12867

LIT 123      Introduction to the Study of Poetry

Elizabeth Frank

W Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm

ASP 302

LA

ELIT

 This course explores the infinite richness of poetry in English: the dazzling variety of forms and voices available to us across nearly a thousand years of poetic “making.”  Working both chronologically and thematically, we will be looking at lyric modes (songs and sonnets), narrative forms (ballads and other kinds of storytelling), occasional poems (birth and death and marriage), epigrams, and dramatic monologues. We will consider Golden (Sweet) style poems and “plain style” poems, devotional poems and love poems, poems for children, pastoral poems, political poems, poems about “everything under the sun.” We will read anonymous medieval lyrics, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Langston Hughes and poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts movement, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore.  We will look at blues lyrics, rap and hip-hop lyrics and lyrics to “The Great American Songbook.” Weekly reading responses, two short papers and one longer term paper. 

Class size: 18

 

12486

LIT 127      Who is Joaquin Murieta?

Alexandre Benson

T  Th  3:10 pm-4:30 pm

HEG 102

LA D+J

Cross-listed: American Studies; Human Rights; Latin American & Iberian Studies

2 credits (the course will run from January 28 to March 12). This half-semester course centers on a singular text in Native American and Latinx literary history: The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, by John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee Nation). When it appeared in 1854, Joaquín Murieta was not only the first novel published by a Native American author but also one of the first printed in California, only a few years after the United States annexed that territory during the Mexican-American war. After closely reading Ridge’s work, we will revisit the narrative (and the questions that it raises about state power, violence, land rights, and aesthetics) from several perspectives. We will turn, for instance, to historical documents (treaties, speech transcripts, legal statutes) that help us trace the novel’s connections both to the Cherokee displacements of the 1830s and to the labor politics of the Mexico-US border, at the moment when that border first took roughly the geographic shape it has today. We will also consider the many adaptations and afterlives of Ridge’s bandit story, from folk histories of the “real” Joaquín, to a play by Pablo Neruda, to the creation of Zorro and other pop-culture vigilantes. Our discussion will be informed by readings in contemporary Native literary studies, introducing students to the field’s ongoing debates about nationalism and narrative form.

Class size: 22

 

12028

LIT 130      Anna Karenina

Elizabeth Frank

W Th     10:10 am-11:30 am

ASP 302

LA

ELIT

 Cross-listed:  Russian & Eurasian Studies  An introduction to the study of fiction through a semester devoted to the close reading of not one, but two translations of this major Russian novel.  In addition to constant comparison between the two texts, discussion includes such topics as genre, narrative voice, the representation of character and time, nineteenth-century French, English and Russian realism, and the play of psychological analysis and social observation. We will pay particular attention to the magnificent construction of the novel--what Tolstoy himself referred to as its "architecture,” particularly its parallel plots. Weekly reading responses and frequent class reports, two short (4-6pp) papers and one long (10-12) term paper.

Class size: 22

 

12487

LIT 153      Falling in Love

Maria Cecire

M  W    3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 102

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities; Gender and Sexuality Studies

Caught up, let down, storm-tossed by emotion, under a spell, suddenly looking around as if with new eyes: are we talking about falling in love, or reading a great book? This course will consider some iconic literary depictions of romantic love as well as lesser-known texts, critical theory, and popular material across a range of media as we expand and challenge our ideas about this often-controversial emotional state. We will consider to what extent language and literature can capture and convey our most intimate feelings, experiences, and desires -- and to what extent they participate in creating them. Course texts will include medieval chivalric romance, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, selections of love poetry, and at least one mass-market “bodice-ripper” romance novel. Our discussions will bring us into contact with discourses of gender and sexuality, power and desire, and “literary” and “lowbrow” fiction, and address what role digital culture plays in how love is imagined and experienced today. This course is open both to intended Literature majors and to others interested in developing skills in close-reading and critical analysis.

Class size: 22

 

12069

LIT 2026      Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature

Maria Cecire

M  W   10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 202

LA D+J

ELIT

 What is children’s literature? Who is it for? In this course you will be encouraged to think about how notions of childhood and teenagerdom are constructed and reproduced in Anglophone literature for young people, and to interrogate the social and literary structures that guide these representations. Our goal will be to gain familiarity with the history of children’s literature in English and some of its major genres, while constantly challenging our own conceptions of childhood and literariness. How can we, as adults and critics, read a book that has been classed as “children’s literature”? How do we theorize texts that are written for children by adults? What makes a work of children’s literature a classic? Can we say that children’s literature “colonizes” the child? Given their importance to contemporary ideas of the child, we will give special attention to questions of gender and sexuality throughout the semester. Course texts include literature by J.M. Barrie, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, Toni Morrison, and M.T. Anderson, as well as a selection of picture books. 

Class size: 22

 

12483

LIT 203      The Rhetoric of Conquest and Contact: (De)Colonizing Narratives of Latin America

Nicole Caso

T  Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLINLC 210

FL

Cross-listed: Human Rights; Latin American & Iberian Studies; Spanish Studies

From the first moment of contact between Spain and the Americas, distinct forms of cultural representation have emerged to make sense of new encounters between different ways of knowing and being in the world. This course traces the history of rhetorical strategies and recurrent tropes that continue to repeat in the literature of Latin America as the trauma of the initial contact remains in the consciousness of the region. Notions such as “the tabula rasa,” “the noble savage,” “the marvelous,” and “the ineffable” are central to narratives that contend with unresolvable ontological tensions. Among the topics and texts addressed are the 1550 debate of Valladolid convened to determine whether indigenous people were human and had souls; the connection between legal constructions of religious purity (pureza de sangre) in the Spanish Reconquest against the Moors and later classifications of race in the Spanish colonies; Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s chronicle to the king of Spain using European rhetorical strategies to denounce the violent excesses perpetrated in Perú in his name; indigenous representations cunningly adapted by Spaniards and Ladinos to bring indigenous societies into the Christian fold, and other iconic Western figures that are deployed to resist and subvert cultural assimilation. Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Cornejo Polar, and María Lugones, among others, will provide the theoretical framework for our readings. This course aims to expose students to some of the fundamental concepts needed to understand Latin American colonial and post-colonial studies in various fields. Conducted in English.  This course is part of the World Literature and Pre-1800 course offering.

Class size: 22

 

12484

LIT 212      Succession: Kings and Queens in European History and Literature

Karen Sullivan

T  Th 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 101

LA

Cross-listed: French Studies; Historical Studies; Medieval Studies

Even today, in an age when democracy is widely accepted as the only acceptable form of government, monarchy remains a critical point of orientation in our discussions of political leadership. Why was it that, for most of human history, the rule of kings and queens was seen as natural and even divinely-ordained? What was it that the subjects in monarchies dreamed of in their ruler, and what was it that they feared? What was the connection between the personal and political lives of rulers, and how was that connection seen as affecting their kingdoms? What happens in a family when parents, children, and siblings are all jostling for power? By reading a series of texts, both historical and fictional, from the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Revolutions, we will examine the ideals and the reality of monarchy. Kings and queens to be considered include Charlemagne, King Arthur, King Alfred, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, Saint Louis, Henry V, Elizabeth I, and Marie Antoinette. This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Class size: 22

 

12070

LIT 2140      Domesticity and Power

Donna Grover

T  Th  1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 202

LA D+J

ELIT DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies

Many American women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries used the domestic novel to make insightful critiques of American society and politics. These women who wrote of the home and of marriage and detailed the chatter of the drawing room were not merely recording the trivial events of what was deemed to be their “place.” The course begins with Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). We will also read the novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fausett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and others. 

Class size: 18

 

12027

LIT 2227      Dostoevsky Presently

Marina Kostalevsky

T  Th  3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLINLC 118

LA

ELIT

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky remains one of the most widely read authors in the world. He also remains an inspiration for the immensely productive output of scholarship and artistic renditions through different media. In this course we will read and analyze such Dostoevsky texts as his novels The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov; his shorter prose works Poor Folk, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, The Meek One, Bobok; and his journalistic pieces from A Writer's Diary (which today might be considered the first blog ever). Also, we will pay special attention to the present state of research on Dostoevsky, starting from the classic studies by Mikhail Bakhtin, Joseph Frank, and some others, to the latest works by Russian, American, European, and Japanese scholars of Dostoevsky. By looking at Dostoevsky through the lenses of poetics, philosophy, politics, and psychology, we will try to understand what makes this 19th century Russian writer our contemporary. Taught in English. Interested students should contact the Professor (kostalev@bard.edu) before registration.  

Class size: 16

 

12068

LIT 224      American Existentialism

Matthew Mutter

T  Th 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 201

LA

ELIT

Cross-listed: American Studies

The French existentialists were not impressed by Americans. Jean-Paul Sartre maintained that “American character swaggered with confidence and naïve optimism,” Simone de Beauvoir said Americans had no “feeling for sin and remorse,” and Albert Camus complained that they “lacked a sense of anguish about the problems of existence.” This course will challenge these assertions on a number of levels: First, we will unearth a rich existentialist vein in American writing and explore the ways in which these writers imagine the “problems of existence” differently from their European counterparts. Second, we’ll investigate the comic element that so many American writers pair with the existentialist mood of “anguish.” Finally, we will strive to assess the existentialist attitude itself by asking questions such as: What are the relations between the exigencies the inner life and the broader social or political conditions from which they arise? What are the connections between this literature and the philosophical tradition that includes Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre? How do these writers position themselves in relation to psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and social-scientific accounts of individual experience? Readings will include the fiction of Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and Carson McCullers; the poetry of W.H. Auden, George Oppen, and Sylvia Plath; and the drama of Edward Albee and Adrienne Kennedy.

Class size: 22

 

12071

LIT 2404      Fantastic Journey/Modern World

Jonathan Brent

F     3:00 pm-5:20 pm

OLIN 202

LA

ELIT

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies; Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course will study the genre of the "fantastic" in Central and East European and Russian literature from the beginning of the 20th C. to World War II

Class size: 20

 

12925

LIT 2433      The Coming of Age Novel in the 19th Century

Daniel Williams

T Th  4:40 pm-6:00 pm

OLIN 301

LA

ELIT

 The Bildungsroman (novel of education or formation) was a dominant genre of nineteenth-century literature. Tracing the lives of characters through familiar coming-of-age plots, it showcases the novel’s ability to express both individual hopes and social constraints, youthful ideals and mature realizations. This seminar is an in-depth study of several classics of the genre by Goethe, Austen, Flaubert, Hardy, and Wharton. Along the way we will touch on the topics and essential tensions of the Bildungsroman: love, desire, and courtship; the family and its substitutes; class, money, and social mobility; the shaping role of gender and the limited social choices afforded to women; and the vocation of art or writing. We will read a selection of critical materials on the Bildungsroman, on style and genre, and on social and moral development

Class size: 18

 

12494

LIT 246      Poetry and Rebellion: Milton's Paradise Lost

Marisa Libbon

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 303

LA

 When is disobedience justified? And what price are we willing to pay for disobeying? In this course, we will explore questions of civil and personal responsibility, of freedom of speech, of thought, of allegiance, and of good and evil through a close reading of John Milton’s 17th-century epic, Paradise Lost. It is a strange and breathtaking work. Beginning when the rebel-angel Lucifer, now Satan, finds himself lying disoriented in hell after having been “hurled headlong, flaming” out of heaven, Paradise Lost narrates the story of the creation and fall of humanity as, in part, a consequence of the angels’ rebellion against God. A polemicist, minister of government (Secretary for Foreign Tongues), and poet, Milton was also a radical: an antimonarchist who advocated the overthrow of England’s king and supported the subsequent kingless Commonwealth. When the monarchy was restored, Milton was cast out of government and his home, and was for a time imprisoned. He had long wanted to write a national epic for England, like Virgil’s Aeneid. He wrote instead an epic “of man’s first disobedience,” an attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.” And perhaps to himself. Paradise Lost grapples with questions that remain pressing: how can we use language to express the unknowable? How can we recognize evil? We will read Paradise Lost alongside a selection of Milton’s polemics and poems, and in doing so will join the epic’s community of readers and critics, from T.S. Eliot to Malcolm X.  This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Class size: 18

 

12476

LIT 248      Strangers from a Distant Shore: The Foreign In Japanese Literature

Nathan Shockey

M  W    3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 304

FL

FLLC

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

Japan is often depicted in the popular imagination as a “unique” and remote land long detached from other regions and traditions — but nothing could be farther from the truth. This class explores the integral roles of ostensibly foreign forms of writing, thought, and representation throughout the history of Japanese literature, from the earliest times to the present moment. The class begins with the introduction of kanji writing in the ancient period and moves through the influence of Tang poetry on Japanese verse, Inner Asian precedents for medieval folk tales, and the place of Chinese ghost stories in the evolution of popular vernacular fiction. We then consider the pivotal functions of translation from European languages in the genesis of modern literature, writings by Japanese authors on their experiences overseas, texts by Korean-Japanese authors, and contemporary narratives by migrants from South and Southeast Asia. We will trace a deep view of the contours of Japanese literary history while investigating Japan’s long-standing connectedness to the world in contrast to the nationalist fantasy of the homogeneous ethno-canon.

Class size: 18

 

12477

LIT 272      The Fantastic in Chinese Literature

Lu Kou

T  Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 310

FL

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

From the famous human/butterfly metamorphosis in the Daoist text Zhuangzito contemporary writer Liu Cixin’s award-winning Three-Body Problem, the “fantastic” has always been part of Chinese literature that pushes the boundary of human imagination. Readers and writers create fantastic beasts (though not always know where to find them), pass down incredible tales, assign meanings to unexplainable phenomena, and reject–sometimes embrace–stories that could potentially subvert their established framework of knowledge. Meanwhile, the “fantastic” is also historically and culturally contingent. What one considers “fantastic” reveals as much about the things gazed upon as about the perceiving subject–his or her values, judgment, anxiety, identity, and cultural burden. Using “fantastic” literature as a critical lens, this course takes a thematic approach to the masterpieces of Chinese literature from the first millennium BCE up until twenty-first century China. We will read texts ranging from Buddhist miracle tales to the avant-garde novel about cannibalism, from medieval ghost stories to the creation of communist superheroes during the Cultural Revolution. The topics that we will explore include shifting human/non-human boundaries, representations of the foreign land (also the “underworld”), the aestheticization of female ghosts, utopia and dystopia, and the fantastic as social criticism and national allegory. All materials and discussions are in English.  This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 18

 

12478

LIT 279      Japanese Folklore

Wakako Suzuki

T  Th  1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLINLC 206

FL

Cross-listed: Asian Studies

This course explores a wide range of cultural expressions from premodern through contemporary Japan:  epic narratives, local legends, folktales, stories of the supernatural, music, religious festivals, manga, anime, and film. Rather than focusing on traditional sources in the study of Japanese culture (art and literature of the nobility, imperial anthologies, religious doctrines, etc.), we will consider non-elite modes of expression. Through our discussions and readings, we will also tackle some of the ideas and assumptions underlying the notion of the folk. Who are the folk?  From when and where does the concept of a folk people originate inside and outside of Japan?  Is the folk still a viable, relevant category today?  As we analyze the construction of this concept, we will consider its implications for the Japanese and our own perception of Japan. Includes works by Yanagita Kunio, Izumi Kyoka, Mizuki Shigeru, Lafcadio Hearn, Ueda Akinari and many others.

Class size: 20

 

12479

LIT 284      On Friendship

Thomas Wild

T  Th  3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 205

LA

Cross-listed: German Studies; Philosophy; Political Studies

The core of this course will explore the politics and poetics of friendship. What does it mean to think about political modes of living together through the lens of “friendship”? How is this different from political thinking that focuses on neighboring terms like solidarity, community, fraternity, family, or love? We will be reading from various genres – philosophy, poetry, essay, drama, letters—and asking how different forms of writing may affect our conception of friendship. Reading both canonical and less well-known works from various languages and traditions, we will consider how differences in cultural context or gender norms may shape the idea and practice of friendship. Two guiding concerns will be the connection between friendship and plurality and, relatedly, the relationship between the one and the many. To what extent, for example, is solitude a condition for a life in plurality? And how has the internet altered what we mean by friends? Readings will include works by Arendt, Aristotle, Baldwin, Blanchot, Butler, Derrida, Emerson, Hahn, Heine, Lauterbach, Lessing, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Varnhagen.

Class size: 22

 

12480

LIT 291      The Birth of the Avant-Garde: Futurism, Metaphysics, Magical Realism

Franco Baldasso

M  W   11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLINLC 210

LA

Cross-listed: Art History; Italian Studies

In his essays “Traveling Theory” and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” Edward Said underscored the importance of context and geographical dispersal for revolutionary potential to emerge—or to turn into domestication. In 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet stationed in Milan, but born in Alexandria (Egypt), founded in Paris the modern avant-garde with the publishing of his first “Futurist Manifesto.” Futurism’s breakthrough claims of refashioning Western culture from its very foundations rapidly spread all over the world. Futurism’s inextricable conundrum of art, politics and performance would then impact not only historical avant-gardes, from Dada to Surrealism, but also the idea of the intellectual as “arsonist” throughout the 20th Century. This course approaches Italian Avant-gardes—with a focus also on Metaphysical Art and Magical Realism—in the transnational circulation of aesthetics of the early 20th Century, between bombastic nationalist claims and tragic negotiations with Fascism. Engaging with both literature and art, the course unravels the intricate, yet fascinating knot of aesthetics and politics at the core of modernism, by studying the birth of the avant-garde and its many contradictions between national anxieties and global movements of ideas.

Class size: 18

 

12481

LIT 292      Arab Future Histories

Dina Ramadan

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

OLIN 205

FL

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies

Borrowing its title from Egyptian novelist, Nael el-Toukhy’s concept of “writing future histories,” this course introduces students to contemporary literary and artistic production from across the Arab world. We will examine a growing body of work—including science, speculative, and dystopian fiction—that engages in an exploration of the (not so distant) future. Whether through the complete disappearance of the Palestinians, the reenactment of the Lebanese Rocket Society, or the resurrection of an Iraqi Frankenstein, cultural producers, faced with an uncertain future, invent themselves anew in uncertainty. Together we will trace some of the historic antecedents to these approaches and question their relationship to the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. We will also consider the role translation (into European languages) plays in creating or accentuating such movements. All readings and screenings will be in English. This course is part of the World Literature offering. 

Class size: 22

 

12489

LIT 294      South African Literature

Daniel Williams

M  W    3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 306

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Africana Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights

This course offers an overview of South Africa’s vibrant literary landscape, from 19th-century colonial literature through 20th-century writing under Apartheid to 21st-century fiction in a new democracy. Alongside novels, plays, short stories, and films, we will encounter a range of sub-genres (travel writing, historical romance, legal statute, political manifesto, and journalism). Topics include the political and ethical responsibilities of literature; the relationship of fiction to history and memory; the stakes of representation and testimony; and the enduring difficulties of racial segregation and class inequality. Readings may include Olive Schreiner, Sol Plaatje, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Alex La Guma, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, Antjie Krog, and Masande Ntshanga, as well as selections from nonfiction and literary criticism. This course is part of the World Literature offering

Class size: 18

 

12493

LIT 295      Hunger in World Literature

Alys Moody

M  W    1:30 pm-2:50 pm

HEG 201

LA D+J

Cross-listed: Human Rights

Hunger is one of the most banal and everyday experiences of human existence, but at its extremes it can take us to the limits of what it is to be human. It is experienced as deeply personal, embodied, and individual, but it makes intensely political claims on how society should be structured and what we owe to the most vulnerable amongst us. How have writers around the world sought to represent this extreme and traumatizing experience? This course examines how hunger has been represented and imagined in world literature. We will consider histories of self-starvation, from medieval ascetics, to twentieth-century mystics like Simone Weil, and from global hunger strikers to contemporary anorexics; and histories of hunger imposed on whole populations, from Malthus's and Jonathan Swift’s writings about poverty and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, to texts of contemporary world hunger, by writers including Tsitsi Dangarembga, Dambudzo Marechera, and Clarice Lispector. We will ask: how does hunger create and cut through communities? How does it shape individuals and their psychological, religious, and social worlds? What kinds of political claims does it make on us? And what role does literature have to play in the imagination and documentation of hunger? This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Class size: 22

 

12488

LIT 297      Victorian Twilight: Degeneration and the Culture Wars of the Fin-de-Siècle

Stephen Graham

M  W   11:50 am-1:10 pm

RKC 101

LA

Cross-listed: Victorian Studies

This course tracks the idea of degeneration—the nightmarish offspring of Victorian progress—from the 1857 prosecution of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, to the simultaneous trials of Oscar Wilde (for gross indecency) and Captain Alfred Dreyfus (for treason) in 1895. Using as our reference point Max Nordau’s 1892 bestseller Degeneration, which argued that contemporary artists like Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche were clinically insane, we will explore the prevalent late nineteenth-century identification of new literary forms with madness, criminality and perversion; we will also try to understand why the themes of disease, degeneration and cultural decline fascinated the very artists whom Nordau attacked, and inspired some of their greatest works. Readings include Zola’s Nana, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

Class size: 22