|
17204 |
LIT 2026
INTRODUCTION TO Children’S AND Young
Adult LiteraturE |
Maria
Cecire |
T Th 11:50am-1:10pm |
OLINLC 120 |
LA |
ELIT |
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 J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, Toni Morrison, and
M.T. Anderson, as well as a selection of picture books.
Class
size: 20
|
17205 |
LIT 2041
making love: IntroDUCTION to Renaissance Poetry |
Adhaar
Noor Desai |
M W 10:10am-11:30am |
OLIN 307 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Experimental Humanities When we think about Renaissance poetry, we tend to
think of the sonnet: rule-bound, blatantly artificial, and old-fashioned. The
funny thing is, the poets writing in the Renaissance tried everything they
could to make their poems appear as just the opposite: organic, sincere, and
excitingly new. Just beneath the veneer of formal qualities like rhyme and
meter, poems from the period are sensitive and probing explorations of chaos,
frustration, madness, desire, and the sublime. This course examines, by
focusing on the theme of love as a psychological, emotional, and political
concept, how poets in the period fought with language in order to make poetry
say things that could not be said otherwise. Our units will consider how both
the concept of love and the poetic techniques used to articulate it intersect
in surprising ways with political subversion, queerness, and religious doubt.
Through both critical assignments and creative exercises, including engaging
with digital media to better understand how the technologies of publication and
the expectations of popular culture shape the transmission of ideas, we’ll hone
a deep understanding of essential aspects of poetry while we think about how it
was (and still is) a tool for thought and an instrument of emotional
understanding. The course covers a broad range of major works as well as less
commonly-read (yet nevertheless indelibly great) poetry, in particular poetry
by women; Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne and Milton will take their place in
context alongside Mary Sidney, Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, George
Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, and Margaret Cavendish. This course counts as pre-1800
offering. Class
size: 18
|
17059 |
LIT 2117
Russian Laughter |
Marina
Kostalevsky |
T Th 3:10pm-4:30pm |
OLINLC 115 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed: Russian & Eurasian Studies A study of laughter and its
manifestation in Russian literary tradition. Issues to be discussed
relate to such concepts and genres as romantic irony, social and political
satire, literary parody, carnival, and the absurd. We will examine how authors
as distinct as Dostoevsky and Bulgakov create comic
effects and utilize laughter for various artistic purposes. We will also
examine some of the major theories of laughter developed by
|
17207 |
LIT 2156
Romantic Literature |
Cole
Heinowitz |
M W 1:30pm-2:50pm |
ASP 302 |
LA |
ELIT |
This course offers a critical introduction to
the literature produced in
|
17922 |
LIT 217
LGBTQ in Rural and urban america |
Natalie
Prizel |
M 10:10am
– 11:50am |
OLIN 309 |
|
|
Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality
Studies; Human Rights 2 In an article published in the New
York Times shortly after the election, Columbia University professor,
Mark Lilla, wrote: “In recent years. American liberalism has slipped into a
kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has
distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force
capable of governing.” Colin Jost, of Saturday
Night Live’s “Weekend Update” joked that: “The dating app Tinder
announced a new feature this week, which gives users 37 different gender
identity options. It’s called: Why Democrats Lost the Election.” Since the election of Donald Trump, the media
has pitted minorities against working-class whites, with particular vitriol
towards to LGBTQ community. Why has this presumed divide become the scapegoat
for the Democrat’s electoral loss? 2016 also saw the release of the film Loving, which demonstrates how the legal impetus to
overturn anti-miscegenation laws came from the working class. This ELAS class
will work to counter that perceived divide by focusing on LGBTQ populations,
particularly working-class ones—white and of color—in both rural and urban
America. In additional to critical academic essays, texts will include works by
Justin Torres, Leslie Feinberg, Dorothy Allison, Samuel Delaney, and E. Patrick
Johnson. Films will include Boys Don’t Cry, Tongues Untied, Pariah,
and others. As this is an ELAS class, our work will also focus on engagement
within the community. We will welcome various speakers, and, most importantly,
you will each do a community-oriented project—at Bard, in the Hudson Valley, or
in New York City. Class
size: 18
|
17208 |
LIT 218
Free Speech |
Thomas
Keenan |
M W 11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 204 |
MBV D+J |
HUM DIFF |
Cross-listed: Human Rights (core
course) An introduction to debates about freedom of expression.
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. and the arts. 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
|
17531 |
IDEA 220
Performing Race and Gender: Uncle Tom's Cabin on Page and Stage |
Donna
Grover Jean
Wagner |
M W 1:30pm-3:50pm |
RKC 103 |
AA LA D+J |
AART ELIT DIFF |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Literature; Theater 6 credits “So you’re the little lady who started
the war,” Abraham Lincoln allegedly told Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was of
course referring to her best-selling novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a seminal work of 19th century American literature. It
also has been adapted many times for the theater and performed all over the
United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine the
important role this work played in the birth of American theater and culture.
We will begin with a close reading of the novel, then
turn our attention to the various theatrical adaptations that were produced and
toured the United States over the years. Among the questions that will be
examined include: What role did the novel and its theatrical adaptations play
in the formation of American culture; what do its theatrical adaptations tell
us about what it means to perform “American”? What does it mean for its
archetypal characters to be portrayed by performers of different races or
genders? Also, we will look at the uses or misuses of dramatic literature as a
form of popular entertainment and as well as early American propaganda.
Important to our inquiry is the relationship between Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Blackface and the roles race and gender played in the creation of a
contemporary American culture. Other works to be examined include Spike Lee’s
movie “Bamboozled,” the contemporary Broadway hit “Hamilton,” George C. Wolf’s
musical “The Colored Museum,” and “Funnyhouse of a Negro”
by contemporary playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Close readings, in-class
discussions, film screenings, performance projects, personal essays field
trips, museum visits and other project-based explorations of texts will round
out the class. Class size: 28
|
17211 |
LIT 2306
William Faulkner: Race, Text and Southern History |
Donna
Grover |
M W 11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 205 |
LA D+J |
ELIT DIFF |
Cross-listed: American Studies; Gender
& Sexuality Studies One of
America’s greatest novelists, William Faulkner was deeply rooted in the
American South. Unlike other writers of
his generation who viewed
|
17008 |
LIT 2324
Freudian Psychoanalysis, Language and literature |
Helena
Gibbs |
M W 3:10pm-4:30pm |
OLIN 304 |
MBV |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Mind, Brain, Behavior
Sigmund Freud conceived of
psychoanalysis as a body of theoretical knowledge and as a clinical practice
grounded in listening and interpretation. It is Freud who taught us to read
slips of the tongue, bungled actions, memory lapses, dreams, and symptoms as
speech in their own right, and to understand them as formations of the
unconscious. He also showed us how, beyond communication, speech and language
are constitutive of human subjectivity. In addition to inventing a practice to
help patients, Freud’s influence spans art, literature, and the human
sciences—fields that themselves greatly influenced Freud. This course will
address fundamental concepts of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses (such as
the unconscious, repression, transference, and drives), explore various
affinities between psychoanalytic and literary insights into the human psyche
and culture, and consider the ways in which the two fields can illuminate each
other. Readings will include selections from Freud’s seminal texts, as well as
writings by Jacques Lacan, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Isak
Dinesen, Marguerite Duras, Xavier Marias, and W. G. Sebald, among others.
Class size: 18
|
17210 |
LIT 2414
The Book Before Print |
Marisa
Libbon |
M W 1:30pm-2:50pm |
HEG 102 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Experimental Humanities; Medieval Studies What were
books like before the invention of print? What was the experience of reading
them? How did they shape and how were they shaped by the world in which they
were produced? And how do we know? In
1476 William Caxton set up England’s first printing press. Prior to the arrival of this new
technology—which the sixteenth-century writer John Foxe deemed
miraculous—English books were made of vellum (sheepskin) and were written and
decorated by hand. In this course, we’ll
study early English books as both cultural objects and literary archives,
dividing our time between investigating how pre-print English manuscript-books
were made and read, and reading their contents—the popular literature of medieval
England—for ourselves: epics, lyrics, histories, romances, all of which will be
made available in modern printed editions.
Our work will raise questions about the relationship between material
form and literary content; the intersection of image and text; the development
and preservation of literary and visual artifacts; the ethical and practical
problems of producing modern printed editions of handwritten texts; and the
proximity of anonymous pre-print culture to the so-called Internet Age. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class size: 22
|
17212 |
LIT 2481
Theater and Politics: The power of imagination |
Thomas
Wild |
T Th 4:40pm-6:00pm |
OLIN 201 |
FL |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
German Studies;
Theater How do
theater and politics interrelate? What is the role of imagination in politics
as well as in literature to challenge the realities of our existing world? We
will pursue the dialog around these questions along four major themes:
(1) ‘War
and Violence’ are at the core of Heinrich von Kleist’s “Amphitryon”
and “Penthesilea”; composed around 1800, both
tragedies also re-write ancient traditions of how war and violence impact our
identities. (2) In ‘Revolution,’ we will investigate through Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck” and “Danton’s
Death”; both dramas reflect on social and political revolutions of
the 19th century still relevant today. (3) ‘Populism’ and its
totalitarian aspirations have ignited signature works by Bertolt
Brecht (The Good Person of Szechwan, Three Penny Opera, The
Measures Taken) and by Tankred Dorst (Toller; D’Annunzio: The Forbidden Garden; This
Beautiful Place), the latter being the most significant living German
playwright albeit hardly known in the U.S. (4) In ‘Migration and
Transformation’ we will address conditions of our current world – in politics
and the arts, where projects such as “Rimini-Protokoll”
deliberately cross the lines between theater, performance, reportage, and
political activism. Questions around gender and sexuality inform most of these
plays. Alongside the plays, we will engage with selected poetic writings by
those authors as well as with related theories (of tragedy, of performance, of
gender etc.). – If available, we will investigate stage productions of the
dramas we read; please plan for additional screening sessions outside of the
regular class time. Class
size: 22
|
17213 |
LIT 2501
Shakespeare |
Adhaar
Noor Desai |
T Th 10:10am-11:30am |
OLIN 205 |
LA |
ELIT |
Before Shakespeare was ever an icon, an industry, or
required reading in high schools throughout the world, he was merely one of
dozens of poets and playwrights working in London around the turn of the
seventeenth century. This course attempts to recover an unfiltered view of
Shakespeare’s works by performing close readings grounded in an attention to
their historical conditions. We will learn how Shakespeare’s writings are
embedded in theatrical and literary traditions, and how they fit into a context
undergoing tremendous social, political, artistic, and intellectual upheaval.
Through careful investigations of Shakespeare’s techniques, we will also
discover how his writings engage philosophical and social issues relating to
politics, sexuality, gender, and race that remain pressing today. While our
primary aim will be to cultivate our close-reading skills, we will also draw on
philosophical texts, theater history, film, and performance work. In addition
to the sonnets, we will read representative plays that span Shakespeare’s
career, including Richard III, Love's
Labour's Lost, Henry IV pt. 1, Macbeth,
As You Like It, Othello, and Cymbeline.
Open to all students. This course counts as pre-1800 offering. Class
size: 22
|
17214 |
LIT 2507
Barbarians at the Gate: degeneration and the culture wars of the
fin-de-siecle |
Stephen
Graham |
M W 1:30pm-2:50pm |
HEG 201 |
LA |
ELIT |
This course tracks the
idea of degeneration—the nightmare offspring of Darwinian progress—from the
1857 prosecution of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, to the simultaneous
trials of Oscar Wilde (for gross indecency) and Captain Alfred Dreyfus (for
treason) in 1895. Using as our focal point Max Nordau’s 1892 bestseller Degeneration,
which argued that contemporary artists like Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, Richard
Wagner, Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche were clinically insane, we will
explore the prevalent late nineteenth-century identification of new literary
forms with madness, criminality and perversion; we will also try to understand
why the themes of disease, degeneration and cultural decline fascinated the
very artists whom Nordau attacked, and inspired some of their greatest works.
Texts include Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda
Gabler, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll
and Mr. Hyde, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Conrad’s Secret
Agent, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Zola’s L'Assommoir,
Wilde’s De Profundis, Huysmans’ Against
Nature, and H. G. Wells’s Time Machine.
Class
size: 22
|
17198 |
LIT 256
the rise of Fiction in Enlightenment Britain |
Collin
Jennings |
T Th 11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 203 |
LA |
ELIT |
Cross-listed:
Experimental Humanities The course is a history of modern fictionality that
locates the eighteenth-century novel in relation to other Enlightenment forms
of supposition. The period from the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660
through the French Revolution tends to be treated as a period of progress in
Britain and Europe. It has been called the Age of Revolutions, referring to
dramatic changes in politics, science, and political economy that produced new
views of factuality related to scientific discoveries and mechanical
inventions. However, this course explores the premise that new forms of
fictionality equally characterized the emergence of modern civil society. From
the scientific hypothesis, to historical conjecture, to economic
prognostication, to the national lottery and other games of chance,
eighteenth-century British society witnessed the proliferation of many forms of
make-believe. By gathering together discussions of these different forms, this
course will challenge the typical division between imaginative and scientific
types of supposition. Readings will include works by Margaret Cavendish, Isaac
Newton, Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne, Adam
Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. This course counts as pre-1800
offering. Class
size: 22
|
17215 |
LIT 2607
Introduction to Literary Theory |
Alexandre
Benson |
M W 3:10pm-4:30pm |
ASP 302 |
LA |
ELIT DIFF |
This course focuses on key theoretical works from the
twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. If literary theory rigorously questions
things we take to be common sense -- what precisely do we mean when we talk
about “authors” and “texts,” for instance? -- it also
provides a space for the critical, creative linking of the literary to the
social. How has colonialism shaped our ideas of the novel? What is the
relationship between theories of intention and the performance of gender? And
how do questions of racial difference intersect with models of narrative voice?
We will read works that tackle these issues (and more) by theorists including
Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Barbara Johnson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward
Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri
Spivak, and Raymond Williams. Class
size: 22
|
17199 |
LIT 265
Victorian Poverty in Paint and Print |
Natalie
Prizel |
T Th 1:30pm-2:50pm |
OLIN 204 |
LA D+J |
ELIT DIFF |
Cross-listed: Art History; Victorian Studie s In Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Mr. Podsnap quotes Jesus out of context by
saying, “For ye have the poor always with you” in order to justify his own
indifferent wealth. This course explores the myriad ways that Victorian
writers, thinkers, politicians, and artists responded to seemingly timeless but
persistently present poverty and its effect on the “Condition of England.”
Focusing on texts as disparate as economic theory, aesthetic theory, the novel,
and poetry and the rich tradition of nineteenth-century visual culture,
particularly reproducible prints, oil paintings in both the English School and
the Pre-Raphaelites, and nascent photography, this class aims to demonstrate
how questions about and responses to poverty vary by discipline and media but
also cut across them. To what extent is poverty
an ethical, social, economic, political, or aesthetic problem? In centralizing
social and economic class as the primary register of difference, we will think
intersectionally about how poverty in nineteenth-century Britain attaches to
certain marked bodies. Texts and
paintings might includes those by: Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, John
Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett, Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William
Morris, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, David Wilkie, William Holman
Hunt, Richard Beard, and others. Class
size: 22
|
17038 |
CLAS / LIT 275
Poetry and Athletics |
William
Mullen |
M W 11:50am-1:10pm |
OLIN 201 |
FL |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: Literature The
meanings to be seen in athletics have stirred the meditations and praises of
poets in many different cultures and genres.
Poetry itself, particularly when joined with music and dance by
competing choruses, has established itself as its own kind of competitive
event. This course will study the
strange intersections of the physical, the social and the sacred we still
recognize in sports. We will allot equal
time to three different sets of readings: 1) case studies of the wedding of
poetry to athletics in still thriving Oceanic cultures, from the Hawaiians to
the Maori; 2) victory odes for the ancient Greek games, principally those of
Pindar, praising victors in boxing, wrestling, running, pentathlon, pancratium
(a.k.a Ultimate Fighting), chariot, and dithyramb; 3) sports poetry in Europe
and the Americas, ranging from bullfighting and capoeira to ball games both in
Classic Mesoamerica (Mayan and Aztec) and baseball poems in the 100 years. In
all three parts we will not only study the poems themselves but also some
scholarship by sports historians on the particular athletic events they
reflect, and will view some video clips of the sports and poetry in
action. All readings will be in English. Class
size: 22
|
17202 |
LIT 275
Auto/biography |
Michael
Staunton |
M W 1:30pm-2:50pm |
OLIN 204 |
LA |
ELIT |
There are few more fascinating or popular literary
subjects than the lives of others – except perhaps one’s own life – yet
biography and autobiography are curiously unexamined genres. In this course we will
pay attention to the variety of ways in which people in different periods and
in different cultures have written about peoples’ lives, whether others’ or
their own. We will ask what place biography and autobiography have in
literature, what conventions and preoccupations give such works their shape,
how people have addressed the different stages of life and common experiences,
and how politics, psychology and culture influence biography and autobiography.
Reading include works by and/or about Suetonius, Augustine, Christine de Pizan,
Giorgio Vasari, Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Hailie Selassie, Patti Smith,
Rigoberta Menchú, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Marjane Satrapi. Class size:
22