19205

19205

LIT 3012 Wittgenstein's Lion: The

Question of the Animal

Nancy Leonard

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

HUM

Cross-listed: Philosophy Toward the end of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes a remark that could serve to render what puzzles the writers of much modern and contemporary philosophy: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” The comment remains puzzling, but the question of the animal—the topic of this course—has fascinated philosophers and other writers. The poet and philosopher Vicki Hearne addressed the abyss implicit in the man/animal boundary: “The human mind is nervous without its writing, feels emptiness without writing….So when we imagine the inner or outer life of a creature without that bustle, we imagine what we would be like without it, that is, we imagine ourselves emptied of understanding” (Animal Happiness, l7l). This course will take up primary readings drawn from Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Cavell, Agamben, and Hearne, with some literary interventions by writers such as Tolstoy, Kafka, Rilke, and J. M. Coetzee. We will raise and puzzle about questions about the language, ethical implications and symbolic character of the man/animal boundary. For upper college students; a prior course in philosophy or theory required. No animal rights or pet-appreciative perspectives supplied.

19189

LIT 3013 In Praise of Idleness:

Literature and the Art of Conversation

Marina van Zuylen

. . W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed: French Studies The Useful, Schiller wrote in The Aesthetic Education of Man, is the great idol of our age. It divorces leisure from labor and turns life into a series of utilitarian dead ends. Conversely, the impulse to play, to engage in gratuitous moments of being, in seemingly evanescent conversations, might be our only chance to convert specialized knowledge into self-knowledge. Since Socrates, conversation has been admired for its seemless ability to perform thinking, to integrate knowledge into society, and to supplement savoir (knowledge) with savoir-vivre (the art of living). But conversation, precisely because it clashes with the useful, has often been condemned as merely artful, dangerous for its proximity to the decadent and the idle. But what is so threatening about idleness? According to Nietzsche, because idleness leads to self-reflection, we avoid it by mindlessly embracing work. The work ethic has become an excuse for not thinking about the desperate human condition.. Paradoxically, work has become an escapist diversion and the time to rest and to converse has being usurped by the false plenitude of mechanical labor. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time adds a new twist to this dichotomy: for the social-climber, conversation becomes work, a laborious exercise in appearing rather than being. This course examines how these tensions are played both on a rhetorical (we will read diverse narratological studies on conversation, studying the use of silences, repetition, dialogue, etc.) and on a thematic level. After reading a selection of critiques of “pure” work (Aristotle, Schiller, Marx, and Nietzsche), we will examine texts that expose the vanity of conversation (Pascal’s Pensées, Molière’s Misanthrope), novels that thematize the tensions between work and conversation as social and cultural phenomena (Henry James, The Europeans, Updike Rabbit Run), and works that offer up possible aesthetic theories of conversation (Proust, Swann’s Way and Against Sainte Beuve). We will also scrutinize instances where conversation becomes a mere filler (Beckett’s Waiting for Godot). Students will also read Paul Lafargue’s In Praise of Idleness and Corinne Maier’s Laziness, the recent French bestseller attacking the dangers of work. Students must include a one-page statement of purpose at the time of on-line registration request.

19035

LIT 3014 Avant-garde American Poetry

and Poetics, 1978 to present:

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

Cole Heinowitz

M . . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

Language Poetry, from its inception to the present day, has been controversial. Growing out of the radicalism of the 1970s and deeply informed by Marxist and poststructuralist theory, Language Poetry infused the tradition of Modernist literary experimentation with renewed political urgency. Because, as Ron Silliman argues, language bears the stamp of the dominant ideology under which it is used, a politically committed poetry must begin with the radical de-instrumentalization of language. Through strategies such as the violation of normative syntax, the disruption of habitual associational patterns, and the rupturing of words themselves, Language Writing insists that thought is not reducible to language and that words do not function solely (or even primarily) as vessels for communicating meaning. Rather than producing texts that claim to express the poet’s ideas or beliefs, Language Writing seeks to engage a language that is responsive, first and foremost, to its own necessary provisionality. This seminar begins with a study of the twentieth-century influences that helped to shape the Language School, paying particular attention to works by Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Clark Coolidge. We then consider the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978-81), which featured important work by emerging experimental writers such as Charles Bernstein, Carla Harryman, Alan Davies, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews, and Jean Day. From this base, we will explore the later writings of the Language School, examining the ways in which they shift and redefine themselves throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and up to the present day. Along the way, we will ask questions such as: Can one properly speak of a “Language School” or of “Language Poetry”? Was it indeed a consolidated movement or does the term “Language Poetry” itself suggest a degree of misrepresentation and/or self-canonization? What would be the motivations behind such strategic self-representation? What are the possibilities opened up by a specifically political poetics? What are its limits? We will end with an investigation of the newer generation of poets, including Kevin Davies, Laura Elrick, and Rod Smith—writers who often resist the title of “Post-Language Poets,” but for whom Language Poetry remains a seminal, if problematic and contested, force.

19183

LIT 3033 Toward (A) Moral Fiction

Mary Caponegro

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights The texts 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 authors’ concerns are furthered by formal considerations. Students will read one novel per week, and write several short papers. The option of a final creative project will allow students to find their own fictive path to a social, ethical, or political issue. Readings will be chosen from among the following mostly contemporary novels, with a few read in translation: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Edie Medav’s Crawl Space, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times or Lust, Russel Banks’s Continental Drift, Norman Rush’s Mating, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Tournier’s The Ogre, A.M. Holmes’s The End of Alice, Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, Will Heinrich’s The King’s Evil, Sebald’s The Emigrants, Nicolson Baker’s Checkpoint.

19043

LIT 3104 Modern Tragedy

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT

All tragedies see the human condition as doomed; but in classical Greek tragedy the protagonist's fate, usually signified by an oracle, is externalized as something beyond human control, whereas in modern tragedy, starting with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, fate is more or less internalized as a flaw in the protagonist's character. Since then the modern protagonist has increasingly been seen as a helpless victim of circumstance, a scapegoat. Fate is sometimes externalized as history, war, or society, sometimes internalized, but in either case the protagonist has been reduced in stature, so that 20th century tragedy can only be called ironic--a far cry from the heroic tragedy of ancient Greece. In tracing this complex history, including the disappearance and revival of the chorus, we will examine tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky (his novel Crime and Punishment), Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Sartre, and Miller, all of which will be scrutinized in the light of major theories by Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others.

19185

LIT 3110 James Joyce's Ulysses

Terence Dewsnap

. T . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

OLIN 304

ELIT

Cross-listed: Irish and Celtic Studies Participants in this seminar pool their ideas about text and context. Recent Joyce criticism will be emphasized. Prior knowledge of Joyce and his early writings, notably Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is required.

19025

RUS 312 Nabokov: Puzzle, Pattern, Game

Jennifer Day

. . W . .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 310

ELIT

As poet, master fiction writer, translator, chess enthusiast, and lepidopterist, Vladimir Nabokov made it his life’s work to cultivate a creative understanding able to recognize hidden patterns and sleights-of-hand, and to play along in his own art. In this course, structured as a seminar, we will approach our selection of Nabokov’s works as “players” and treasure-seekers, training our senses to discern what has been so carefully and lovingly hidden. As we search, we will consider such major interpretive strategies as: life as design and variants on (auto)biography; memory and its role in art; varieties of translation; aesthetic and ethical implications of patterns and their manipulation; and the usefulness of categories such as modern and postmodern in reading Nabokov. Significant attention will be given to the Russian cultural and literary context that underlies Nabokov’s sense of design in both his life and art. Students will read, in addition to poems, short stories, and critical articles, The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and Pale Fire, as well as Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. Conducted in English.

19202

LIT 3127 The Pursuit of Happiness

Deirdre d'Albertis

. . . Th .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 310

ELIT

Americans believe that the pursuit of happiness is a basic human right; how have writers over the last two hundred years represented the desire for happiness and what narrative forms have they turned to in exploring this all too quixotic quest? Our focus in the seminar will be on the “optative” or “wishing mood,” as Samuel Johnson describes our fundamental human characteristic in his philosophical tale, Rasselas. What role has enlightenment thought played in shaping our expectations that happiness is, in fact, attainable (Franklin)? How are we to distinguish “happiness” from joy, for instance, or from contentment, or rapture? What role does pleasure play in the pursuit of happiness (a question seriously addressed by, among others, Casanova and Aldous Huxley)? We shall investigate the claims of political theorists and philosophers (Bentham, Hume, Smith, Jefferson, and Mill), as well as the imaginings of novelists (Tolstoy) and poets, in tracing some possible histories of happiness (working throughout with Darrin McMahon’s recent Happiness: A History). More often than not, however, we will investigate the gap between longing for and attainment of this elusive object of desire (Goethe, Carlyle, Freud). Finally, we will study the recent turn to “happiness studies” in economics and psychology. What does it mean when we purport to measure and indeed predict our human capacity for happiness? Our work in the seminar will be complemented by a three-day interdisciplinary conference in late April co-sponsored by Bard and Skidmore Colleges to which all students in the course are invited.

19208

LIT 3128 Saints, Sinners & Lunatics

Gabriela Carrion

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLINLC 208

FLLC

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies, LAIS What constitutes conformity and transgression in Early Modern Spain? Who is considered a “freak” and how is “monstrous” behavior defined? Nuns, visionaries, cross-dressers, clerics, wild men, neurotics, con artists, and poets are figures that receive a great deal of attention in a wide range of historical and literary discourses. This course examines the values attached to these figures and the way in which these discourses—and other artistic representations—call into question our own assumptions regarding conformity and transgression. Discussions explore the ways in which these figures were thought of as both ordinary and extraordinary. (Consider a Spanish nun who escapes her convent, dresses up as a man, travels to Peru, is later received by Philip IV, receives a pension from the Pope and is made honorary citizen of Rome). Readings include texts from Spain and Spanish America by authors such as Fernando de Rojas, Miguel de Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, St. Teresa, Catalina de Erauso, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others. Conducted in English

19266

LIT 3204 Literature and Politics

Thomas Keenan

. . W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 205

The seminar will read recent texts in critical theory with special attention to the ways in which political questions are articulated with literary or aesthetic ones. Why is this a question again? How are contemporary theorists posing it? We will be guided by the provocation of Jacques Rancière's suggestion that "humans are political animals because they are literary animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss questions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation to things." What difference does this attention to words, and to excessive 'literary' words, make to the persistent theoretical and practical questions of dissent and consent, justice, rights, responsibility, equality, and freedom? The seminar will explore a range of possible answers. Readings from Derrida, Foucault, Ranciere, Balibar, Butler, Spivak, and others.

19025

RUS 312 Nabokov: Puzzle, Pattern, Game

Jennifer Day

. . W . .

9:30 -11:50 am

OLIN 310

ELIT

19027

RUS 325 Body, Mind, and Spirit

in Dostoevsky

Marina Kostalevsky

. T . Th .

2:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 306

ELIT

An exploration of Dostoevsky’s multifaceted world. Particular attention will be paid to the way the writer experiments with the themes of body and sexuality, intellectual pursuit and philosophy, spiritual quest and religion. Readings include three short stories: “Bobok,” A Gentle Creature,” “Notes from the Underground;” three novels: “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “The Brothers Karamazov;” as well as Dostoevsky’s letters and excerpts from “A Diary of a Writer.” Analysis of ideas, devices and structures of these texts will be supplemented by reference to major critical and theoretical writings. The course is meant to provide both an approach to Dostoevsky and to existing scholarship on Dostoevsky’s art and techniques. All readings and discussions in English.

19535

LIT 331 Translation Workshop

Peter Filkins

. .W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 302

FLLC

The workshop is intended for students interested in exploring both the process of translation and ways in which meaning is created and shaped through words. It will explore the art of literary translation by focusing on style, craft, tone, and the array of options available to the literary translator in using translation as a tool for both interpreting textual origins and the performative shape of the translation itself. Class time will be divided between a consideration of the approach taken by various translators, theoretical articles on translation, and several of the students' own translations into English of poetry and prose from any language or text of their own choosing. Prerequisite: One year of language study or permission of the instructor.

19039

LIT 333 New Directions in

Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M . . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 205

ELIT

The diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed by innovative contemporary prose fiction writers is matched only by the range of cultural and political issues chronicled in their works. In this course we will closely examine novels and collections of short fiction from the last quarter century in order to begin to define the state of the art for this historical period. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of work by some of the more pioneering practitioners of the form. Authors whose work we will read include Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Thomas Bernhard, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Gaddis, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and others. One or two writers are scheduled to visit class to discuss their books and read from recent work.

19062

LIT 3362 The Essay

Luc Sante

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 305

ELIT

This course will consider the essay form as well as its style, with a particular focus on voice, viewpoint, and rhetorical technique. Intensive study will be devoted to word choice, cadence, and even punctuation, in the belief that even the most minute aspects of writing affect the impact of the whole. The goal is to equip students with a strong but supple command of their instrument, a prerequisite for personal expression. There will be writing and reading (from Macauley to Didion) assignments each week, and exercises and discussion in class.

19281

LIT 358 Exile & Estrangement in

Modern Fiction

Norman Manea

M . . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights Reading and discussion of selected fiction by such writers as Mann, Kafka, Nabokov, Camus, Singer, Kundera, Naipaul, etc. examining the work for its literary value and as a reflection of the issue of exile – estrangement as a fact of biography and a way of life. The complex topics of foreignness and identity, (ethnic, political, sexual) of rejection and loss, of estrangement and challenge, and also of protean mutability, are discussed in connection to relevant social-historical situations (war, expulsion, migration) and as major literary themes. Preference given to students moderated in Language and Literature. Not available for on-line registration. To register for this course see Prof. Manea on Thursday December 4th from 10:00 to 1:00 or 3:00 to 5:00 in his office Seymour 303.

19253

LIT 3640 19th C. Continental Novel

Justus Rosenberg

. T . . .

4:00 pm -6:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

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 19^th century. Readings include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Balzac’s Cousin Bette, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Fontane’s Effi Briest. Not available for on-line registration.

19269

LIT 3742 Gertrude Stein and Arts

of Composing

Joan Retallack

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 307

In this course we will look at Gertrude Stein’s experimental and performative practices of language composition in relation to the arts, science, philosophy, and popular media of her contemporary moment and our own. Stein believed that “the whole business of writing is the question of living in [one’s] contemporariness.” That project involved use of concepts and forms from science and technology as well as close kinship with certain philosophers and visual artists who were friends, mentors, colleagues. Her relationships with William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Pablo Picasso are legendary for good reason. Stein, whose literary aesthetic was nourished by her love of Shakespeare, Henry James, Walt Whitman and other literary icons, enjoyed American popular music, movies, comic strips, and detective novels. The result was a lifelong dedication to the equality of understanding and enjoyment: an ambition for an entirely democratic high culture. Stein’s influence on all the arts has been enormous as has her complicated reputation: representative of modernist ideology, queer culture, socio-political conservatism, inexplicable delights. Though Stein died in 1946, she has—for reasons we will explore—remained a perennial contemporary. Her work continues to challenge, puzzle, and stimulate as if it were written on the rim of an ever receding future. This class will be a practice-based seminar. The work of the semester will include extensive reading, viewing, listening, performing, collaborative composing, writing (short essays and poetic compositions) and will culminate in individual and/or collaborative projects to be presented during the final two weeks of the semester.

19392

LIT 3812 Henry James

Elizabeth Antrim

. T . Th .

9:00 -10:20 am

OLIN 305

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies In this course we will undertake an in-depth study of the career of Henry James, paying particular attention to questions of genre, narrative technique, and the representation of consciousness, as well as to James’s engagement with social issues such as gender and sexuality, transatlantic cultural clashes, and the transformation of American political and economic structures. Major texts under consideration include The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, and The Golden Bowl, as well as selected short stories and nonfiction. We will supplement our reading of James’s fiction with a range of critical approaches to James, including works by Shoshana Felman, Jonathan Freedman, Judith Fetterley, and Millicent Bell.