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Junior Seminars 

The Junior Seminars in criticism are intended especially for moderated junior literature majors. The seminars will introduce students to exciting current thinking in the field, emphasizing how particular methods and ideas can be employed in linking literary texts to their contexts. Intended too is a deep exploration of writing about literature at some length, in the form of a 20-25 pp. paper, developed over the course of most of the semester. Junior Seminar courses are writing intensive. The general goals of the writing component of the courses are to improve the development, composition, organization, and revision of analytic prose; the use of evidence to support an argument; strategies of interpretation and analysis of texts; and the mechanics of grammar and documentation. Regular short writing assignments will be required.

 

11714

LIT 3367   In Absentia: the Death of the Narrator in Modern Fiction

Stephen Graham

               Writing Lab:

. . W . .

M . . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

3:10 - 4:10 pm

HEG 200

HEG 200

ELIT

“And you, holding this book with one white hand, sunk in your cushy armchair . . .”—thus did the narrators of nineteenth-century novels once address, instruct, and occasionally scold their readers. But within a few decades, these confident, infinitely wise speakers were banished from literary fiction by Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and their modernist successors. The resultant questions—Who is telling this story? Why should I listen, or believe?—will be the focus of this course. Reading select works of Flaubert, James, Conrad, Ford, and Joyce, we will focus on the mental transaction between the reader and the writer’s mysterious “second self” that tells the story, as the classic omniscient narrator of European fiction vanishes, multiplies, dons strange masks, and sometimes misrepresents. Our journey leads to the innovations of Joyce, for whom ''the artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.''Class size: 15

 

11558

LIT 3741   Virginia Woolf

Deirdre d'Albertis

                Writing Lab:

. . W . .

M . . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

2:00 – 3:00 pm

BITO 210

RKC 200

ELIT

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies   In this seminar we will study Woolf's novels, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941), in the context of two distinct periods of innovation and conflict in twentieth-century literary culture. The first period, beginning "on or about December 1910" as Woolf memorably suggested, was the formation of the Bloomsbury circle, in particular, and English modernism, in general. What makes Woolf a modernist? How did her interactions with other members of the literary avant-garde (Forster, Eliot, even Joyce and Mansfield), as well as artists and thinkers associated with Bloomsbury, shape her experiments in fiction? The second period, following the women's movement in England and America of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, was the introduction into the academy of feminist literary criticism. Why did Woolf's novels and essays, especially "A Room of One's Own," become canonical texts of late twentieth-century feminism? In examining the historical reception of Woolf's writings we will struggle to come to grips with that larger-than-life figure critic Brenda Silver recently referred to as "Virginia Woolf, Icon." Has Woolf’s literary reputation fared well in the wake of “post-feminism”?  How are early 21st century readers coming to terms with her difficult-to-categorize literary imagination?  Class size: 15

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Other 300-level literature courses

 

11602

LIT 3023   Poetry and Society

Joan Retallack

. T . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLINLC 208

ELIT

Cross-listed: Human Rights   What, if anything, does poetry contribute to the most significant conversations of humankind? Conversations about our commonalities and differences—matters of race, class, gender, war and other forms of violence; cultural and political power; social values; responsibilities to fellow human beings as well as to other forms of life on the planet. Does poetry resonate with knowledge and intuition necessary for thinking about such matters but unavailable by other means? Can it be a potent form of agency? These are complex questions we will be examining via specific texts and writing explorations of our own in both essay and poetic forms. We’ll look at the role of poetics in human rights and environmental (ecopoetic) discourses, investigative poetics, ethical thought experiments and more. Texts by Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Wallace Stevens, Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, Raul Zurita, Nourbese Philip, Rachel Zolf, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr, and Jena Osman, among others are likely to be included. This is a practice-based seminar. You will have the opportunity to experiment with poetic forms, write short essays, and conduct collaborative research in areas of contemporary social concern that interest you. The final assignment will be a combined essay and poetic project. The class is required to attend poetry readings and other events (e.g., Human Rights, and Environmental Policy programming) related to the course during the semester.  Admission by permission of professor. Class size: 15

 

11866

LIT 3042   Nobel Laureates

Norman Manea

. T . . .

3:10 -5:30 pm

OLIN 305

ELIT

The class will discuss some important books of modern and contemporary literature by authors who received the Nobel Prize for Literature (Albert Camus, Th. Mann, J.P. Sartre, Saul Bellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Orhan Pamuk, Elfriede Jelinek, Czeslaw Milosz, Imre Kertesz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak), for their topic and vision, for their innovative way of writing. We'll take in account some special cases (J.P. Sartre, Soljenitsin, Pasternak, Jelinek) for their political and/or moral impact in the public arena. The class will also examine the procedure and value of granting prizes, big and small, deserved and not well deserved, in a time when even the cultural field is dominated by the market.  We will also debate the absence in the Nobel list of some great literary names (Tolstoi, Dostoievski, Joyce, Kafka, Borges etc).  Class size: 15

 

11532

LIT 3044   World Literature and the CIA

Elizabeth Holt

M . . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 107

FLLC/DIFF

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies; Middle Eastern Studies  As part of American Cold War cultural propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) funded Arabic and African literary journals including Lotus, Black Orpheus, Hiwar and Transition.  Covertly created by the Central Intelligence Agency, the CCF and its journals will be read in this course to consider how the fields of African and Arabic literature were constructed in the context of American empire and the emergence of area studies.  Authors to be read include Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Tayeb Salih, Layla Baalbaki, Salah Abd al-Subur, Ghadah al-Samman and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.   This is a World Literature offering. Class size: 15

 

11784

LIT 3045   Irish Writing and the Nationality of Literature

Joseph O'Neill

M . . . .

11:50 -2:10 pm

HEG 200

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed:  Irish and Celtic Studies In this course, students will read so-called Irish writing as a means of investigating the general notion that literary texts may possess the attribute of nationality. How is 'Irishness' to be located in a text? What is the function of the term 'Irish' when applied to a piece of writing? In what ways does the idea of 'nationality' (or 'ethnicity,' or 'community') connect the literary, juridical, and political realms? What does artistic discourse have to do with political ethics? What might a post-national literature involve?  Students will read artistic work by (inter alia) Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, Somerville & Ross, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Francis Stuart, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. Theoretical work by (inter alia) Rudolf Rocker, John Rawls, Noam Chomsky, and Benedict Anderson will be touched on.  This is a World Literature offering. Class size: 15

 

11580

LIT 3090   Black Mountain College &

The Invention of Contemporary American Arts and Poetry

Ann Lauterbach

. . . Th .

3:10 -5:30 pm

OLINLC 120

ELIT

Cross-listed: Art History  Started in 1933 in Asheville, North Carolina by a disaffected academic idealist, Black Mountain College was founded on John Dewey's notion of a Progressive education, where the relations between thinking and doing, idea and practice, were understood as in a seamless continuum, one that was necessary to an enlightened politics of engagement. We will examine the premise of this utopian experiment and explore the historical platform, both European and American, that allowed radical modernist idioms in poetics, performance, and the visual arts to flourish in the midst of a depression at home and chaos abroad. Faculty included: John Cage, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson, among many. Class size: 15

 

11582

LIT 3134   Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern

Nancy Leonard

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 310

ELIT

Like Conceptual Art and the Gorilla Girls, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and V. seemed a specific response to the cultural moment of the sixties in America.  Artistic form responded to the pressures of urgent social and political issues, and it could seem difficult to distinguish between comedy and despair. But examining The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow (his signature work) and Bleeding Edge (his just-published novel), students will perceive a longer line of influence in American literature on postmodern novelists . This seminar will place Pynchon within the tradition of narrative experiment begun by Edgar Allen Poe, continued with the “paranoid “ novel of Frank Norris, McTeague,  Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, a story by Flannery O’Connor, and a detective novel by Raymond Chandler.  While our focus will remain on the work of Thomas Pynchon, our study should show us postmodern achievement at its best, the compelling mix of high/low culture and complexity of narrative point of view that make up the postmodern. Upper College standing is assumed. Class size: 15

 

11546

LIT 3143   Women on the Edge

Mary Caponegro

. T . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies  In this class, we will study numerous experimental female authors and their predecessors, concentrating on those who might be least familiar. Emphasis will be on the intersection of formal innovation with preoccupations of sexuality and gender. Authors read will be among the following: Dorothy Richardson, Nathalie Sarraute, Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Young, Kathy Acker, Annie Ernaux, Helen DeWitt, Elfriede Jelinek, Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet , Jeanette Winterson, Giannina Braschi, Jaimy Gordon, Elena Ferrante. Some familiarity with Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein will be assumed but is not a prerequisite.  Class size: 15

 

11541

LIT 3148   Writing Cultures: Literature and Ethnography

Alexandre Benson

. T . . .

3:10 -5:30 pm

OLIN 309

ELIT/DIFF

Cross-listed: Anthropology;  American Studies  This course explores the anthropological imagination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on works written in North America. We will read novels, folktales, local color stories, dialect poems, and ethnographic narratives. How, we will ask, have authors been influenced by, and in turn helped to shape, theories of cultural difference? What does the literary depiction of race a century ago have to do with how we talk about "multiculturalism" today? We will also consider relationships between texts and other media (film, photography, painting, and popular music), seeking both to understand and to complicate the now-commonplace idea that what unites ethnography and literature is above all their reliance on the written word. Authors likely to include Sherwood Anderson, Franz Boas, Kate Chopin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Clifford Geertz, Zora Neale Hurston, Tim Ingold, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alan Lomax, Herman Melville, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Jean Toomer. Class size: 15

 

11807

LIT 3206   Evidence

Thomas Keenan

. T . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

CCS

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights What can literature and the arts teach us about evidence? Evidence would seem to be a matter of facts, far from literary or artistic invention. But, whether fact or fiction, we are regularly confronted by all sorts of signs, and we need to learn how to read the traces of things left behind at this or that scene, of a crime for instance. Evidence, etymologically, is what we see, what is exposed or obvious to the eye, and to the extent that something is evident it should help us make decisions, form conclusions, or reach judgments. Hence its legal meanings.  On the basis of these traces of what has happened —whether in the form of statistics, objects, images, or testimony—we have to decide. Sometimes what we see and read seems to compel action, while at other times it appears to immobilize us.  As more and more of our world is exposed to view, what becomes of the would-be foundational character of evidence? What is it to ignore evidence? This seminar will explore the theory and practice of evidence, with special attention paid to the different forms evidence can take and the disputes to which it can give rise, especially when violations of, and claims for, human rights are at stake. Readings from Weschler, Felman, Krog, Ondatjie, Latour, Tamen, Azoulay, Didi-Huberman, Morrison, along with a lot of visual material. Class size: 12

 

11599

LIT 3244   Major Currents in American Thought

Matthew Mutter

M . . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 301

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies  This course focuses on the trajectory of three strains in American thought and culture: Emersonianism, the Protestant tradition, and the conceptualization of American pluralism.  We will begin by identifying impulses in Emerson’s writing (individualism, self-creation, pragmatism, languages of movement and becoming, aesthetic religion) and examine their development in thinkers like William James, John Dewey, F.S. Fitzgerald, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell, as well as critiques from George Santayana, Joan Scott, and others.  Jonathan Edwards will be the point of departure for the Protestant tradition, and we will trace its concerns (original sin and the tragic sense, the transcendence of justice, the imperatives of ethical reform) through the writings of Jane Addams, William Faulkner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  We will consider the criticism of this tradition in writers like H.L. Menken, and examine the transference of moral and emotional authority from American Protestantism to the domains of psychoanalysis and social science (Philip Rieff, Norman O. Brown, Margaret Mead).  Finally, beginning with Walt Whitman, we will investigate conceptualizations and critiques of American pluralism and egalitarianism as they develop through the writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Randolph Bourne, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Harold Cruse, Betty Friedan, Nancy Chodorow, and others.  Class size: 15

 

11955

THTR 326   Brecht and his Legacy

Miriam Felton-Dansky

. . W . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

FISHER PAC CONF ROOM

AART

Cross-listed:  Literature, German, and Experimental Humanities.  Few modern theater artists have been as path-breaking in their own time—or as influential for future generations—as German playwright, poet, director, and theorist Bertolt Brecht. This seminar will explore Brecht’s writings for the theater and his theatrical legacy: after grounding our study in a survey of Brecht’s plays and theory, we will take stock of his influence on dramatic literature from postwar Germany to Brazil, South Africa, and the New York avant-garde. We will locate Brechtian aesthetics in arenas such as feminist and queer performance texts, documentary and political drama, postcolonial drama, and contemporary critiques of capitalism. Other writers and artists under investigation will include Heiner Müller, Peter Weiss, Caryl Churchill, Augusto Boal, and more. Students will prepare an analytical essay examining a Brecht play in relation to his theory, poetry, or production history, and a research paper treating the relationship between Brecht's aesthetics and those of one or more of his artistic heirs. As a class, we will also create a digital scholarship project, mapping Brecht's legacy across time and space.

Class size: 15

 

11606

LIT 330   Innovative Novellas and

Short Stories

Justus Rosenberg

. T . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 306

ELIT

An in-depth study of the difference between the short story, built on figurative techniques closely allied to those employed in poetry which allows the writer to achieve remarkable intimacy and depth of meaning in the space of a few pages, and the novella that demands the economy and exactness of a short work while at the same time allowing a fuller concentration and development of both character and plot. We explore the range and scale of the artistic accomplishments of such masters in these genres as Voltaire, de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sholem Aleichem, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, A. France, Camus, Kafka, Colette, Borges. In addition to writing several analytical papers, students are asked to present a short story or novella of their own by the end of the semester. Class size: 15

 

11560

LIT 331   Translation Workshop

Peter Filkins

. . . Th .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 303

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. Class time will be divided between a consideration of various approaches to the translation of poetry and prose, comparisons of various solutions arrived at by different translators, and 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.   Class size: 12

 

11585

LIT 3314   The Invention of Celebrity

Marisa Libbon

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

HEG 300

ELIT

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies;  Experimental Humanities  Today’s new media has given rise to a particular set of questions: what counts as fame? What distinguishes fame from infamy? What is earned celebrity? How can one protect, manage, and disseminate individual and collective reputation?  These were also the preoccupations of “olde” media and its makers, of medieval and early-modern writers grappling with notoriously unstable manuscript culture and the innovation of the printing press.  In this course, we’ll engage the concepts of fame, reputation, and celebrity in some of their original contexts, through examining how early writers confronted the problem of canonicity, as well as how they devised and managed their own reputations, while alternately burnishing and revising the reputations of their predecessors.  Exactly how early literature was produced, transmitted, and preserved is intimately related to the project of literary longevity, and so we’ll also study how early writers mobilized their contemporary media, such as manuscripts (books copied by hand), early print technology, and rumor and hearsay.  In addition to considering the “anonymous” author (a category once again ubiquitous in the “Internet Age”), our texts will include works by, among others, Virgil, Chaucer, and Chaucer’s devotees John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as Margery Kempe, and works produced by William Caxton, England’s first professional printer. Class size: 15

 

11596

LIT 333   New Directions in Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M . . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 101

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. We will explore both the great diversity of voices, styles, and forms employed in these narratives as well as the cultural, historical, political, and philosophical issues they chronicle. Particular emphasis will be placed on analysis of fiction by some of the groundbreaking practitioners of the form, including Cormac McCarthy, William Gaddis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover, Ian McEwan, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with prominent writers, Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, and David Foster Wallace’s biographer, D. T. Max, who will visit class to talk with us about their books and writing process, and read from recent work.

Class size: 15

 

11590

LIT 3366   Love without Sex (and other Mysteries of the Italian Novel)

Joseph Luzzi

. . W . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

OLIN 301

FLLC

Cross-listed:  Italian Studies  In a modern world where images of sexuality proliferate, how did the “first” Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, create a fascinating portrait of love devoid of all erotic elements? What motivated Gabriele D’Annunzio to go in the opposite direction only a half-century later with his highly sensual writing? Who are the women writers that redefined (and are redefining) the predominantly “male” history of the Italian novel? We will explore these questions and more as we learn how a uniquely “Italian” version of the novel has emerged in European aesthetics. Books include Lampedusa’sThe Leopard, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. All readings will be in English; option of course work in Italian and an Italian section for qualified students.  Class size: 14

 

11865

LIT 358   Exile & Estrangement Fiction

Norman Manea

M . . . .

3:10 -5:30 pm

OLIN 107

ELIT/DIFF

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.  Class size: 15

 

11557

LIT 405   Senior Seminar II: Literature

Deirdre d'Albertis

M . . . .

4:45 -6:00 pm

ASP 302

 

Literature Majors writing a project are required to enroll in the year-long Senior Colloquium.   Senior Colloquium is an integral part of the 8 credits earned for Senior Project.  An opportunity to share working methods, knowledge, skills and resources among students, the colloquium explicitly addresses challenges arising from research and writing on this scale, and presentation of works in progress.  A pragmatic focus on the nuts and bolts of the project will be complemented with life-after-Bard skills workshops, along with a review of internship and grant-writing opportunities in the discipline. Senior Colloquium is designed to create a productive network of association for student scholars and critics: small working groups foster intellectual community, providing individual writers with a wide range of support throughout this culminating year of undergraduate study in the major.  Class size: 25