Literature Sequence Courses: Historical studies in the Comparative, English, and American Literature traditions. One sequence course is required before moderation. Sequence courses have no prerequisites and are open to students at all levels.

 

Course:

LIT 204A  Comparative Literature I: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

CRN:

90253

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies

This course constitutes a survey of the masterworks of medieval and Renaissance European literature. It was during this time period that the concept of the author, as we now conceive of it, first emerged. When a literary work is composed, who is it who composes it? To what extent does such a work represent the general culture out of which it emerged, and to what extent does it reflect an individual consciousness? How does our assumption of who the author is affect how our reading of the text? We will be keeping these questions in mind as we examine the shift from epic to lyric and romance; from orally-based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts to be read will include The Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, The Romance of the Rose, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's sonnets, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies.

 

Course:

LIT 204B  Comparative Literature II: Dreamers and Disruptors: The Birth of Modern European Literature

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

CRN:

90254

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

This course will immerse students in the remarkable literature in Europe from roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. We will cover a wide range of forms (poetry, prose, theater) and movements (Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic) as we focus on groundbreaking authors like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Manzoni, and many more. A major concern will be on how the novel eventually became the preeminent literary genre, and how writers of this vast period responded to – and often shaped – the massive sociopolitical and historical issues of their ages. Overall we will see how the very idea of "literature" in our modern, contemporary sense was created during this epoch of astonishing literary achievement.

 

Course:

LIT 252  English Literature III: Empire, Equality, Ecology

Professor:

Daniel Williams  

CRN:

90255

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) A broad survey of British literature and culture from the early 19th through the late 20th century, with readings organized according to three interconnected themes. First, the expansion, critique, and eventual dissolution of the British Empire, with its concomitant effects on colonized (and later postcolonial) peoples around the globe. Next, Britain's rapid industrialization and the resultant shifts in humanity's relationship to the natural world, partly reflected in scientific and ecological writing. Finally, the widening of equality, particularly in terms of class and gender, with its attendant social and political upheavals. We will consider how literature interacted with these developments, looking at various literary movements and a range of evolutions in form, genre, and style. Readings will include poetry, short stories, novels, plays, manifestos, and essays, as well as relevant historical and theoretical materials.

 

Course:

LIT 257  American Literature I: The Open Boat

Professor:

Alex Benson  

CRN:

90256

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies

American literature from the colonial period to the early republic (16th to early 19th century) is a field of myriad, unstable genres. So in this course our readings will set gothic novels alongside political tracts, captivity narratives alongside hymns, and lyric poems alongside works of natural history. We will read texts from the period by Charles Brockden Brown, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Jonathan Edwards, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah Foster, Cotton Mather, Samson Occom, Mary Rowlandson, and Phillis Wheatley. And to consider their contemporary echoes, we will bring them into dialogue with later writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Edouard Glissant, Leila Lalami, and Sylvia Wynter. Through these texts, we will address questions of difference and justice -- of labor extraction, religious conflict, gender inequality, and the processes of settler colonialism -- as they shape (and are imaginatively reconfigured by) the literary traditions and innovations that come into view during the period.

 

Course:

LIT 258  American Literature II: The Struggle for a Democratic Poetics

Professor:

Matthew Mutter  

CRN:

90257

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course explores the major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century and seeks to sharpen student practice in close reading and historical contextualization.  Discussion includes a variety of topics, among them the engrafting of American Puritanism with American Romanticism; wilderness, westward expansion and emergent empire; metaphor and figurations of selfhood, knowledge, divinity and nature; the slavery crisis, Civil War and democratic poetics.  Writers include  Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Dickinson.

100-Level Literature Courses

 

Course:

LIT 131  Women in Leadership

Professor:

Dierdre d’Albertis, Erin Cannan, Malia Du Mont, and Michelle Murray

CRN:

90990

Schedule:

 Fri    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM Chapel

Distributional Area:

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

20

Credits:

2

It is 2021. Why aren't there more women in leadership positions? According to a 2014 Pew Research Center report, the majority of American men and women acknowledge the capacity of women to lead. Yet in certain domains--most notably politics and business--women continue to be under-represented at the top.  Recent elections have galvanized the electorate around constructions of gender in particularly dramatic ways.  If we are living in a post-feminist society (as some claim), why do these questions and conflicts continue to arise? Identity is an urgent conversation in 21st-century politics and everyday life, and this includes awareness of how intersectionality shapes gendered experiences. What are the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about equality, representation, privilege, freedom, authority, and success? How do these inflect real-world outcomes for individuals and societies?  In this two-credit course we will explore some of the stories that circulate in our culture around women and power, both from an academic and from a practical, real-world perspective. What does it mean to lead? How do we use a language of empowerment? Why has the United States embraced certain narratives of gender equity and success as opposed to those being created in other countries and cultures? We will focus on learning from women who are committed to making a difference in the world through their personal and professional choices, hearing their stories, and reading texts that have been particularly important to them in their lives and work. So too, we will engage with stories from the past (archival research),  from across disciplines (the military, higher education, STEM, the arts, tech, media) and from a wide range of perspectives.  As an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course, this seminar will provide students with the unique opportunity to bring theory and practice together in a very immediate sense: by the end of the term you will have identified a story only you can tell, whether it is based in political activism, community engagement, or work experience. Drawing on the rich resources here in Annandale as well as through Bard's other campuses we will reach out to groups and organizations with a shared focus on gender. Network building is something we will explicitly address and we will convene for a Summit late in the semester.  This course is open to all first-year students. Upper College students may also participate if selected to serve as course fellows.

 

Course:

LIT 138  Writing While Black

Professor:

Peter L'Official  

CRN:

90258

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies; American Studies; Human Rights

This is a course on African American Literature in the 21st Century. In this class, we will explore what it means for an author in the contemporary era to render Blackness, Black folk, and Black experience in prose and poetry. How do Black writers contend with the present, bearing in mind the notion that "the past is never dead. It's not even past"? What does it mean to write in a moment—like many before it--when simply "existing while Black" carries with it a sense of sobering precarity? What is the significance of creating Black literature within a publishing industry that is itself an engine of racial inequality in terms of demographics and the literature itself? We will read broadly to find answers to these questions, and may encounter fiction, essays, poetry, plays, and the graphic novel along the way. Major authors may include but not be limited to: Brit Bennett, Sarah Broom, Tyehimba Jess, Mat Johnson, John Keene, Robin Coste Lewis, Kiese Laymon, Brandon Taylor, Danez Smith, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic difference are discussed at length in this course. This course is open both to intended Literature majors and to others interested in developing skills in close-reading and critical analysis.

 

Course:

LIT 139  Monsters я Us

Professor:

Cole Heinowitz  

CRN:

90259

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin Languages Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of the word "monster" (ca. 1375) is: "a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance." By the early sixteenth century, "monster" had also come to refer to "a person of repulsively unnatural character, or exhibiting such extreme cruelty or wickedness as to appear inhuman." These definitions remind us that monstrosity is not the opposite of humanity; on the contrary, what makes monsters monstrous is precisely their resemblance to humans. If monsters are not humanity's "other" but rather its uncanny double, what stories do they enable us to tell about ourselves? Why does Frankenstein give life to an eight-foot tall creature fashioned from human and nonhuman body parts rather than, say, a human child? Why has the historical Vlad the Impaler been largely forgotten while his undead avatar, Dracula, remains a staple of gothic literature and popular culture? Reading monster narratives from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century (including works by Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Metcalf,  H.P. Lovecraft, and Ursula Le Guin), this course will explore the influence of race, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, and sexuality on the construction of the "human" as a privileged category.

 

Course:

LIT 139 B  Monsters я Us

Professor:

Cole Heinowitz 

CRN:

90856

Schedule:

Mon       12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

18

Credits:

2

(2 Credits) See above for description.  This is a 2-credit version of LIT 129 meeting once a week.

 

Course:

LIT 144  Making Love: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

CRN:

90260

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

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 focuses on the theme of love as a psychological, emotional, and political concept to examine 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 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 significant (and significantly  undervalued, self-consciously strange, or flagrantly subversive) works of poetry, and will pay particular attention to poetry by women. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne will take their place in context alongside Thomas Wyatt, Philip and Mary Sidney, Ben Jonson, Katherine Philips, Mary Wroth, and George Herbert. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

 Pre-Moderation Required Course: Narrative / Poetics Representation

 

Course:

LIT 201 A Narrative/Poetics/Representation

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

CRN:

90251

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.

 

Course:

LIT 201 B Narrative/Poetics/Representation

Professor:

Alys Moody  

CRN:

90252

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 310

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities. This course is a pre-moderation requirement for all prospective Literature and Written Arts majors.

 

200-Level Literature Courses

 

Course:

LIT 2053  Once Upon A Time: The Folktales of the Brothers Grimm

Professor:

Franz Kempf  

CRN:

90261

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  German  Studies

"Enchanting, brimming with wonder and magic, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are the special stories of childhood that stay with us throughout our lives," writes translator and Grimm scholar Jack Zipes. Unfortunately, we seem to know these tales only in adaptations that greatly reduce their power to touch our emotions and engage our imaginations. Through a close reading of selected tales, with emphasis on language, plot, motif, and image, this course explores not only the tales' poetics and politics but also their origins in the oral tradition, in folklore and myth. The course considers major critical approaches (e.g., Freudian, Marxist, feminist) and conducts a contrastive analysis of creative adaptations (Disney, classical ballet, postmodern dance) and other fairy-tale traditions (Perrault, Straparola, Arabian Nights). Creative and critical writing assignments. Taught in English. Tutorial in German can be arranged.

 

Course:

LIT 2054  Sympathy for the Devil

Professor:

Francine Prose  

CRN:

90262

Schedule:

    Fri   2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

How do writers create sympathy for their characters, not only the angelic but the demonic? Are there characters who are beyond our sympathy? Can literature affect our capacity for compassion? We will consider these questions  as we read a range of writers including Dante, Beckett, Milton, James Alan McPherson, Chekhov, Kleist,  ZZ Packer, Roberto Bolaà±o, Amos Tutuola, Jane Bowles, Molly Keane, Mavis Gallant, Denis Johnson, Kevin Barry and others. We will also watch one or more seasons of the HBO series, The Wire. Students, who will write a brief weekly paper, and who will occasionally be asked to read a novel in a week, should write to me at prose@bard.edu, explaining their reasons for wanting to take the course.

 

Course:

LIT 2055  Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets: Modern Japanese Avant-Gardes

Professor:

Nathan Shockey  

CRN:

90263

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities

In this class, we will trace a prismatic cascade of experimental movements in Japanese literary, visual, plastic, and performance arts and architecture, from the turn of the 20th century through the present. The organizing concept of the course is the critic Hanada Kiyoteru's idea of sà´gà´ geijitsu = "art as synthesis" - as a means to understand the mutually productive movements of textual, visual, haptic, and auditory media within their global and transnational contexts. We will begin with prewar Japanese re-imaginations of Euro-American historical avant-gardes and political vanguards, then follow a fragmented trajectory that includes movements such as Fluxus, Neo-Dadaism, and New Wave Cinema, the political provocations of Hi-Red Center, the Sogetsu Art Center scene, divergent trends in photographic experimentation, the Underground Theater of the 1970s, architectural Metabolism, haute couture fashion, noise music, new millennium pop art, contemporary political protest, and much more. Throughout, we will consider the complex dialectics at play between aesthetic and political avant-gardes at play on the razor's edge of reification in the commercial sphere.  This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2057  Youth in Precarious Japan

Professor:

Wakako Suzuki  

CRN:

90264

Schedule:

Mon    Wed   3:50 PM – 5:100 PM Olin Language Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

20

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies

This course explores the theme of youth and adolescence in literary and cinematic works from late 19th-century to contemporary Japan. It examines how the development of industrial capitalism, Japanese colonialism, World War II, the US occupation, the regional Cold War order, the Japanese economic miracle, and the recent recession have been presented differently when we employ the perspective of youth. The course introduces the following key topics: sexuality, romance, friendship, same-sex love, education, family, ethnic identity, disability and anxiety. Particular issues that young people wrestle with have varied in each period. However, youth and adolescents have continuously grappled with the idea of "social identities" that navigate them into mature adulthood or socially expected gender norms, such as masculinity and femininity. Young people's hopes, dreams, disillusionment, frustrations, and struggles will be examined through selected literary and cinematic works. We also consider the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexual identity in Japanese society but also across countries from the perspective of Difference and Justice. The historical approach to literary and cinematic works provides comparative context to bridge our understanding of representation and the social context negotiated by creators and recipients. Readings include works by Natsume Soseki, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kunikida Doppo, Izumi Kyoka, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki. Cinematic works include works by Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, and Koreeda Hirokazu. We also expand our horizons to music, visual images, and magazines.  This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2205  Stalin and Power

Professor:

Jonathan Brent  

CRN:

90226

Schedule:

    Fri   2:00 PM - 5:00 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

20

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Historical Studies; Russian Studies

Josef Stalin was indisputably one of the central political figures of the Twentieth Century.  Inheritor of leadership of the Soviet state after Lenin's death, he was both directly responsible for his regime's monstrous criminality and the architect of its survival in the face of internal threats and the Nazi invasion of 1941. Stalin remains an enigmatic presence in world history today.  At his death in 1953, Molotov said that he will live in the hearts of all progressive peoples forever; yet by 1956, his crimes were denounced publicly, his body was removed from the Lenin mausoleum, , and his image erased from Soviet society.  Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 did Stalin return to public awareness and now it can be said that he is, paradoxically, fully rehabilitated within contemporary Russian society.   This class will explore the enigma of Stalin and his enduring power through primary documents, biography, and the most recent scholarship.

 

Course:

LIT 2213  Building Stories

Professor:

Peter L'Official  

CRN:

90270

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 309

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Architecture; Environmental & Urban Studies; Experimental Humanities

Cities and their surrounds have long been fertile grounds for the construction of narrative. This course examines relationships between narratives and their settings by employing conceptual frameworks borrowed from architectural studies and histories of the built environment. Weekly discussions of a wide range of texts—literary and otherwise—will be structured around building typologies and common tropes of urban planning: the row-house brownstone, the apartment building, the skyscraper, the suburban or rural house, and the arteries of linkage between them. We will read each set of texts as narratives of place, space, and architecture to discover what, if any, architectures of narrative may undergird or influence them. We will consider to what extent geography and landscape shape culture and identity; we'll chart relationships between race, class, gender, and the environment as articulated by the city and related regions; and we will explore notions of public and private space and our ever-mutable understandings of what it means to be "urban." Texts will include novels, essays, films, visual art, and graphic novels. Authors may include: Alison Bechdel, Sarah Broom, June Jordan, Rem Koolhaas, Ben Lerner, Kevin Lynch, Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, D.J. Waldie, Colson Whitehead.

 

Course:

LIT 227  Labor and Migration in Arabic Literature

Professor:

Dina Ramadan  

CRN:

90507

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

Questions of migration, exile, and displacement have been central to the development of the (post)colonial Arabic literary tradition. Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North, widely considered the most important Arabic novel of the last century, charts Mustafa Said’s journey taking him further and further from Sudan, and the frustrations and impossibility of homecoming. While the effects of the expulsions of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) and the further displacement of the 1967 Naksa (setback) on the evolution of Arabic prose and poetry are widely recognized, questions surrounding labor, its precarities, and migrations are largely understudied. How for example, does the intersection of a booming oil economy with a displaced and transient workforce, reshape the cultural map of the region and beyond? Rather than treat the questions of labor and (forced) migration as separate, in this course we will look at them as intertwined and interdependent. By focusing on Arabic literary production from the second half of the 20th century, we will ask how such works produce a language and aesthetic of displacement and estrangement, one that is able to challenge the hegemony of national boundaries. Finally, we will consider how these literary texts, as well as their authors, travel and migrate to speak to different audiences and from new and shifting centers. Literary texts will be supplemented by theoretical and historical material and will be accompanied by regular film screenings. All readings will be in English. This course is part of the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education initiative. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2311  St. Petersburg: City, Monument, Text

Professor:

Olga Voronina  

CRN:

90271

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Albee 106

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Environmental & Urban Studies; Russian Studies

Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers built St. Petersburg, but it was the writers who put it on the cultural map of the world. Founded on the outskirts of the empire, the city served as a missing link between "enlightened" Europe and "barbaric" Asia, between the turbulent past of the Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered to be too cold, too formal, too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg harbored revolutionary ideas and terrorist movements that threatened to explode from within. While its granite quays were erected to withstand the assault of the floods, some of its most famous monuments, including literary works, resisted the onset of new, radical ideologies.   In this course, we will study the conflicting nature of the city as reflected in literature and literary criticism. The poems and novels on our reading list will provide a sweeping overview of Russia's literary canon in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky and from Gogol to Bely and Nabokov. After exploring Queen of Spades, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina, we will move on to Petersburg and The Defense, thus undertaking a journey through Russia's literary tradition and the urban landscape of the north with the authors who either reconstructed St. Petersburg in their memory or re-visited it in their imaginations.

 

Course:

LIT 2318  Toward the Condition of Music: Poetry and Aesthetics in Victorian England

Professor:

Stephen Graham  

CRN:

90265

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Reem Kayden Center 111

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Victorian Studies

John Ruskin announced in Modern Painters (1843) that the greatest art must contain "the greatest number of the greatest ideas." Fifty years later, Oscar Wilde declared with equal assurance the "All art is quite useless." What happened in that intervening half-century? Reading major Victorian poets including Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy, as well as criticism by John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde—among the finest prose stylists of the century—this course follows the evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the accompanying Victorian debate about the status of art and of the artist in relation to society. This latter narrative begins with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate and cultural institution, and concludes with Oscar Wilde, social pariah and convicted felon, as Victorian poets gradually withdraw from their position in the center of the culture to a stance of defiance, transgression, and martyrdom.

 

Course:

LIT 2319  The Art of Translation

Professor:

Peter Filkins  

CRN:

90272

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

15

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Written Arts

By comparing multiple translations of literary, religious, and philosophical texts, this course will examine the way in which translation shapes textual meaning and our appreciation of it. We will also read several key theoretical essays that trace differing approaches to translation and what can or cannot be expected from translation. Finally, students will also take on a short translation project of their own in order to explore firsthand what it means to translate. Brief comparative readings will include multiple translations of Homer, Sappho, Plato, the Bible, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Babel, Rilke, Neruda, Borges, Basho, Li Po, and Celan. Essays on translation will include those by Dryden, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Goethe, Benjamin, Valéry, Paz, and Nossack. Students should contact instructor to get permission.

 

Course:

LIT 240  Literary Journalism

Professor:

Ian Buruma  

CRN:

90266

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

This course will offer an introduction to the best of literary journalism since Hazlitt. We will read texts such as Hazlitt's own The Fight(1822) and Emile Zola's J'Accuse (1898). From there we will move on to readings that will encompass criticism (of art, theater, film, music), political reportage, travel essays, and war reporting. Writers will include H.L. Mencken, Gay Talese, V. S. Naipaul, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, and Zadie Smith. What makes some journalism literary, and not just informative, is to some extent a question of taste and subjective judgment. But the main thing is that the text has lasting value on merits unrelated to topicality. The aim of this course is to teach students how to read a literary text, and appreciate its value. But just as important is to impart a sense of history. The essays will give students a chance to consider past events in some depth. This should help them develop their writing, as well as analytical skills, and give them some historical grounding as well.

 

Course:

LIT 245  Palestinian Literature in Translation

Professor:

Elizabeth Holt  

CRN:

90552

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

This course is a survey of Palestinian literature, from the early Arabic press in Palestine to contemporary Palestinian fiction.  We will read short stories, poetry and novels by authors including Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Samira 'Azzam, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish, Sahar Khalifeh, Fedwa Tuqan, and Elias Khoury.  All literary texts will be read in translation. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2485  James Joyce's Fiction

Professor:

Elizabeth Frank  

CRN:

90273

Schedule:

  Wed Thurs    8:30 AM – 9:50 AM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Irish and Celtic Studies

Joyce was an autobiographical writer who wrote about one place, Dublin. And he was an experimental writer and a prominent Modernist in tune with the literary and artistic innovations of the early twentieth century. We will read his short stories in Dubliners and his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man as well as his modern epic Ulysses.

 

Course:

LIT 280  The Heroic Age

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

CRN:

90268

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 310

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies

In this course, we will be reading the great epics and sagas of the early Middle Ages, concentrating upon northern Europe. Through these texts, we will explore the tensions between paganism and Christianity, individual glory and kingly authority, and heroism and monstrosity. Texts to be read include the Old English Beowulf; the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge; the Old Norse Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil's Saga; the Old French Song of Roland; and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied; the Old Norse Poetic and Prose Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil's Saga; the Old French Song of Roland; the Middle High German Nibelungenlied; and the Finnish Kalevala. Consideration will be given to the resonance of these works in modern literature and culture. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

300-Level Literature Courses

 

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 Reem Kayden Center 101

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 310

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

World Literature

 

Course:

LIT 2055  Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets: Modern Japanese Avant-Gardes

Professor:

Nathan Shockey  

CRN:

90263

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies; Experimental Humanities

In this class, we will trace a prismatic cascade of experimental movements in Japanese literary, visual, plastic, and performance arts and architecture, from the turn of the 20th century through the present. The organizing concept of the course is the critic Hanada Kiyoteru's idea of sà´gà´ geijitsu = "art as synthesis" - as a means to understand the mutually productive movements of textual, visual, haptic, and auditory media within their global and transnational contexts. We will begin with prewar Japanese re-imaginations of Euro-American historical avant-gardes and political vanguards, then follow a fragmented trajectory that includes movements such as Fluxus, Neo-Dadaism, and New Wave Cinema, the political provocations of Hi-Red Center, the Sogetsu Art Center scene, divergent trends in photographic experimentation, the Underground Theater of the 1970s, architectural Metabolism, haute couture fashion, noise music, new millennium pop art, contemporary political protest, and much more. Throughout, we will consider the complex dialectics at play between aesthetic and political avant-gardes at play on the razor's edge of reification in the commercial sphere.  This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2057  Youth in Precarious Japan

Professor:

Wakako Suzuki  

CRN:

90264

Schedule:

Mon    Wed   3:50 PM – 5:100 PM Olin Language Center 208

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies

This course explores the theme of youth and adolescence in literary and cinematic works from late 19th-century to contemporary Japan. It examines how the development of industrial capitalism, Japanese colonialism, World War II, the US occupation, the regional Cold War order, the Japanese economic miracle, and the recent recession have been presented differently when we employ the perspective of youth. The course introduces the following key topics: sexuality, romance, friendship, same-sex love, education, family, ethnic identity, disability and anxiety. Particular issues that young people wrestle with have varied in each period. However, youth and adolescents have continuously grappled with the idea of "social identities" that navigate them into mature adulthood or socially expected gender norms, such as masculinity and femininity. Young people's hopes, dreams, disillusionment, frustrations, and struggles will be examined through selected literary and cinematic works. We also consider the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexual identity in Japanese society but also across countries from the perspective of Difference and Justice. The historical approach to literary and cinematic works provides comparative context to bridge our understanding of representation and the social context negotiated by creators and recipients. Readings include works by Natsume Soseki, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kunikida Doppo, Izumi Kyoka, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki. Cinematic works include works by Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, Miyazaki Hayao, and Koreeda Hirokazu. We also expand our horizons to music, visual images, and magazines.  This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 227  Labor and Migration in Arabic Literature

Professor:

Dina Ramadan  

CRN:

90507

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Aspenwall 302

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

Questions of migration, exile, and displacement have been central to the development of the (post)colonial Arabic literary tradition. Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North, widely considered the most important Arabic novel of the last century, charts Mustafa Said’s journey taking him further and further from Sudan, and the frustrations and impossibility of homecoming. While the effects of the expulsions of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) and the further displacement of the 1967 Naksa (setback) on the evolution of Arabic prose and poetry are widely recognized, questions surrounding labor, its precarities, and migrations are largely understudied. How for example, does the intersection of a booming oil economy with a displaced and transient workforce, reshape the cultural map of the region and beyond? Rather than treat the questions of labor and (forced) migration as separate, in this course we will look at them as intertwined and interdependent. By focusing on Arabic literary production from the second half of the 20th century, we will ask how such works produce a language and aesthetic of displacement and estrangement, one that is able to challenge the hegemony of national boundaries. Finally, we will consider how these literary texts, as well as their authors, travel and migrate to speak to different audiences and from new and shifting centers. Literary texts will be supplemented by theoretical and historical material and will be accompanied by regular film screenings. All readings will be in English. This course is part of the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education initiative. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 245  Palestinian Literature in Translation

Professor:

Elizabeth Holt  

CRN:

90552

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

This course is a survey of Palestinian literature, from the early Arabic press in Palestine to contemporary Palestinian fiction.  We will read short stories, poetry and novels by authors including Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Samira 'Azzam, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish, Sahar Khalifeh, Fedwa Tuqan, and Elias Khoury.  All literary texts will be read in translation. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.

 

 Pre-1800 Literature

 

Course:

LIT 144  Making Love: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

CRN:

90260

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin Languages Center 118

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

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 focuses on the theme of love as a psychological, emotional, and political concept to examine 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 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 significant (and significantly  undervalued, self-consciously strange, or flagrantly subversive) works of poetry, and will pay particular attention to poetry by women. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne will take their place in context alongside Thomas Wyatt, Philip and Mary Sidney, Ben Jonson, Katherine Philips, Mary Wroth, and George Herbert. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 280  The Heroic Age

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

CRN:

90268

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 310

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Medieval Studies

In this course, we will be reading the great epics and sagas of the early Middle Ages, concentrating upon northern Europe. Through these texts, we will explore the tensions between paganism and Christianity, individual glory and kingly authority, and heroism and monstrosity. Texts to be read include the Old English Beowulf; the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge; the Old Norse Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil's Saga; the Old French Song of Roland; and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

ASIA 205  Representations of Tibet

Professor:

Li-Hua Ying  

CRN:

90200

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin Languages Center 210

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

19

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Chinese; Human Rights; Literature

 

Course:

CLAS 245  The Iliad of Homer

Professor:

Daniel Mendelsohn  

CRN:

90205

Schedule:

 Tue      2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Literature

 

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 267  Human Rights and Decolonization

Professor:

Alys Moody  

CRN:

90142

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Global & International Studies; 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:

SPAN 241  20th Century Spanish American Short Story

Professor:

John Burns  

CRN:

90267

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit

Class cap

22

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Latin American/Iberian Studies; Literature

 

Course:

WRIT 216  Contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic Poetics

Professor:

Jenny Xie  

CRN:

90387

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

PA Practicing Arts

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Asian Studies; Literature

 

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