August 11 - 27, 2008

Welcome

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” This is the opening line of Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis,” which we are asking you to read in preparation for the 2008 Language and Thinking program (L&T). If you are trying to imagine what the program will be like, that sentence is a good place to start. Not that L&T will necessarily turn you into an insect (although who knows?), but you will be expected to enter into other points of view, to speculate on what happened to Gregor, to write and think your way into his predicament. We’re asking you to think about other kinds of metamorphoses as well by reading Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection. These texts give you an opportunity to consider not only the differences between homo sapiens and other species, but also how one species has, as Darwin put it, “given birth to other and distinct species” over evolutionary time. Kafka, on the other hand, shows how the human imagination can make this happen in a fictive instant. Once at Bard, you’ll engage with many other texts by a variety of authors, all chosen to challenge your imaginative intelligence. If things proceed as we hope they will, you should find yourself undergoing some interesting transformations of your own.

To prepare for L&T, we ask you to obtain and read both “The Metamorphosis” and On Natural Selection. Information about Darwin, Kafka, and their works is readily available from a large variety of sources and doubtless some of you will want to explore them before you arrive. What matters most, however, is that you read the two assigned texts, reflect on them individually and in tandem. (In both, the narrator is attempting to persuade the reader of extraordinary events!) This assignment is, for most of you, a first opportunity to begin the transformation from high school to college student. Your future classmates, presently dispersed throughout the world, will be engaged with it too as we all prepare to gather at Bard in August, to write and think together.

On the first day of L&T, you will receive an anthology with a long question wrapped around its binder: What does it mean to be human in the year 2008 on an abundant and fragile planet, with memory and possibility, with people like ourselves and different, with affluence and squalor, hope and despair, with mountains and rivers and trees, with herons and cyborgs, music and urban noise, with art and TV and infinite space? Reflect on this as you read Darwin and Kafka. What does each work suggest to you about what it means to be human? What are the attributes of the set or category “human being”and how is it distinguished from that which is not human? Who makes such determinations and why? What do the arts and sciences, of which Kafka and Darwin are exemplary representatives, have to do with being human? Why is it of interest to pair these two authors and, in particular, these two works?

We recommend that you write as you read: mark passages; annotate in the margins (why not start by annotating this letter?); formulate questions about what you find confusing or compelling; record words or phrases that catch your fancy. Explore in writing some of the questions posed in the previous paragraph. Keep a journal as you read, a notebook in which you record your responses to the texts. If you like, write a fictional metamorphosis of your own. Bring the results with you in August.

The Language and Thinking program is intensive. It's learning to swim by diving into the wide open sea. But having been accepted to Bard, you can be confident that you are well-equipped to meet the challenges this program presents. The College has taken care to assemble a highly skilled team of instructors, advisors, and counselors to support you during your first three weeks on campus and, most importantly, you will have each other, the intellectual and social community of the Class of 2012.
 
We look forward to your arrival in Annandale-on-Hudson in August!

A Note on the Texts and Secondary Sources

For more information on L&T or First-Year Students at Bard contact the Dean of Students office by calling 845-758-7454 or e-mail firstyear@bard.edu.

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