CRN

 13210

Distribution

 B/F

Course No.

 LIT 123

Title

First Poetry Workshop

Professor

 Robert Kelly

Schedule

 Mon Wed 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 101
This workshop is for students who strongly desire to experiment with making their own writing a means of learning, both about literature and poetry, and about the discipline of making works of art. Stress is on growth: in the student's own work, and in the individual's awareness of what sorts of activities, rhythms, and tellings are possible in poetry, and how poets go about learning from their own work. The central work of the course is the student's own writing, along with the articulation, both private and shared, of response to it. Readings will be undertaken in contemporary and traditional poets, according to the needs of the group, toward the development of familiarity with poetic form, poetic movement, and poetic energy. Attendance at various evening poetry readings and lectures is required. Admission will be by portfolio; candidates must submit samples of their work before registration, with optional cover letter, to Prof. Kelly via campus mail by noon on Tuesday, December 3rd.

CRN

 13182

Distribution

 A

Course No.

 LIT / THEO 201

Title

Working Theologies: Biblical Literatures

Professor

 Nancy Leonard / Bruce Chilton

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 203
Meaning emerges from the Bible, as from many texts, along two principal axes. This text generates meanings, and understanding that involves seeing how the myths, legends, histories, poems, songs, and other genres incorporated within the Bible were produced. But the text also incites meanings, as these same kinds of literature have interacted with readers far outside the horizon of the intended audience. This active intertextuality is a form of "working theologies" in which representation, language, and the boundaries of the literary are crucially concerned. Poetry, fiction, and drama across a range of periods will appear in sustained engagement with classic passages from the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

CRN

 13629

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 LIT / CHI 204

Title

Classical Chinese Fiction

Professor

 Bruce Knickerbocker

Schedule

 Wed Fr 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 307 .

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

As an introduction to the outlines of Chinese literature from the beginnings to the nineteenth century, this course aims to provide insights into the humanistic Chinese tradition. We will work through masterpieces of prose and poetry in a roughly chronological manner. These include lyrical masterworks in the various poetic forms, fiction from the early strange and supernatural Daoist-inspired tales to the adventurous and sensual Ming and Qing novels, as well as exemplary essays, vivid historical writings, and profound philosophical pieces. Impossible though it may be to cover all traditional Chinese literature in one semester, you will leave the course with a sense of the richness and the wonder of the literature, a basic blueprint of China's literary development, and hopefully an interest in roaming through it further. Conducted in English.

CRN

 13213

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2012

Title

The Letter

Professor

 Catherine Liu

Schedule

 Tu Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 304

Cross-listed: French Studies

This course explores the epistolarity as a literary idea, and the epistolary novel as a literary form. Based upon a certain conception of temporality and long distance communication, the novel of letters was also attributed feminine qualities. Letters will be studied as both a medium and a literary form. We will read from The Portugese Letters, Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, Rousseau's Julie, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. We will consider the problems raised by the form, its demise and the problems that it poses today for literary theory and literary history. The course will conclude with a study of the debate between Lacan and Derrida on the status of the letter in Edgar Allan Poe's Purloined Letter. Finally, we must pose the questions raised by letters and correspondence in contemporary every day life, where the ubiquity of email has supplemented and in some cases replaced the operations of the postal system.

CRN

 13514

Distribution

 B/D

Course No.

 LIT / RUS 211

Title

Human Love, Divine Love in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

Professor

 Lee Johnson

Schedule

 Tu Th 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm LC 115
A study of one of the central literary preoccupations throughout Russia's "Golden Age": the individual in relation to community and to God. Through close textual analysis, supplemented by film and reference to secondary reading material, the course will explore themes of isolation, transcendence, and loss, and the social or metaphysical yearning to bridge the gap between self and other, and between self and God (the two relationships frequently being interconnected). Attention will also be paid to the manner in which these notions of self are reflected on the level of national identity, in terms of Russia's struggle to define itself vis-à-vis Western Europe, as well as the perceived unique historical role of the Russian Orthodox Church. Readings include works by Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and V. Arseniev. Readings and discussion in English.

CRN

 13382

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2138

Title

Women and Culture

Professor

 Fiona Wilson

Schedule

 Tu Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 303

Cross-listed: Gender Studies

Current feminist criticism rejects the notion that any single narrative can describe female identity. Instead, emphasis is placed on diversity of standpoint - on the effects of cultural and racial experience, of age, class, gender, and of sexual orientation, on how writers write about (and readers read about) women. This class seeks to introduce students to a selection of narratives about femininity. Students are invited to interrogate these narratives for themselves using such fundamental critical tools as literary research and close reading. Works by Milton, Bronte, Dickinson, Freud, Woolf, Stein, and Morrison, among others.

CRN

 13593

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2145

Title

Women on the Edge

Professor

 Mary Caponegro

Schedule

 Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 205
A study of numerous experimental women authors and their predecesors, including Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Sarraute, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, Rikki Ducornet, Diane Williams, Patricia Eakins, and others, along with critical texts such as Breaking the Sequence, Women's Experimental Fiction.

CRN

 13164

Distribution

 A/C

Course No.

 LIT 218

Title

Free Speech

Professor

 Thomas Keenan

Schedule

 Mon Wed 3:00 pm -4:20 pm OLIN 203
An introduction to the intersections between literature and human rights, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, Salman Rushdie, hate speech and censorship on the Internet. The course will examine the ways in which rights, language, and public space have been linked together in ideas about democracy. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do with literature. Why have poetry and fiction always been such privileged examples of protected speech? What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? What is the special role of language, which belongs to no one and can be appropriated by anyone, in the experience of human rights and democracy? These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, including case studies (Sade, Madame Bovary, The Satanic Verses, the Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslav conflict) and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Butler, Salecl, Spivak).

CRN

 13380

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 221

Title

Writers' Workshop: Fiction

Professor

 Peter Sourian

Schedule

 Tu 10:30 am - 12:50 pm ASP 302
Practice in imaginative writing. Students will present their own work for group response, analysis, and evaluation. Also reading of selected writers. Permission of the instructor is required. Candidates must submit samples of their work before registration, with optional cover letter, via campus mail to Prof. Sourian by noon on Tuesday, December 3rd.

CRN

 13381

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 223

Title

Workshop in Cultural Reportage

Professor

 Peter Sourian

Schedule

 Tu 4:00 pm - 6:20 pm OLIN 101
For the self-motivated student interested in actively developing journalistic skills relating to cultural reportage, particularly criticism. The course stresses regular practice in writing reviews of plays, concerts, films, and television. Work is submitted for group response and evaluation. College productions may be used as resource events. Readings from Shaw's criticism, Cyril Connolly's reviews, Orwell's essays, Agee on film, Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials, Susan Sontag, and contemporary working critics. Enrollment limited, but not restricted to majors.

CRN

 13073

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2331

Title

Classic American Gothic

Professor

 Donna Grover

Schedule

 Wed Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm ASP 302
The gothic novel is considered to be the stronghold of ghost stories, family curses and heroines in distress. Its use of melodrama and the macabre often disguise the psychological, sexual, and emotional issues that are in fact more horrifying than the contents of a haunted house. The gothic novel in America has often confronted topics pertinent to American identity and history. In this course we will examine how many American authors used the gothic genre to actually engage with social, political and cultural concerns. We will read novels and short stories that span the 19th and 20th century by authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson and James Baldwin.

 

 

 

 

 

CRN

 13148

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 240

Title

Satire

Professor

 Terence Dewsnap

Schedule

 Mon Th 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 310
This course explores formal and informal satire from ancient to contemporary times, with special attention to the works of Pope and Swift. Students have the opportunity to experiment with different forms of satire.

CRN

 13378

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 249

Title

Arthurian Romance

Professor

 Karen Sullivan

Schedule

 Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm ASP 302

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies

A study of the variety of concerns, meanings, and pleasures in medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights. Readings in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot, Beroul and Thomas's Romance of Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among other works.

CRN

 13348

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2502

Title

Shakespearean Tragedy

Professor

 Mark Lambert

Schedule

 Mon Wed 10:00 am - 11:20 am OLIN 202
Consideration of the idea of tragedy as it has been understood in different times and places, and a semester's experience of Shakespeare's tragic drama, one of the supreme achievements of Western art. The plays to be read are: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. Open to all.

CRN

 13377

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 264

Title

The Nineteenth-Century Continental Novel

Professor

 Justus Rosenberg

Schedule

 Mon Wed 1:30 pm - 2:50 pm OLIN 203

Cross-listed: Russian, French and German Studies

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with representative examples of novels by distinguished French, Russian, German and Central European authors. Their works are analyzed for style, themes, ideological commitment, and social and political setting. Taken together they should provide an accurate account of the major artistic, philosophical and intellectual trends and developments on the Continent during the 19th century. Readings include Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Balzac's Cousine Bette, Hamsun's Hunger, T. Mann's Buddenbrooks.

CRN

 13272

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 2650

Title

Irish Fiction

Professor

 Benjamin La Farge

Schedule

 Mon Wed 1:30 pm -2:50 pm OLIN 309

Cross-listed: Irish & Celtic Studies

Irish fiction of the modern period - the stories, novels, and plays of the past 300-years - has been divided between two traditions: the Anglo-Irish tradition of writers who were English by descent but deeply identified with Ireland; and the Catholic tradition of modern Ireland. From the first we will read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, and Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Grey, together with plays by J. M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregoy and additional fiction by Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. From the second, we will read Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, and additional fiction by Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, and Paddy Doyle, among many others. As background we will also read a brief history of Ireland during this period.

CRN

 13563

Distribution

 B/C

Course No.

 RUS / LIT 2702

Title

Russia on the Opera Stage

Professor

 Marina Kostalevsky

Schedule

 Tu 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm LC 206

Th 10:00 am - 12:30 pm HDRANX 106

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

Modern Russian culture, although it represents an inseparable part of European culture, has a distinctly original character, initially shaped by the Orthodox Christian tradition passed on from Byzantium. This tradition eventually came into contact and conflict with the flow of West European ideas. The monumental achievements of European civilization were absorbed and confronted, transformed and blended with the unique Russian experience. The history of Russian music predictably echoed that path. The early development of Russian music benefited from appropriation of the Byzantine unaccompanied choral singing and at the same time suffered from the absence of instrumental music. By comparison, the Western European music combined the use of vocal and instrumental faculties and resulted in the creation of numerous forms of musical art, including the most elaborate one: opera. The flourishing of this genre in Europe consequently had direct impact on the progress of musical life in Russia; during the nineteenth century, opera became the main agent for (using Richard Taruskin's apt words ) "defining Russia musically." The course will offer the students an opportunity to explore Russian culture through the medium of Russian opera. A considerable part of the discussions will be dedicated to the anxieties of Italian influence (including Verdi's) on Russian composers. The material will include selected literary texts, musical recordings, and opera performances on video. This course is one of the first being offered under the auspices of the Bard-Smolny Virtual Campus Project. Students will participate in experimenting with using innovative technologies, including live videoconferencing, to establish direct exchange between students at Bard and students taking the same course in parallel at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia. Also, the students will have a chance to attend a live performance of Sergei Prokofiev's "War and Peace" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. No knowledge of Russian or training in music is required. Conducted in English.

CRN

 13376

Distribution

 B

Course No.

 LIT 276B

Title

Chosen Voices: Major Jewish Authors

Professor

 Elizabeth Frank

Schedule

 Wed 7:00 pm - 8:20 pm OLIN 310

Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 310

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies

Related Interest: MES

The course surveys the contribution of European and North American Jewish writing to twentieth-century literature. We will examine various works by Jewish writers and discuss whatever questions come up, most particularly questions about Jewish identity and stereotypes, mythology, folk wisdom, humor, history, culture, and relation to language. Jewish participation in literary modernism will be explored as well. Authors include Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley.