92136

LIT 3019

Nabokov’s shorts: the art of Conclusive Writing

Olga Voronina

T Th 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian This course will focus on Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories as well as his memoir Conclusive Evidence and the novel Pnin, both of which first appeared in story-length installments in The New Yorker. We will read “Details of a Sunset,” “Christmas,” “A Guide to Berlin,” “A Nursery Tale,” “The Visit to the Museum,” “The Circle,” “Spring in Fialta,” “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” “Ultima Thule,” “Solus Rex,” “Signs and Symbols,” and “The Vane Sisters.” Keeping our eyes open for the elusive, but meaningful, textual details and discussing the writer’s narrative strategies, we will also trace the metaphysical streak that runs through the entire Nabokov oeuvre. A discussion of all matters editorial will be our priority. We will study Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine White and William Maxwell, his editors at The New Yorker, and look at the drafts of his stories, now part of the Berg Collection in the NYPL. Our endeavor to understand the Nabokovian process of composition and revision will go hand-in-hand with the work on our own writing. This course is a literature junior seminar. The Junior Seminars in criticism are intended especially for moderated Junior Literature majors. The seminars will introduce students to current thinking in the field, emphasizing how particular methods and ideas can be employed in linking literary texts to their contexts. Intended too is a deep exploration of writing about literature at some length, in the form of a 20-25 page paper, developed over the course of most of the semester. Class size: 15

92142

LIT 3033

Toward (A) Moral Fiction

Mary Caponegro

T 4:40 pm-7:00 pm

OLIN 101

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Written Arts The novels in this course each grapple with ethical issues through fictive means. In navigating them, we will try to assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas—or eschew morality altogether. We will also attend to craft, investigating how these author’s concerns are furthered by formal considerations. Students will read one novel per week, occasionally supplemented by theoretical texts. Analytical writing will be the primary mode of response, but a creative option will be given for students to find their own fictive path to a social, ethical or political issue. The syllabus will draw from the following texts: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, Michel Tournier’s The Ogre, Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Rikki Docornet’s Netsuke, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Michael Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Dinaw Mengestu’s All of our Names, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Class size: 15

92173

LIT 3036

Poetic Lineages

Cole Heinowitz

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Written Arts 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, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Clark Coolidge, and J.H. Prynne. This course is a literature junior seminar. The Junior Seminars in criticism are intended especially for moderated Junior Literature majors. The seminars will introduce students to current thinking in the field, emphasizing how particular methods and ideas can be employed in linking literary texts to their contexts. Intended too is a deep exploration of writing about literature at some length, in the form of a 20-25 page paper, developed over the course of most of the semester. Class size: 15

92147

LIT 314

Women's Bodies / Women's Voices: Victorian to Modern

Natalie Prizel

M 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 301

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Victorian Studies Explaining his own poetic vetriloquizing of Sappho, Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote, “It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her.” This course will interrogate what it meant to write in a woman’s voice, to write of a woman’s body, and to work as an embodied female artist in the years between approximately 1840 and 1930 in Britain. The course will include explorations of women’s writing across genres, representations of and by women in the poetry, fiction, and visual art of the period, and a rigorous interrogation and destabilization of the category of “woman” and the “female body” as historical and literary figures. Using methodologies drawn from feminist studies, queer studies, and disability studies, this course will ask the fundamental question: how or what does the word “woman” mean across the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries? How might the category be useful or not for evaluating the aesthetic and ethical positions of texts, verbal and visual? And how are bodies relevant in thinking through these questions? Texts might include works by: Charlotte and Emily Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Harriet Martineau, Coventry Patmore, Robert Browning, the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticist painters, photographers, and poets, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, William Butler Yeats, and Radclyffe Hall. This course is a literature junior seminar. The Junior Seminars in criticism are intended especially for moderated Junior Literature majors. The seminars will introduce students to current thinking in the field, emphasizing how particular methods and ideas can be employed in linking literary texts to their contexts. Intended too is a deep exploration of writing about literature at some length, in the form of a 20-25 page paper, developed over the course of most of the semester. Class size: 15

92137

LIT 315

Proust:In Search of Lost Time

Eric Trudel

T Th 3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLINLC 208

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

92153

LIT 3212

Writing Africa

Nuruddin Farah

T 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Human Rights Over the years, Africa has served as the background setting for a variety of British and American authors, who perceive the continent as a place with “no intellectual life” as V.S. Naipaul put it. Why is it, we’ll ask, that in these works, grand ideas are raised and discussed with great intensity, when the African is ‘virtually absent,’ because the author denies him/her the power of speech, or is physically present but not wholly as a full human being equal to the others? We will, along the way, explore topics such as colonialism, racism, and civilization, inquire into the construction of the African in the consciousness of these authors, and ask what ‘contribution’ if any has the continent made towards the ‘manufacture’ of these texts by Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, V.S. Naipaul, William Boyd, Paul Theroux, and Norman Rush. Class size: 12

92149

LIT 333

InNovative Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

In this course students will have the unique opportunity to meet and interact with several leading contemporary writers who will join us in class to discuss their work, answer questions about the art of fiction, and then give a public reading from a recent book. We will also devote much time to close readings of key novels and short story collections by innovative fiction writers of the past couple of generations, with an eye toward exploring the great diversity of voices and styles employed in these narratives as well as the cultural issues they chronicle. Particular emphasis will be placed on reading and analyzing books by some of fiction’s most pioneering practitioners, including David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Jamaica Kincaid, and others whose work has revitalized and revolutionized our understanding of narrative forms. Class size: 15

92148

LIT 339

Writing After Modernism: quixote, the boom and postmodern play

Mark Danner

W 1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 308

ELIT

How to account for the startling rise of an artistic movement that seizes on the innovations of modernist giants Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf and pushes them further in untrammeled and boldly vertiginous directions? The Boom dominated Latin American letters for scarcely twenty years -- decades in which Latin America found itself in the full glare of the Cold War struggle for influence -- and yet it produced a score of masterpieces and its reverberations in world literature are still being felt. In this seminar we will trace some of the Boom's antecedents, particularly in Miguel Cervantes' woeful knight and Jorge Luis Borges' intricate fictional mazes; examine its classics, from Carpentier, Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa; and delve into the work of some of its irrepressible second generation -- seeking throughout to discover what might account for this brief efflorescence of bold literary experimentation. Conducted in English. This course is part of the World Literature offering. Class size: 18

92086

LIT 355

American Realisms

Jaime Alves

Th 6:00 pm-8:20 pm

HEG 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies 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

92138

LIT 3640

Memorable 19th Century Novels

Justus Rosenberg

Th 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: French Studies; Russian In this course we isolate through close critical reading, stylistic, thematic, ideological and other possible factors that make the following novels have become part of the literary canon: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, Effie Briest by Theodor Fontane, and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Prior knowledge of European 19th century general history is recommended but not required. This course is part of the World Literature offering. Class size: 15

92150

LIT 389

Different Voices / Different Views

Justus Rosenberg

T 10:10 am-12:30 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Global & International 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

92151

LIT 405

Senior Colloquium: Literature

Rebecca Heinowitz

M 4:40 pm-6:00 pm

OLINLC 115

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: 40

Cross-listed courses: