11303

LIT 2011 Aesthetics of Narrative

Nancy Leonard

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 310

ELIT

A study of varieties of modern narrative and the aesthetic questions that shape our attention and involvement. How does a narrative reflect its own telling and give us signs as to where to find—or lose—the author? How does it create sympathy with a self-absorbed teller, or use detachment to alarm us? How have minority authors, especially African-Americans, altered narrative traditions? How does literary narrative differ from film narrative? Fictions to be read include Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and the recent novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Film adaptations of Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, and of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, will be screened. Some theory of narrative will be included. Each week a critical, creative, or theoretical response is due. Class size: 18

11312

LIT 2026 Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature

Maria Cecire

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies In this course, students will explore questions about what children can, do, and should read, and be encouraged to think about how the notion of childhood is constructed and reproduced through texts and images. We will ask how we, as adults, can read a book that has been classed as 'children's literature' and how to theorize texts that are written for children by adults. What makes a work of children's literature a classic? Who are these texts really for? Does children's literature "colonize" the child? Together we will examine a range of children's and young adult literature genres including the school story, fairy tale, fantasy, historical fiction, and the teenage novel. We will cover issues such as the child in the book, the pastoral child, crossover fiction, the children's publishing phenomenon in the years since Harry Potter, and taboo teen realism. Course texts include literature by Kenneth Grahame, J.M. Barrie, Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, among others.

Class size: 20

11320

LIT 2060 Modern Arabic Literature

Elizabeth Holt

. . W . F

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 307

FLLC

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Middle Eastern Studies. In the late nineteenth century, Arabic's long legacy of poetry and literary prose, not to mention popular storytelling, encountered the novel form. This course will survey a history of modern Arabic literature through the shifting reception and role of prose narrative, from the hopeful early years of the Arab Nahdah (the 19th to 20^th century Arab renaissance), through to the 1960s and the crisis of committed literature, to the rants and romances of the contemporary literary scene; authors include Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Taha Husayn, Mohammed Choukri, Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Ibrahim al-Koni, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Rajaa Alsanea, and Ahmed Alaidy. Class size: 20

11847

LIT 210 Modern American Poets

Benjamin La Farge

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies American poetry found its own voice in the first half of the 19th century when Emerson challenged American "scholars" to free themselves from tradition. For the next three generations most of the major poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, acknowledged Emerson as a crucial inspiration. Emerson himself and two of his contemporaries, Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, were the first to achieve international fame, but it was in Whitman's poems that a distinctively American voice was first heard--a voice that was both oracular and plain-spoken. At the same time, the oddly metered, introspective poems of Emily Dickinson, mostly unpublished during her lifetime, spoke in a New England voice that was no less distinctive and no less American. Then, only thirty years after her death, the powerful modern voices of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, and Hart Crane began to be heard. We will read selected poems by each of these, and we will also give equal time to Frost, the great contrarian poet who was dismissed by some as anti-modern but is now acknowledged as one of the greatest. Class size: 18

11889

LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Power

Jonathan Brent

. . . . F

2:00 – 4:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies This course will examine the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the time of the Revolution to the stagnation of the Brezhnev period.  We will look at the majestic, triumphant imaginative liberation in writers such as Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the Terror of the 1930s in Yuri Olesha, Anna Akhmatova, Lidia Chukovskaya, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pilnyak and Yuri Tynyanov; the hesitant Thaw as reflected in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; and the course will conclude by reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and  Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev. Readings of literary works will be supplemented with political and historical documents to provide a sense of the larger political-social-historical context in which they were written. After the violent, imaginative ebullience of the Revolutionary period, how did literature stay alive during the darkest period of mass repression, censorship and terror when millions of Soviet citizens were either imprisoned or shot?  What formal/aesthetic choices did these writers make in negotiating the demands of official ideology and Party discipline, on the one hand, and authentic literary expression, on the other?  What image of history and of man did these “Engineers of human souls” produce?  These are some of the questions we will ask and seek to answer.  All readings will be in English. Class size: 20

11850

LIT 2197 Transmediterraneans

Karen Sullivan

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 101

FLLC/DIFF

For millennia, the Mediterranean Sea has been criss-crossed by a wide variety of travelers, from Greek explorers and Roman legionaries in classical antiquity, to Arab conquerors and Norman crusaders in the medieval period, to Italian traders and French colonialists in the early modern and modern eras, to African emigrants and European tourists today. What happens when one studies literature by focusing, not upon a land mass, demarcated by a nation-state's boundaries, but upon a sea that has served as the site of contact between dramatically different civilizations and religious traditions? What happens if one concentrates, not upon current territorial powers, but upon vanished maritime empires, like those of the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Normans, the Venetians, the Ottomans, and Napoleon? In this course, we will be reading a series of authors who have turned their attentions, not inward, to their own country, but outward, to this sea and the cultures on its other side. Works to be considered include Homer's Odyssey; Plutarch's lives of Mark Antony and Cleopatra; Provençal songs; French, Byzantine, and Arab chronicles of the Crusades; The Arabian Nights; Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron; C. P. Cavafy's lyrics; Albert Camus' "The Guest"; and Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men.

Class size: 20

11368

LIT 2194 Berlin: A Pathway to Understanding Contemporary Europe

Thomas Wild Screenings:

. T . Th . M . . . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm 7:00 pm -10:00 pm

OLIN 203 PRE 110

ELIT

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, German Studies Throughout Germany's turbulent twentieth-century history, Berlin has been not only the capital of five different German states but also the continuous capital of German culture. In this course, we shall explore the interconnections between politics, art, and social life through manifold literary texts (e.g. Döblin, Nabokov, Baudelaire, Poe), major theoretical writings (e.g. Benjamin, de Certeau, Augé, Young), as well as through films (e.g. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Triumph of Will, Run Lola Run), architecture (Hitler's and Speer's plans for "Germania"), memorials (Holocaust memorial, Jewish Museum), and other visual art works (e.g. by Kollwitz, Grosz, street art), including Bard College's Hessel Museum collection. Our scrutiny of the significant changes in Berlin over the past century will focus on two historical thresholds: Around 1930, when the totalitarian regimes in Europe emerged, and around 1989, when this "age of the extremes" seems to come to an end, and our contemporary period with its compelling developments begins. Taught in English. Class size: 22

11697

LIT 2195 Why Do They Hate Us? Representing the Middle East

Dina Ramadan

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 107

FLLC

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies This course takes its provocative title from the American media's favorite post 9/11 question with regards to the Middle East and the larger Muslim world. However, the intention here is not to try and answer this question but rather to interrogate and problematize it, by examining how this region has been historically produced as an "other" by the West and why such ideas continue to have currency in the contemporary moment. Beginning with 19th century orientalism and European colonialism, this course will trace the development of representations of the "orient" in a range of literary, artistic and cinematic production. Whether it is the licentious sheikh with his exotic harem, the suicide bomber promised seven virgins in the afterlife, or the oil-rich businessman, certain images have dominated the Western imagining of the "Orient." Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will unpack some of these representations, situating them with a larger historical and political context. We will consider how the region has been gendered and sexualized from Flaubert to "Sex and the City." We will also consider the ways in which such representations have been internalized and reproduced in the region. Additional themes covered in the course will include travelers and travel writing, biblical landscapes, imagined oil fields, and fatwas and fanatics. Readings will include Edward Said, Edward Lane, Alan Nidel, Ella Shohat and Jack Shaheen. Class size: 20

11840

LIT 2196 Writing the Female Rebel: The Antiheroine in Fiction

Edie Meidav

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies What do women want? What do they script -- or have scripted upon them -- when societal mores resist their desires? In this practice-based seminar, a literature class designed for writers, we investigate the trope of the female rebel. Does a woman of independent mind go the way of Shakespeare's Ophelia, Hermia, Olivia, or Lady Macbeth? From madness to cunning, from truth-telling to gender minstrelsy, from cunning submission to power-mad subversive, the antiheroine finds herself crossing boundaries dictated by class, gender, familial convention or ethnicity, resorting to a particular taxonomy of tactics. Beginning with Sophocles' Antigone (and a few of her later dramatic, fictive, and operatic iterations), we will explore the memorable creations of writers such as Alemaddine, Braschi, Bronte, Cather, Defoe, Dermansky, Freud, Gaitskill, Larsen, Myles, O'Connor, Rhys, Roth, Schutt, I.B. Singer, Tea, Tevis, Winterson, and Woolf, all the way through contemporary graphic novelists such as Alison Bechdel and Leela Corman. What will aid our cartography of female rebellion in literature will be the following course requirements: class presentations, literary analysis, film viewing and creative writing. Admission to this class requires submitting a letter of interest by Nov. 28th to Edie Meidav via campus mail, including your year, major, contact information and a one-paragraph writing sample. Class size: 15

11758

LIT 2318 Poetry and Aesthetics in Victorian England

Stephen Graham

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies John Ruskin announced in Modern Painters (1843) that the greatest art must contain "the greatest number of the greatest ideas." Fifty years later, Oscar Wilde declared with equal assurance the "All art is quite useless." What happened in that intervening half-century? Reading major Victorian poets including Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, as well as criticism by Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Wilde—among the finest prose stylists of the century—this course follows the evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the accompanying Victorian debate about the status of art and of the artist in relation to society. This latter narrative begins with Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate and cultural institution, and concludes with Oscar Wilde, social pariah and convicted felon, as Victorian poets gradually withdraw from their position in the center of the culture to a stance of defiance, transgression, and martyrdom. Class size: 18

11737

LIT 2401 The Canterbury Tales

Marisa Libbon

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is an acknowledged masterpiece, a cornerstone of the canon of English literature. Yet, Chaucer never finished The Canterbury Tales: he spent the last dozen years of his life working on the Tales, dying in 1400 and leaving behind a fragmented collection of stories that readers have been reassembling since his death. In this course we will undertake a semester-long exploration of The Canterbury Tales, reading the text and piecing together the picture of medieval England that it at once preserves and critiques. We will be particularly concerned with the literary and cultural conventions that Chaucer both expertly mobilizes and fascinatingly troubles. Although we will read The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English, no previous experience with Middle English is necessary. Class size: 20

11750

LIT 244 Literature and Revolution in East Asia and Beyond

Nathan Shockey

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 204

FLLC

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Japanese This class introduces students to a variety of fictional, critical, filmic, and theatrical works on the theme of political revolution in East Asia. Socialist and communist movements constitute some of the most remarkable moments in 20th century world history as well as in world literature, as radical political movements were intertwined with radically new forms of literature. As these movements were fundamentally internationalist in nature, this course introduces the political literature of East Asia within a synchronous transnational context. The first half of the course focuses on text from Japan, Korea, and China, read in tandem with works from the Soviet Union, the United States, and Europe. The second half of the class will center on the role of East Asia in the re-imagination of global ideas of revolution in the literature and art of the Cold War period. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the contentious relationships between political and aesthetic avant-gardes, ideals and realities of utopian society, the international contexts of "national" literatures, and the ways in which the idea of revolution in Asia has shaped the past century. This course is part of the World Literature offering. Class size: 22

11715

THTR 250 Dramatic Structure

Gideon Lester

. T . Th .

4:40 pm -6:00 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

See Theater section for description.

11332

LIT 2508 Poets Theater

Cole Heinowitz

M . W . .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLINLC 115

ELIT

Following the Second World War, innovative American writers took a new interest in poetry as a performative art, turning to theater as a way to question the bounds of subjectivity and community and to expand the formal and political concerns of poetry. Over the last 65 years, Poets Theater has grown and changed, producing a form of writing that defies conventional notions of genre. This course will examine the development of Poets Theater from its beginnings to the present day, focusing on key regional movements including Black Mountain College, New York Poets Theater, and west coast Language Poetry. Our consideration of these movements will be framed by a study of earlier British and American experiments in non-conventional theater, including the Renaissance masque and the Romantic closet drama. Readings will include works by Ben Jonson, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, and Leslie Scalapino.

Class size: 22

11738

LIT 254 Middle English Romances

Marisa Libbon

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies In later medieval England, so-called romances—highly popular stories written in verse, in common language rather than in Latin, depicting a protagonist's adventures, and by turns escapist and topical—were at their height. By the thirteenth century, such was the sway of "romance" that religious anthologies of saints' lives engaged the genre in a battle for readers, urging readers to turn away from romance adventures of knights and kings. What constitutes a Middle English romance and why were romances so controversial? To address these questions, we will read widely in the genre of Middle English romance, defining "romance" on its own terms; thinking about its functions including and beyond entertainment—for instance, its occupation of political spaces and potential usefulness for emergent nationalisms—investigating its historical and political contexts; and imagining its potential readers. In their popularity and complex topicality, Middle English romances may well have been the precursors to the Victorian novel: stories that were at once thoroughly pleasurable and culturally foundational, not only in the ways they constructed and reflected their own world, but as inspiration to future generations. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare were all influenced by these stories that circulated in England's print culture well into the eighteenth century. We will read all texts in their original Middle English, but no previous experience with Middle English is necessary.

Class size: 20

11735

LIT 2650 Irish Fiction

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 308

ELIT

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 Gray, together with plays by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, plus additional fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor, et al. 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 many others. As background we will also read a brief history of Ireland during this period. Class size: 18

11690

LIT 2882 Different Voices, Different Views

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: Global and Int'l 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 inclue 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: 20

11449

LIT 2883 Cinematic Adaptation of Italian Literature

Joseph Luzzi

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 204

FLLC

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Film Of all the national cinemas, the eminent historian Gian Piero Brunetta writes, Italy's has hewn most closely to the structures and legacies of literary history, a situation he describes as a "grande migrazione" ("great migration") of genres from literature to the screen. What enabled a critical mass of Italian directors from the neorealist and auteur generations—Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luchino Visconti, to name only the better known—to make so many critically acclaimed and aesthetically influential cinematic adaptations of literary works? Were such groundbreaking adaptations merely the result of individual talent and vision, or may one speak of a distinctly "Italian" approach to cinematic adaptation? More specifically, can one argue that there exists an Italian "art film" tradition, in which filmmakers self-consciously explore abiding issues in the history of aesthetics, often those at the intersection of cinema and literature? This course will consider the profound role that adaptation has played in Italian film in such works as Decameron (Boccaccio and Pasolini), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Bassani and De Sica), and The Leopard (Lampedusa and Visconti). Taught in English. All readings/films in English translation; additional times set aside for screenings; option of course work in Italian for qualified students. Class size: 22