92011 |
LIT 307 THROUGH A FUTURE DARKLY, GLOBAL CRISIS AND
THE TRIUMPH OF DYSTOPIA |
Mark Danner |
. . W . . |
1:30 pm - 3:50 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
At what past moment did the future grow so dark?
Formal literary dystopia has been with us prominently since at least 1726, with
the arrival of Swift’s Gulliver. But the tendency to critique the present by
imagining a darkly extrapolated future surely extends back much further – and
grew in prevalence and popularity until the twentieth became the veritable
dystopic century. Today central components of dystopian satire -- global
climate destruction, nuclear annihilation, terrorist states – have become
commonplaces of our politics. In such a world has dystopia become prophetic, or
redundant? In this seminar we will grapple with that question, as we explore
the literature of dystopia present and past, plumbing increasingly murky
visions of destruction to come. Authors whose work we will read include Margaret
Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, P.D.
James, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Vladimir
Sorokin, H.G. Welles, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Open only to moderated
91768 |
LIT 3090 |
Ann Lauterbach |
. . . Th . |
10:10 am -12:30 pm |
OLIN 309 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Art
History Started in 1933 in
91790 |
THTR 310 Shakespeare: The director and the text |
Jonathan Rosenberg |
. . . Th . |
10:10 am -12:30 pm |
FISHER PAC CONFERENCE |
AART |
See Theater section for description.
91793 |
THTR 337 The Sixties |
Miriam Felton-Dansky |
. T . . . |
10:10 am -12:30 pm |
FISHER PAC CONFERENCE |
AART |
See Theater section for description.
91549 |
LIT 315 MARCEL Proust: In Search of Lost Time |
Eric Trudel |
M . W . . |
3:10 pm -4:30 pm |
OLIN 203 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: French Studies Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
tells of 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 love, sex and cruelty, reading,
language and memory, Proust’s modernist 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 in which it accounts for the
temporality and new rhythms of modern life. 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 investigate why
the visual arts and music are seminal to the narration. Additional readings
from Barthes, Beckett, Benjamin, Deleuze, de Man, Kristeva and Lévinas among
many others. Taught in English. Class size: 22
91770 |
LIT 3308 |
Susan Rogers |
. T . . . . . . Th . |
11:50 am -1:10 pm 8:30 am -1:10 pm |
OLIN 304 FIELD STATN. |
PART |
Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies “To those who know it, the
91771 |
LIT 333 New Directions IN ContempORARY Fiction |
|
M . . . . |
1:30 pm -3:50 pm |
OLIN 205 |
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. We will explore both the great
diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed in these narratives as well as
the cultural, historical, political, and philosophical issues they
chronicle. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of fiction by
some of the groundbreaking practitioners of the form, including Cormac
McCarthy, William Gaddis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro,
David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover, Ian McEwan, and
91963 |
LIT 355 American Realisms |
Jaime Alves |
. . . Th . |
6:00 pm -8:20 pm |
OLIN 202 |
ELIT |
This course is centered around American
literary texts produced between (roughly) 1865 and 1914, by a variety of
writers seeking to convey the “realities” of American life and culture in this
turbulent period. A conventional understanding of Realism has, for many years,
been defined by the works of James, Howells, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, Wharton,
and Chopin---a handful of writers whose influential and significant
contributions to the aesthetic movement of Realism are uncontested, but whose
positionality (especially as white, privileged, and, for the most part, male)
severely limited their ability to record, shape, or criticize the diverse whole
of “real” American life. Alongside works by these writers, then, we will also
examine texts by writers of color, of varying ethnicities, and by greater
numbers of women, in order to access and better understand the different realities
they were striving to document and influence. Texts by Zitkala-Sa, Charles
Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sui Sin Far---whose
contributions are now, finally, garnering attention as responsive to and
constitutive of a larger Realist aesthetic---flesh out our shared reading list,
enriching and complicating our encounters with American languages, stories, and
forms. In addition to the course readings, students will work closely with
essays in contemporary criticism to analyze how current scholars wrangle with
problems of defining Realism and its offshoots, among them Naturalism and
Regionalism. A variety of writing assignments will afford us the opportunity to
consider how small groups of texts converse about Realism’s major themes and
preoccupations. This course is
cross-listed with the MAT program for 3+2 students in literature. Class
size: 10
91772 |
LIT 405 Senior Colloquium: Literature |
Deirdre d'Albertis |
M . . . . |
4:40 pm -6:00 pm |
RKC 103 |
|
1
credit Literature
Majors writing a project are required to enroll in the year-long Senior
Colloquium. Senior Colloquium is an
integral part of the 8 credits earned for Senior Project. An opportunity to share working methods,
knowledge, skills and resources among students, the colloquium explicitly
addresses challenges arising from research and writing on this scale, and
presentation of works in progress. A
pragmatic focus on the nuts and bolts of the project will be complemented with
life-after-Bard skills workshops, along with a review of internship and
grant-writing opportunities in the discipline. Senior Colloquium is designed to
create a productive network of association for student scholars and critics:
small working groups foster intellectual community, providing individual
writers with a wide range of support throughout this culminating year of
undergraduate study in the major. Class size: 35
91773 |
LIT 431 Post-FANTASY,
Fabulism & the New Gothic |
|
M . . . . |
10:10 am -12:30 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Over the past several decades the critical
boundaries between literary novels and genre fiction have become—as the result
of ambitious work by various innovative, pioneering writers—increasingly
ambiguous. The earliest gothicists framed their tales within the metaphoric
scapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by
protagonists whose inverted psyches led them to test the edges of propriety and
sanity. Masters such as Angela Carter, William Gaddis, and Cormac McCarthy,
while embracing this same fundamentally dark artistic vision, have radically
reinvented and contemporized tropes, settings, and narrative arcs to create a
new phase in this historic tradition. This movement, identified as the New
Gothic, appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon,
which for the purposes of this course is termed New Wave Fabulism, whose
achievement is to have taken the genre of fantasy/horror in a similar literary
direction. While not breaking allegiance with the fundamental spirit that
animates its genre counterparts, writers such as John Crowley, Kelly Link, and
Elizabeth Hand are creating a body of serious literary fiction that deserves
critical examination. Among others we will read are Robert Coover, Brian
Evenson, Karen Russell, and Peter Straub.
One or two authors will join us in class to discuss their work with
students and give a reading.
Class size: 15