|
99065 |
LIT 3015 After Nature: Imagining the World without Us |
Deirdre d'Albertis |
. . . Th . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
HEG 300 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: EUS In this seminar we examine the recent
history of fictions imagining what Alan Weisman memorably calls “the world
without us.” Taking our departure from W.G. Sebald’s “After Nature” (and the 2008
New Museum show exploring the same theme), we will trace the development of a
distinctly modern strain of post-apocalyptic literature from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) through Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) to Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2006). We will consider cinematic works of Tarkovsky, Herzog and Haneke
in tandem with readings in 20th and 21st century
fiction. Of particular concern will be
writers’ and film-makers’ vision of existence in a post- or “neo” human
society. What does it mean to be
human “after nature”? How do we re-conceptualize the state of
nature so central to enlightenment discourse from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau
on?
|
99475 |
LIT 3023 Poetry and Society |
Joan Retallack |
. . W . . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
OLIN 309 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Human Rights What consequences, if any, do the poetries
of a culture and a time have on the ethical, if not moral, framework of the
society’s relation to its citizens and those it considers “others”? This question could of course be asked
exactly the other way around, probing how social contexts generate certain
kinds of poetics. In considering the forms of life that poetries enact and
imply, we’ll be engaging in inquiries that are both domestically and
internationally “cross-cultural.” We will also importantly consider poetics not
explicitly political at all, since they too embody social values. Poets whose
work will be studied include those responding (or not!) to times of civil and
“world” wars, occupation, imprisonment, racial and ethnic injustice, sexual and
gender discrimination, and ecological concerns. Poetic form will be as much
under scruitiny as arguments or messages.
Work by Guillaume Apollinaire, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Anna Akhmatova,
Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston
Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Yehuda Amchai, Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Caroline
Bergvall, C.D. Wright, and Juliana Spahr are likely to be included. This is a
practice-based seminar. You will have the opportunity to experiment with poetic
forms, write short essays and conduct collaborative research in an area of
contemporary social concern that interests you. The final assignment will be a
poetic project accompanied by a detailed statement of the principles that went
into composing it, including its relation to authors we have studied. Admission
by permission of professor.
|
99143 |
LIT 3027 Poetics of Pragmatism |
Ann Lauterbach |
. . W . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
ASP 302 |
ELIT |
Before,
during and after the election of Barack Obama, the word “pragmatism” was often
heard, and perhaps William James’ comment that “truth happens to an idea” was
proven by this singular event. But what is Pragmatism, and how did it come to
be central to American philosophical and poetic thought? Is it merely a matter
of use, what works, or is there more to it, as the radical relation between
experience and experiment becomes one that tests both empiricism and
transcendence, and complicates values of objectivity and subjectivity. Readings
in: Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, James, Dewey, Cavell, Geertz, Joan Richardson,
Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, John Ashbery.
|
99550 |
LIT 3036 Poetic Lineages |
Cole Heinowitz |
M . . . . |
1:30 – 3:50 pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
T.
S. Eliot famously remarked, “what happens when a new work of art is created is
something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded
it.” Taking this statement as our starting point, this seminar will explore the
perpetual trans-historical dialogue taking place within Anglo-American poetry
and poetics. Tracing the various poetic lineages from the Romantic era to the
present moment, we will explore the ways in which conceptions of the power of
poetry are transformed by shifting historical, aesthetic, political, and
philosophical moments. Throughout our investigations, we will ask: What is the
relationship between poetic utterance and political power? What role do
subjectivity and emotion play in poetic expression? How do the formal
dimensions of language complicate its denotative function? Writers to be
considered include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, J.H. Prynne, and Lyn
Hejinian.
|
99471 |
LIT 3134 Thomas Pynchon & Don DeLillo |
Elizabeth Antrim |
M . . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 304 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo are
conventionally understood as two of the most important practitioners of
American literary postmodernism. But what, formally, makes them postmodern?
What is postmodernism? How do Pynchon and DeLillo defy or push the
limits of this frame? The process of answering those questions will lead us
into a wide range of related subjects, including consumerism, paranoia,
violence, technology, mass media, and the construction of history. Major texts
under consideration include Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, V., Gravity’s
Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon, and DeLillo’s White Noise, Mao
II, Underworld, and Falling Man.
|
99501 |
LIT 3143 Women on the Edge |
Mary Caponegro |
. . . Th . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 303 |
ELIT |
A
study of numerous experimental women authors and their predecessors, including
Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Sarraute, Clarice Lispector, Elfriede
Jelinek, Marguerite Young, Kathy Acker, Jamie Gordon, Yoko Tawada, Diane
Williams, Christine Schutt, Patricia Eakins, Fiona Maazel, and others. Critical
essays will supplement the fiction.
|
99388 |
LIT 315 Proust: In Search of Lost Time |
Eric Trudel |
. . W . F |
10:30 -11:50 am |
OLIN 304 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: French Studies Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
is about an elaborate, internal journey, at the end of which the narrator
discovers the unifying pattern of his life both as a writer and human being.
Famed for its style and its distinctive view of time, love, sex and cruelty,
reading, language and memory, Proust's epic broke new ground in the invention
of a genre that lies between fiction and autobiography. Through a semester
devoted to the close reading of Swann’s Way and Time Regained in
their entirety and several substantial key-excerpts taken from all the other
volumes, we will try to understand the complex nature of Proust's masterpiece
and, among other things, examine the ways by which it accounts for the
temporality and new rhythms of modernity. We will also question the
narrative and stylistic function of homosexuality, discuss the significance of
the massive social disruption brought about by the Great War and see how the
arts are represented and why they are seminal to the narration. Additional
readings will include philosophy, art criticism and literary theory. Taught in English.
|
99495 |
LIT 3215 Power, Violence and Make Believe:
Revealing Politics in Fiction |
Mark Danner |
. T . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 304 |
HUM |
Cross-listed: Human Rights Power and politics we learn not at first hand but by following their elaboration in fictional forms. Though both epic and drama focused on violence, power and political struggle - beginning with The Illiad, the "poem of force," if not before - it is in the modern novel that we find an ongoing, centuries-long narrative investigation into the workings of power. In this seminar, through the works of Stendhal, Trollope, Adams, James, Conrad, Chesterton, Malaparte, Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Penn Warren, Camus, Just, DeLillo, and McCarrey, among others, we will undertake a close study of the development of the political novel, with special attention to the analysis of violence, force and power.
|
99074 |
LIT 323 Economies of Modern European Literature |
Joseph Luzzi |
. T . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
RKC 200 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Italian Studies Economic history tells us that, from around
1820, the rates of production and general standards of living in Europe began to
increase dramatically (and unevenly), and the industrial revolution that they
reflect has continued to define the world’s economic organization. This course
will explore how the emergence of free-market economic practices altered the
literary map of the Continent and shaped the idea of literature itself. We will
consider the major events that triggered this sea change, and how the writers
of the age interpreted them. Most important, we will analyze how this
free-market ethos was internalized and incorporated into the thought processes
and literary forms in the modern age. Authors and works under discussion
include the idea of “contract” in William Wordsworth’s “Michael”; the Christian
political economy of Alessandro Manzoni’s Betrothed;
the role of the free market in the free indirect style of the Realist novel;
the link between literary and aesthetic “value” in the late-Enlightenment
discourses of aesthetics and political economy; and classic (Adam Smith, Karl
Marx, and John Ruskin) and more contemporary (Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci)
theorists on the nexus between aesthetics and economics. Readings/course work
in English. Interested students should contact Prof. Luzzi ([email protected]) prior to registration to determine
eligibility.
|
99061 |
LIT 331 Translation Workshop |
Peter Filkins |
. T . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 302 |
FLLC |
The workshop is intended for students interested in
exploring both the process of translation and ways in which meaning is created
and shaped through words. Class time will be divided between a consideration of
various approaches to the translation of poetry and prose, comparisons of
various solutions arrived at by different translators, and the students' own
translations into English of poetry and prose from any language or text of
their own choosing. Prerequisite: One year of language study or
permission of the instructor.
|
99496 |
LIT 3324 Freudian Psychoanalysis and Language |
Helena Gibbs |
. T . . . |
4:00 – 6:20 pm |
OLIN 301 |
HUM |
The understanding that language inhabits the human
subject is essential to Freud’s conception of the unconscious. It is Freud who taught us to read slips of
the tongue, bungled actions, memory lapses, and dreams as a language in its own
right, as a formation of the unconscious.
He demonstrates throughout his work that language implicates us at a
level far beyond what we typically consider as communication. By singling out certain properties of
language (i.e., words signifying a variety of meanings at once), he scrutinizes
language’s ability to structure us as subjects. This course will focus on selections from Freud that demonstrate
this close attention to language. Among
them, we will read sections from The
Interpretation of Dreams, Studies on
Hysteria, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
These readings will serve as a point of departure for a broader examination of
Freudian psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Freud’s texts will be complemented by essays by Jacques Lacan and
other authors whose works shed further light on the subject of the unconscious.
|
99081 |
LIT 333 New Directions in
Contemporary Fiction |
Bradford Morrow |
M . . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
This
seminar is devoted to close readings of novels and collections of short stories
by innovative contemporary fiction writers published over the last quarter
century, with an eye toward exploring both the great diversity of voices and
styles employed in these narratives as well as the cultural, historical, and
social issues they chronicle.
Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of fiction by some of the
more pioneering practictioners of the form, including Cormac McCarthy, William
Gaddis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Powers,
David Foster Wallace, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Jamaica Kincaid, along with
two or three authors who will visit class to discuss their books and read from
recent work.
|
99109 |
LIT 3401 Poetry and Politics in Ireland |
Terence Dewsnap |
M . . . . |
9:30 -11:50 am |
RKC 200 |
ELIT |
Cross listed:
Irish and Celtic Studies Nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets
such as James Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, W. B. Yeats and Austin Clarke recreated
images of a Celtic past that served the cause of Irish nationalism. We will
study their poetry; also militant songs and ballads from the late eighteenth
century to the present, some anonymous, some by prominent patriots like Thomas
Davis and Padraic Pearse; also problem poems by poets Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh
and Seamus Heaney dealing with contemporaneous events and issues. We will pay
some attention to diaries and memoirs illuminating specific moments in Irish
history from 1798 to the present.
|
99134 |
LIT 3500
A 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 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, dates to be announced.
|
99084 |
LIT
389
Different Voices, Different Views from the Non-Western World |
Justus Rosenberg |
. T . . . |
4:00 -6:20 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Significant
short works by some of the most distinguished contemporary writers of Africa,
Iran, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East are examined for
their intrinsic literary merits and the verisimilitude with which they portray
the socio-political conditions, spiritual belief systems, and attitudes toward
women in their respective countries.
Through discussions and short analytical papers, we seek to determine
the extent to which these writers rely on indigenous literary traditions, and
have been affected by Western artistic models and developments by competing
religions and ideologies. Authors
inclue Assia Djebar, Nawal El Saadawi, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer,
Mahmoud Darwish, Mahasveta Devi and Tayeb Salih.
|
99078 |
LIT 390 Contemporary Critical Theory |
Nancy Leonard |
. T . . . |
1:30 -3:50 pm |
OLIN 308 |
HUM |
During the last century major changes in the ways
works of art and culture were conceived took place under the influence of
modernism and poststructuralism. This course engages key texts, both classic
and contemporary, in this transformation of our knowledge of language and
representation. Reading full-length
studies or significant excerpts of major theorists, the seminar will introduce
students to the aesthetics and ethics of modernist and postmodern debates about
representation, and about the links between ethics, politics and language.
Perspectives to be introduced include semiotics, deconstruction, Lacanian
analysis, Foucauldian history, and arts theory. Students will be working collaboratively as theorists, independently
as writers, and collectively as members of the whole seminar. Theorists to be
read include Walter Benjamin, Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia
Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Hal Foster, and Judith Butler. Admission by interview prior to registration;
Upper College standing is assumed.
A college course in philosophy,
literary, cultural, political or arts theory is ordinarily a prerequisite. Interview
with Professor Leonard necessary before online registration.