11581

LIT 2607   Introduction to Literary Theory

Nancy Leonard

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 310

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies  Literary theory questions things we take to be common sense: that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the writer ‘had in mind,’ that writing ‘expresses’ some truth that lies elsewhere, that what we take to be ‘natural’ is free of bias.  In showing us alternative ways of thinking about literature and the real, theory shows us conditions of possible meaning and aesthetic pleasure.  This course introduces students to several different modern and contemporary writers about literature and the kinds of criticism they often represent. Among writers to be studied are Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Chinua Achebe, Henry L. Gates Jr., and Gayatri Spivak.  There will be several visits by other Bard literature scholars exploring with us their interest in particular theoretical problems. Students interested in the course should have had at least one Bard course in literature.  Class size: 18

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11548

LIT 2026   Introduction to Children’s and

Young Adult Literature

Maria Cecire

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies  What is children’s literature? Who is it for? In this course you will be encouraged to think about how notions of childhood and teenagerdom are constructed and reproduced in Anglophone literature for young people, and to interrogate the social and literary structures that guide these representations. Our goal will be to gain familiarity with the history of children’s literature in English and some of its major genres, while constantly challenging our own conceptions of childhood and literariness. How can we, as adults and critics, read a book that has been classed as “children’s literature”? How do we theorize texts that are written for children by adults? What makes a work of children’s literature a classic? Can we say that children’s literature “colonizes” the child? Given their importance to contemporary ideas of the child, we will give special attention to questions of gender and sexuality throughout the semester. Course texts include literature by Kenneth Grahame, J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones, J.K. Rowling, Jane Yolen, Toni Morrison, and M.T. Anderson, as well as a selection of picturebooks.  Class size: 20

 

11549

LIT 2082   Multimediated Medievalisms: Arthurian Afterlives, 1800-Present

Maria Cecire

M . W . .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLIN 202

ELIT

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Medieval Studies; Victorian Studies  This course will consider how the Middle Ages have been reconstructed in Anglo-American literature and culture in the past two hundred years, with a focus on representations of King Arthur and his court. How does a period that is frequently seen as “primitive” and “backwards” simultaneously exist in popular imagination as the epitome of nobility and chivalry? What do reimaginings of this period reveal about contemporary ideas of nation, gender, ethnicity, and class? How do iconic figures like King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Gawain take on new meanings in each rewriting? In addition to reading poetry and novels, we will also address the proliferation of Arthurian material across other media, including painting, prints, film, gaming, and the graphic novel. Authors will include Mark Twain, William Morris, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, T.H. White, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Meg Cabot. We will read excerpts of medieval literature to contextualize our work, and students will have the opportunity to conduct digital projects related to their research. Previous experience with medieval literature and art is preferred but not required.

Class size: 20

 

11543

LIT 2159   Literary Greatness and Gambles

Jonathan Brent

. . . . F

3:00 -5:20 pm

OLIN 201

ELIT

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: 22

 

11797

LIT 218   Free Speech

Thomas Keenan

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

HEG 102

HUM

Cross-listed:  Human Rights (core course)  An introduction to debates about freedom of expression. The course will examine the ways in which rights, language, privacy and publicity have been linked together in ideas about democracy. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? Why? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do in particular with literature. What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what?  Debates about censorship, hate speech, the First Amendment and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be obvious starting points, but we will also explore some less obvious questions: about faith and the secular, confession and torture, surveillance, the emergence of political agency. In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will look at the ways in which the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from a 'literary' experience. These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, with a heavy dose of case studies (many of them happening right now) and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory.  Class size: 22

 

11614

LIT 2206   Sex and Gender in Japanese Literature and Culture

Mika Endo

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

FLLC/DIFF

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies  This course explores the historical construction of gender and sexuality by examining works of literature and culture from Japan’s eleventh century to the present. As we move through readings that range from the classical era (The Tale of Genji) to the present (selections of gender-bending manga), we will interrogate how the shifting dynamics of sex and gender were shaped by the social and political forces of their time. In the process, we will read a variety of genres including fiction, diaries, poetry, drama, folk tales, film, and manga, and will seek to situate these varied modes of creative expression alongside a study of the lived experiences of gender and sexuality in their historical moment. Topics include the classical canon and women’s courtly writings, Buddhist conceptions of women, Confucian teachings on gender and the body, Edo-period male-male cultures, modernization and the nuclear family, representations of the ‘modern girl’ of the 1920s, gender in revolutionary cultures, and feminist discourse from the 1960s. All readings will be in English.   Class size: 20

 

11782

LIT 2209   Plato's Writing: Dialogue

and Dialectic

Thomas Bartscherer

M . W . .

6:20 -7:40 pm

OLIN 203

HUM

Cross-listed:  Classical Studies; Philosophy  Why did Plato write dialogues? Answers to this perennial question 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 philosophical and a literary 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, Phaedrus, Republic, and Symposium, among others. We will also read some of Plato’s predecessors in the Greek tradition—both philosophical and literary—and examples of modern critical approaches to Plato. The focus will be on the primary texts, and all readings will be in English.  Class size: 22

 

11716

LIT 2217   The History of the Experiment

Lianne Habinek

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 305

HUM

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Science, Technology & Society   The scientific method and the modern form of the scientific experiment are arguably the most powerful innovations of the modern period. Although dating back in its modern form to only the sixteenth century, the concept of the experiment as an attempt to find underlying continuities in experience has numerous origins stretching back to earliest recorded history. In turn, artistic culture both enabled the development of experimental thought and functioned as a site to test alternatives.  Thus, while we examine how different epochs defined experiment and experimentation, we will also study concurrent experiments in literature: experiments depicted in literature, literary experiments, and experimental literature.  Throughout, we will understand the concept of experiment as closely connected with how a particular era understood “experience,” and locate the epistemological problem of the experiment in a broader, extra-scientific framework. We will read foundational texts by Aristotle, Lucretius, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Darwin, Curie, Tesla, Einstein, Schroedinger, Pasteur, and others.  Alongside, we will consider the theatrical laboratories of Shakespeare and Benjamin Jonson, OuLiPo’s potential literary workshops, and other authors such as H.G. Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Italo Calvino, Shelly Jackson, and Mark Z. Danielewski.  Class size: 20

 

11575

LIT 2245   Contemporary Russian Fiction

Marina Kostalevsky

. . W . F

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLINLC 208

FLLC

Cross-listed:  Russian & Eurasian Studies  In this course, we will examine the diverse and unpredictable world of contemporary Russian literature from the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the present. Through the reading of both the underground publications of "samizdat" and officially published texts of the first period; the post-modernist works written at the end of the twentieth century; and the literary texts of the last decade, we will focus on the issues of narrative strategies adopted by individual writers, reassessment of Russian history, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, cultural and national identity. The course will also explore the changing relationship between Russian literature, the state, and society. Readings include: Venedikt Erofeev, Tatiana Tolstaia, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Viktor Pelevin, Boris Akunin, The Presniakov Brothers,  Ludmila Ulitskaia, Dmitry Bykov, Vladimir Sorokin, and Mikhail Shishkin. Conducted in English.   Class size: 20

 

11578

LIT 2263   Culture and the Rise of the

English Novel

Lianne Habinek

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

Cross-listed: Science, Technology & Society  How do “nature” (ingrained, inborn, biological and genetic constraints) and “nurture” (upbringing, circumstances, and environment) interact to create society, personality, and ideas – in short, to create culture?  Answering this question became crucial for thinkers in 17th- and 18th-century England.  The unfurling British Empire’s travels necessitated a deep bout of national introspection; concurrently, the new literary form of the novel began its ascent, seeking to create and to capture an English culture. We will investigate the earliest iterations of the nature/nurture debate, examining how it played out across the interwoven fabrics of science, philosophy, and literature in this period. In addition, we will listen for their echoes in modern approaches to culture, e.g., Freud, Dawkins, and Pinker.  The course begins with Shakespeare’s Winter's Tale and its curious “alteration” by David Garrick; we turn then to problems of race and gender raised in the early novella Oroonoko by Aphra Behn (who may have been a spy).  Thereafter, we will read Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, essays by Locke and Rousseau, epistolary novels by Fanny Burney and Tobias Smollett, and works by Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. Class size: 15

 

11584

LIT 2264   Devotion, Dissent, Dissolution: Saints’ Lives from the Middle Ages to the Reformation

Marisa Libbon

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 101

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies  A saint’s life, by nature, should emulate the trajectory of the life of Christ: beginning with a miraculous birth (or conversion), culminating with an extenuated and captivating (sometimes problematically so) period of physical suffering, and ending with impressive martyrdom.  Like faith itself, however, the genre of saints’ lives is not a static or un-politicized thing.  In this course, we’ll read a variety of saints’ lives and affiliated writings produced on the Continent and in the British Isles, ranging from the ubiquitous thirteenth-century Golden Legend to John Foxe’s sixteenth-century Protestant martyrology.  We will begin with the genre’s heyday in the early and high medieval periods, when saints’ lives rivaled popular romances for readership; continue to the pre-Reformation period, when dissenting from the Catholic cult of saints could result in inquest and much worse; and conclude with the English Reformation, when images were smashed, books effaced, belief policed, Catholic sainthood dismembered, and Protestant martyrdom constructed.  Our work might raise questions about, among other things, the relationship between fidelity and the literary; identity and reading habits; popular culture and faith; politics and religion; and the institution and the individual.  Class size: 20

 

11610

LIT 2311   St. Petersburg:

City, Monument, Text

Olga Voronina

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 204

FLLC

Cross-listed:  Environmental & Urban Studies; Russian & Eurasian Studies  Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers built St. Petersburg, but it was the writers who put it on the cultural map of the world. Founded on the outskirts of the empire, the city served as a missing link between “enlightened” Europe and “barbaric” Asia, between the turbulent past of the Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered to be too cold, too formal, too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg harbored revolutionary ideas and terrorist movements that threatened to explode from within. While its granite quays were erected to withstand the assault of the floods, some of its most famous monuments, including literary works, resisted the onset of new, radical ideologies.   In this course, we will study the conflicting nature of the city as reflected in literature and literary criticism. The poems and novels on our reading list will provide a sweeping overview of Russia’s literary canon in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and from Gogol to Bely and Nabokov. After exploring Queen of Spades, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, we will move on to Petersburg and The Defense, thus undertaking a journey through Russia’s literary tradition and the urban landscape of the north with the authors who either reconstructed St. Petersburg in their memory or re-visited it in their imaginations. Class size: 22

 

11806

LIT 2325   Modern Chinese Fiction

Li-Hua Ying

. T . Th .

3:40 -5:00 pm

OLINLC 210

FLLC

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies  Conducted in English, this course is a general introduction to modern Chinese fiction from the 1910s to the present. China in the 20th century witnessed a history of unprecedented upheavals and radical transformations and its literature in this period was often a battleground for political, cultural, and aesthetic debates. We will read English translations of representative works by major writers from three periods (1918-1949; 1949-1976; since 1976) such as Lu Xun, Ding Ling, Ba Jin, Shen Congwen, Lao She, Mao Dun, and Chang Eileen from the May Fourth Movement and the intellectual radicalization of the first half of the 20th century, and Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Can Xue, and Han Shaogong out of the Cultural Revolution and the liberalization of the post-Mao era.  In addition, we will study works by authors from Taiwan and Hong Kong such as Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, Li Ang, Li Yung-p’ing, Chu T’ien-wen, Xi Xi, and Shi Shu-ching. We will consider issues of language and genre, nationalism and literary tradition, colonialism, women’s emancipation movement, the influence of Western literary modes such as realism and modernism on the inception of literary modernity in China, and the current state of critical approaches to the study of modern Chinese literature.  Class size: 20

 

11564

LIT 2331   Classic American Gothic

Donna Grover

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 308

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies   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.  Class size: 18

 

11579

LIT 2501   Shakespeare

Benjamin La Farge

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

A careful reading of ten masterpieces, plus a selection of his sonnets, by the greatest writer of the English language. The plays, representing the full range of his genius in comedy, tragedy, romance, and royal history, will be chosen from among the following: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest.  Class size: 15

 

11562

LIT 2601   American Literature 1945-2001: "Where do we find ourselves?"

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

10:10 - 11:30 am

ASP 302

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies  In the wake of World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant military, economic, and cultural power. That power, diffused into the lives of individual Americans by technological, political, and social change, simultaneously deepened a sense of powerlessness for some and fulfilled hopes and expectations for others: if you imaginatively identified with the nation and its privileged symbols—for example, whiteness, masculinity, weaponry, and material plenty—would  you experience the promised sense of centrality and significance seemingly mandated by our military triumph, our wealth, our extraordinary global prestige, and our historical sense of providential destiny? Or  would you experience, or even be aware of, America’s failure to deliver on its promises? In this course, we will be looking at the ways in which American literature imagined and represented what it was like to live American lives between August 6, 1945, and September 11, 2001, the day when American verities and pieties underwent a sudden reckoning. We will begin by asking ourselves and our writers the same question with which R.W. Emerson opens his great essay, "Experience": "Where do we find ourselves?" and go on to examine works by mid-to late twentieth-century and contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Moreover we shall do so through explicit reference to traditions and problems bequeathed to us by American writing from the seventeenth-century on.  Can we still see ourselves as the "City on a Hill"? What has happened to the democratic faith of Emerson and Whitman?  Do we possess a "usable past"?  Is ours a society marked by "quiet desperation"? Readings vary each time the course is given; authors may include but are not necessarily confined to Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and others.

Class size: 22

 

11605

LIT 2882   Different Voices, Different Views

Justus Rosenberg

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 309

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: 18

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World Literature (WL) courses explore the interrelations among literary cultures throughout the world. They pay special attention to such topics as translation, cultural difference, the emergence of diverse literary systems, and the relations between global sociopolitical issues and literary form.

 

11551

LIT 2198   Ancient Fiction: The Greek

and Roman Novel

Robert Cioffi

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 310

FLLC

Cross-listed:  Classical Studies    Best known to modern readers through Petronius’ Satyrica, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, the ancient novels were action-packed narratives full of youthful romance, exotic travel to the edges of the earth, human travails, shipwrecks, and pirates. They also represented a new and important literary form in the Roman imperial period: prose fiction. We will explore this innovative ancient genre by reading all the surviving Greek and Roman novels, selected other ancient prose fiction from other cultures and belief systems, and works by contemporary literary theorists and critics. Questions to consider include: How do genres define themselves? What is the relationship between fictional literature and its religious, cultural, and historical context? How do texts represent space, time, and Others? How are Greek and Roman gender and social roles (re)defined? What is the relationship between narrative text and artistic representation? All readings will be in English translation.  This is a World Literature offering.  Class size: 18

 

11561

LIT 2203   Balkan Voices: Writing

from  Southeastern Europe

Elizabeth Frank

. . W . .

. . . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLINLC 118

ASP 302

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Russian and Eurasian Studies “The Balkans,” writes journalist Robert D. Kaplan, “are a region of pure memory: a Bosch-like tapestry of interlocking ethnic rivalries where medieval and modern history thread into each other.” Indeed, the countries of the  Balkan Peninsula, or “Stara Planina” (“Old Mountain” in Bulgarian) are often seen as especially “savage,” “primitive,” “dark” and “violent” in comparison with the more “civilized” West. In this course, relying on Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania to frame questions and provoke discussion, we will read fiction, nonfiction and poetry from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia that explores past and present as represented by Balkan writers themselves.  During the first half of the course we will concentrate on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the struggle for liberation from the five-hundred year “Turkish Yoke” led in turn to the lasting enmities of the Balkan Wars and varied Balkan participation in World War II. For the second half we will examine writing that has come out of the fall of communist regimes since 1989, and the wars provoked by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.  Authors include but are not limited to Ismail Kadare (Albania), Ivan Vazov, Vladislav Todorov (Bulgaria), Miroslav Krleža, Slavenka Draculic, Dubravka Ugreŝić (Croatia), C.P. Cavafy (Greece), Tashko Georgievski (Macedonia), Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš (Serbia), Gregor von Rezzori, Herta Muller (Romania). Bosnian-American writers Téa Obreht and Aleksandar Hemon are also included, with supplementary readings from such Western writers as Rebecca West, Robert D. Kaplan, and Misha Glenny. This is a World Literature offering. 

Class size: 22

 

11595

LIT 2208   Literary and Cinematic Reflections of War in the Modern Middle East

Amir Moosavi

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

OLINLC 210

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies  This course explores the theme of war in cultural productions originating from the contemporary Middle East. Using works of prose fiction, poetry and films created in the eastern Arab World and Iran, from 1975 until the present day, we will interrogate the various ways in which men and women from the region have attempted, through literature and film, to grapple with some of the longest and most brutal conflicts that the world has witnessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the Lebanese Civil War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq since 1991, and the current Syrian Civil War. Aside from war we will also explore related themes such as ideology, religion, gender, mourning, memory, exile and "war cultures" through a comparative, regional framework. All readings and in-class discussions will be in English, however original texts in Arabic or Persian will be  available for any students who wish to read them are welcome to do so. In addition to the readings there will be film viewings outside of class. Key authors and filmmakers will likely include: Elias Khoury, Hoda Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish, Hushang Golshiri, Bahram Beyzai, Hassan Blasim, Betool Khedairi and Bahman Ghobadi. This is a World Literature offering.  Class size: 18