91785

LIT 3100

Writing Darkness: NarrATIVES OF CaptivIty

Mark Danner

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights Writing from prison is writing from extremity. Carving sentences from isolation, deprivation, emotional and physical torture, the prison memoirist struggles to describe credibly a wholly foreign world, one far outside most readers’ experience. These writers’ subjects, on the other hand, from concentration camp to gulag to penitentiary, bid fair to be considered our most representative institutions. The stories their narratives tell, harrowing as they often are, are vital to understanding modern writing and the experience of modernity itself. Our reading in this seminar will comprise both memoir and fiction and may include, among others, works by Jack Henry Abbott, e.e. cummings, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Genet, Eugenia Ginzburg, Billy Hayes, Primo Levi, Naguib Mahfouz, Xavier de Maistre, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Marquis de Sade, Victor Serge, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, Jacobo Timerman, Leo Tolstoy and Malcolm X. Class size: 18

91759

LIT 318

Hannah Arendt: Political Thinking and the plurality of languages

Thomas Wild

T 4:40 pm-7:00 pm

HEG 308

MBV

HUM

Cross-listed: German Studies; Philosophy; Political Studies This seminar will be centered on a detailed exploration of Hannah Arendt’s pivotal work The Human Condition. We will close-read Arendt’s book and discuss her re-thinking of the political, which is carried by reflections on phenomena and concepts such as action, speech, power, plurality, freedom, world, labor, work, the private and the public sphere. Activating one of the core tropes of Arendt’s book – “to think what we are doing” – we will also have a close look at how The Human Condition is crafted, i.e. at its poetics. Arendt’s deliberations were written in conversation with philosophers, political thinkers and poets ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine over Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Sophocles, Faulkner, and Rilke. As part of our class, we will research Arendt’s personal library, hosted at Bard College, and examine the actual books she used for The Human Condition, including her underlining and marginalia. Arendt responded to the experience of totalitarianism in a plurality of languages and traditions, which includes her own re-writing of virtually every text for the German publication. Our seminar will reflect on this unique feature of Arendt’s work in discussion with invited scholars who are currently preparing a critical edition of The Human Condition. Additional readings by Arendt will include essays from “Between Past and Future” (on tradition, authority, truth), “On Violence” as well as essays on writers such as Lessing, Kafka, and Walter Benjamin. – Attendance will be required, in addition to the regular class time, at four workshops in Hannah Arendt’s library over the course of the semester. ** This course is part of the “Difficult Questions” cluster of courses; students will be expected to attend parts of the Hannah Arendt Center Conference “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex, and Religion” on October 20-21. Class size: 18

91811

LIT 319

Literature & the Refugee

Nuruddin Farah

T 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLINLC 210

FLLC

Cross-listed: Human Rights This course will focus on the literature of people in flight, more specifically on the millions who move because they are threatened with persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or political opinion. When they are pushed out of or flee their native countries, they can be legally described as "refugees," but there are many others who leave their homes fearing death or detention and are turned into "exiles." Today nearly 40 million people are counted as refugees or 'internally displaced people.' Hannah Arendt described stateless people as “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.” This seminar will explore some of the factors underlying displacement and the responses -- especially literary -- to it. We will devote time to Arendt’s treatises about the refugee experience and read her essay on the Origins of Totalitarianism. We will also read Edward Said, in "Reflections on exile” - Said defines exile as "a condition of terminal loss" and describes the modern period as "orphaned and alienated, the age of anxiety and estrangement." In addition, we will above all focus on imaginative reflections on and accounts of displacement, flight, and (re)settlement. Among the texts will include Robin Gwynn's Huguenot Heritage, Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, Mahmoud Darwish’s Write Down, I am an Arab, Aleksander Hemon's Nowhere Man, Leila Abouleila's Minaret, Steinberg’s A Man of Hope, Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics and Mathias Enard’s Street of Thieves. In our attempt to pay particular attention to Africa’s boat people, we will read Patrick Kingsley’s article “On the Road in Agadez.” And time permitting, the films we will watch will include “Wanted: 18 Cows,” "Casablanca," Elias Kazan's "America, America," Ibtisam Mara’ana Menhuini’s film on Mahmoud Darwish, “Write Down, I am an Arab,” and Senegalese director Mouse Tore’s "The Pirogue." Class size: 18

92238

LIT 321

UNRULY BODIES: From Frankenstein

to X-Men

Natalie Prizel

M 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 307

D+J

ELIT

Bodies are biological and social facts that raise ethical and aesthetic questions. In this course we will consider how are our bodies socially regulated and constituted in ways that reflect prevailing values, ethics, and ideas of normalcy. What happens when an unruly body resists a regime of the normal? What are a body’s limitations? What makes a body extraordinary? And who gets to decide? In this course we will explore the meanings that attach to physical differences in the nineteenth century and beyond. Texts may include works by: Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Charles Lamb, Henry Mayhew, John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, and visual objects by William Hogarth, Théodore Géricault, Thomas Lawrence, John Everett Millais, and Ford Madox Brown. These nineteenth century texts and objects will be placed in conversation with contemporary ones by: Kazuo Ishiguro, Kehinde Wiley, Alice Neel, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Diane Arbus, and films and television including The Twilight Zone, the X-Men franchise, Game of Thrones, and America’s Next Top Model. Class size: 15

91809

LIT 327

Reconstructing Ruin

Peter L'Official

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HDR 106

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies We are often confronted with images of ruin: from coffee-table books about the decline of major American city centers to blockbusters that constantly re-imagine the destruction of our cities by natural and unnatural means. This course will examine the idea of ruin as manifested in literature, visual art, and other forms of media through a trans-historical and transnational lens. We will first consider the classical figure of the ruin; then, we will “un-build” such canonical conceptions by examining a diversity of texts in an attempt to discern what relationship our notions of ruin bear towards real examples of destruction and devastation in the built and natural environment. We will also pay particular attention to how these conceptions change over time, using each previous generation’s conception of ruin—whether urban, maritime, natural, or even supernatural—to understand the next. Readings will be organized thematically and by geographical or historical site: the postwar landscape; environments of natural disaster; the declining urban center; the post-apocalyptic city and hinterland. In this way, we will endeavor to make sense of our own present, and indeed, perhaps even our future. Readings will likely include texts by Cormac McCarthy, L.J. Davis, Don DeLillo, Ben Lerner, Rose Macaulay, Paule Marshall, Georg Simmel, Rebecca Solnit, W.G. Sebald, and Colson Whitehead, along with much visual material. Class size: 15

91810

LIT 329

Literature of Dissent

Marisa Libbon

T 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 304

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Medieval Studies; Theology In this course we’ll investigate the books, texts, and images that were produced, circulated, concealed, confiscated, banned—and sometimes burned along with their owners—during late medieval England’s widespread heretical movement. Calls for drastic changes to Catholic practice and belief in England began in the universities in the early 1400s, but by the end of the century had mutated and spread among social classes and throughout the country, coinciding with revolutions in printing technology, and eventually playing a role in Henry VIII’s break with Rome and establishment of the Church of England. But one person’s heretic is another’s reformer. Recent innovative scholarship has rebranded the movement as England’s “Premature Reformation” (relative to the later, more successful Protestant Reformation), and has sought to reexamine it from the reformer’s (or heretic’s) point-of-view. Moving from late medieval Catholic to early modern Protestant England and reading orthodox, heterodox, and heretical as a fluid spectrum rather than an absolute, our work will raise and engage questions about the ways in which institutionalized (and underground) religion harnesses the power of text and image; the role literature and the arts play in institutional reform and revolution; bookmaking, book hiding, and book burning in medieval and early modern England; the affiliation between Church and State; literacy and institutionalized religion; the blurry line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy; and the complex relationship between tangible texts and supposedly ineffable faith. Primary and secondary texts will include Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend; various lives of St. Thomas Becket; the Confession of Hawisia Moone of Loddon; Piers the Plowman’s Crede; John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; proclamations from Henry VIII on saints and their images; the Lantern of Light; Hudson’s Premature Reformation and Selections from English Wycliffite Writings; Aston’s Lollards and Reformers; Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution; and Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars. Class size: 15

91812

LIT 333

Directions IN ContempORARY Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

Contemporary fiction of the last several decades has been revolutionized by a number of literary writers whose work explores new directions in narrative form. In this course we will make close, comparative readings of novels and short stories by some of the most pioneering authors of the period, including David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Ondaatje, and others. Several writers who are a vital part of this new tradition will visit class to discuss their work with students and give a reading from a recent book. Class size: 15

91813

LIT 334

Postfantasy, Fabulism AND THE

New GothiC

Bradford Morrow

M 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

In recent decades the boundaries between literary fiction and genres such as gothic, fantasy, noir, and horror have become increasingly blurred, with many contemporary masters reworking and revitalizing OLD tropes. In this course we will examine how writers such as Robert Coover, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Elizabeth Hand, Karen Russell, Peter Straub, John Crowley, have taken traditional fantasy and gothic literature in innovative directions. Several writers will visit class to discuss their work with students. Class size: 15

91817

LIT 3522

The Empire Writes Back

Derek Furr

Th 6:00 pm-8:20 pm

RKC 101

D+J

ELIT

In this course, we will explore how major works in the English literary tradition have inspired and troubled 20^th century writers outside of England, and how these writers adapted, revised or deconstructed them. We will examine how the expatriate writer and the writer under colonialism developed a poetics of place that was at once imaginary and true to “home.” While we will focus on how later works relate to earlier, we will also look for connections between a work and its socio-historical context. Three essential questions will provide points of departure for our explorations:

1. How have canonical English texts and traditions factored into the writing and thinking of 20^th century Anglophone and expatriate writers?

2. What is the relationship among language, power, and literary forms?

3. How does place—real and idealized—shape the style and aesthetic of a writer?

We will read works by such authors as Kamau Brathwaite, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Daniel Defoe, Gayatri Spivak, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. Assignments will include three papers that respond to the essential questions and, for MAT students, an annotated bibliography of critical sources and a review of curriculum materials. Class size: 18

91814

LIT 389

Different Voices, DiffERENT Views

Justus Rosenberg

T 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 307

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Global and Int’l Studies 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 include 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. Class size: 15

91819

LIT 405

Senior Colloquium IN Literature

Cole Heinowitz

M 4:40 pm-6:00 pm

OLIN 205

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 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

Courses cross-listed in Literature:

91758

FREN 354

Literature of Private Life

Marina van Zuylen

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLINLC 208

D+J

FLLC

DIFF