100-Level Literature Course:

 

Course:

LIT 162  The Dean's Colloquium: Reading Three Nineteenth-Century Novels

Professor:

Deirdre d'Albertis

CRN:

15987

Schedule/Location:

Fri   11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Reem Kayden Center 200

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 2

 

Class cap: 15

As part of the Bard Reading Initiative, the Dean invites students interested in the process of reading long narratives to join this two-credit, weekly colloquium.   We will meet each Friday from 11-1 in the Bard Chapel (and elsewhere) to investigate the tactics that 19th century novelists invented to enlist our sympathy, hold our interest, and change our minds. These are novels that encourage us to think about ourselves and each other. Focusing on three works--Jane Austen's Emma, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles--we will explore very different textual worlds with special focus on narration and narrative form.    What do these novels ask of us in terms of imagination and attention?  What part of ourselves might we recognize in the seemingly trivial social concerns of  "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition"?  What does it mean for a protagonist (as in Tess of the d'Urbervilles) to be described as “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented“?   How does the first-person voice in Jane Eyre proclaiming "the more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself" speak to us across space and time?  And just how do we experience time when we read a nineteenth-century novel?  Curious readers who are interested in (re)discovering the pleasures particular to these questions are welcome: students will engage in frequent short writing assignments,  keep a reading journal, and develop new strategies for working with these texts to be shared with others through the Reading Initiative.

 

 

200-Level Literature Courses: 200-level courses have no prerequisites and are open to students at all levels.

 

Course:

LIT/HR 218  Free Speech

Professor:

Ziad Aub-Rish

CRN:

15963

Schedule/Location:

 TBA

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Human Rights

(Human Rights Core Course) An introduction to debates about freedom of expression. What is 'freedom of speech'? Is there a right to say anything? Why? We will investigate who has had this right, where it has come from, and what it has had to do in particular with literature and the arts. What powers does speech have, who has the power to speak, and for what? Debates about censorship, hate speech, the First Amendment and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be obvious starting points, but we will also explore some less obvious questions: about faith and the secular, confession and torture, surveillance, the emergence of political agency. In asking about the status of the speaking human subject, we will look at the ways in which the subject of rights, and indeed the thought of human rights itself, derives from a 'literary' experience. These questions will be examined, if not answered, across a variety of literary, philosophical, legal and political texts, with a heavy dose of case studies (many of them happening right now) and readings in contemporary critical and legal theory. 

 

Course:

LIT 204C  Comparative Literature III: The City, the Novel, and the Making of Modern Identity

Professor:

Matthew Mutter  

CRN:

15703

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.) This course centers on key texts from French, German, Russian, and British literature, from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. We will consider novelists who have diagnosed the effects of urban reality on their protagonists, prompting their readers to link the transformation of traditional power structures, the rise of social mobility, and the increasing centrality of science, to new literary techniques and a breakdown in self presentation. Belief and doubt, the real and the fantastic, omniscience and fragmentation, are at play in most of our texts. Readings will be from Balzac, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Hoffman, Woolf, and Zola.

 

Course:

LIT 2071  Modernity and Modernism in the Arabic Literature

Professor:

Ziad Dallal  

CRN:

15708

Schedule/Location:

Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Middle Eastern Studies

This course introduces students to the major revolutions of Arabic literature from the nineteenth century onwards. Our readings will be anchored in the two terms, modernity and modernism, in order to understand how social and material changes precipitate cultural transformation, and in turn, how literary movements emerge as galvanized critiques of a world marked by (de)colonization, national independence movements, and (civil war). Thus, one of the objectives of this course would be to define and distinguish modernity and modernism. To do so, we will read manifestos and essays on literary theory, as well as new scholarship that situates literary movements within their global contexts. The second objective of this course will be to familiarize students with the rich material of modern literary production from the Arab world. We will read widely and wildly from this bountiful material, including hybrid literary forms from the 19th century, the travel literature of the early 20th century, the modernist poetry of the mid-20th century, the response in prose to that latter movement, and postcolonial prison literature. Authors may include Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Zaynab Fawwaz, Etel Adnan, Tayeb Salih, Adonis, Nazik al-Maka’ika, Mahmoud Darwish, Anton Shammas, Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habibi, Saadallah Wannous, Sulayman al-Bassam, Sonallah Ibarhim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Ibrahim el-Salahi, Ibrahim Aslan, and Edwar al-Kharrat. The course will also tackle issues of globalization, nationalism, gender, and citizenship. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2084  Literature of Experiment

Professor:

Daniel Williams  

CRN:

15707

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Language Center 120

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

What is the relationship of literary writing to scientific experiment? How do literary authors and movements characterize themselves (or become characterized) as experimental? This course surveys a range of texts from the 19th century to the present that engage with experiment in terms of content, form, or shape. We will read texts that represent scientific praxis alongside texts that deploy literary improvisation. We will consider what commonalities exist across experimental and avant-garde modes: the commitment to linguistic innovation and metatextual reflection; the prevalence of manifestos and movements; the lure of technology and intermediality. Throughout we will also consider experimentalism as both value and vice in critical method, from deconstruction to the digital humanities. In keeping with our theme, class meetings and assignments will frequently adopt improvisational practices—from automatic writing to chance-driven composition to quantitative analysis. Authors might include Hopkins, Mallarmé, Kafka, Woolf, Stein, Breton, Calvino, Pynchon, Ashbery, Hejinian, Davis, and Saunders.

 

Course:

LIT 2103  Modern Ireland

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

CRN:

15528

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Irish and Celtic Studies

One of the most distinctive aspects of modern Ireland has been the intertwining of political struggle and literary creation. From the eighteenth century onward, writers were troubled by the fact that the native Irish population was subjected politically, economically, and culturally to the descendants of English and Scottish settlers. In this context, writers wondered, what did it mean to be Irish? If Ireland was to become its own country, as many of these authors hoped it would, how would history, religion, and language define its citizenry? What would the relation be between Catholics and Protestants and, ultimately, between the independent Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom?  What role would Irishwomen play alongside Irishmen in this new society? In this course, we will be exploring how writers responded to these questions, whether in the ballads inspired by the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the novels penned by nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish landowners, the often nationalistic poems and plays sponsored by the Irish Literary Revival, and the literary accounts of the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and the Troubles. Authors to be read will include Jonathan Swift, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Maria Edgeworth, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edna O’Brien, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, William Trevor, and Anna Burns.

 

Course:

LIT/RUS 220  An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov

Professor:

Marina Kostalevsky  

CRN:

15712

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 120

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 16

Crosslists: Literature

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov began writing simply to earn much needed money while studying to become a doctor at Moscow University.  His connection to the medical profession, and the natural sciences, is not mere biographical fact.  As Chekhov himself later admitted, "there is no doubt that my study of medicine strongly affected my work in literature." Moreover, he claimed that "the writer must be as objective as the chemist."  This course will give students the opportunity to analyse how Dr. Chekhov's "general theory of objectivity" impacted his writing and how his "treatment" of human nature and social issues, of love and family, all the big and “little things in life,” has brought an entirely new dimension to Russian literature and culture.  Readings include Chekhov's prose, plays, and letters.  Also, attention will be given to contemporary interpretations of his work, new biographical research, and productions of his plays on stage and screen. Conducted in English.

 

Course:

LIT 2205  Stalin and Power

Professor:

Jonathan Brent  

CRN:

15720

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Historical Studies; Russian Eurasian 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 2227  Dostoevsky Presently: Poetics, Philosophy, Politics, & Psychology

Professor:

Marina Kostalevsky  

CRN:

15721

Schedule/Location:

  Wed Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 16

Crosslists: Russian 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.

 

Course:

LIT 2291  Fictions of Southeast Asia

Professor:

Nathan Shockey  

CRN:

15709

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Asian Studies

This class explores the vibrant body of literature from and about Southeast Asia and considers the role of fiction in the imagination of modern national and transnational histories. Reading works by local, imperial, immigrant, and diasporic authors, both those written in English and in translation, we will bring a prismatic array of texts into contestation and conversation in order to explore conflicting narratives of colonization, decolonization, war, empire, refugee passages, and the loss of homeland. We will read novels from across Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malay(si)a, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as stories about those places by British, American, and other Asian writers to think about how acts of storytelling have themselves shaped the region’s contours and fractured histories. Topics will include the polyphonic and polyglottal history of Philippine literature, ghostly memories of the Pacific War, conflicting perspectives on the American War, the effects of global capitalism and multinational trade on everyday life, and attempts by first- and second-generation diasporic and immigrant authors to rectify transformations of culture and memory in the United States. Readings may include works by Jose Rizal, Nick Joaquin, Gina Apostol, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Le Thi Diem Thuy, Tash Aw, Pitchaya Subandthad, Jessica Hagedorn, Kao Kalia Yang, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Veasna So, Joseph Conrad, Bao Ninh, Graham Greene, Eka Kurniawan, Kevin Kwan, and Pramaoedya Ananta Toer, among others. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2381  Translating Tact

Professor:

Thomas Wild  

CRN:

15935

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    5:10 PM - 6:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: German Studies; Human Rights; Written Arts

“Tact” could be regarded as “the art of not treating all things in the same way,” writes translator Kate Briggs: a “fine responsiveness to the concrete”, a manifestation of ‘discretion’ in the sense of ‘to differentiate’, understood as a particular “attentiveness to difference.” In a first step, we will explore this notion as a literary practice through works on and in translation (e.g., Rosmarie Waldrop “Lavish Absence”, Anne Carson “NOX”). In a second step, we will reflect on further political and ethical implications of “tact” by comparing various translations of works by Paul Celan, whose German poems and prose confront the challenge of responding to the Holocaust; correspondingly, we will discuss M. NourbeSe Philip’s translation of a legal record, the only trace of hundreds murdered Africans on the Middle Passage in 1781, into her poem “Zong!”. Is this a breach of tact – to discuss such utterly different historical experiences and artistic responses together, in relation to each other? We will engage with this open-ended question, debated in recent years along the notion of “multidirectional memory” (Michael Rothberg), by considering, e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois’ writing on the Warsaw Ghetto and Hannah Arendt’s account of colonial imperialism in Africa. Further readings will include works by Ilse Aichinger, John Ashbery, Édouard Glissant, William Kentridge, Ann Lauterbach, Fred Moten, Uljana Wolf. In order to reflect on the task of tact for our own writing, this course welcomes to explore a diverse range of critical approaches, including the analytical essay as well as other creative formats and media. All readings will be in English (translation). - Students who wish to discuss German texts in the original are welcome to request an accompanying tutorial.

 

Course:

LIT 2404  Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World

Professor:

Jonathan Brent  

CRN:

15722

Schedule/Location:

    Fri   10:00 AM - 12:20 PM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Jewish Studies; Russian Eurasian Studies

We will  explore the literature of the Fantastic of Eastern Europe and Russia from the early 20th century to the 1960s in writers such as Ansky, Kharms, Kafka, Capek, Schultz, Mayakovsky, Erofeyev, Olesha and others.  Fantastic literature, as Calvino has noted, takes as its subject the problem of "reality." In this class, we will discuss questions of identity, meaning, consciousness, as well as understanding of the relationship between the individual and society in these writers.     This course is part of the World Literature offering.

 

Course:

LIT 241  Sex, Lies and the Renaissance

Professor:

Joseph Luzzi  

CRN:

15713

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Art History; Historical Studies; Italian Studies

This new course will study how the Renaissance changed the world we live in today, as we learn how the period was a time of ongoing cultural experimentation and radical change that was only understood hundreds of years after it appeared. With topics ranging from Machiavelli's masterpiece on the relation between deceit and power in the Prince to the new paradigms for gender and sexuality in leading woman writers and artists including Vittoria Colonna and Artemisia Gentileschi, we will reconstruct the Renaissance in all its complexity and groundbreaking influence. Other topics will include the birth of the modern “artist” through the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and their pioneering biographer Vasari, and the emergence of new international institutions like the Medici banking empire and a highly political—and often sinister—papacy. We will also unpack the idea of “the Renaissance,” or age of “rebirth,” in the brilliant 19th-century historians, ranging from Burckhardt and Michelet to Pater and Ruskin. Overall, we will see how the Renaissance was much more than a mere moment in cultural history; it was and remains a mindset that continues to shape the way we make art and literature. This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering. All course work in English.

 

Course:

LIT 2451  The Art of Chinese Poetry

Professor:

Lu Kou  

CRN:

15706

Schedule/Location:

Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Asian Studies

This course introduces students to the rich tradition of premodern Chinese poetry and poetics. We will learn the art of reading poetry, theories on poetic composition and criticism in Chinese literary tradition, and receptions of classical Chinese poetry and poetics in the global context. Our survey starts with The Odes in the first millennium BCE and ends at China’s last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), when literati found traditional poetic forms and language insufficient to describe their encounters with the modern world. The course will take a chronological approach, covering famous poets including Tao Qian, Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and Su Shi; within the chronology, each class will focus on a specific theme, such as poetry and ritual, poetry and translation, or poetry and the everyday. The last one-third of the course will be devoted to discussions of non-Chinese readers’ (for example, Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, I. A. Richards, and William Empson) interpretations and appropriations of Chinese poetics in the 20th century when the East became a profession and the subject of academic enquiry for poets and scholars from Europe and America. Are there “epics” in Chinese poetic tradition? Is Chinese poetry non-mimetic? Is there an aesthetic or ethnic “essence” in Chinese poetry that will be misinterpreted, if not erased, during translation? Investigating the questions posed by these modern readers—their assumptions and implications—will generate fruitful discussions on issues important in fields of comparative literature, world literature, and Sinophone studies, such as “Chineseness,” “comparison” as a methodology, and application of western critical theories on non-western texts. This course encourages students to critically engage with the politics of difference in the East-West comparative paradigm. No background in Chinese language or literature is required. This course is part of the World Literature and Pre-1800 course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2461  Global Modernism

Professor:

Alys Moody  

CRN:

15710

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin Languages Center 115

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

Crosslists: Global and International Studies

 

Class cap: 22

Modernist literature and the other arts represented a revolution in aesthetic form, keyed to the disasters, possibilities, and disorientations of modernity. While it has traditionally been seen as a movement limited to Europe and the US in the early twentieth century, recent scholarship has revealed that modernism—like modernity itself—was a global phenomenon. In this course, we explore the implications of this new understanding of “global modernism.” We will ask: what happens to modernism when we read it as a movement that operated at the scale of the world? What can a study of global modernism reveal about the nature of modernity, including its interactions with colonialism and decolonization, global capitalism and industrialization, and the associated changes in how we see and experience the world itself? And what are the literary consequences of this dynic, cross-cultural, and highly contested aesthetic movement? Readings will include work from all over the world, in English and in translation, and may include works by Oswald de Andrade, Aimé Césaire, Mulk Raj Anand, Lu Xun, Chika Sagawa, Ahmed Hid Tanpinar, Adonis, Wole Soyinka, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and others, as well as little magazines and digital archives. This is an OSUN Collaborative Course taught in cooperation with courses on global modernism offered at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Bard College (USA), Bard College Berlin (Germany), BRAC University (Bangladesh), and the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Common sessions, lectures, readings, and/or assignments will offer opportunities for connections across the network, but the core teaching of the course will be conducted fully in-person on Bard’s Annandale campus. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 2471  The Gothic

Professor:

Cole Heinowitz  

CRN:

15711

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

This seminar explores the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of gothic literature from its 18th-century origins to the present day, beginning with foundational “terrorist novels” by Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis and concluding with the television series “Twin Peaks” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Throughout the course, our study of these texts will focus on their distinctive formal and rhetorical features as well as on the socio-political contexts of their production, circulation, and consumption. Considering stock gothic tropes such as black magic, sexual deviance, and the doppelgänger in light of key historical events from the French Revolution to the first Gulf War, we will question the range of impulses and anxieties to which the genre appeals and from which it draws its persistent power. Readings will include works by Radcliffe, Lewis, Godwin, Coleridge, Hogg, Dacre, and the Shelleys, among others.

 

Course:

LIT 249  Arthurian Romance

Professor:

Karen Sullivan  

CRN:

15517

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Medieval Studies

In this course, we will be studying the major works of the Arthurian tradition, from the early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur; to the Welsh Mabinogion; to the French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Merlin and Morgan, and the Quest for the Holy Grail; to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Throughout its history, Arthurian literature has been criticized for the effects it has upon its readers. The alternate world presented by these texts—with their knights errant, beautiful princesses, marvelous animals, enchanted forests, and decentralized geography—can seem more attractive than our own mundane world, and, in doing so, it is feared, can distract us from this world and our responsibilities within it. Over the semester, as we chart the birth and growth of Arthurian romance, we will be considering the uncertain moral status of this genre and its consequences for us today.  This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 251  English Literature II: Enlightenment & its Specters

Professor:

Cole Heinowitz  

CRN:

15704

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Aspinwall 302

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

(This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.)  From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, England underwent a series of systemic transformations whose repercussions would extend across the globe and whose reverberations still underpin the concept of a modern world. In political-historical terms, our study begins with the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and ends with the Inclosure Acts of 1773-1801, tracing an arc from the decline of feudalism, through decades of civil and religious wars, the restoration of monarchy, and the Act of Union with Scotland, to the rise of industrial capitalism. In literary and cultural terms, these changes are confronted and contested in the works of poets and novelists from John Donne and John Milton to Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood, as well as in foundational scientific and moral writings by thinkers from Francis Bacon to John Locke. Our inquiry into the writers, artists, and intellectuals who defined this epoch will be guided by the still-unanswered questions their works first provoked, among them: Is there a rational basis for universal human rights? Where is the dividing line between revolution and reform, or between critique and complicity? And, in the words of Audre Lorde, can you take down the master’s house using the master’s tools?

 

Course:

LIT 259  American Literature III: What Does it Mean to Be Modern?

Professor:

Peter L'Official  

CRN:

15705

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 102

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies

What did modernization, modernity, and modernism mean to American literature? This course explores American literary production from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the 20th century. In focusing upon this era’s major authors and works, we will explore the formal characteristics of this period’s literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism) while examining many of the principal historical contexts for understanding the development of American literature and culture (including debates about immigration, urbanization, industrialization, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and the rise of new technologies of communication and mass entertainment). Writers likely to be encountered include: James, Cather, Wharton, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Toomer, Hurston, and Faulkner. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic differences are discussed at length in this course. This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.

 

Course:

LIT 263  What is a Character?

Professor:

Adhaar Desai  

CRN:

15714

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 18

Crosslists: Experimental Humanities

We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies. This happens despite our knowing that characters remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. Characters are always mediated, but they can also show us how concepts like humanity and personhood depend on and contend with the media humans use to share ideas. In this course, we will study the history of characters in western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and the capabilities of different media technologies shape our encounters with them. We will also explore different ways of "reading" characters by thinking about how computer algorithms might understand something as supposedly complex as an individual's personality. Primary texts will include Shakespeare's Hamlet, Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Parks’s The America Play, Cusk’s Outline, and short stories by Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, and others. We will also consider films, television shows, and video games. Students will have the opportunity to become characters in class debates, discuss fan fiction, and experiment with how to translate characters between media as we engage in analytical, theoretical, and creative work throughout the term.

 

Course:

LIT 2670  Women Writing the Caribbean

Professor:

Donna Grover  

CRN:

15723

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 306

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 18

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies

The “creolized” culture of the Caribbean has been a hotbed of women’s writing from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes creolization as “nowhere purely African, but … a mosaic of African, European, and indigenous responses to a truly novel reality.” This course is concerned with how women, through fiction, interpreted that reality. While confronting the often explosive politics of post-colonial island life and at the same time navigating the presence of French, English, and African influence, women saw their role as deeply conflicted. We will begin with The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Other writers will include Martha Gelhorn, Jean Rhys, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat.  This course counts as a World Literature offering.

 

Course:

LIT 279  Japanese Folklore

Professor:

Wakako Suzuki  

CRN:

15715

Schedule/Location:

Mon   Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Asian Studies

This course explores a wide range of cultural expressions from premodern to contemporary Japan: magic, epic narratives, local legends, myth, folktales, fairy tales, urban legends, stories of the supernatural, music, discourses of monsters, images of witches, religious festivals, manga, anime, and film. Rather than focusing on the survey of folklore, we examine its ontological dimension, historical roots and epistemological shifts along with the development of industrial capitalism. 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? How does it treat regional versus national identity? As we analyze the construction of this concept, we will consider its implications for the Japanese and our own perception of Japan. By looking at folklore and magic across East Asia, we also move beyond confines of “Japanese” folklore and grapple with critical discourses related to (de)colonization and (dis)enchantment, in relation to re-reading of primitive accumulation and a Marxist-feminist viewpoint. Includes works by Lafcadio Hearn, Yanagita Kunio, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Enchi Fumiko, Izumi Kyoka, Ueda Akinari, Mizuki Shigeru, Kobayashi Masaki, Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji, Miyazaki Hayao, Shinkai Makoto and many others. The course will be conducted in English, and students who wish to read Japanese texts in the original are welcome to discuss with the instructor. This course is part of the World Literature Course offering.

 

Course:

LIT 287  The Ring of the Nibelung

Professor:

Franz Kempf  

CRN:

15716

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 16

Crosslists: German  Studies

A study of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four immense music dramas. A story about “gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants and humans, it has been read and performed as a manifesto for socialism, as a plea for a Nazi-like racialism, as a study of the workings of the human psyche, as forecast of the fate of the world and humankind, as a parable about the new industrial society of Wagner’s time.” As we travel down the Rhine and across the rainbow and on through the underworld, our tour-guides will be the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as well as the anonymous authors of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied and of the Old Norse Poetic Edda. Musical expertise neither expected nor provided. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German can sign up for a two-credit tutorial and read the libretti in the original. Opera videos available online or on Wednesday afternoons in Weis Cinema.

 

Cross-listed courses:

Course:

AS 101  Introduction to American Studies

Professor:

Peter L’Official  

CRN:

15570

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Literature

 

Course:

CC 108 A  The Courage to Be: Achilles, Socrates, Antigone, Mother Courage, Barbara Lee

Professor:

Thomas Bartscherer 

CRN:

15983

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Albee 106

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 22

Crosslists: Literature

 

Course:

CC 108 D  The Courage to be: Courage, Cowardice, and the Colonial Encounter

Professor:

Tara Needham  

CRN:

15986

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Barringer 104

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value LA Literary Analysis in English  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 18

Crosslists: Literature; Human Rights

 

Course:

GER 214  What Makes Us Think? Hannah Arendt, Critical Judgment and Moments of Crisis

Professor:

Thomas Bartscherer

CRN:

15957

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed    6:40 PM – 8:00 PM Olin 201

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value    

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 20

Crosslists: Human Rights; Literature

 

Course:

REL 231  Jewish Textualities: Conceiving the Jewish Bookshelf

Professor:

Shai Secunda  

CRN:

15618

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 115

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap: 18

Crosslists: Jewish Studies; Literature

 

Course:

RUS 220  An Appointment with Dr. Chekhov

Professor:

Marina Kostalevsky  

CRN:

15712

Schedule/Location:

 Tue   Fri   1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 120

Distributional Area:

FL Foreign Languages and Lit  

Credits: 4

 

Class cap 16

Crosslists: Literature