. From the first, we will read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, together with plays by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, plus additional fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, et al. From the second, we will read Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, and additional fiction by Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty and many others. As background we will also read a brief history of Ireland during this period.

99124

LIT 2801 The Nobel Slavs

Marina Kostalevsky

. T . Th .

1:00 -2:20 pm

OLINLC 208

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies The reader’s response to the literature of the twentieth century was affected, for better or worse, by critical reviews, bestseller lists, and numerous literary prizes, among which the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious. In this course we will examine the works of the Nobel Prize laureates from Russia, and Eastern Europe. Readings include works by Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladislaw Reymount, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Jaroslav Seifert, and Ivo Andric. Significant attention will be paid to the political and social impact of the Nobel Prize, particularly in the cases of Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn. Subject matter also includes viewing and discussion of films based on the works of some of the writers. Classes will be conducted in English.

99069

LIT 284 Dickens Reconsidered

Stephen Graham

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Charles Dickens crafted a public persona--the embodiment of manly virtue, the pillar of family values, the genial creator of Scrooge and Little Nell--that mirrored all the self-flattering myths of the Victorian middle classes. The real Dickens, obsessed with class distinctions, criminality, mob violence, and sexual predation, more authentically embodied the realities of his age. Through close readings of Dickens’ masterpieces--Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations--we will travel both inward, mapping the author’s complex and conflicted psyche, and outward, toward a more realistic appreciation of a literary master and his self-confident yet troubled epoch.