Catalogue

Literature

literature.bard.edu

Faculty

Marisa Libbon (director), Jaime Osterman Alves (MAT Program), Franco Baldasso, Thomas Bartscherer, Ingrid Becker, Alex Benson, Jonathan Brent, John Burns, Ian Buruma, Mary Caponegro, Nicole Caso, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Robert Cioffi, Lauren Curtis, Deirdre d’Albertis, Ziad Dallal, Mark Danner, Adhaar Noor Desai, Nuruddin Farah, Peter Filkins, Elizabeth Frank, Derek Furr (MAT Program), Stephen Graham, Donna Ford Grover, Alma Guillermoprieto, R. Cole Heinowitz, Elizabeth N. Holt, Hua Hsu, Michael Ives, Thomas Keenan, Marina Kostalevsky, Ann Lauterbach, Soonyoung Lee, Peter L’Official, Patricia López-Gay, Joseph Luzzi, Daniel Mendelsohn, Alys Moody, Bradford Morrow, Matthew Mutter, Phuong Ngo, Melanie Nicholson, Joseph O’Neill, Francine Prose, Karen Raizen, Susan Fox Rogers, James Romm, Nathan Shockey, Karen Sullivan, Jana Schmidt, Éric Trudel, David Ungvary, Marina van Zuylen, Olga Voronina, Thomas Wild, Daniel Williams, Shuangting Xiong

Overview

Requirements

A student planning to major in the Literature Program must take Literature 201, Narrative/Poetics/Representation, and at least four additional courses in the Division of Languages and Literature. One of these courses may be a Written Arts workshop and one may be a language instruction course. 

For Moderation, the student submits a 10-page critical essay written for Literature 201 or one of their other literature courses, as well as the two short reflection papers required by all programs. These papers are evaluated by a board composed of the student’s adviser and two other members of the Literature Program faculty.

If they have not already done so by the time of Moderation, moderated students must take at least one additional course that focuses on literature written before 1800 and at least one course that focuses on literature written after 1800. Moderated students are expected to enroll in a minimum of one 300-level seminar and are strongly encouraged to take at least one world literature course and one junior seminar. In order to graduate, students must also complete a Senior Project and enroll in Literature 405-406, the yearlong Senior Colloquium in Literature. 
 

Recent Senior Projects in Literature:

• “About-fiction, Beyond-fiction, and After-fiction” 
• “Alphabetic Poetics: Between Joyce and Nabokov” 
• “Kafka beyond Signification: Testimony, Community, and Truth”
• “Time, History, and the Folk: Miguel de Cervantes, Virginia Woolf, and Aimé Césaire”

Courses

The descriptions below are a sampling of courses from the past four years.

The Good-Enough: Rethinking Success and Ambition
Literature 112
This 2-credit seminar contrasts the present moment and its tyranny of meritocracy with what the ancients called golden mediocrity. How can Aristotle, Spinoza, Eliot, Levinas, Rankine, and Chekhov help us navigate the brutal world of competitiveness? How can we feel that ours is a good life, without having to give in to the constant judgment of others?

Asian Humanities Seminar
Literature 117
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES
An introduction to some of the most artistically significant, historically influential, and culturally celebrated works from a number of Asian traditions (China, India, Japan, and Korea). Texts span almost three thousand years and come from a wide variety of genres, including epic and lyric poetry, mytho-historical chronicles, court fiction, memoirs, travelogues, sutras, tales of miracle, philosophical treatises, and dramatic literature. Issues explored include self and community, truth(s) and competing narratives, the everyday, the afterlife, trauma and writing trauma, and modes of modernity.

Introduction to World Literature
Literature 119
This course explores how literary texts get read and re-read across time and space, interacting in the process with global systems of power, including globalization, colonization, and decolonization; social movements; national borders; and hierarchies of language. It addresses how translation, adaptation, and circulation shape literature, through a study of texts ranging from the canonical works Epic of Gilgamesh and The Tempest to modern and contemporary works by Aimé Césaire, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sawako Nakayasu, Kamau Brathwaite, and Alexis Wright. 

Introduction to the Study of Poetry
Literature 123
This course explores the infinite richness of poetry in English. Working both chronologically and thematically, the class looks at lyric modes, narrative forms (ballads and other kinds of storytelling), epigrams, dramatic monologues, style poems and “plain style” poems, devotional and love poems, poems for children, pastoral poems, political poems, and blues, hip-hop, and American Songbook lyrics. Texts from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Hughes, Bradstreet, Dickinson, Moore, and others.  

Who Is Joaquin Murieta?
Literature 127
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN STUDIES, LAIS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
This course centers on 1854’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit by John Rollin Ridge, the first novel published by a Native American author and one of the first printed in California. The class also considers historical documents (treaties, speech transcripts, legal statutes) that help trace the novel’s connections to the Cherokee displacements of the 1830s and labor politics of the Mexico-U.S. border, as well as to afterlives of Ridge’s bandit story, including the creation of Zorro and other pop culture vigilantes.

Anna Karenina
Literature 130
CROSS-LISTED: RES
An introduction to the study of fiction through a semester devoted to the close reading of two translations of this major Russian novel. In addition to comparing the texts, discussion includes such topics as genre; narrative voice; the representation of character and time; 19th-century French, English, and Russian realism; and the play of psychological analysis and social observation. A special focus is on the construction of the novel—what Tolstoy himself referred to as its “architecture”—particularly its parallel plots.

Women and Leadership
Literature 131
DESIGNATED: ELAS COURSE
This 2-credit course explores some of the stories that circulate around women and power, from both academic and real-world perspectives. 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? The class engages with stories from across disciplines (the military, higher education, STEM, the arts) and from a broad range of perspectives.

The Joke as Literature
Literature 134
Like poems, jokes often rely on the precise use of language. Like plays, they are meant to be performed, and so depend on context, audience, and actors’ bodies. Like stories, they frequently feature characters, conflicts, and resolutions. This course examines intersections between jokes and issues pertaining to power, race, sexuality, gender, and class. Texts include joke books; essays by Bergson, Freud, and Gay; plays by Shakespeare and Wilde; and stand-up by Pryor, Diller, and select contemporary comedians. Student writing is analytical and creative (everyone must write at least one joke).

Writing while Black
Literature 138
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
This course explores what it means for an author in the contemporary era to render Blackness, Black folk, and Black experience in prose and poetry. What does it mean to write in a moment—like many before it—when simply “existing while Black” carries with it a sense of precarity? What is the significance of creating Black literature within a publishing industry that is, itself, an engine of racial inequality? Readings by, among others, Brit Bennett, Mat Johnson, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, Danez Smith, Brandon Taylor, Jesmyn Ward, and Bryan Washington.  

Monsters R Us
Literature 139
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,” 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 Vlad the Impaler been largely forgotten while his undead avatar, Dracula, remains a staple of literature and popular culture? Authors include Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ursula Le Guin. 

The Perils of Plot: Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Northanger Abbey
Literature 141
Stories can be addictive, distracting us from our anxieties and often driving us to identify with the unlikeliest of characters. This course looks at the dangers and seductions of empathy and identification in fiction—Do we want reading to release us from our passions or let them flow unpredictably? Will we ruin the aesthetic experience if we keep our distance from character and plot?—in three novels that embody, while playing out, the causes and consequences of escapism: Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

Making Love: Introduction to Renaissance Poetry
Literature 144
When we think about Renaissance poetry, we tend to think of the sonnet: rule-bound, artificial, old-fashioned. But poets of the period tried to make their poems appear as just the opposite: organic, sincere, and excitingly new. Beneath the veneer of formal qualities like rhyme and meter, these poems are probing explorations of chaos, madness, desire, and the sublime. This course focuses on love as a psychological, emotional, and political concept to examine how poets fought with language in order to make poetry say things that could not be said otherwise. 

Labor and Migration in Arabic Literature
Literature 148
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, MES
DESIGNATED: MIGRATION INITIATIVE COURSE
Questions of migration, exile, and displacement have been central to the postcolonial 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 Sa’eed’s journey further and further from Sudan and the possibility of homecoming. The course focuses on Arabic literary production from the second half of the 20th century, and asks how such works produce a language and aesthetic of displacement and estrangement that challenges the hegemony of national boundaries.

Supernatural Tales of Asia: Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins
Literature 152
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES
Since ancient times, humans have been fascinated with the otherworldly: stories of divine, ghostly, and fantastical beings appear across various traditions and serve as endless sources of inspiration. Students read texts from across East, South, and Southeast Asia that explore encounters between the ordinary and the strange. The materials span a wide range of genres and time periods, starting with creation myths and the earliest written traditions and ending with horror movies, novels, and comics in the modern period. 

The Dean’s Colloquium: Reading Three 19th-Century Novels
Literature 162
As part of the Bard Reading Initiative, the dean of the College invites students interested in reading long narrative fiction to join this weekly 2-credit colloquium. Jane Austen’s fiction is read slowly, as the class deliberates questions such as: What do we need to understand to enter the intricate social world of Pride and Prejudice? How do we experience time when we read Persuasion? What relationship does reading have to feeling and performativity in Sense and Sensibility?

The Art of Letter Writing
Literature 163
For thousands of years the art of letter writing was considered an essential part of a student’s education. The letter was a genre both formal and informal, studied and spontaneous, private and public. The first novels in English took the form of collections of letters, which made them seem like found documents. Today, email and social media have replaced—and revived—the epistolary tradition. Authors considered include Cicero, Ovid, Saint Paul, Lu Chi, Abelard and Heloise, De Quincey, Rousseau, Austen, Kafka, and Butler.

Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle
Literature 199 / German 199
Kafka can be read as a chronicler of modern despair, of human suffering in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape. Yet he can also be read as a representative of his era, his “existential anguish” springing from the very real cultural and historical conflicts that agitated Prague at the turn of the century (e.g., anti-Semitism, theories of sexuality). Readings range from parables, letters, diary excerpts, and sketches to complete tales (“The Judgment,” The Metamorphosis) and the novels The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika). In English

Middlemarch: The Making of a Masterpiece
Literature 2005
CROSS-LISTED: VICTORIAN STUDIES
How can personal letters, notebooks, and journals allow us into the psyche of a great writer? This course traces the stages of conception, research, and composition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which students experience as its first readers did, reading facsimiles of the eight bimonthly “parts,” complete with advertisements and other ephemera. Also considered are the politics, culture, and science of the high Victorian period, an epoch comparable to the Elizabethan era in the richness and variety of its literary production.

Narrative / Poetics / Representation
Literature 201
What does it mean to study literature today? How do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? This course emphasizes the practice of close textual analysis, introduces foundational methods in literary studies, and lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities.

Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Literature 2026
What makes a work of children’s literature a classic? Who are these texts really for? Students explore questions about what children can, do, and should read, and consider how the notion of childhood is constructed and reproduced through texts and images. Authors: J. M. Barrie, Diana Wynne Jones, C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. K. Rowling, and others.

Engaging Latin American Poetry
Literature 2027 / Spanish 2027
A consideration of several major 20th-century Latin American poets as a kind of dialogue between the “historical” avant-garde (1920s through 1940s) and later poetry, which both honored and contested the principles of the “vanguardia.” In addition to close readings of primary texts, discussions also address the texts within the poets’ historical, social, and political contexts. Conducted in English, with an optional weekly tutorial for students wishing to read and discuss the poetry in Spanish.

The Rhetoric of Conquest and Contact: (De)Colonizing Narratives of Latin America
Literature 203
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, LAIS, SPANISH STUDIES
A look at the history of rhetorical strategies and recurrent tropes in the literature of Latin America, including notions such as “tabula rasa,” “noble savage,” “the marvelous,” and “the ineffable.” Topics and texts addressed include the 1550 debate of Valladolid, convened to determine whether Indigenous people were human and had souls; 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; and Indigenous representations adapted by Spaniards and Ladinos to bring Indigenous societies into the Christian fold.

Comparative Literature I, II, III
Literature 204A, 204B, 204C
Literature 204A looks at the masterworks of medieval and Renaissance European literature, a time when the concept of the author, as we now conceive of it, first emerged. Texts include the Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. The second section immerses students in European literature from roughly the 17th through the 19th century, covering a wide range of forms (poetry, prose, theater), movements (Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic), and authors (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Manzoni). Questions addressed include how the novel became the preeminent literary genre, and how writers of this vast period responded to—and often shaped—the sociopolitical and historical issues of their ages. The third part considers novelists who have diagnosed the effects of urban reality on their protagonists, prompting readers to link the transformation of traditional power structures, the rise of social mobility, and the increasing centrality of science to new literary techniques. Readings from Balzac, Baudelaire, Brecht, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Hoffman, Woolf, and Zola.

Religion and the Secular in Literary Modernism
Literature 2035
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, RELIGION
One theorist calls the modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Another critic says of modernism, “No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours.” This course seeks to make sense of these divergent views by exploring the religious and secular frameworks—both tacit and explicit—that inform 20th-century Anglo-American and European literature. Authors may include Baldwin, Cather, Celan, Coetzee, Kafka, Hurston, Rushdie, Toomer, Weil, and Woolf.

Comparative Literature I, II, III
Literature 204A, 204B, 204C
Literature 204 considers the literary masterworks of medieval and Renaissance Europe, a period in which the concept of the author first emerged. The class examines the shift from epic to lyric and romance; from orally based literature to written texts; and from anonymous poets to professional writers. Texts include the Song of Roland, troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romances, Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Inferno, Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. Literature 204B immerses students in the remarkable literature in Europe from roughly the 17th through the 19th centuries, covering a range of forms (poetry, prose, theater), movements (Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic), and groundbreaking authors like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, and Manzoni. The third part considers novelists who have diagnosed the effects of urban reality on their protagonists, prompting readers to link the transformation of traditional power structures, rise of social mobility, and increasing centrality of science to new literary techniques. Readings from Balzac, Baudelaire, Brecht, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Hoffman, Woolf, and Zola.

Blues, Spirituals, and the 20th-Century African American Novel
Literature 2050
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, GSS
African American spirituals and blues music share fundamental musical structures, but offer very different narratives. Spirituals detail a transitory existence, marked by suffering, that culminates in a celebratory ascendance into heaven. While the blues often feature stories of anger and hurt, earthly survival is the only cause for celebration. This course explores the influence these musical forms had on African American writers of the 20th century, including Baldwin, Morrison, Ellison, Hurston, Wright, and Mosley. 

Once Upon a Time: The Folktales of the Brothers Grimm
Literature 2053
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 Grimm scholar Jack Zipes. Unfortunately, we primarily know these tales in adaptations that greatly reduce their power to touch our emotions and engage our imaginations. The class reads selected tales and considers both their poetics and politics and their origins in the oral tradition.

Sympathy for the Devil
Literature 2054
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
How do writers create sympathy for their characters, not only the angelic but also the demonic? Are there characters who are beyond our sympathy? Can literature affect our capacity for compassion? The class considers these questions in readings from Dante, Beckett, Milton, James Alan McPherson, Chekhov, Kleist, ZZ Packer, Roberto Bolaño, Amos Tutuola, Jane Bowles, Molly Keane, Mavis Gallant, Denis Johnson, and Kevin Barry, among others. Students also watch one or more seasons of the HBO series The Wire. 

Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets: Modern Japanese Avant-Gardes
Literature 2055
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
The course traces experimental movements in Japanese literary, visual, and performance arts, from the turn of the 20th century through the present. The organizing concept is the critic Hanada Kiyoteru’s idea of sōgō geijutsu (art as synthesis), a means to understand the mutually productive movements of textual, visual, haptic, and auditory media within their global contexts. Topics include prewar Japanese reimaginations of Euro-American historical avant-gardes; movements such as Fluxus, Neo-Dadaism, and New Wave Cinema; the political provocations of Hi-Red Center; haute couture fashion; and contemporary political protests. 

Youth in Precarious Japan
Literature 2057
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, GSS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
This course explores the theme of youth and adolescence in literary and cinematic works from late 19th century to contemporary Japan, considering how the development of industrial capitalism, colonialism, World War II, U.S. occupation, the Cold War order, the Japanese economic miracle, and the recent recession have been presented through the perspective of youth. Texts by, among others, Natsume Soseki, Higuchi Ichiyo, Kunikida Doppo, Izumi Kyoka, Tanizaki Junichiro, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki. Film, music, visual images, and magazines are also featured. 

The Beheaded Angel: Literature and Film after the Second World War
Literature 2058
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
A survey of German literature following World War II. Topics considered include the ways that writers and film directors dealt with the historical atrocities of the war, the guilt and suffering of the Holocaust, increased industrialization, the separation of the two Germanys, and the philosophical and aesthetic approaches to poetry and the novel in the contemporary work of West Germany, East Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and the reunited Germany. Writers include Grass, Böll, Bachmann, Celan, Dürrenmatt, Koeppen, Bernhard, Sebald, and Adler. Films by Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, and Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Goethe’s Faust
Literature 206
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES 
An intensive study of Goethe’s drama about a man in league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust’s striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life and Mephistopheles’s advancement and subversion of this striving provides the basis for analyzing central themes such as individuality, knowledge, and transcendence in regard to their meaning in Goethe’s time and their relevance for our time. Faust literature before and after Goethe and the integration of Faust in music, theater, and film is also considered.

The Arabic Novel
Literature 2062
CROSS-LISTED: MES
Students read a selection of Arabic novels and short stories from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, and the wider Arab diaspora. Through this sampling of texts, in addition to accompanying critical literature, films, and lectures, students gain a broad understanding of the history of Arabic literature, including its formal developments, genres, and themes. Topics discussed include colonialism and postcolonialism, occupation and liberation, religion versus secularization, and Islam and the WesT.

Other Romanticisms
Literature 2064
It is only in recent decades that studies of Romantic poetry have looked beyond the Big Six: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Yet between the 1780s and the 1830s, Britain witnessed an explosion of writing by figures generally excluded from the canon, including women, proletarians, people of color, peasants, and those deemed insane. This course explores the works of this “other” Romantic tradition. Authors include George Crabbe, Robert Burns, Mary Prince, Thomas Beddoes, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Isaac d’Israeli, and William Hazlitt.

Is Anything Funny Anymore?
Literature 2066
A look at how writers use humor to address serious subjects. Does humor complicate or diminish? What is its relation to anger, discomfort, community, self-protection, and love? Does humor preclude seriousness? Is it innately conservative or subversive? Writers studied may include Chaucer, Dickens, Freud, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Amos Tutuola, Spalding Gray, Danzy Senna, Isaac Babel, ZZ Packer, Roberto Bolaño, Denis Johnson, and Hunter Thompson.

Modernity and Modernism in the Middle East
Literature 2071
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, MES
An introduction to the major revolutions in Arabic literature from the 19th century onward. Readings are 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. Authors may include Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Etel Adnan, Tayeb Salih, Adunis, Nazik al-Malaika, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Saadallah Wannous, Sonallah Ibrahim, Latifa al-Zayyat, Ibrahim Aslan, and Edwar al-Kharrat.

Mass Culture of Postwar Japan
Literature 2081
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
A survey of the literature, history, and media art of Japan since the Second World War. Beginning with the lean years of the American occupation (1945–52) through the high-growth period of the 1960s and 1970s, the “bubble era” of the 1980s, and up to the present moment, the course examines radio broadcasts, television, popular magazines, manga/comics, film, fiction, theater, folk and pop music, animation, advertising, and contemporary multimedia art. 

Modern American Poetry
Literature 2083
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN STUDIES
“America is a poem in our eyes,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844. He complained, however, that no poet equal to this muse had arisen. In the following decades, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson would inaugurate a tradition of poetic practice and vision more distinctive than Emerson could imagine. This course traces modern American poetry from Whitman and Dickinson through the mid-20th century, exploring transformations of form and shifting accounts of the interplay among language, self, and world.

Literature of Experiment
Literature 2084
CROSS-LISTED: 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. Class meetings and assignments frequently adopt improvisational practices—from automatic writing to chance-driven composition to quantitative analysis. Authors may include Hopkins, Mallarmé, Kafka, Woolf, Stein, Breton, Calvino, Pynchon, Ashbery, and Saunders.

Reading Bleak House
Literature 2090
What happens when we read—when our optic nerves send signals to areas in our brain that decode the black marks and translate them into images, actions, and meaning? Can we become better readers by exploring studies of the psychology and neurobiology of reading? This course sheds light on these questions by reading Dickens’s Bleak House, slowly and attentively. Students also read selections from the literature of reading about reading. 

Modern Ireland
Literature 2103
CROSS-LISTED: ICS
A distinctive aspect of modern Ireland has been the intertwining of political struggle and literary creation. From the 18th century onward, writers were troubled by the fact that the native Irish population was subjected politically, economically, and culturally to descendants of English and Scottish settlers. Writers wondered, what did it mean to be Irish? Readings from Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Edna O’Brien, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Connor, Anna Burns, others.

Kings and Queens in European History and Literature
Literature 212
CROSS-LISTED: FRENCH STUDIES, HISTORICAL STUDIES, MEDIEVAL STUDIES
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 subjects dreamed of in their ruler, and what was it they feared? What was the connection between the personal and political lives of rulers? Students read historical and fictional texts from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Age of Revolutions. Kings and queens considered include Charlemagne, King Arthur, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, Henry V, Elizabeth I, and Marie Antoinette.

Traditions of African American Literature
Literature 2134
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES
An introduction to African American literary practices and the development of related cultural, aesthetic, and vernacular forms and movements from the 18th century to the present. In tracing these emergent and lasting voices, modes, and styles, the class examines how authors have created, defined, and complicated the traditions of literature within which they participate. Writers likely to include Douglass, Du Bois, Toomer, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, and Whitehead.

Domesticity and Power
Literature 2140
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, ARCHITECTURE
Many American women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries used the domestic novel to make insightful critiques of American society and ­politics. The course begins with Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s handbook of housekeeping, The American Woman’s Home (1869). Readings also include the novels and short stories of Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather.

Free Speech
Literature 218 
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
What is “freedom of speech”? Do people have a right to say anything? Why? This course investigates who has had this right, where it came from, and what it has to do with literature and the arts. Censorship, hate speech, the First Amendment, and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are starting points, but questions about surveillance, faith and the secular, confession, and torture are also explored. Taught in parallel with classes at Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard, and American University of Central Asia.

Appointment with Dr. Chekhov
Literature 220 / Russian 220
See Russian 220 for a full course description.

Stalin and Power
Literature 2205
CROSS-LISTED: RES
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
An investigation of Stalin’s rise and seizure of absolute power, and the way his power was reflected in society and Soviet literature. Readings concentrate on historical documents from Soviet political and governmental organs, including top secret and still-classified KGB documents; novels; diaries; letters; transcripts of conversations with Stalin; and contemporary reflections. Texts include Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman; Walpurgis Night by Venedikt Erofeev; and Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya.

Building Stories
Literature 2213
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES
This course explores relationships between narratives and their settings by employing conceptual frameworks borrowed from architectural studies and histories of the built environment. Weekly discussions are structured around building typologies and common tropes of urban planning: the row-house brownstone, apartment building, skyscraper, and suburban or rural house.
Students consider to what extent geography and landscape shape culture and identity. Authors: Nicholson Baker, Paul Beatty, Alison Bechdel, Don DeLillo, Junot Díaz, Joan Didion, Ben Lerner, Paule Marshall, D. J. Waldie, and Colson Whitehead.

Dostoevsky Presently
Literature 2227
CROSS-LISTED: RES
By looking at Dostoevsky through the lenses of poetics, philosophy, politics, and psychology, the class seeks to understand what makes this 19th-century Russian writer our contemporary—and one of the most widely read authors in the world. Texts include his novels The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov; shorter works, such as “Poor Folk,” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and “Bobok”; and journalistic pieces from A Writer’s Diary (which might be considered the first ever blog). Attention is also paid to the present state of research on Dostoevsky.

American Existentialisms
Literature 224
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN STUDIES
The French existentialists were not impressed by Americans. 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 challenges these assertions, unearthing a rich existentialist current in American writing from Emily Dickinson to Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy.

Contemporary Russian Fiction
Literature 2245
CROSS-LISTED: RES
An examination of the diverse world of contemporary Russian literature from the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the present. Readings include the underground publications of samizdat and officially published texts of the first period, postmodernist works from the end of the 20th century, and literary texts of the last two decades. Discussions focus on issues of narrative strategy, a reassessment of Russian history, religion and spirituality, cultural identity, and the changing relationship between Russian literature, the state, and society.

Global Medieval Literature
Literature 2247
CROSS-LISTED: MEDIEVAL STUDIES
The terms “medieval” and “Middle Ages” were first coined to refer to the period in European history between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (fifth century CE) and the Renaissance (15th century CE). But can we also use “medieval” to describe non-Western cultures? What about periods in other cultural traditions that share similarities with the European Middle Ages in terms of social, religious, and political structures? This course introduces masterpieces in medieval literature and explores the implication of the “global Middle Ages” through cross-cultural comparisons. 

Rilke in English
Literature 2248
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES
Modern mystic, poet of love and melancholy, ecstatic visionary, fictional fantasist, probing correspondent, astute art critic, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) bridges the decadence of the late 19th century and the intellectual rigor of the early 20th. This course considers Rilke’s poetry, fiction, essays on art, the semiautobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his Letters to a Young Poet and Letters on Cézanne, and considers why Rilke remains deeply trenchant.

Literature after the Plague: Desire, Deceit, and Delight in a Renaissance Masterpiece
Literature 2250
CROSS-LISTED: ITALIAN STUDIES
Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic book The Decameron (1353) has long been celebrated for its bawdy humor and open exploration of sexuality. The course examines the profound undercurrents swirling beneath Boccaccio’s entertaining narratives, as he delves into key issues such as how to rebuild a world devastated by pandemic, the role of women as readers in Europe’s new literary culture, and the creation of the “Renaissance” itself through the reanimation of long-lost pagan and classical traditions. 

Fictions of Southeast Asia
Literature 2291
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES
This course explores the vibrant body of literature from and about Southeast Asia as well as the role of fiction in the imagination of modern national and transnational histories. Readings from local, imperial, immigrant, and diasporic authors bring a prismatic array of texts into contestation and conversation in order to investigate conflicting narratives of colonization, decolonization, war, empire, refugee passages, and the loss of homeland. 

Wild Romanticism
Literature 230
This course traces the emergence of the wild as a poetic, ecological, and ontological concept in Romantic literature. By developing practices for perception of and communication with the nonhuman world, these late 18th- and 20th-century writers simultaneously reactivated ancient ways of knowing, and contested Enlightenment paradigms that privilege thinking over feeling, reason over sensation. Texts from Goethe, P. B. Shelley, and Thoreau, as well as 20th- and 21st-century poets, philosophers, and scientists whose work extends these lines of inquiry.

St. Petersburg: City, Monument, Text
Literature 2311
CROSS-LISTED: RES
Emperors, serfs, merchants, and soldiers built St. Petersburg, but writers put it on the cultural map. The city served as a missing link between “enlightened” Europe and “barbaric” Asia, and between the turbulent past of Western civilization and its uncertain future. Considered to be too cold, too formal, and too imperial on the outside, St. Petersburg harbored revolutionary ideas that
threatened to explode from within. This course examines these dualities in works from Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, and Nabokov

Toward the Condition of Music: Poetry and Aesthetics in Victorian England
Literature 2318
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 that “all art is quite useless.” What happened in that intervening half century? This course follows the evolution of poetry and poetic theory, and the accompanying Victorian debate about the status of art in relation to society. Readings: Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde.

The Art of Translation
Literature 2319 
By comparing multiple translations of literary, religious, and philosophical texts, this course examines the ways in which translation shapes textual meaning and our appreciation of it. Students also read key theoretical essays and take on a short translation project of their own. Readings include translations of Homer, Sappho, Plato, the Bible, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Babel, and Neruda.

Literature of the Crusades
Literature 234
CROSS-LISTED: MEDIEVAL STUDIES, MES 
This course explores literature produced around the Crusades, including epics, lyric poems, chronicles, and sermons, in an attempt to understand the mentality that inspired lords and peasants, knights and monks, men and women, and adults and children to take up the cross. Although the class primarily considers the Catholic perspective, attention is also paid to the Greek, Muslim, and Jewish points of view on these conflicts.

The Ark of Memory
Literature 236
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, RES
Russia’s tragic history precipitated the creation of literary works that recorded confrontation between the authoritarian state and its defiant citizens. This course explores human resistance to cruelty, coercion, deprivation, and political ostracism as documented in 19th- and 20th-century nonfiction by, among others, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky. Texts include diaries, journals, memoirs, travelogues, and essays. Readings in English.

Translating Tact
Literature 2381
CROSS-LISTED: 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. The course explores this notion through works on and in translation, and reflects on the political and ethical implications of “tact” by comparing translations of works by Paul Celan, whose German poems and prose confront the challenge of responding to the Holocaust; and M. NourbeSe Philip’s translation of a legal record, the only trace of hundreds of murdered Africans on the Middle Passage in 1781, into her poem “Zong!” Further readings by Du Bois, Arendt, Aichinger, Ashbery, Glissant, and Kentridge, among others. 

Nonsecular Modernities
Literature 239
Despite the seemingly monolithic secularism of 20th- and 21st-century Western thought, writers and thinkers in an important countertradition have engaged with religious issues in thought-provoking ways. This course examines works by authors including Charles Péguy, Charles Maurras, Thérèse de Lisieux, Paul Claudel, Simone Weil, G. K. Chesterton, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Mary Gordon, as well as continental philosophers who engage with religious thought. Theists, atheists, agnostics are all welcome.

Literary Journalism
Literature 240 / Written Arts 240
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
Students read examples of literary journalism, stretching back to William Hazlitt’s reportage on a boxing match in 1821. Genres of literary journalism, from political polemics and war reporting to art criticism, are examined, offering an opening to discussions of politics and culture in the context of different countries at different times. An interest in history is encouraged as much as an interest in literature. Readings include pieces by H. L. Mencken, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, and James Baldwin. 

The Canterbury Tales
Literature 2401
CROSS-LISTED: MEDIEVAL STUDIES
An instant classic after Chaucer’s death in 1400, The Canterbury Tales inspired “fan fiction” almost immediately and has since been enshrined within the literary canon. But The Canterbury Tales is also one of the most radically experimental works written in English. By turns beautiful and dirty, politically risky and calculatedly evasive, poetry and prose, the Tales tests, negotiates, and worries over the ways in which language—written, spoken, read, overheard—constructs reality. Following Chaucer’s lead, the class grapples with how literature can influence social change.

Fantastic Journeys and the Modern World
Literature 2404
CROSS-LISTED: JEWISH STUDIES, RES
An examination of the “fantastic” literature of Eastern Europe and Russia from the early 20th century to the 1960s, in texts by Ansky, Kharms, Kafka, Capek, Schultz, Mayakovsky, Erofeyev, and Olesha. Fantastic literature, as Calvino has noted, takes as its subject the problem of “reality.” Topics discussed include questions of identity, meaning, and consciousness, as well as the relationship between the individual and society in the work of these writers. 

Speaking Truth to Power: Testimony, Prison, and Exile
Literature 2407
DESIGNATED: COURAGE TO BE SEMINAR
Is it possible to react creatively to experiences of subjugation, internment, and prison? Through documenting personal and collective traumatic experience caused by political and social oppression, intellectuals are able to bear witness and make sense of their experience, challenging the indifference of the outer world. This course analyzes groundbreaking testimony and fiction (Levi, Gramsci, Plath, Milosz, and Coates) as well as theoretical texts and contemporary filmmaking that describes how poetry can happen, even in prison.

Sex, Lies, and the Renaissance
Literature 241
CROSS-LISTED: ITALIAN STUDIES
How did the Renaissance, a time of ongoing cultural experimentation and radical change, shape the world we live in today? The course reconstructs the Renaissance in all of its complexity and influence, with topics such as Machiavelli’s masterpiece on the relation between deceit and power in the Prince; the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Botticelli, and the birth of the modern “artist”; and new paradigms for gender and sexuality in women writers and artists, including Vittoria Colonna and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Social Change and the Arts in Modern China
Literature 2422
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY AND VISUAL CULTURE, ASIAN STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
How can works of art bring about social change? This question has haunted and confounded Chinese intellectuals and writers throughout the 20th century and remains relevant today. This course looks at various aesthetic debates and experiments undertaken by Chinese writers and artists who were in a constant search for ideal aesthetic forms that both appealed to the masses and actively sought to transform the populace and society. 

A Thousand-Year-Old Romance: Reading the Tale of Genji across the Ages, Media, and Genres
Literature 2423
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Students read the English translation of the Tale of Genji, a masterpiece of Japanese literature, and primary texts from roughly the same time period to gain an understanding of the sociohistorical and literary context in which the tale came about. The second half of the course focuses on the reception and adaptations of the tale across media, genres, and time periods, ranging from Noh plays, traditional paintings, and even “fan fiction” to modern novels and manga. 

Literature and Revolution across Asia
Literature 244
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES
Socialist and communist movements constitute some of the most remarkable moments in 20th-century world history and literature, as politically committed authors explored the role of fiction and criticism in revolutionary action. This course focuses on the transnational movement of texts, images, and ideas across and beyond Asia, beginning with works of proletarian fiction from the early 20th century. Also considered: postwar student movements, the role of Asian revolution in the global imagination, and ideals and realities of utopian society.

Palestinian Literature in Translation
Literature 245
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, MES
A survey of Palestinian literature, from the early Arabic press in Palestine to contemporary fiction. Authors: Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, Samira Azzam, Anton Shammas, Mahmoud Darwish, Sahar Khalifeh, Fadwa Tuqan, and Elias Khoury.

Poetry and Rebellion: Milton’s Paradise Lost
Literature 246
The course explores questions of civil and personal responsibility, freedom of speech and thought, and good and evil through a close reading of John Milton’s 17th-century epic. A polemicist, minister of government (Secretary for Foreign Tongues), and poet, Milton was also an antimonarchist who advocated the overthrow of England’s king. When the monarchy was restored, Milton was cast out of government and briefly imprisoned. He 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. 

Global Modernism
Literature 2461 / GIS 2461
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
Modernist literature and art represented a revolution in aesthetic form, keyed to the disasters, possibilities, and disorientations of modernity. While it has traditionally been seen as a European and U.S. movement, recent scholarship has revealed that modernism was a global phenomenon. This course explores the implications of this new understanding, asking: what can the study of global modernism reveal about the nature of modernity, including its interactions with colonialism and decolonization, global capitalism and industrialization, and changes in how we see and experience the world itself? 

The Gothic
Literature 2471
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 TV series Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Readings by Radcliffe, Lewis, Godwin, Coleridge, Hogg, Dacre, and the Shelleys, among others.

Theater and Politics: The Power of Imagination
Literature 2481
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS, THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
What role does imagination play in challenging the realities of our existing world? The course pursues this question through readings of works by Heinrich von Kleist (Amphitryon, Penthesilea), Georg Büchner (Woyzeck, Danton’s Death), Bertolt Brecht (The Good Person of Szechwan, Threepenny Opera, The Measures Taken), and Tankred Dorst (D’Annunzio: The Forbidden Garden, Merlin, This Beautiful Place). Questions around gender and sexuality inform most of these plays and are a recurring theme in class discussions.

James Joyce’s Fiction
Literature 2485
CROSS-LISTED: ICS
Joyce was an autobiographical writer who wrote about one place: Dublin. He was also an experimental writer and a prominent modernist in tune with the literary and artistic innovations of the early 20th century. In this course, students read his short stories in Dubliners, his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and his modern epic Ulysses.

Arthurian Romance
Literature 249
CROSS-LISTED: MEDIEVAL STUDIES
The course explores works of the Arthurian tradition—early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur, the Welsh Mabinogion; French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur—and considers the appeal and uncertain moral status of the genre.

English Literature I, II, III
Literature 250, 251, 252
In the first of three independent courses, students gain experience reading, thinking, and writing about early English literature, and devise a working narrative about the development of that literature and its role in the construction of the idea of England. Readings range from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with consideration of historical context and the continuum of conventions and expectations that the texts enact—and sometimes pointedly break. Texts also include Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and early descriptions and histories of England. Literature 251 explores 17th- and 18th-century literature in England during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle, and war to an achieved modernity. Works by six radical writers: Francis Bacon, Rachel Speght, John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift. Literature 252 provides a survey of British literature and culture from the early 19th through the late 20th century, with readings organized around three interconnected themes: the expansion, critique, and eventual dissolution of the British Empire; Britain’s industrialization and the resultant shifts in humanity’s relationship to the natural world; and the widening of equality, particularly in terms of class and gender, with its attendant social and political upheavals. Readings include poetry, short stories, novels, plays, manifestos, and essays, as well as relevant historical and theoretical materials.

Shakespeare
Literature 2501
Before Shakespeare was an icon, an industry, and required reading in high schools throughout the world, he was merely one of dozens of poets and playwrights working in London around the turn of the 17th century. The course offers an unfiltered view of Shakespeare’s works by performing close readings grounded in attention to historical conditions and literary traditions. Texts include Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus, Richard II, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale. 

Telling Stories about Rights
Literature 2509 / Human Rights 2509
What difference can fiction make in the struggle for rights and justice? What can works representing injustice, suffering, or resistance tell us about fiction and literature? This course focuses on a range of fictions that tell unusual stories about the rights of individuals and communities to justice. Texts may include García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Dai’s Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, and Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, among others.

Asian/American Lives
Literature 256
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ASIAN STUDIES
DESIGNATED: RETHINKING PLACE COURSE
Nowhere have the parameters of Asian American identity been contested more thoroughly than in discussions of literature. This course considers literary works produced by Asians in the United States, from travel reportage and poetry carved on the walls of immigration detention centers to experimental fiction, film, graphic novels, zines, and memoir. Throughout, close attention is paid to how different generations of Asian Americans have negotiated their own racialization and the slippery qualities of this category of identification. 

American Literature I, II, III, IV
Literature 257, 258, 259, 260
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES
 Early American writing is a field of myriad, unstable genres and literary forms, and class readings set gothic novels alongside political tracts, captivity narratives alongside hymn texts, and lyric poems alongside works of natural history. Authors include Charles Brockden Brown, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Olaudah Equiano, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, and Phillis Wheatley, among others. In Literature 258, discussion topics include 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. Texts by Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson. Literature 259 focuses on the formal characteristics of literary movements such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism; historical contexts for understanding the development of American literature and culture, including debates about immigration, urbanization, industrialization, inequality, racial discrimination, and new technologies of communication and mass entertainment. Texts by James, Cather, Hemingway, Wharton, Pound, Toomer, Faulkner, others. In Literature 260, students explore the role of literature in articulating, galvanizing, or criticizing the various social and political upheavals between the Second World War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Works by Ashbery, Baldwin, Didion, Ginsberg, Hersey, Mailer, Morrison, Roth, others.

Introduction to Literary Theory
Literature 2607
Literary theory is one of the main routes by which we discover how literature relates to society, culture, and politics. It can help generate new insights into how capitalism, colonialism, race, gender, and other structures of power shape our world, and how their analysis can in turn shed new light on literature. Students read a range of texts, from the 1001 Nights to works by Judith Butler, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson, John Crowe Ransom, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

What Is a Character?
Literature 263 
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies, although we know they remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. This course explores the history of characters in Western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and different media technologies shape our encounters with them. 

Women Writing the Caribbean
Literature 2670
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, GSS 
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan describes Creolization as “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. Students begin by reading The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Works by Gellhorn, Rhys, Allfrey, Kincaid, Cliff, and Danticat are also studied.

Life into Art: Emergent Modernities from Rousseau to Césaire
Literature 271
This course explores the key aesthetic and philosophical issues that first emerged in European Romanticism in the late 18th century and continue to shape our understanding of literature. From Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” the class pursues several through lines: the spiritual vocations of literature in conditions of secularization; shifting boundaries between art and life and aesthetics and politics; experience of the city; and literature’s relation to the discourses of history and science. 

Japanese Folklore
Literature 279
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES 
Students explore a 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. The course also tackles ideas and assumptions underlying the notion of “folk.” Who are the folk? From when and where does the concept of a folk people originate inside and outside of Japan? Is folk still a viable, relevant category today? Works by Kunio Yanagita, Kyoka Izumi, Shigeru Mizuki, Lafcadio Hearn, Ueda Akinari, and others.

The Heroic Age
Literature 280
CROSS-LISTED: MEDIEVAL STUDIES
The course surveys the great epics and sagas of the early Middle Ages, concentrating on Northern Europe and exploring tensions between paganism and Christianity, individual glory and kingly authority, and heroism and monstrosity. Texts include the Old English Beowulf; Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge; Old Norse Eddas, Saga of the Volsungs, and Egil’s Saga; Old French Song of Roland; Middle High German Nibelungenlied; and Finnish Kalevala. Consideration is given to the resonance of these works in modern literature and culture. 

On Friendship
Literature 284
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, and love? The course explores works of philosophy, poetry, essay, drama, and letters, from various languages and traditions, and asks how different forms of writing may affect our conception of friendship. Texts by Arendt, Aristotle, Baldwin, Blanchot, Butler, Derrida, Emerson, Hahn, Heine, Lauterbach, Lessing, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Varnhagen.

The Ring of the Nibelung
Literature 287 
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES
A study of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas. A story about gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants, and humans, it has been called a manifesto for socialism, a plea for Nazi-like racialism, a study of the human psyche, and a parable about the new industrial society. As we travel down the Rhine, across the rainbow, and through the underworld, our tour guides are the Brothers Grimm, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the anonymous authors of the medieval Nibelungenlied and the Old Norse Poetic Edda.

The Birth of the Avant-Garde: Futurism, Metaphysics, Magical Realism
Literature 291
CROSS-LISTED: ART HISTORY AND VISUAL CULTURE, ITALIAN STUDIES
In 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet stationed in Milan but born in Alexandria, founded in Paris the modern avant-garde with the publishing of his first futurist manifesto. Futurism’s claims of refashioning Western culture from its very foundations rapidly spread all over the world. Engaging with both the literature and art of the Italian avant-gardes, this course unravels the intricate yet fascinating knot of aesthetics and politics at the core of modernism.

Arab Future Histories
Literature 292
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, MES
Borrowing its title from Egyptian novelist Nael el-Toukhy’s concept of “writing future histories,” this course introduces contemporary literary and artistic production from across the Arab world. Works discussed engage in an exploration of the (not-so-distant) future, whether through the disappearance of the Palestinians, the reenactment of the Lebanese Rocket Society, or the resurrection of an Iraqi Frankenstein. The class traces historic antecedents to these approaches, questions their relationship to the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, and considers the role translation plays in creating or accentuating such movements.

South African Literature
Literature 294
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES
An overview of South Africa’s literary landscape from 19th-century colonial literature, through 20th-century writings under Apartheid, to 21st-century fiction in a new democracy. Alongside novels, plays, short stories, and films, the class considers 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, and the enduring difficulties of racial segregation and class inequality. Works by Schreiner, Plaatje, Fugard, Gordimer, Coetzee, La Guma, Wicomb, Mpe, Krog, and Ntshanga.

Hunger in World Literature
Literature 295
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
Hunger is one of the most banal experiences of existence but at its extremes it can take us to the limits of what it is to be human. This course examines how hunger has been represented in world literature. Texts range from medieval ascetics to 20th-century mystics like Simone Weil and from global hunger strikers to contemporary anorexics, and include histories of hunger imposed on whole populations, including Malthus’s and Jonathan Swift’s writings about poverty in the 18th and 19th centuries and contemporary accounts by Dangarembga, Marechera, and Lispector.

Victorian Twilight: Degeneration and the Culture Wars of the Fin de Siècle
Literature 297
CROSS-LISTED: VICTORIAN STUDIES
This course tracks the idea of degeneration—the nightmare offspring of Darwinian progress—from the 1857 prosecution of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil to the trials of Oscar Wilde (for gross indecency) and Alfred Dreyfus (for treason) in the mid-1890s. Using Max Nordau’s Degeneration as a focal point, the class explores the prevalent late 19th-century identification of new literary forms with madness, criminality, and perversion. Readings include works by Zola, Wilde, Conrad, Hardy, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.

Solidarity as World Making
Literature 301 / MES 301
See MES 301 for a full course description. 

Petroculture
Literature 303 / MES 303
CROSS-LISTED: ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, STS
This course joins a growing movement to imagine a world after oil, focusing on North America’s relationship with the Middle East. Students read from a range of work in English and Arabic—from Allen Ginsberg and William Faulkner to Amitav Ghosh, Ghassan Kanafani, and Abdelrahman Munif—in order to historicize and theorize the literary formations, aesthetics, and metaphors produced by and productive of petroleum. 

Melville
Literature 3043
This course follows the mutations of Herman Melville’s career, which produced both hugely popular adventure novels and commercially disastrous narrative experiments. Readings include Moby-Dick; or, the Whale from the latter category as well as lesser-known works of short fiction and poetry. To explore topics such as the representation of race, law, sexuality, and ecology, Melville’s work is in placed in conversation with other artists and writers, including John Akomfrah, Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth Bishop, and C. L. R. James.

Woman as Cyborg
Literature 3046
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES, GSS, STS
From the robot Maria in the 1927 film Metropolis to the female-voiced Siri application for iPhone, mechanized creations that perform physical, emotional, and computational labor have been routinely gendered female in both fiction and reality. This course considers how gynoids, fembots, and female-identified machinery reflect the roles of women’s work and women’s bodies in technologized society. Texts include writings from ancient Greece, Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (in which the word “robot” first appeared), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, among others.

Extraordinary Bodies: Disability in American Fiction and Culture
Literature 3048
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS
An investigation of the histories of people with disabilities in this country and of how those histories are documented in literary and nonfiction texts across three centuries. Though the course is primarily a study of literary texts, it also considers social and medical models of disability as well as current issues in disability activism and the implications of such activism for young people in the nation’s educational, social, and cultural institutions.

Auden and Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic, the Ethical, the Religious
Literature 3049
Students immerse themselves in the intellectual and political cultures that shaped W. H. Auden’s poetry—Marxism, psychoanalytical theory, the Spanish Civil War, World War II—and explore why he saw poet/philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as an indispensable guide to an “age of anxiety.” Attention is paid to the distinctiveness of each writer’s poetic voice: for Kierkegaard, the use of pseudonyms and the play of irony; for Auden, his early, difficult idioms, his ambition to compose a viable public poetry, and his mastery of a wide range of verse forms. 

Senses of Sensibility
Literature 3050
CROSS-LISTED: MBB, STS
When Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, “sensibility” had a different meaning than it does today. As developed by 18th-century philosophers, “sensibility” denoted the vibrations that produced vision, hearing, and other bodily senses, and the theory that physical sensation was the cause of emotion, memory, reason, imagination, and volition. The course begins with treatises on sensibility by Locke, Hartley, and Smith, and concludes by considering the points at which these ideas intersect with modern neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary biology. 

Choose Your Own Adventure: Doing Research in Literary Studies
Literature 3130
This junior seminar offers students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge about a topic in literary studies of their choosing—a specific writer, time period, theoretical approach, genre, etc. They create their own reading list, in consultation with faculty members, with the goal of developing a strong foundation for the Senior Project. Students also learn about the history and methods of literature as a discipline, and convene each week to discuss and practice different elements of research.

Cavafy: A Modernist in the Ancient World
Literature 3138
CROSS-LISTED: CLASSICAL STUDIES
The Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933), at once an impassioned amateur of the Greek past and a pioneer in the forthright representation of homoerotic desire in the present, is widely considered the greatest poet of modern Greece. Although scholars have long divided his work into two groups—“historical” and “erotic”—this course reevaluates the relationship of history and sexuality in the poet’s canon. Works are read in translation, with texts from contemporaries such as Pound, Eliot, and H. D.

Geographies of Unease
Literature 3139
CROSS-LISTED: FRENCH STUDIES, GSS, HUMAN RIGHTS
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
The books we read, the tastes we acquire, and the ambitions we hold make us insiders or outcasts, depending on where we stand. This course explores the process of passing from one condition to another. Whether this integrative process involves race, country, sexuality, gender, or socioeconomics, it explodes the notion of a stable and unchanging self and focuses on border zones of culture and being. Readings from Bourdieu, Rancière, Larsen, Howells, Hardy, Ernaux, 

Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Literature 315
CROSS-LISTED: FRENCH STUDIES
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is is about 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. Students read Swann’s Way and Time Regained in their entirety along with key excerpts from other volumes. Topics of discussion include the ways in which Proust’s masterpiece reflects the temporality and new rhythms of modernity, the narrative and stylistic function of homosexuality, and the massive social disruption brought about by the Great War.

“Country of Imagination”: Contemporary Writers in Conversation
Literature 3151
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
This course is structured around a series of conversations between and about contemporary writers and their texts. Every few weeks, the class reads a novel by Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah, which is paired with a novel written by another author, who joins the class. Themes include the intersection of familial and political relations; generational guilt; dictatorship, repression, and dissent; migration, exile, and diasporic communities; and national identity. Guests may include Ab Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ilija Trojanow, Louise Erdrich, Aleksandar Hemon, and Anita Desai. 

Jeanne Lee’s Total Environment
Literature 3152
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
This course bridges the study of American literature, campus history, and avant-garde music through a reflection on the work of vocalist, poet, writer, and educator Jeanne Lee ’61 (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.” The class considers questions of voice, aesthetics, race, gender, and relationships between art and politics, improvisation and community. Collaborative projects may include designing an audio tour or podcast, conducting oral history interviews, and/or curating an educational exhibi 

Writing into a Political Future: Contemporary African Writing
Literature 3161
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
designated: osun course
Even if European empires no longer dominate as much of the world as they did in the 19th and 20th centuries, they have left behind a political, economic, and cultural legacy in the regions they dominated. Structured as a series of conversations with writers whose works are read by the class, the course focuses on themes of cultural dominance, racism, quest for identity, and inequality. Authors may include Mandla Langa, Antjie Krog, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mia Couto, Leila Lalami, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Jonny Steinberg, and Achille Mbembe.

The Essays of Hannah Arendt
Literature 318
CROSS-LISTED: GERMAN STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS
The class reads the essay collections Between Past and Future, which Arendt considered her most important book, and Men in Dark Times, which profiles poetic thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Rosa Luxemburg. Also considered are individual essays from across Arendt’s lifetime. Students have the opportunity to investigate Arendt’s personal library, preserved at Bard, to scrutinize the traces of her interactions with essayists like Montaigne, Nietzsche, Emerson, and others.

Love and Death in Dante
Literature 3205 / Italian 3205
CROSS-LISTED: ITALIAN STUDIES, MEDIEVAL STUDIES
What makes Dante’s Divine Comedy so essential to our lives today, even though it was written seven centuries ago? The fascinating world of Dante’s epic poem is explored in all its cultural and historical richness, as the class considers Dante’s relation to his beloved hometown of Florence, his lacerating experience of exile, and his lifelong devotion to his muse Beatrice, among other issues. Course/readings in English.

The Tragic Heroine in the Western Imagination
Literature 3217
CROSS-LISTED: CLASSICAL STUDIES, THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, alluring—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly 30 centuries and raises a question that remains compelling: Why do male authors focus so consistently on the representation of suffering females, often for the benefit of male audiences? Through close readings of texts in a number of genres—from the classical and medieval eras to the 20th century—this course explores the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.

Representing the Unspeakable
Literature 322
CROSS-LISTED: GSS, HUMAN RIGHTS
What means do writers use to demonstrate conditions that defy our comprehension? This seminar focuses on how literary works find a language to describe emotions and experiences that usually cannot be translated into everyday speech; and how figurative tropes, such as description and metaphor, can evoke powerful states of physical difference and illuminate the distinction between the human and the nonhuman, success and failure. Texts include Shelley’s Frankenstein; Kafka’s The Metamorphosis; Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone.

Lolita: Nabokov and the Language of Desire
Literature 323
This course considers the eroticism of Nabokov’s masterwork not only as a matter of plot, characterization, or dialogue, but also as a linguistic phenomenon. Lolita was written in English, Nabokov’s adopted language. The class investigates how his complicated relationship with the language influenced his techniques and stylistic choices, as well as strategies of narrative concealment used to seduce, mislead, and even morally blind his reader.

American Study
Literature 3233
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN STUDIES, EUS
DESIGNATED: CALDERWOOD SEMINAR
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Attributed to Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Miles Davis, among others, this irresistible aphorism suggests the difficulties of writing cultural criticism. What does it mean to write about culture? What is culture? What might it mean to “study” America’s cultural products, aesthetics, and history? This course examines various forms of culture writing that interrogates and illuminates works in American literature, art, film, music, and, yes, architecture, space, and the city.

Climate Fiction
Literature 3251
CROSS-LISTED: EUS
What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? This course surveys the genre that has come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, the class considers realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. Authors: Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jesmyn Ward, Amitav Ghosh, and Ian McEwan. 

Translation Workshop
Literature 331
This workshop explores both the process of translation and ways in which meaning is created and shaped through words. Class time is divided between a consideration of various approaches to the translation of poetry and prose, comparisons of solutions arrived at by different translators, and the students’ own translations of poetry and prose of their choosing. Prerequisite: one year of language study or permission of the instructor.

Dramatic Difference: Russia and Its Theater
Literature 330 / Russian 330
See Russian 330 for a full course description.

Innovative Contemporary Fiction
Literature 333
Students have the opportunity to meet and interact with several leading contemporary writers— British-Guyanese poet, playwright, and fiction writer Fred D’Aguiar; Bard Fiction Prize winner Akil Kumarasamy; and Rikki Ducornet ’64—who discuss their work and answer questions about the art of fiction and creative nonfiction. Readings also include novels and short story collections by some of contemporary fiction’s most pioneering practitioners, including Cormac McCarthy, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Richard Powers, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Solidarity with the Nonhuman: Poetry as Coexistence
Literature 3330
How do you write about what you cannot rationally know? What kind of psychic and political orientation emerges from the acknowledgment that human existence is necessarily a coexistence with the nonhuman? Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, these questions became a focal point for innovative thinking about poetics; since then, their urgency has only intensified. This course charts the compositional practices by which experimental writers have sought to encounter the nonhuman in language. Works by Diderot, Goethe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Hopkins, Ruskin, Yeats, H.D., Pizarnik, others.  

Fantastika and the New Gothic
Literature 334
Traditional Gothic authors, such as Mary Shelley, Poe, and the Brontë sisters, framed their tales within landscapes of ruined abbeys and diabolic grottoes, settings populated by protagonists whose troubled psyches led them beyond the verges of propriety and sanity. Later masters reinvented tropes, settings, and narrative strategies to create the New Gothic. This phase rose in tandem with Fantastika, a movement that has taken the fantastic, fabular, and horror genres in a similar groundbreaking direction. Karen Russell and Brian Evenson join the class to discuss recent works.

Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory
Literature 3356
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, ITALIAN STUDIES
DESIGNATED: OSUN COURSE
Is it possible to think about modernity without taking fascism into account? Why were so many modernists, from Ezra Pound to F. T. Marinetti and Gertrude Stein, fascinated by fascist dystopia and contributors to its propaganda? Readings of texts by Anna Banti, Curzio Malaparte, Ennio Flaiano, and Maaza Mengiste, and screenings of films by Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller, and Liliana Cavani.

Extinction: Loss and Futurity in American Literature
Literature 336
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
The concept of extinction is central to how we talk about precarity and change across spaces: biological, cultural, linguistic, even technological. This hasn’t always been the case. Only after fossil discoveries made during the Industrial Revolution did the idea of extinction gain traction. This course looks at this idea’s evolution through the lens of American literary history. Texts by Octavia Butler, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo, Ursula K. LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, and Ed Roberson.

Radical Romanticism: Percy Bysshe Shelley and His Circle
Literature 337
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life. At 18 he was expelled from Oxford for distributing his pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism.” Soon after, he published Queen Mab, a poem that indicted organized religion as the root of all evil. He eloped to Italy with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the future author of Frankenstein. Living in self-imposed exile for the remainder of his life, he produced some of the most poetically, ethically, and ideologically challenging literature written in English. The class examines selected works by Shelley and his contemporary interlocutors. 

American Literature and the Reinvention of the Human
Literature 340
The 20th century saw a surge in the cultural prestige and moral authority of psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology. These disciplines, rather than religion or literature, established the principal vocabularies through which human identity and the prospects for social change were articulated. This course combines the study of American literature and American intellectual history, and explores the ways in which literature both appropriated and resisted this cultural transformation. Writers considered: Baldwin, Auden, Nabokov, Wright, O’Connor, Bellow, Heller, Dreiser, and McCarthy.

The Book before Print
Literature 341
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES, MEDIEVAL STUDIES
In 1476, William Caxton set up England’s first printing press at Westminster in London. Prior to this technological innovation, books were made from vellum (animal skin) and written and illuminated by hand. The course considers Anglo-Saxon and medieval English books as both cultural objects and literary artifacts, and raises questions about literacy, the history of the book, the relationship between image and text, and the proximity of anonymous preprint culture to the Internet age, among other topics.

Literature in the Digital Age
Literature 3432
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
The proliferation of digital communications technologies over the past half century has transformed how literary works are composed, produced, circulated, read, and interpreted. What is the nature, extent, and significance of these changes? This course reassesses themes central to the study of literature, including archiving, authorship, canon formation, circulation, materiality, narrative, poetics, and readership. To understand our present moment in historical context it pairs contemporary works with texts from and about other shifts in media from the ancient world to the modern era. 

Literature Live
Literature 344
CALDERWOOD SEMINAR
The course examines culturally significant literary works produced in the United States today. Texts are explored both for their literary merit and their social impact. Students are expected to produce a body of writing in the style of the “public intellectual,” the critic or commentator who is able to communicate ideas in an accessible style (no academic jargon), and maintain a weekly blog. Authors studied likely to include Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Rankine, Adelle Waldman, Leslie Jamison, and Dave Eggers.

The World Upside Down: Carnivalesque Narratives in Russian Literature
Literature 3441 / Russian 3441
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, RES
How do we examine a world turned upside down? View social order in such a world? Represent such a vision through words? Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin developed powerful ideas about these questions, including his concepts of “dialogism,” “polyphony,” and “carnival.” This course probes Bakhtin’s ideas within the cultural context of today, with particular focus on carnivalesque narrative in artistic forms of representation. Readings include works by other literary scholars and philosophers, as well as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Bulgakov.

Difficulty
Literature 345
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? Students examine a variety of texts and think about the roles a reader might assume in order to productively receive a “difficult” or “easy” text: decoder, philologist, ideologue, psychoanalyst, aesthete, etc. In this way, the course lays a foundation for literary theory and develops strategies for engaging with writings deemed too forbidding (or simple) for our attention.

Black Skin, White Masks: Decolonization through Fanon
Literature 348
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, FRENCH STUDIES, HUMAN RIGHTS
Where does the concept of decolonization come from? What can we learn by reading the history of decolonial thought as a simultaneously literary, political, and philosophical project? This course approaches these questions through the work of Frantz Fanon, a Martinican writer, intellectual, psychiatrist, and anticolonial revolutionary. Texts include Black Skin, White Masks, his analysis of the psychopathologies produced by colonial racism, and The Wretched of the Earth, his controversial defense of anticolonial violence. 

Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Literature 353
CROSS-LISTED: THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
Students read all 10 Shakespeare’s tragedies—Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, King Lear, and Coriolanus—with an eye to their examination of agency, coercion, belonging, and hatred. These tragedies remain durable mechanisms for exploding assumptions in politics, gender, race, and economics. The class considers where they came from and how they’ve been reshaped over time by artists like Toni Morrison and Akira Kurosawa.

American Realisms
Literature 355
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN STUDIES
This course focuses on texts produced between (roughly) 1865 and 1914, by writers seeking to convey the “realities” of American life in this turbulent period. Realism has long been defined by the works of James, Howells, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, Wharton, and Chopin. In addition to selections from these authors, the class considers texts by writers of color, of varying ethnicities, and by greater numbers of women, in order to better understand the different realities they were striving to document and influence.

Playing in the Dark: Toni Morrison’s Literary Imagination
Literature 356
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES
“How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made?” “What happens to the writerly imagination of a Black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race?” This course takes Toni Morrison’s 1992 essay “Playing in the Dark” (the above quotes are drawn from its preface) as inspiration for an exploration of Morrison’s fiction, nonfiction, and work as a literary editor. The class also learns how to read critically within the fields of American and African American literature.

Romance and Realism: Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Internet Age
Literature 366
CROSS-LISTED: FILM AND ELECTRONIC ARTS, ITALIAN STUDIES
The phrase rifare l’Italia (remake Italy) was a refrain for many Italian filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s whose works dealt with the nation’s struggle to rebuild itself after two decades of Fascism and years of world (and civil) war. The course focuses on the works and legacies of the Neorealist movement, whose directors (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti) trained or influenced a generation of so-called auteur filmmakers (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), but also considers the silent film era and recent directors who produce “art cinema” in the tradition of the Neorealist and auteur masters. 

Trading Fictions in the Indian Ocean
Literature 368
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, MES
This course investigates empire’s intersections with capitalism in the Indian Ocean, beginning with the Arabic story cycle of Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, followed by Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, and concluding with The Third River and its figurations of the port of Basra. The class considers how Islamic finance, merchant practices, and exploitative slavery and labor markets intersected with the rise of European expeditionary maritime and settler colonialism in the region, with a special emphasis on narrative and the commodity form.

Places and Spaces
Literature 391
CROSS-LISTED: AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES, ARCHITECTURE, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
DESIGNATED: RETHINKING PLACE COURSE
What do our surroundings want from us? How do these surroundings—city blocks, buildings, roads, parks—change us? What stories do our movements through space tell? And what power do individuals have to reshape or reimagine the landscape around them? This seminar surveys various approaches to thinking and writing about the world around us. Authors may include Barthelme, Benjamin, Whitehead, Perec, Cole, Kincaid, and Vadi. 

Dreyfus/Wilde: Narratives of Martyrdom
Literature 392
CROSS-LISTED: HUMAN RIGHTS, VICTORIAN STUDIES
DESIGNATED: HSI COURSE
The trials and convictions of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1894–95) and Oscar Wilde (1895) placed anti-Semitism and homophobia, respectively, at the center of modern political discourse, sent shock waves through Britain and France, and transformed politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens into passionate partisans. Both “affairs” became literary narratives even as they played out in real time, involving some of the best-known writers of the last 125 years. Readings from Wilde, Émile Zola, Frank Harris, Anatole France, André Gide, Moisés Kaufman, and Robert Harris. 

Beyond Technopolis: Media/Theory/Japan
Literature 394
CROSS-LISTED: ASIAN STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
In the global imagination, Japan frequently floats as a symbol for high-tech hyperfuturism, a vision into a techno-utopian (or dystopian) wonderland. In addition to reading major Japanese texts of media theory on film, photography, animation, games, and networked subjectivity, the class also investigates connections between architecture, infrastructure, and communications; media 

Senior Colloquium: Literature
Literature 405
Literature majors must enroll in this yearlong colloquium, where they share working methods, knowledge, skills, and resources, and address challenges arising from research and writing on this scale. A focus on the nuts and bolts of the Senior Project is complemented with life-after-Bard skills workshops and a review of internship and grant-writing opportunities.