Course:

LIT 3048  Extraordinary Bodies: Disability in American Literature and Culture

Professor:

Jaime Alves  

CRN:

90280

Schedule:

 Tue      6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

10

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

In this course, we will examine U.S. fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir to understand how writers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries represent the "normal" body, as well as a constellation of bodies presented as extraordinary: bodies that differ from the average at birth or as transformed by illness or war; bodies paraded as "freaks"; bodies that don't fit into established categories. We begin in the early nineteenth century, when popular Enlightenment ideology suggested Americans could control their own destinies, making and remaking their characters, and even their bodies, at will. What ideas emerged here about the kind of self one should make, and the kinds of bodies that should be discarded? How were those ideas proffered in and shaped by literary imaginings? How have they persisted and changed over time, especially in relation to ideas about American identity? Our reading list takes us into the present day, and includes an introduction to the major questions and scholarly perspectives under debate at the intersection of Disability Studies and the study of literature. This course is cross-listed with the MAT program for 4+1 students in literature.

 

Course:

LIT 315  Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"

Professor:

Eric Trudel 

CRN:

90276

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin Language Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

20

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  French Studies

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time tells of an elaborate, internal journey, at the end of which the narrator discovers the unifying pattern of his life both as a writer and human being. Famed for its style and its distinctive view of love, sex and cruelty, reading, language and memory, Proust's modernist epic broke new ground in the invention of a genre that lies between fiction and autobiography. Through a semester devoted to the close reading of Swann's Way and Time Regained in their entirety and several substantial key-excerpts taken from all the other volumes, we will try to understand the complex nature of Proust's masterpiece and, among other things, examine the ways in which it accounts for the temporality and new rhythms of modern life. We will also question the narrative and stylistic function of homosexuality, discuss the significance of the massive social disruption brought about by the Great War and investigate why the visual arts and music are seminal to the narration. Additional readings from Barthes, Beckett, Benjamin, Deleuze, de Man, Kristeva and Lévinas among many others. Taught in English.

 

Course:

LIT 3151  "Country of Imagination": Contemporary Writers in Conversation

Professor:

Thomas Bartscherer and Nuruddin Farah

CRN:

90274

Schedule:

  Tues     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM RKC 122

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

15

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies; Human Rights

"For a little under twenty five years I have dwelt in the dubious details of a territory I often refer to as the country of my imagination" (Yesterday, Tomorrow). This course is structured by a series of conversations between and about contemporary writers and their texts. Each few weeks, the class will read one novel by Nuruddin Farah, which will be paired with another novel written by an author who will join the class (preferably in person). The class will explore questions of subject matter and of technique, and will attend to points of commonality and contrast in the texts we read. Key themes will include: the intersection of familial and political relations; generational guilt; dictatorship, repression, and dissent; migration, exile, and diasporic communities; the complex interplay between "tradition" and colonization; national identity; and the intersection of art and politics. We will also consider questions of literary technique, including: multivocal narration and point of view; the use of myth, history, and folktales within contemporary novels; intertextuality; the relationship between oral and written culture; and multilingualism. Potential guests/texts include: Abdulrazak Gurnah/Paradise; Ilija Trojanow/The Collector of Worlds; Louise Erdrich/The Plague of Doves; Aleksandar Hemon/Nowhere Man; Anita Desai/Cry, the Peacock. Texts by Nuruddin Farah may include: Sweet and Sour Milk; Maps; Secrets; North of Dawn; Yesterday, Tomorrow.

 

Course:

LIT 3152  Jeanne Lee's Total Environment

Professor:

Alex Benson  

CRN:

90275

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

15

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Experimental Humanities; Human Rights

This course bridges the study of American literature, campus history, and avant-garde music (especially free jazz) through an extended reflection on the work of vocalist Jeanne Lee (1939-2000). "I look at myself as already an environment," Lee said in a 1979 interview, "and in turn the music is created as a total environment to the audience." What did she mean by this? We may find some answers in our own environment; Lee graduated from Bard in 1961. She then went on to a four-decade career as a singer, poet, writer, and educator. Through that career we'll consider questions of voice, aesthetics, race, and gender, paying special attention to relationships between art and politics, improvisation and community. To this end we will study a number of artists with whom Lee collaborated or from whom she drew inspiration, including writers Ralph Ellison, Ntozake Shange, and Gertrude Stein and musicians Marion Brown, John Cage, and Abbey Lincoln. Archival campus materials will help us understand Lee's time at Bard, with a focus on musical performances, student publications, and curriculum. We'll ask how all of these things intersected with broader currents of US culture at a moment of civil rights activism and other social transformations. In addition to listening, reading, writing, and discussion, coursework will involve collaborative, public-facing projects that may include designing an audio tour or podcast, conducting oral history interviews, and/or curating an educational exhibit. Open to Literature students but also to all others with interests in interdisciplinary arts. Preference in registration to moderated students, but no prerequisites.

 

Course:

LIT 333  Innovative Contemporary Fiction

Professor:

Bradford Morrow  

CRN:

90277

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

In this course students will have the unique opportunity to meet and interact with several leading contemporary writers who will join us in class to discuss their work and answer questions about the art of fiction and creative nonfiction. Among those visiting us are the British-Guyanese poet, playwright, and fiction writer Fred D’Aguiar (Year of Plagues: A Memolr), Bard Fiction Prize winner Akil Kumarasamy (Half Gods), and Rikki Ducornet (Trafik). We will also devote much time to close readings of key novels and short story collections by innovative fiction writers of the past couple of generations, with an eye toward exploring the great diversity of voices and styles employed in these narratives as well as the cultural issues they chronicle.  Particular emphasis will be placed on reading and analyzing books by some of fiction's most pioneering practitioners, including Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Richard Powers, Jamaica Kincaid, and others whose work has revitalized and revolutionized our understanding of narrative forms.

 

Course:

LIT 337  Radical Romanticism: Percy Bysshe Shelley and his Circle

Professor:

Cole Heinowitz  

CRN:

90278

Schedule:

   Thurs    2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life. At the age of 18, he was expelled from Oxford for distributing his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. Soon after, he published Queen Mab, a long poem that indicted organized religion as the root of all evil and prophesied the emergence of a post-moral utopia. The following year, Shelley eloped to Italy with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future author of Frankenstein. Living in self-imposed exile for the remainder of his life, Shelley produced some of the most poetically, ethically, and ideologically challenging literature written in English. In addition to a close study of Shelley's work, this seminar will examine writings by his intimate contemporary interlocutors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, and Mary Shelley—as well as his influence on later writers and activists such as George Bernard Shaw, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. As a Junior Seminar, this course emphasizes research methods, writing, and revision. All are welcome, but priority will be given to students who have moderated into the Literature Program or another program in the Division of Languages & Literature.

 

Course:

LIT 345  Difficulty

Professor:

Joseph O'Neill  

CRN:

90338

Schedule:

Mon       10:20 AM - 12:40 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

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).

 

Course:

LIT 366  Romance and Realism: Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Internet Age

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

CRN:

90279

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Film and Electronic Arts; Italian Studies

The phrase rifare l'Italia (remake Italy) was a refrain for many of the Italian filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s who created works that dealt in some way with their nation's struggle to rebuild itself after two decades of Fascism and years of world (and civil) war. In particular, the famous postwar cinematic movement Neorealism revolutionized filmmaking by employing documentary-style techniques to address the pressing sociopolitical issues of the day. A focus of this course on the history of Italian film will be the works and legacies of the vaunted Neorealist movement, whose directors (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) trained or influenced a generation of the so-called auteur filmmakers (Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini). We will also study the richly interdisciplinary realm of the silent film era as well as the major recent Italian directors who continue to produce "art cinema" in the tradition of the Neorealist and auteur masters. All course work/readings in English; films with English subtitles.

 

Literature Senior Colloquium:

 

Course:

LIT 405  Literature Senior Colloquium I

Professor:

Matthew Mutter  

CRN:

90281

Schedule:

 Tue      5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

40

Credits:

1

 (To be taken concurrently with LIT 401) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers.

 

Course:

LIT 406  Literature Senior Colloquium II

Professor:

Matthew Mutter  

CRN:

90282

Schedule:

Mon       5:40 PM - 7:00 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

20

Credits:

1

 (To be taken concurrently with LIT 402) Senior Colloquium is the capstone course in the Literature curriculum and, along with the Senior Project, represents the culmination of your work in the major. The course has several interrelated goals: 1) to facilitate and support every stage of your work on the Senior Project; 2) to develop ways of sharing that work and constructively exchanging ideas with fellow colloquium members as well as other Literature students and faculty; 3) to actively engage with related intellectual and artistic events (such as readings, panel discussions, and lectures) in ways that connect your work on the Senior Project with the work of prominent scholars and writers; 4) to cultivate an honest, self-reflective relationship toward your own scholarship, thinking, and writing; and 5) to document your research in a way that is generous toward future readers and writers

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

FREN 336  The French Novel and the Poetics of Memory

Professor:

Eric Trudel  

CRN:

90213

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Reem Kayden Center 102

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Literature

 

Course:

HR 3206  Evidence

Professor:

Thomas Keenan  

CRN:

90140

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Center for Curatorial Studies Seminar Room

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Literature; Philosophy

 

Course:

WRIT 347  Manifestations of the Self in Narrative: Metafiction to Autofiction

Professor:

Mary Caponegro  

CRN:

90294

Schedule:

  Wed     2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Literature