17220

LIT 3046

Woman as Cyborg

Maria Cecire

W 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 303

D+J

ELIT

DIFF

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Gender and Sexuality Studies From the robot Maria in the 1927 film Metropolis to the female-voiced Siri application for iPhone, mechanized creations that perform physical, emotional, and computational labor have been routinely gendered female in both fiction and reality. In this course, we will discuss how gynoids, fembots, and female-identified machinery reflect the roles of women’s work and women’s bodies in technologized society. Why might it matter that the words “typewriter” and “computer” used to refer to women who typed and performed calculations? How are sexualized fembots marked both by their total manipulability and ultimate inaccessibility? What can cyborgism contribute to feminist theory? We will draw upon scholarship by Anne Marie Balsamo, Rita Felski, Donna Haraway, Andreas Huyssen, and others as we explore the relationships between women, modernity, and mechanization in a range of cultural texts. These will include written works from ancient Greece, Karel Capek’s 1923 play R.U.R. (in which the word “robot” first appeared), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer; examples from film and television such as “Blade Runner”, “Wall-E”, and the reimagined “Battlestar Galactica”; as well as real-world androids and computer programs. Class size: 15

17530

LIT 316

Chinese Cinema

Wah Guan Lim

Screening:

W 1:30pm-3:50pm

M 7:00pm-10:00pm

OLINLC 208

PRE 110

FLLC

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Film This course examines the Chinese-speaking world(s) through the medium of film. We use film as a lens through which to investigate the commonalities and differences in China, Taiwan and the diaspora, paying particular attention to how the recent historical developments of these various Chinese societies shape their contemporary political realities. Examples include auteur films of the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Generation directors Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang, the Taiwanese and Hong Kong “New Wave Cinemas” of Hou Hsiao Hsien, Edward Yang and Ann Hui, as well as the action films of Jacky Chan and Jet Lee, and the comedies of Sam Hui, Stephen Chow and Xu Zheng. Compulsory Monday evening film screenings, an additional individual film viewing, on top of a three-hour seminar per week. Conducted in English. Class size: 22

17100

LIT / PHIL 322

Citizens of the World, Ancient, modern, contemporary

Thomas Bartscherer

M 4:40pm-7:00pm

HEG 204

MBV

HUM

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Human Rights; Literature “I am a citizen of the world.” First attributed to the 4th century philosopher Diogenes, the concept of “global citizenship” has a complex history and urgent relevance to the present historical moment. This course explores a tension at the heart of the idea of global citizenship: the relationship between the particularity that defines membership in a given cultural and political community and the universality that characterizes the human condition. We will examine the philosophical and historical development of the concept of global citizenship and its political, ethical, and psychological implications from antiquity through to the present day. Authors to be read include Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Ibn Tufayl, Kant, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt, Darwish, Coetzee, Nussbaum, and Appiah. This course will be co-taught simultaneously in Berlin and Annandale-on-Hudson. Interested students should contact the professor in advance of registration [email protected]. Class size: 15

17222

LIT 326

Banned Books and other Literary Scandals

Joseph Luzzi

T 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 304

ELIT

What do books as diverse as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and George Orwell's Animal Farm all have in common? At one point they were all banned for their controversial content, even though they are now celebrated as literary classics. This course will explore the complex universe of the banned or forbidden book, as we see how writers from James Joyce to Alice Walker have been barred from literary circulation because of their alleged threats to accepted views on sex, politics, religion, and social identity. Class size: 15

17590

LIT 330

innovative novellas and short stories

Justus Rosenberg

T 10:10am- 12:30pm

OLIN 302

FLLC

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: 12

17223

LIT 331

Translation Workshop

Peter Filkins

Th 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 304

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

17224

LIT 333

New Directions in Contemporary Fiction

Bradford Morrow

M 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLIN 101

ELIT

Contemporary fiction of the last several decades has been revolutionized by a number of literary writers whose work explores new directions in narrative form. In this course we will make close, comparative readings of novels and short stories by some of the most pioneering authors of the period, including David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Ondaatje, and others. Paul Lisicky, Francine Prose and Pulitzer prize winner Robert Olen Butler will visit class to discuss their work with students. Class size: 15

17216

LIT 336

Extinction

Alexandre Benson

T 4:40pm-7:00pm

OLINLC 208

D+J

ELIT

Cross-listed: Anthropology; Environmental & Urban Studies “Extinction” can describe more than one kind of calamity: species death, the disappearance of ways of life, the loss of languages. When and why did this trope -- suggesting some vital flame snuffed out -- become key to how we talk about the realities of biological, cultural, and linguistic precarity? How does one narrate the end, not of an individual organism, but of a form of life? And what social or institutional histories influence the designation of a given group or tradition as "vanishing" or "endangered"? For answers to such questions, we will look to early works of natural history; to ethnographic and historical studies of populations on the edge; and to literary works, from Romantic-era poetry to science fiction, that investigate the links between ideas of species, culture, sexuality, media, religion, and violence -- and that sometimes propose speculative alternatives to the narrative of extinction. Authors to include Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Charles Darwin, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Kolbert, Theodora Kroeber, Jonathan Lear, Cormac McCarthy, Ishimure Michiko, and Mary Shelley. Class size: 15

17217

LIT 340

American Literature and the Reinvention of the Human

Matthew Mutter

W 10:10am-12:30pm

BITO 210

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies Related interest: Sociology In his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1946, W.H. Auden commanded his listeners, “Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians nor commit / A social science.” In an essay of 1962, James Baldwin wrote, “I am far from being convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now—in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life—expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist.” The twentieth century saw an enormous surge in the cultural prestige and moral authority of psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology. These disciplines, rather than religion or literature, established the principal vocabularies through which human identity and the prospects for social change were articulated. This course, which combines the study of American literature and American intellectual history, will explore the ways in which literature both appropriated and resisted this cultural transformation. We will ask questions such as: what is the relation between humanistic and social scientific knowledge? How does literature represent agency and desire, and do those representations track with social scientific accounts? Can certain emotional or spiritual states be explained by appeals to psychological structure or social forces? How might a literary anthropology evade the canons of psychiatric normalcy? How does the moral imagination respond when the language of good and evil is displaced by that of health, adjustment, and alienation? Writers considered in this course may include James Baldwin, W.H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, Nathanael West, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, Joseph Heller, Theodore Dreiser, and Mary McCarthy. Class size: 15

17591

LIT 342

literature and apocalypse

Mark Danner

W 1:30pm-3:50pm

OLINLC 115

ELIT

Almost from the time people began using styluses on clay tablets they wrote to depict the end of the world. Apocalypse was the act of revelation, an unveiling of what had been hidden: What was to come. Revealing it belonged to the voices of the prophets and the sacred markings of the written word. Likewise moments of extremity have always brought movements toward apocalypse. In this seminar we will study apocalyptic writing from its emergence in the sacred books of the Middle East to its contemporary efflorescence in novels, poetry and film. We will seek to study the wellspring of apocalypse and the progressive development of our writing the end of the world. Texts will include Gilgamesh and associated texts, John’s Revelation, and the Book of Daniel; Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Richard Jefferies’ After London; and more contemporary work by Beckett, Brooks, Carpentier, Crace, DeLillo, Leigh Fermor, Porter, Saramago, Stapledon and Vargas Llosa. Class size: 15

17218

LIT 345

Difficulty

Joseph O'Neill

M 11:50am-2:10pm

OLIN 107

ELIT

What do we mean when we say a piece of writing is “difficult” or “easy?” In what sense is, say, a children’s tale less difficult than a modernist poem? In this course we will closely examine a variety of short texts in order to investigate such questions, and to think about the different roles a reader might assume in order to productively receive a “difficult” or “easy” text: decoder, technician, philologist, ideologue, initiate, psychoanalyst, aesthete, and so forth. In this way, we will lay a foundation for literary theory and develop strategies for engaging with writings that are often deemed to be too forbidding (or too simple) for our attention. Readings will include the Gospel of St. Mark and work by Thomas Browne, the Grimm brothers, James Joyce, Hermann Broch, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, John Ashbery, Lydia Davis, the 9/11 Commission, Annie Dillard, and Arnold Lobel (author of the Frog and Toad books). Class size: 15

17225

LIT 379

Emily Dickinson

Philip Pardi

F 10:10am-12:30pm

OLINLC 210

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies Although frequently depicted as working in relative isolation, Emily Dickinson was in fact vitally connected to the world around her. This seminar will be devoted to a close and careful reading of Dickinson’s poetry in the context of the historical moment and literary world of which she was a part. By exploring how her work participates in the poetic practices and intellectual currents of her day, we will seek to sharpen our understanding of her unique, even radical, contribution to American poetry. Open to all students, but preference will be given to moderated students and to literature majors. Class size: 14

17231

LIT 405

Senior Colloquium: Literature

Cole Heinowitz

M 4:40pm-6:00pm

OLIN 202

1 credit 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

Cross-listed courses:

17039

CLAS 322

THE INVENTION OF DIFFERENCE

Robert Cioffi

T 4:40pm-7:00pm

OLIN 301

D+J

FLLC

DIFF

Cross-listed: Literature

17460

HR 3206

Evidence

Thomas Keenan

T 1:30pm-3:50pm

CCS

D+J

SSCI

Cross-listed: Literature Class size: 18

17516

REL 231

Great Jewish Books

Samuel Secunda

M W 11:50am-1:10pm

OLIN 307

MBV

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Studies Class size: 18

17399

ANTH 280

The Edge of Anthropology

John Ryle

M W 11:50am-1:10pm

HEG 308

D+J

SSCI

DIFF

Cross-listed: Global & International Studies; Literature

17068

SPAN 301

Intro to Spanish Literature

Mar Gomez Glez

(Maria Del Mar Windeler )

T Th 1:30pm-2:50pm

OLINLC 210

FLLC

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Literature Class size: 15

17329

WRIT 341

Poetics of Space:Language and Visuality

Ann Lauterbach

T 1:30pm-3:50pm

ALBEE 106

PART

Cross-listed: Literature Class size: 12