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 Upper College students.  Class size: 15

 

91768

LIT  3090   

 BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE & THE INVENTION OF ContempORARY American ArtS & Poetry

Ann Lauterbach

. . . Th .

10:10 am -12:30 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Cross-listed:  Art History  Started in 1933 in Asheville, North Carolina, by a disaffected academic idealist, Black Mountain College was founded on John Dewey’s notion of a Progressive education, where the relations between thinking and doing, idea and practice, were understood as in a seamless continuum, one that was necessary to an enlightened politics of engagement. We will examine the premise of this utopian experiment and explore the historical platform, both European and American, that allowed radical modernist idioms in poetics, performance, and the visual arts to flourish in the midst of a depression at home and chaos abroad. Faculty included: John Cage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson, among many. Interested students should submit a short statement to Prof. Lauterbach indicating why they would like to participate in this class.  Send to [email protected] no later than April 27th.  Class size: 15

 

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   

 Reading & Writing the Hudson

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 Hudson River is the most beautiful, messed up, productive, ignored, and surprising piece of water on the face of the earth,” writes Robert Boyle in The Hudson: A Natural and Unnatural History. In this course students will get to know the Hudson in all of its complexity through reading a range of works and through writing personal essays of place. Readings will range from history to natural history, literature to environmental policy. In addition, each student will be required to undertake independent research into some aspect of the river, from the brick or whaling industry to gardens or villas of the valley. This research, combined with personal experience of the valley, will be used to develop extended creative nonfiction essays. These personal essays will be read and critiqued in a workshop format. This course is open to all students interested in creative nonfiction writing from a researched, interdisciplinary perspective. Class size: 15

 

91771

LIT  333   

 New Directions IN ContempORARY Fiction

Bradford Morrow

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 Jamaica Kincaid. Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, and Brian Evenson will visit class to talk with students about their books and writing process, and read from recent work.  Class size: 15

 

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

Bradford Morrow

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