CRN	13042
Course No.	FSEM II NC
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Machiavelli's The Prince
Professor	Nina Cannizzaro
Schedule	Mon Wed 4:30 pm -5:50 pm OLIN 308

A close reading of the Renaissance treatise whose explicit and renowned premise (the ends justify the means) marked a watershed in the history of Western thought. Yet what constitutes the nature of the ethical? Is there such a thing as an absolute model of behavior? Are there no occasions in which justice can be relative? Did Machiavelli believe what he wrote? This seminar will focus on the pivotal elements in the author's literary formation and the historical context in which the monumental work was produced (such as the widespread fashion among Renaissance contemporaries to write "how-to" manuals), and further examine the response to Machiavellian ethics throughout the ages and within different disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, etc.). Weekly papers will reassess historical and contemporary events and basic human interactions according to the tenets of Machiavellian logic. Students with experience in Italian language or literature (esp. Dante's Inferno), or a desire to study them in future are encouraged.

CRN	13343
Course No.	FSEM II GC
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Don Quijote and Cultural Difference
Professor	Gabriela Carrion
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 304

This course examines the role of difference in Miguel de Cervantes' masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. In this "first modern novel" conflict erupts when an old man-Don Quijote-pronounces himself a knight to succor those who are unable to protect themselves. He takes up this mission when knighthood has long ceased to be a social reality in sixteenth-century Spain. Difference and conformity thus become critical issues at every level of this novel. What are the ideological forces that compel conformity in Don Quijote? How are language and violence posited as instruments of change? Why are these questions relevant to modern-day readers? This course considers various critical approaches through a close reading of Don Quijote. Conducted in English.

CRN	13469
Course No.	FSEM II MC1
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Montaigne's Essays
Professor	Mark Cohen
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 307

Montaigne's Essays represent one man's assessment of himself and his times at the end of the sixteenth century. The essay-Montaigne was the first to use this title for his work-was a piece of short prose, shorn of rhetorical flourish or systematic philosophical armature, in which common opinions and higher learning on all manner of subjects were subjected to the "trial" ('assay') of the author's individual judgment. The topics covered by Montaigne are traditionally "noble" ones, ranging from philosophy, war, and religion to literature and civilized discourse. What is different about the Essays is that Montaigne claims no authority for his views on these matters, while persistently weaving his own personal habits, ailments and daily affairs into the discussion as if they were of equal importance.

CRN	13502
Course No.	FSEM II MC2
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Montaigne's Essays
Professor	Mark Cohen
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 307

See description above.

CRN	13053
Course No.	FSEM II MD
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Professor	Melissa Demian
Schedule	Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm HEG 300

Middlemarch is a book about order and chaos, the divine and the temporal, and the meaning of the good life at a historical juncture when Western society appeared to be at risk of losing its moral compass. The premise of this class is that we will take seriously the subtitle given by George Eliot to her 1872 magnum opus. That is, we will read the book under the assumption that, whatever other intentions she had for it, Eliot meant for Middlemarch to be taken as a more or less accurate portrayal of social relationships in a small English market town in the early nineteenth century. Eliot was acutely aware of the religious, scientific and aesthetic paradigm shifts being experienced by British society during her lifetime, and Middlemarch represents a distillation of how she anticipated these shifts would affect relationships on every scale imaginable: from the place of a woman who wishes to be a force for good in her immediate social world, to the place of a human being in the physical and cosmological world itself. To supplement our consideration of Middlemarch we will also read Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, selections from Eliot's translation of The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach, and shorter critical texts.

CRN	13431
Course No.	FSEM II PD
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy
Professor	Paula Droege
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 210

The focal text for the course will be Descartes' Meditations. We will develop a deeper appreciation of this slim volume through an examination of related work by Descartes, such as the Discourse on Method and the Principles of Philosophy. More recent work will provide a sense of Descartes' positive and negative contribution to debates in philosophy of mind, epistemology and feminist theory.

CRN	13507
Course No.	FSEM II CG
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Mahler's World and the World of his Third Symphony
Professor	Christopher Gibbs
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm -2:50 pm BDH

"My symphony will be unlike anything the world has ever heard! All of nature speaks in it, telling deep secrets that one might guess only in a dream!" And true to his conception, Mahler's Third Symphony is one of the most ambitious compositions in the history of music, a monumental work-the longest symphony ever written-that attempts to provide a musical representation of the natural world and to explore enduring philosophical questions. (One of the movements is a setting of words by Friedrich Nietzsche.) This course will explore the fascinating musical, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siecle Vienna in which Mahler was educated and lived for most of his professional life. We will consider the musical issues this piece raises concerning the genre of the symphony, the interrelations between music, words, and ideas, and problems of musical performance. Taking a broader view as well, we will look at Mahler's relationship to the artistic, intellectual, and political trends of his time. (Mahler's mention of dreams is telling: he consulted with Sigmund Freud when his marriage to the beautiful Alma Schindler was in trouble.) This course is given as a complement to the Bard Music Festival, which focused this year on Mahler, and in conjunction with a performance in April of the Third Symphony that will open the new Fisher Performing Arts Center at Bard, featuring the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. Students will attend rehearsals and a performance of the symphony and meet with performers involved with this special event. The ability to read music or play an instrument is not necessary to take this course-all interested students are welcome.

CRN	13042
Course No.	FSEM II HG
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Professor	Helena Gibbs
Schedule	Tue Thurs 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm Aspinwall 302

Description to follow as soon as it is available.

CRN	13508
Course No.	FSEM II DFG
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Professor	Donna Grover
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:00 am - 11:20 am ASP 302

"So you're the little lady who started the war," Abraham Lincoln allegedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Despite its controversy and often poor reviews (even Charles Dickens attacked it for being overly sentimental) in the 19^th century it sold more copies than the Bible and has never gone out of print. In our close reading of this text we will examine Stowe's use of sentimentality and romance within her highly politicized text. We will discuss and analyze how the archetypes of race and gender that Stowe created managed to become fixtures within American culture. In our discussion of the text we cannot ignore the broad scope of literary criticism that this novel has generated from the mid-nineteenth century until now.

CRN	13340
Course No.	FSEM II FK
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Sympathy for the Devil? -- Goethe's Faust
Professor	Franz Kempf
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118

An intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of this striving provides the basis for our analysis of the play's central themes, individuality, knowledge and transcendence, in regard to their meaning in Goethe's time and their relevance for our time. To gain a fuller appreciation of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, we will also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (e.g. Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele, Friendrich W. Murnau's film Faust).

CRN	13383
Course No.	FSEM II PK
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals
Professor	Peter Krapp
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 308

Friedrich W. Nietzsche was a philosopher who wanted to destroy the possibility of philosophy. In Genealogy of Morals, he demonstrates that Christianity's will to power was masked as morality. In order to launch an adequate critique of such hypocrisy, Nietzsche proposes nothing less than the overturning of all value. His controversial legacy comprises groundbreaking contributions to the way we understand power, ethics, history, pedagogy and autobiography. We will try to understand this figure in the context of the radical upheavals in nineteenth-century Europe. This course will focus on close readings from both Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo.

CRN	13215
Course No.	FSEM II BLF
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Tolstoy's War and Peace
Professor	Benjamin La Farge
Schedule	Tu Th 8:30 am -9:50 am OLIN 309

Among the world's greatest novels, Tolstoy's War and Peace is an unparalleled achievement, as it cannot be reduced to a single genre. It is not a history, although its focus is historical. It is not an epic, though epic in scope; nor is it like any other novel previously written, although its method and its interest in life are novelistic. Yet its importance as a philosophic treatise on the question of chance and agency in warfare and on the interdependence of the public and the private in political affairs is indisputable. In demonstrating the role of the "will of the people" as an historical force, it anticipates later developments in Russian and world history. Perhaps the ultimate source of its power is that it reflects Tolstoy's inner struggle between a rational, positivistic view of history and a spiritual, nationalistic view of Russia, but it is the famous characters themselves, ranging from Pierre, Andrew, and Natasha to General Kutuzov and Napoleon, who give this struggle a larger dimension and make it so memorable. We will also read a number of Tolstoy's masterful short stories. Frequent short papers.

CRN	13390
Course No.	FSEM II PL
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species.
Professor	Peter Linebaugh
Schedule	Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 303

In this course we give a close reading to the classic book of evolutionary theory and investigation. We shall see it as a summary of preceding studies in English of geology and natural history. We shall see it as a major contribution to a broader moment of human thought in mid-19th century Europe. We shall study its influences, some of which have been malignant, such as the social Darwinism that led to genetic experiments on human beings, and some of which are benign, such as the gradualist approach to biological and social change. The goal is to understand the work very broadly as an achievement of human thought and research rather than as a foundation text of particular sciences. Finally, we shall note contributions from contemporary Darwinians like Stephen Jay Gould or Barbara Kingsolver, as well as the persistence of anti-evolutionist thinking.

CRN	13474
Course No.	FSEM II DM
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Leonardo's Last Supper
Professor	Diana Minsky
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 301

This seminar will situate Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper both within the visual tradition of Last Suppers and within the central artistic concerns of the Renaissance (scientific perspective, narrative composition, and Christian iconography). Using Leo Steinberg's Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper as the central text, this seminar will also address how subsequent generations have responded to this work in paint and in print. The class will follow Steinberg's lead and explore the possibility of multiple meanings within one work of art.

CRN	13389
Course No.	FSEM II PO
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Political Man: Lipset and the Social Bases of Politics
Professor	Pierre Ostiguy
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 303

S. M. Lipset's Political Man is a foundational book for students interested in the study of society and politics. Translated into fifteen languages and reedited countless times, the book has shaped our thinking on a broad range of topics. Yet, it is also accessibly written. Political Man attempts to answer several key questions. 1) Is there a relationship between economic development and democracy? As societies "develop" economically, do they become more democratic? Do transitions to mass democracy tend to be socially smooth or violent? 2) What is political legitimacy? We look at differences between the effectiveness of a system and its legitimacy. 3) Lipset has introduced the controversial thesis that the culture of the working class is more authoritarian than that of the middle class. Is this true? 4) In politics, we talk of liberals and conservatives, or of left, center, and right. What do these categories mean and, more importantly, is there any relationship between the political beliefs we hold and social class?

CRN	13497
Course No.	FSEM II JP
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Professor	John Pruitt
Schedule	Mon Th 3:00 pm -4:20 pm PRE 128

The seminar will devote itself primarily to a long and difficult, yet ground-breaking and utterly influential text, arguably one of the most significant works of modern thought, Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, published significantly enough in 1899, at the very dawn of the last century. Its theoretical argument, the urtext of the psychoanalytic movement, contains a then radically new and probing model for mental and emotional processes. Towards the end of the semester, we will turn to a couple of his late essays, Civilizations and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle in order to frame Freud's central contribution more philosophically. We may touch briefly on some contemporary critiques to gain further perspective. Additionally, since Freud had a deep and lasting influence on modern artists, we will look at a few films -- those by Luis Bunuel, Buster Keaton, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren and David Lynch -- whose radical non-linear structure is influenced by Freud's notion of "dreamwork."

CRN	13628
Course No.	FSEM II JR2
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Sappho and the Aesthetics of the Fragment
Professor	Joan Retallack
Schedule	Mon 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 101 Wed 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 107

This seminar will be centered on the complete extant works of the Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos (circa 600 B.C.E.). Using multiple translations of the texts (numbering, by various counts, from 130 to 160), selected references to Sappho from Latin and Greek prose and poetry, and recordings spoken in Greek, we will try to gain a lively sense of her work and our relation to it. This course requires no knowledge of Greek or Latin. We will, alongside our study of the poetics of the work, consider the role of the feminine in Ancient Greece. All this is, of course, part of our 21^st century legacy as readers and writers. How do we read/use these fragments in our contemporary moment? What do they make known to us? Do they give us access, across almost three millennia, to the female desire of a real woman-lesbian poet-or to an ultimately impenetrable myth that gives every era the job of remaking its meaning? The work of formulating answers to these questions will take us into an examination of the place of Sappho's texts within the complex historical Masculine-Feminine agon known as Western culture. (Is M-F perhaps the Western Yin-Yang?) In addition to Sappho's work, there will be critical and historical readings and selections from modern and contemporary poetry that has been called Sapphic. (This course requires no knowledge of Greek or Latin.)

CRN	13499
Course No.	FSEM II SR1
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Gerard.
Professor	Susan Rogers
Schedule	Tu Th 3:00 pm -4:20 pm LC 120

This masterpiece of travel/expeditionary writing is the account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1910 doomed quest for the South Pole. In March 1912, two months after reaching the South Pole, he froze to death in a tent just eleven miles from a depot of food and heating oil. Cherry-Gerard's version of this heroic expedition is a literary feat, containing descriptive narrative, journal entries, and poetry. Cherry-Gerard describes men hauling hundreds of pounds of gear through unrelieved darkness, with temperatures reaching 50, 60, 70 degrees below zero--all with humanity and even humor. In this course we will investigate notions of adventure, geography (and uncharted lands), while also exploring the historical, cultural and political climate that encourages such adventure. We will read other adventure narratives, including Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River (1875), Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, Mark Twain's Roughing It, and two accounts of ascents of Annapurna.

CRN	13500
Course No.	FSEM II SR2
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Gerard.
Professor	Susan Rogers
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118

See description above.

CRN	13082
Course No.	FSEM II JR
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Primo Levi: If This is Man and The Drowned and the Saved
Professor	Justus Rosenberg
Schedule	Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 305

A close reading of an autobiography and a sober, literary meditation on the holocaust by an Italian-Jewish poet, novelist, scientist, survivor of a Nazi extermination camp. These works will inevitably lead to an examination of those ideologies in Europe between 1914-1945 that resulted in two World Wars and one of the most cruel and deliberated genocides in man's history, caused by ideas still reverberating today and exonerated by revisionist historians.

CRN	13001
Course No.	FSEM II GS
Title	First-Year Seminar II: The Brothers Karamazov
Professor	Gennady Shkliarevsky
Schedule	Mon Wed 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 309

The great Russian writer Fedor Dostoyevsky wrote most of his great novels during two very dynamic decades--from approximately 1858, when Dostoyevsky was allowed to return from exile to European Russia, to 1881, the year of his death. The dramatic transformations that occurred during that period affected all spheres of Russian life. Among other things, they created a new sense of autonomy and agency that was the source of profound anxiety in the Russian society, and particularly among its educated elite. Dostoyevsky's novels wonderfully capture this anxiety as they try to grapple with the loss of certitude, ambivalence, and ambiguity generated by this new sense of autonomy and agency. The seminar will focus on what is widely believed to be the greatest of Dostoyevsky's novels, The Brothers Karamazov. The author uses the story of a patricide that takes place in provincial Russia to bring up the "accursed questions" of human freedom and responsibility. In addition to a very close reading of the novel itself and some short stories by Dostoyevsky, students will read supplementary texts that will deal with the life of the great writer and the period in which he lived and worked.

CRN	13003
Course No.	FSEM II AS
Title	First-Year Seminar II: A Voyage to the Moon
Professor	Alice Stroup
Schedule	Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 308

The Other World, or States and Empires of the Moon, written by poet-philosopher Cyrano de Bergerac and published only after his death, is an early work of science fiction. In it, Cyrano uses science and philosophy to satirize politics, religion, and social convention. The inspiration for this dangerous book came partly from ancient writers like Aristophanes, Lucretius, Cicero, and Lucian, and also from Cyrano's seventeenth-century contemporaries, especially Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes. To understand Cyrano's controversial novel, we will analyze the text, read ancient and modern authors whom he admired, and weigh competing interpretations of the author and his work; we will also examine other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operatic and literary treatments of the space travel.

CRN	13212
Course No.	FSEM II ET
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Professor	Eric Trudel
Schedule	Tu Th 1:30 pm -2:50 pm LC 120

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 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 entirely to the close reading of selections including Swann's Way and Time Regained, 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. We will watch Raoul Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé. The course will be taught in translation but students able to read the original French are encouraged to do so.

CRN	13434
Course No.	FSEM II FW
Title	First-Year Seminar II: Don Juan
Professor	Fiona Wilson
Schedule	Tu Fr 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 203

When the first cantos of Byron's Don Juan were published in 1819, they were greeted as blasphemous, outrageous--and utterly fascinating. More recently, readers of this sprawling, tragi-comic poem have characterized it as an epic of modern life. This class will explore the writing, reception, and influence of Don Juan in relation to the rich cross-cultural variety of source materials that fed its creation. Among other issues, we will be considering: Byron's life; the history and politics of post-Waterloo Europe; classical definitions of satire and the mock-heroic; Augustan Poetic precedents; literary competition; gender construction; Regency Orientalism; and the development of the Don Juan legend, as exemplified in opera, Italian commedia dell arte, and English pantomime. With works by Molina, Moliere, Mozart, Pope, Plato, Goethe, Sade, Butler, de Man, and others.