|
11352 |
LIT 3013 In Praise of Idleness: Literature and the Art of Conversation |
Marina van Zuylen |
. . W . . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
OLIN 310 |
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 email Prof. van Zuylen a one-page rationale
explaining their interest in the topic. Class size: 16
|
11301 |
LIT 3039 Modernism and Its Discontents: Literary, Philosophical, Spiritual |
Joan Retallack Writing Lab: |
. . . Th . . . W . . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm 3:00 – 4:00 pm |
OLINLC 120 OLINLC 210 |
ELIT |
This course will look at a small number of iconic
Euro-American modernist figures in order to trace transformative literary,
philosophical, and spiritual questions arising in the early part of the 20th
century and brought into conversation in their work. Major protagonists will be Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S.
Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cage. We will begin by exploring turn of the
19th century historical contexts (socio-political, philosophical,
scientific) as well as the word “modernism” itself as term of play. With an
ongoing background of critical, contextual, and primary sources of importance
to the works we’re reading (e.g., Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Shakespeare,
Whitman, William James, Benjamin, Hugh Kenner, Janik & Toulmin, Bruno Latour,
Terry Eagleton) we will concentrate on what is happening in the poetics of our
authors’ literary discourses and linguistic enactments, both as new
developments in form and lenses on early to mid-20th century
retrospections and reinventions of the contemporary. The reading list is likely to include Stein’s History Or Messages From History,
selections from Pound’s Personae and Cantos, the facsimile edition of The Waste Land (with revisions and
editorial comments by Pound), selections from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Culture and Value, Philosophical
Investigations, John Cage’s Silence, and
Art Is Either A Complaint Or Do Something
Else. This is a writing intensive course. Regular
short writing assignments will be required, along with two 10-page essays (see
below). We will meet for weekly hour-long writing labs. General goals are to
help with the development, composition, organization, and revision of
analytical and exploratory prose; the use of evidence to support an argument;
strategies of interpretation and analysis of texts. Students will be
responsible for their mechanics of grammar and documentation. All this is in
service of composing two lecture-essays to be presented orally during mid- and
end-of-term in-class symposia, after which revised versions are to be submitted
to the professor. Class
size: 15
|
11489 |
LIT 3104 Modern Tragedy |
Benjamin La Farge |
. T . Th . |
1:30 - 2:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
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. Class size: 15
|
11201 |
LIT 3110 James Joyce's Ulysses |
Terence Dewsnap |
M . . . . |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
RKC 100 |
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. Class size: 15
|
11462 |
LIT 3123 Children's Fantasy Literature In Cultural Conversation |
Maria Cecire Writing Workshop |
. T . . . TBA |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
RKC 122 |
ELIT |
Related
interest: Studio Arts, Theater, Written Arts An intensive study of twentieth-century
children’s fantasy literature and the literary and cultural traditions to which
they speak. Our focus will be on how cultural change and ideas of the child
influence the manipulation of canonical source material to produce new meanings
in works by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones,
Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, Tamora Pierce, and Stephenie
Meyer. In addition to critical writing, students will have the opportunity to
produce a creative final project in the medium of their choice that reimagines
and/or responds to the literary texts that we explore, which will be shared
with the Bard community. The course
will meet for an additional hour per week in order to develop these
projects, which may be individual or collaborative, and to work on
course-related academic writing. Topics to be covered in class include what
Jacqueline Rose calls the “impossibility” of children’s literature, the role of
academic institutions in the creation of popular culture (and vice-versa),
theories of influence and intertextuality, and the creation of “hybrid”
fantasies through the fusion of multiple genres. We will also consider the
impact of such twentieth-century concerns as the decline of Empire, the World
Wars, feminism, multiculturalism, globalization, and the new digital age on
children’s fantasy and its choice of sources. Class size: 15
|
11617 |
LIT / AFR 315 National Politics of the Soul: The Inner Life of a Nation in Kojo Laing's Novel,
Search Sweet Country |
Binyavanga Wainaina |
M . W . . |
3:10 - 4:30 pm |
OLIN 107 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Human Rights Kojo
Laing's ground-breaking novel, Search
Sweet Country, first published in 1986 is one of the more difficult and
rewarding novels, deserving a slow meditative reading. A truly original novel
that fits no category, it is one of the towering modernist novels of the 20th
century. This class celebrates its reissue as an African Writers series
classic. We will look at the existing body of literary criticism of the novel;
critique the early media reviews of the book. We will spend some time immersing
ourselves in the political economy of Ghana in the 1970s, when the novel is
set. There will be assignments every two weeks, a few one-on-one tutorials, and
a term project. Class size: 15
|
11303 |
LIT / CLAS 326 Afterlives of Antiquity: Posthumanism and
its Classics |
Benjamin Stevens |
M . W . . Su . . . |
10:10 - 11:30 am 7:00 - 10:00 pm |
RKC 200 OLIN 102 |
HUM/DIFF |
Cross-listed:
Human Rights, Literature If the classics have been used to define 'humanity',
then how may 'classics' be defined for a posthuman world? What would it mean to
speak of the 'posthumanities'? In this
seminar, we consider how processes of classification and canon-formation --
i.e., the selection of items in, as, and for 'culture' -- may serve as material
for cultural critique: viz., by exposing superficially factual claims about
what is essential, timeless, or real for their deeper complicity in what is,
properly, the products of historically contingent and materially mediated
ideologies. We focus on works that
suggest reclassifications, even decanonizations, of a liberal humanist subject
-- 'the human being' -- in discursible relations to its others. Beginning with
a study of philology or textual criticism, we consider alternatives to a
classical image of 'human subject(ivity)'. Areas of interest include gender and
ethnicity; anthropology and zoology; other(ed) organic biologies, including
genetic, surgical, and extraterrestrial; inorganic 'biologies', including
artificial intelligence and life; and transhumanism, including the 'coming
singularity', in which we may (be) witness (to) a posthumanist return to an
image of "transcendental Man".
Literary and otherwise artistic texts from, e.g., Apuleius, Atwood,
Dick, Edson, LeGuin, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stoppard, and Wells; films by,
e.g., Cameron, Cronenberg, Demme, Kubrick, Lang, Scott, Tarkovsky; critical
readings in, e.g., Baudrillard, Benjamin, Dawkins, Deleuze and Guattari, Eliot,
Feyerabend, Foucault, Haraway, Hayles, Jameson, Lyotard, Mandelbrot, Sontag. We
conclude by attempting posthumanist readings of Bardian 'canons', including the
Language & Thinking anthology, the First-Year Seminar syllabus, and the
book of Genesis. Regular film screenings. Prerequisite: moderated junior or
senior standing or permission of instructor; knowledge of ancient Greek or
Latin potentially helpful but not required. Preference to Classical Studies and
other L&L program concentrators, or to students with some familiarity with
textual criticism.
Class
size: 15
|
11491 |
LIT 328 Ideology and Politics in Modern Literature |
Justus Rosenberg |
. T . . . |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
OLIN 310 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Political Studies We
examine how political issues and beliefs, be they of the left, right, or
center, are dramatically realized in literature. Works by Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Thomas Mann,
Brecht, Sartre, Malraux, Gordimer, Kundera, Neruda, and others are analyzed for
their ideological content, depth of conviction, method of presentation, and the
artistry with which these writers synthetize politics and literature into a
permanent aesthetic experience. We also
try to determine what constitutes the borderline between art and propaganda and
address the question of whether it is possible to genuinely enjoy a work of
literature whose political thrust and orientation is at odds with our own
convictions. The discussions are supplemented
by examples drawn from other art forms such as music, painting, and film. Class
size: 15
|
11501 |
LIT 3309 The American Comic Novel |
Matthew Mutter |
. T . Th . |
3:10 - 4:30 pm |
OLIN 301 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
American Studies This
course explores the comic perspective in modern American fiction. We will focus on a number of remarkable
tensions: does comedy reinforce social hierarchies by representing comic
figures as social and moral inferiors, or is it intrinsically egalitarian in
its attention to the shared physical body? Why has comedy been considered both
conservative and an excellent medium for social protest? Is the comic perspective inherently secular,
as some critics have argued, “satanic,” as Charles Baudelaire thought, or “the
incognito of religion,” as Sören Kierkegaard claimed? Is the feeling that animates comedy close to disgust, or closer
to the affirmation of life? Along the
way we will identify different moods, genres and perspectives within
comedy—satire, irony, grotesque, slapstick, camp, farce—and work to understand
what distinguishes comedy from tragedy.
Theoretical texts will likely include Bergson, Freud, Kenneth Burke, and
Cavell. Literary texts will likely
include Mark Twain, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, V.S. Naipaul, Ishmael Reed,
Joseph Heller, John Barth, John Kennedy Toole, and Dorothy Parker. Class
size: 15
|
11302 |
LIT 3312 Louisiana |
Karen Sullivan |
. . . . F |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: American Studies, French Studies This course
will be considering Louisiana, not just as a place, but as an idea. What does
Louisiana (and New Orleans in particular) mean in the American imaginary? How
did the various populations distinctive to this region—the Creoles, the Cajuns,
the “Americans,” the free people of color, among others—help define this
meaning? The history of this region is a history of traumatic changes, from its
sale to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, to its defeat in the Civil
War, to the turbulence of Reconstruction, to the introduction of Jim Crow, to
the cholera and yellow fever epidemics, to the flood of 1927, to the oil boom
and bust of recent decades, to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. How has the
idea of Louisiana (and New Orleans) persisted through all of those crises? We
will start out reading the first French accounts of Louisiana, then turn to
works by George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Lafcadio
Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy,
and John Kennedy Toole. Class size: 15
|
11474 |
LIT 3313
The San Francisco Renaissance |
Cole Heinowitz |
M . . . . |
1:30 – 3:50 pm |
OLIN 305 |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
American Studies The
end of World War II saw the migration of a diverse group of poets to the San
Francisco Bay Area. Although their aesthetics and politics often differed
wildly, these writers were united by a resistance to a poetic mainstream they
felt had abandoned the experimental inheritances of prewar writing and by the
desire to recreate a radical literary bohemia that seemed to have been lost. In
their search, they drew inspiration from everything from the western landscape
itself, to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Eastern religions and
literature. This course will chart the development of these writers and their
communities, closely examining the works of (among others) Kenneth Rexroth,
Helen Adam, Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Diane DiPrima, Jack Kerouac, Joanne
Kyger, and Philip Whalen. Class size: 15
|
11228 |
LIT 333 New Directions in Contemporary Fiction |
Bradford Morrow |
M . . . . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
OLIN 205 |
ELIT |
This
seminar is devoted to close readings of novels and collections of short stories
by innovative contemporary fiction writers published over the last quarter
century, with an eye toward exploring both the great diversity of voices and
styles employed in these narratives as well as the cultural, historical, and
social issues they chronicle.
Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of fiction by some of the
more pioneering practictioners of the form, including Cormac McCarthy, William
Gaddis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, David
Foster Wallace, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Jamaica Kincaid, along with two
or three authors who will visit class to discuss their books and read from
recent work. Class size: 15
|
11611 |
LIT 3500
B Advanced Fiction: The Novella |
Mona Simpson |
|
By arrangement |
. |
PART |
The second semester of a yearlong class, intended for advanced and serious writers of fiction, on the "long story" or novella form. Students will read novellas by Henry James, Flaubert, Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Allan Gurganus, Amy Hempel, and Philip Roth (and perhaps others) using these primary texts to establish a community of reference. We will discuss technical aspects of fiction writing, such as the use of time, narrative voice, openings, endings, dialogue, circularity, and editing, from the point of view of writers, focusing closely on the student's own work. The students will be expected to write and revise a novella, turning in weekly installments of their own work, and of their responses to the assigned reading. The course will meet six times over the semester, dates to be announced. Class size: 12
|
11467 |
LIT 360 Shakespeare |
Lianne Habinek |
. . W . . |
1:30 - 3:50 pm |
HEG 200 |
ELIT |
In this course, we'll tackle two of the most
fascinating, perplexing, and enduring plays of all time: Hamlet and King
Lear. We will focus on the content
of the plays, but our work will be greatly enriched with a number of different
critical lenses. Book history (the
study of the development of printing and publishing) is one such lens: multiple
strikingly different versions of each play are extant from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, so part of our focus will be to investigate and evaluate
each text to discover what meaning the dissimilarities reveal. We will also examine both plays generically,
alongside other examples of revenge tragedy and historical tragedy, and
alongside other Shakespearean plays.
Critics and theorists have puzzled over both plays since their
publication, so we will consider various approaches to textual analysis. Finally, we will engage with the vast and
exciting number of performances of Hamlet and Lear, both on stage
and film. Class size: 15
|
11421 |
LIT / CLAS 362 Plato's Writing:Dialog and Dialectic |
Thomas Bartscherer |
. T . . . |
3:10 - 5:30 pm |
OLIN 305 |
HUM |
Cross-listed: Classics,
Philosophy Interpreters
of Plato have often asked why he wrote in dialogue form, and the answers
proposed have frequently appealed to Plato’s conception of dialectic, although
the meaning of that term in his texts is itself a matter of considerable
debate. In this course, we shall be examining Plato’s writings from both a
literary and a philosophical perspective. Our main business will be close and
careful reading of whole dialogues, paying particular attention to the
hermeneutical implications of the dialogue form—including such features as
dramatic setting, character, and the interrogative mode itself—and the
conception of dialectic as it emerges both in and through Plato’s writing.
Readings from Plato will include Euthyphro,
Euthydemus, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, and Sophist. Primary readings will be complemented by a sampling of
secondary scholarship that illustrates the wide range of modern approaches to
Plato. All readings in English. Class size: 15
|
11641 |
LIT 422 Writing Workshop for Non-Majors |
Robert Kelly |
. . W . F |
11:50 - 1:10 pm |
HEG 200 |
PART |
A course designed for juniors and seniors,
preference to seniors, who are not writing majors, but who might wish to see
what they can learn about the world through the act of writing. Every craft,
science, skill, discipline can be articulated, and anybody who can do real work
in science or scholarship or art can learn to write, as they say,
"creatively"--that is, learn how to make what concerns them also
interest other people by means of language. This course will give not more than
a dozen students the chance to experiment with all kinds of writing. Poetry is
the name of an activity, and that activity will sometimes produce objects
called poems and sometimes other sorts of texts. Towards all resultant texts
our attention will turn. This is not a course in self-expression, but in making
new things. No portfolio is required but
prospective students must consult with Prof. Kelly prior to registration. Class
size: 12
|
11229 |
LIT 431 Post-Genre Fabulism and New Gothic |
Bradford Morrow |
M . . . . |
10:10 - 12:30 pm |
OLIN 101 |
ELIT |
Over the
past several decades the critical boundaries between literary and genre fiction
have become—as the result of ambitious work by a number of innovative,
pioneering writers—increasingly ambiguous.
The earliest gothicists framed their tales within the metaphoric scapes
of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, chthonic settings populated by
protagonists whose inverted psyches led them to test the edges of propriety and
sanity. Postmodern masters such as
Angela Carter, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes, while embracing a similarly
dark artistic vision, have radically reinvented and contemporized tropes,
settings, and narrative arcs to create a new phase in this historic tradition. This movement, identified as the New Gothic,
appears to have risen in tandem with a parallel literary phenomenon known as
postfantasy or New Wave Fabulism, whose achievement is to have taken the genre
of fantasy/horror in a similar revolutionary direction. While not breaking allegiance with the
fundamental spirit that animates their genre counterparts, writers such as
Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, and Jonathan Lethem are creating a body of serious
literary fiction. Among others we will
read are Valerie Martin, Karen Russell, John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll,
and Peter Straub. One or two authors will attend class to
discuss their work. Class size: 15