2007–2008 Literature Courses
African American Literature
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course will explore the aesthetic forms and rhetorical strategies that characterize African American letters, including works by writers such as Walker, Stewart, DuBois, Hurston, Baldwin, Wright, and Morrison, among others. Discussions will engage close readings of texts from slave narratives through Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and into the 21st century. Careful attention will be paid to the shared thematic concerns while considering the historical, political, and cultural context of intellectual production. A range of critical approaches will be engaged throughout the course, including theories of identity formation, race/hybridity, class/power, gender/sexuality, nationalism, cultural theory, and semiotics.
Bodies and Words: Literature of the African Diaspora
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
By investigating the relationship between language and representations of the body over time, this course will explore literary representations of the experiences of bodies within the cultural complexities and contested spaces of slavery, colonialism, and post-colonialism in the African diaspora of the Americas. Close readings of how bodies experience phenomena and move within and through their particular material realities will serve as points of departure for discussing issues of identity development, race, gender, sexuality, consciousness, signification, and literary aesthetics. Readings from the African diaspora will be contextualized by comparing them to European and African works, including writers such as Reid, Morejón, Rhys, Equiano, and Head, among others.
Defiant Acts: Trends and Singularity in Latin American Theatre
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Beginning with a brief overview of early dramatic traditions in Spain and in pre-colonial and colonial Spanish America, this course will focus on Latin American movements ranging from modernism/vanguardia to theatre of cruelty and of the absurd, feminism, political theatre, and Teatro Campesino. Authors will include Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana Ines, Maria de Zayas, Virgilio Pinera, Ariel Dorfman, and Sabina Berman. We will attend performances at Repertorio Español and see some of the plays on film as well. This course is open to students in theatre (as a component) (THEA-5747-U) and to those who wish to take it as a regular seminar, with a conference project.Dickinson and Her Era
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Emily Dickinson will be the focus of this study of mid-nineteenth-century American writers—including Emerson, Douglass, Fuller, Melville and Whitman. In a variety of genres—lyric poems, personal narratives, fiction and the new epic poem—these writers explored the growing powers of the secular self at the dawn of the Civil War. This course will read Dickinson's poems against a variety of contexts (intellectual, religious, poetic historic, ethnic, and feminist) while exploring the latest critical approaches to reading her work.
First-Year Studies: Dostoevsky and the West
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
While Dostoevsky is often considered the most Russian of writers, he was in fact deeply influenced by his reading of contemporary Western European literature; among Russian writers he is also remarkable for the extent of his influence outside of Russia. This course will read Dostoevsky’s major novels in the context of the non-Russian works that preceded and followed them. Our reading of Crime and Punishment, for example, will begin with Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Balzac and finish with Nabokov and Robert Bresson. While we will focus on Western Europe and the United States, we will also consider the work of at least two readers of Dostoevsky who claimed him from other parts of the globe: J. M. Coetzee and Akira Kurosawa. Other texts will include works by Rousseau, Benjamin Constant, Stendhal, Dickens, Ralph Ellison, and Walker Percy.
First-Year Studies: The Changing English Language
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
What happened to English between Beowulf and Virginia Woolf? What is happening to it now? The first semester of this course introduces students to some basic concepts in linguistics. Then looking at pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and social context, and using both linguistic and literary texts, we trace the evolution of our language from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Chaucer’s Middle English, through the Early Modern English of Shakespeare and the eighteenth century, to an English we recognize—for all its variety—as our own. In the second semester, we take a sociolinguistic approach to the ways language alters from one community of speakers to another, and we explore some varieties of contemporary English. Among the topics for second semester are pidgins and creoles, American Sign Language, language and gender, and African American Vernacular English (Ebonics). This course is intended for anyone who loves language and literature, and students may choose conference work from a range of topics in either linguistics or literature or both.
First-Year Studies: Life, Instructions for Use
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
Adulthood, according to Freud, is realized through the development, in a given life, of love and work. How does that come about for most of us? In this course, we will examine the testimony of prominent writers on the matter of growing up, its phases and its hurdles: accommodating parental limitations and exhortations; surviving the pathos and cruelties of adolescence; establishing autonomy, sexuality, and vocation. In short tales treating of moments of initiation and in the more substantive bildungsroman or the autobiographical memoir, literature offers thought-provoking reflection on the search for meaningful work and the commitment to enduring love. Joyce, Hemingway, Proust, Wharton, Austen, Gordimer, Cather, Flaubert, and Lawrence are among the writers we will consult, bearing in mind that the writer’s own search for being, in writing, finds allegory in the rites of passage these narratives describe. That is, we will be as concerned with understanding how writers grow into their literary destinies as we will be with how fictional accounts of the process inform our own coming of age. Incidentally, the title of the course is taken from Perec’s novel of the same name.
First-Year Studies: Modern Japanese Literature
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
Japanese popular culture, including forms such as anime and manga, has fascinated those outside of Japan as vivid representations of imagined worlds. In what ways have Japanese writers created alternative worlds through their literature or worlds that attempt to mirror their lived realities? In this course, we will read broadly in Japanese literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, and consider critical issues related to interpreting these texts. In the first semester, we will read short stories, essays, and novels by Higuchi Ichiyo, Shimazaki Toson, Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Enchi Fumiko, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, and Murakami Haruki, among others. In the second semester, we will revisit these literary texts (and supplement them) by considering different topics, such as: How do we read literature in translation? How are literary canons shaped, both in Japanese and in English translation? How are literary traditions (e.g., The Tale of Genji) recast in modern literature? Conference work will be to read literature (or drama or poetry) outside of course readings and to hone one’s interpretive methods specific to the selected text(s).
First-Year Studies: “The Three Crowns of Florence”
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
In the arc of two generations, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, three writers emerged in Tuscany who shaped both the Italian language and Western literature. Their major works—Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s Canzoniere,and Boccaccio’s Decameron— offered monumental examples of epic poetry, lyric poetry, and narrative prose, respectively, all in Tuscan Italian. This course will offer a careful reading of these important texts. Dante’s Divine Comedy is in many ways a consummation of medieval culture, a prism through which he filters classical and medieval civilization and melds them in one magnificent and totalizing Christian vision embracing art, literature, philosophy, science, history, and theology. Like all concepts of heaven and hell, it is a repository for dreams of ecstasy, fantasies of horror and, ultimately, moral guidance. A generation later Petrarch puts together his Canzoniere, a collection of lyric poems that establish the form and tenor of the sonnet for succeeding centuries but also project moral concerns in the more “modern” context of individual sensibilities and internal psychology. In the Decameron,his contemporary Boccaccio offers one hundred delightful short stories—many amusing, some exemplary—all rooted in the real and practical world of the emerging modern mercantile society that characterized the fourteenth century. It is a worldview that is as totalizing, as it is different, from that of Dante. Through close reading of these rewarding texts, we will trace some of the salient ideas of the late Middle Ages and consider some of the transformations that occur in attitudes and aesthetics as a more “modern” sensibility emerges. The possibilities for conference projects are vast. In the first semester, they might include antecedents and analogues of the Divine Comedy, such as the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Platonic myths, medieval mystical literature, as well as other works by Dante, pictorial representations of heaven and hell, and contemporary films. In the second semester, projects might continue the work of the first semester or address courtly love poetry, Chaucer, the sonnet, and narrative traditions.
First-Year Studies: Mobility in American Literature
Level: FYS
Semester: Year
This course looks at how, from the inception of our nation, various forms of mobility (economic, social, geographic) and our culture’s fundamental belief in the opportunities it affords have affected our understandings of personal identities (especially race, class, and gender) as particularly “American.” At the beginning of The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925), Gertrude Stein writes, “It has always seemed to me a rare privilege, this, of being an American, a real American.” But what is a “real American”? Stein attempts to identify it in her novelistic examination of her own family’s immigrant history, implying that what makes us American resides as much in where we have come from as in where we are now. This course introduces first-year students to the study of literature by interrogating how, in the United States, we are defined by our movement. We will begin with early seventeenth-century crossing accounts that document the journey from England to America. We will examine slave narratives, American Romanticism, and the Declaration of Independence. We will consider constructions of class in nineteenth-century novels that explore the myth of “the American Dream,” continuing into Modernist novels and poetry that look back toward the Civil War and westward expansion for the founding of these American principles. The last segment of the course will examine America from the outside in, including texts written about America by those who do not live here. Throughout the year, we will consider how key events—including the Gold Rush, the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance, the cold war, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the Reagan Era, and 9/11—are treated by American writers, thinkers, and politicians as we focus on issues such as passing, migration, immigration, expatriation, gentrification, suburbanization, and homelessness. While the first semester will concentrate on American literature through the Civil War, the second semester comprises of works written during the twentieth century. Developing students’ writing skills for the college level will be an additional aim of the course.
Allegories of Love
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
A reading of five great storytellers and poets: Vergil, Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, and Spenser. The powerful and complex fictions of these five contributed crucially to the ongoing “invention of love,” that profound, and profoundly problematic, passion that has seemed for more than two thousand years of Western civilization to lie at the heart of human existence. Collateral readings drawn from Homer, Plato, Catullus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Roman de la Rose, and Arthurian romance will help us establish cultural contexts and provide some sense of both continuities and revisions in the literary imagining of love from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Imagining War
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
War is one of the great themes in European literature: the greatest works of Greco-Roman antiquity are meditations on war, and as an organizing metaphor, war pervades our attempts to represent politics, economics, and sexuality. Efforts to comprehend war were the genesis of the disciplines of history and political science, and the disaster of the Peloponnesian War forms the critical if concealed background to the first great works of Western philosophy. We shall begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine; we shall go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V), and Hobbes. In the second semester, we shall look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military meta-phor; at Marxism, which remilitarized political economy; at Byron’s mock epic Don Juan; and at two nineteenth-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy, one of whom concerned himself with war directly, the other of whom used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic and economic life. We will conclude with a look at some twentieth-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy. This is an interdisciplinary course, and group conferences will usually be committed to works of modern scholarship, often by historians and social scientists. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision.
The Early Novel: Origins and Experiments
Level: Lecture
Semester: Spring
Jane Austen may be the mother of the nineteenth-century English novel, but before she was a (literary) mother she was a daughter, heir to over a century of experimentation in the new, controversial, and ultimately dominant genre of narrative fiction. One hundred fifty years before Austen, poetry was the top literary form, the novel did not exist, and Restoration England was teetering between the “early” world of the Renaissance (which had included religious revolution, cultural brilliance, and political upheaval) and the “modern” world of the Enlightenment (which would include party politics, urbanization, capitalism and empire, science and sentiment, and revolution). Out of this volatile mix arose popular literary culture, fueled by cheap print publication and spawning works that were literally novel—late-breaking, innovative, newsy, and scandalous. This early novel was not a genre but a phenomenon without name or status that was (mainly) female in authorship, amorous in content, and immensely popular. Popular, that is, until it was taken over by a generation of (mainly) male writers who mined its resources for what it claimed was a new and culturally serious kind of storytelling. Happily, the great “novelists” of the 1740’s were as inventive as they were arrogant, and they were followed by fifty years of innovation that showed the new form to be remarkably responsive to the demands of social satire, feminist vision, meta-novelistic play, pornography, gothic sentiment, and radical polemics. Our survey will choose from among Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, John Cleland, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth.
The European Fairy Tale: A Modern History
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Chances are you know something about the Brothers Grimm, but not so much, perhaps, about the complex storytelling traditions to which the stories they collected belonged. This yearlong seminar will explore the fairy tale (with some attention to myths, fables, legends, and parables) in its historical development as an oral and written form between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, including works written or collected by Charles Perrault, Jean de La Fontaine, Marie de Beaumont, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (who first coined the term “conte de fée,” or “fairy tale”), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang, and others, along with what precursor texts still survive in written form. We will also explore the history of the “Kunstmärchen,” or “art fairy tale,” which emerged in the German Romantic period, including Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose work inspired Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, as well as the role played by these stories in the development of the influential turn-of-the-twentieth-century psychological theories of Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Carl Gustav Jung (archetypes and the collective unconscious), and others. Our twentieth- and twenty-first century readings will include writers who used some form of the fairy tale tradition as a starting point for literary experimentation, among them Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Edgar Wideman, Sandra Cisneros, and others. We will pay some attention to the Disney phenomenon as well, along with considering why the fairy tale has been re-embraced in recent decades as a specifically female genre and made the basis of highly political feminist rewritings and analyses. All readings will be in English, though students able to read any of these tales in their original languages will be encouraged to do so. And while we will be concentrating on the Western European tradition, students are encouraged to select tales and traditions from other parts of the world to study as their conference projects (e.g., an Icelandic saga or storytelling traditions from an African or Asian country) and present their findings to the seminar to enhance the scope of our comparative focus. Writing assignments will include historical, analytical, and fantastical projects.
Romantic Poetry and Its Legacies: Blake to Yeats
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course explores the origin and evolution of modern poetry. In the wake of the French Revolution, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge invented a new kind of poem and we will trace its influence on subsequent authors from the second generation Romantics to the early modernists, including Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hardy, Owen, Rosenberg, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. Our understanding of literary and historical periods will emerge from our close, imaginative reading of texts.
Abandonment of Origins: Asian American Literature, Film, and Criticism, 1882-2005
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This course will move across the social and political histories of Asian Americans, but the greater project will involve a sustained reflection on “Asian American” as a theoretical problem. The category of “Asian American” (or “Oriental” and “Asiatic” in early twentieth century) is one that emerges with exclusionary immigration laws in 1882. Up to 2005, immigrant legislation continues to modulate the category of the “American citizen,” according to the perceived political needs of the U.S. If the long twentieth century of Asian American cultural production begins with “exclusion” as its keyword, then we might argue that it ends with “transnationalism” and “flexible citizenship” as new terms for discrimination. These different ways of becoming Asian American not only point to the century-long tenuousness of this very category but also suggest the creative force of its unruly naming. We will explore the contradictions of U.S. policies and practices regarding migrant labor, citizenship, war, diplomacy, racial taxonomy, transnational immigration, and global capitalism, while remaining attentive to the aesthetics of their cultural representations. Our analysis of U.S.-based contexts will always be in dialogue with postcolonial and other political movements concurrently occurring at various sites in “Asia.” Our guiding questions: How does one become Asian American, and what are the contours of this political becoming that paradoxically tends to depoliticize the Asian American subject? What are the politics of identity and, subsequently, what are the politics of identity politics? How have diverse articulations of modernization and of globalization emerged at various sites within Asian American history? How are the multiple temporalities of the Asian American ethnoscape captured in aesthetic projects by diverse artists? Authors, filmmakers, and scholars will include Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lawrence Chua, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Vyvyane Loh, Catalina Cariaga, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Leslie Bow, and David Eng, among others.
The Making of Modern Theatre: Ibsen and Chekhov
Level: Open
Semester: Year
A study of the originality and influences of Ibsen and Chekhov. The first semester begins with an analysis of melodrama as the dominant form of popular drama in the Industrial Age. This analysis provides the basis for an appreciation of Ibsen, who took the complacent excitements of melodrama and transformed them into theatrical explosions that undermined every unquestioned piety of middle-class life. The effect on Strindberg leads to a new way of constructing theatrical experience. The second semester focuses on Chekhov, who in retuning theatrical language to the pitches and figures of music, challenges conventional ideas of plot. Finally, Brecht, Lorca, and Beckett introduce questions about the very sensations delivered by drama, plumbing its validity and intent.
Contemporary Global Fiction
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
The aim of this course is to introduce students to a wide array of recent and contemporary writing from sites as various as Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, New Zealand, India, China, Algeria, South Africa, Cuba, and the United States. Readings consist of literary works written originally in English and works in translation. Although primary attention will be directed toward the particular stylistic, formal, and thematic features of the individual texts, we will keep in mind the dynamic relation between local contexts and transnational space—the complex processes by which languages and cultures circulate globally. Thus we will also examine such terms as “cosmopolitan,” “world,” and “global” and consider what “comparative literature” means today.
Reading Kafka
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
This course will be an intensive study of the parables, stories, novels, diaries, and letters of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the Jewish writer from Prague whose enigmatic meditations on identity, language, law, truth, faith, guilt, writing, and death have indelibly marked our sense of the twentieth century and of modern literature. Because Kafka’s narrative strategies and rhetorical techniques compel interpretation just as they resist all attempts to affix meaning(s), our engagement with Kafka’s work will include the extraordinary range of commentary and criticism it has elicited—formalist, theological, ideological, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, aesthetic.
Diagramming Ethnicity: Theories, Methods, and Texts of Ethnic Studies
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
In what contexts does ethnicity emerge as a new way of thinking through and responding to political challenges? How was ethnicity imagined as a form of power during decolonization movements in the third world and anti-racism movements in the U.S.? How was ethnicity re-envisioned as ethnic nationalisms in anti-colonial liberation movements and the U.S. civil rights movement? How has ethnicity been linked to linguistic minority in relation to different types of nationalisms and to immigration? How has ethnicity become fragmented into multiple, individual “identities” during the growth of niche markets globally? We will try to figure out what ethnicity is by focusing on how it has been used and what it has produced. We will also investigate some of the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of ethnicity that get at issues of power, identification, subjectivity, freedom, agency, and language. These theoretical discussions will enable us to rethink a number of disciplinary holds on the ethnic, specifically certain state-invested forms of anthropology, area studies, and sociology; as well as to explore uses of the ethnic that have helped to produce interdisciplinary and critical methodologies, i.e., cultural studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, globalization studies, and critical ethnographies. These analyses of discourse will be threaded through a diverse selection of literary texts, which open up flashpoints on the twentieth century. Literary authors will include Richard Wright, Jose Rizal, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Li-Young Lee, Wendy Law-Yone, Trinh Minh-ha, Le Ly Hayslip, Assia Djebar, and Arundhati Roy. Critical perspectives will be culled from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Rey Chow, Naoki Sakai, Ngugu wa Thiong’o, Ella Shohat, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others.
Borrachita me voy: Mexico at the Crossroads
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
With the advent of the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century, Mexico becomes the source of endless fascination and the locus for an enormous political, social, and cultural ferment of truly international dimensions. Over four decades (roughly 1909 to 1959), political upheavals are threaded with the surprising figures who coincide there, cross paths, leave their mark—John Reed, Trostky, Neruda, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and the many exiles from the Spanish Civil War, Angelina Beloff, Carrington, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, et al. At the same time, many Mexicans who themselves have traveled abroad, to the U.S., to Europe, to Asia—Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz—become themselves towering figures in twentieth-century Latin America. Others still are most universal when they are most “Mexican,” like Juan Rulfo, while José Vasconcelos, who revolutionized education in his country, proposes a “cosmic race,” and Mexico is at its center. This course will look at the literature, visual arts, and film of this period in the context of this international flux. Students who would like to explore Mexico or Latin America beyond the proposed timeline in their conference projects (in English or Spanish) are more than welcome. Taught in English.
An Introduction to Shakespeare
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Over the centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have moved from being primarily scripts for actors to being literary works read by a large middle-class public to being texts for study in the academy. We will consider the ways in which this perennial classic is reinvented as our contemporary, as well as the radical differences between the Shakespearean imagination of social life, erotic life, and the nature of the self and our own. The plays studied will include examples of Shakespeare’s four main genres—comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. Occasionally we will also read critical essays that connect Shakespeare to issues in contemporary literary and cultural theory.
some previous work in literature or philosophy is desirable
Image-Affect-Ethnic: How to Make Bodies Move
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
If I am a person in Korea, a Korean in Asia, an Asian in the world, and an Asian American in the U.S., then what is it that I am? Must this description of movement also serve as an explanation of an identity crisis? A key challenge in ethnic and cultural studies today comes from a political impasse and critical exhaustion in confronting the ethnic subject’s identity crises, psychic ills, and traumas. This course will take an uncharted (though well-traveled) route through the notion of “affectivity”—understood as the capacity for bodily movement in the fullest sense of the phrase—in order to arrive at a new way of viewing and engaging crisis. We will attempt to rethink the “ethnic” through four rhetorical tropes: turn, fold, cut, switch. These tropes offer us figural descriptions of how ethnic bodies move and act. Thinking through these moving figures gets us away from the spectacle of the ethnicized body (marked by race, class, gender, and sexuality) and encourages us to explore the creative energy of crisis itself. How does one turn into oneself and then again into some other self? How do exterior pressures cause one to fold in on oneself, producing double selves? How does one make cuts in one’s world, dividing oneself up into fragments of a self? How does one switch between different loyalties and affiliations? Given the mobility of these tropes’ ability to represent the ethnic, we will consider a selection of literary and visual texts that directly engage the movements of travel—from the return journey home to the wanderings of the not-so-casual tourist. Rather than focus our discussion on examples from a single, clearly demarcated time and space, we will instead take up the ambiguous ethnic designation of “transnational Asian” as a more appropriate case study in our musings on ethnicity, bodily movement, and travel. Authors will include Pamela Lu, David Mura, Andrew Pham, Lawrence Chua, Dai Sijie, Zhang Yimou, and Wong Kar-Wai. Critical discussions of affect will consider Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler, among others.
The Traditions of Opera: Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Berg
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Opera seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance: the audience for opera grows, works that have fallen into obscurity are revived, and directors attempt new and radical stagings of the familiar works of the operatic repertory. This course will pay some attention to the history of opera from its invention at the beginning of the seventeenth century as a combination of music and drama that attempted to revive the lost glories of Greek theatre, but most of our time will be given to analysis of works of major importance by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Berg. We will be especially concerned with opera’s relationship to earlier dramatic forms (Greek and Shakespearean drama) as well as its relationship to both the nondramatic musical forms and the literary forms contemporary with its development. We will frequently be concerned with what might be called questions about the cultural work of opera. For example, what can opera represent with it often extravagant materials and means that other narrative and dramatic forms of its period can’t, and how can an opera be related to the important social and political issues of its time? Although a technical knowledge of music is not required, students will be instructed in those basic elements of musical form and technique that are necessary to a serious study of opera. Readings will be drawn from opera librettos, theoretical writing about opera and music generally (including the composers), earlier writings on opera (e.g., Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno), and the impressive amount of contemporary writing on opera. Conference work, at least at first, will be conducted in small groups that can consider such topics as late Renaissance opera, Baroque opera, Wagner’s Ring tetralogy, French opera, contemporary opera, and opera and the nineteenth-century novel, among others.
Metamorphoses from Ovid to Rushdie
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
“May/the song I sing be seamless as its way/weaves from the world’s beginning to our day,” begins Ovid’s first-century Metamorphoses, and it is hard to imagine a more prophetic vision in Western culture in general and English literature in particular. For two millennia, readers and writers have served as latter-day Pygmalions, transforming the yielding marble of Ovid’s poem into the vital shape of their own personal, cultural, and historical desires. From Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, to Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s pastoral poems, to the great translation edited by Samuel Garth in 1717, each generation has discovered aspects of itself in Ovid’s polished stories of sex, violence, power, desire, gender, song, and fame: Daphne and Apollo, Phaeton, Narcissus and Echo, Proserpina, Philomela and Procne, Pyramis and Thisbe, Acteon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Tiresius. Moralized in medieval times, eroticized (through Ovid’s own Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris) in the early modern era, and powerfully identified with the discourses of desire (through his Heroides) in the eighteenth-century novel, the Metamorphoses developed its own subgenres in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most powerfully in the Orphic tradition that found its way into the poetry, art, music, and eventually film of Monteverdi, Rilke, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, among many others. In recent decades, Ted Hughes, Rita Dove, Joseph Brodsky, Salman Rushdie, and Mary Zimmerman have helped to spark yet another Ovidian era in English letters, one uniquely responsive to the shadows cast by the poet’s late exilic Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. We will pick our very selective way through what a translator once called “Ovid’s MetamorphosesEnglish’d,” beginning with a sustained focus on how the work’s genres, sources, themes, politics, and self-conscious poetics help us to make sense of what it means by “metamorphoses.” We will then consider a few representative texts from some major periods of literary history, reading Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, or The Tempest during our time in the Renaissance, for example, or Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis or VirginiaWoolf’s Orlando when we take on twentieth-century modernism. The final third of the seminar will be devoted to more recent Ovidian transformations, such as the limpid lines of Louise Glück or the rock star world-city universe of Rushdie’s monumental The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Reading The Tale of Genji
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
The Tale of Genji, written by an eleventh- century imperial lady-in-waiting known as Murasaki Shikibu, is probably the most canonized, lionized, pored over, quoted, and alluded to work of fiction in all of Japanese literature. Sometimes characterized as the world’s first novel, the Genji remains one of the most opulent and subtle works of fiction ever produced. This fascinating window into the lives and minds of the Japanese aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1185) is a deeply sophisticated exploration of that period’s gender relations and gender politics—one that, in many ways, can resonate with surprising potency even for the modern reader. Much of the novel chronicles the many and varied love affairs of “the Shining Genji,” an almost preternaturally beautiful, cultured, and alluring imperial prince. From one point of view, then, the Genji may be said to consist largely of teenagers jumping in and out of bed with each other. But viewed through the lens of Heian aristocratic political praxis, the Genji is extremely revealing about the ways in which sexual behavior and political power were subtly and inextricably meshed in Heian marriage politics. This entwinement is expressed in such recurring themes as surrogacy, child stealing, female jealousy, cuckolding, spirit possession, and the Heian version of “date rape.” Moreover, these same themes, viewed through a slightly different lens, reveal an enormous amount about the ceaseless power struggles that went on between women and men, as well as between same-gender rivals. Indeed, it is possible to view the Genji as a sort of comprehensive manual for Heian aristocratic women on how best to handle both male lovers and the female competition. These are only two of the myriad approaches one can take to a text as rich and subtle as this one. The Genji repays close reading with a trove of deep and fascinating insights into premodern Japanese aristocratic society, into the complexities of human relations, and into human nature itself. Because of its considerable length, the Genji is rarely read in its entirety in the classroom. In this course, however, that is exactly what we are going to do: luxuriate in this sumptuous text as the primary focus of our course. By way of preparation, we will read a number of contemporary works, including several women’s diaries, as cultural background, to provide us a better handle on the cultural assumptions, mores, and motivations of Heian aristocratic society. We will supplement these readings with a number of scholarly writings on the Heian marriage system; Heian history, culture, politics, and religion; and various aspects of the Genji itself.
Performance Practices of Global Youth Cultures
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
This course will engage in two complimentary tasks. First, we will examine how scholars and the popular media have defined “youth.” We will pay particular attention to how young people have been thought about in relation to broader conceptualizations of citizenship, criminality, education, and labor. Second, we will investigate how young people have thought about and represented themselves. Taking seriously music, dance, and fashion, we will explore how youth have used performance practices to engage in political activism, subvert hegemonic norms, reconfigure urban geographies, and critically examine issues of race, gender, and class. Our inquiry will include attention to how youth practices travel globally and adopt new localized political meanings, as well as the ways in which the subversive potential of performances can be subsumed by the normalizing mandates of global capital. Our work in class will be based on readings, discussions, and audiovisual material from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. For conference projects, students will conduct ethnographic research on the Sarah Lawrence campus and in New York City.
History Plays
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues), but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama, plays we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition—for example, much of Greek tragedy—and it is very famously true of some of the greatest work by Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. Some of the best contemporary playwrights also set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony (the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot), but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present or necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past setting little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s best play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960’s, and attempts to locate the causes of the then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960’s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late eighteenth-century politics and the politics of the present. A recent play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, seeks to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In this course, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature, all of them, in one sense or another, history plays, written for various purposes and of generally very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.
Wallace Stevens and Related Phenomena in Modern American Poetry
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course is devoted to Wallace Stevens and a particular line of modern American poetry that followed in his wake. After spending the majority of the fall semester on Stevens and his most important precursors, we will turn our attention in the spring to a handful of poets who were influenced by his work, or in some respect shared his neo-Romantic, modernist project, most notably Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery.
Open to sophomores and above.
Modernism and Fiction
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course will pick up the history of prose fiction roughly at the point when the novel starts to become a self-conscious and problematic literary form in Flaubert, James, and Conrad. From these writers, we will proceed to the more radical and complex formal experiments of the great “high modernists” of fiction—Mann, Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. In the last part of the course, we will consider the question of what is now called “postmodernism” both in fiction that continues the experimental tradition of modernism while breaking with some of its assumptions (Beckett and Pynchon) and in important recent theorizing about problems of narrative and representation. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the social and political meanings both of experimental narrative techniques and of theories of fiction.
Open to sophomores and above with at least a year of literature or philosophy.
Shakespeare and the Semiotics of Performance
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself, a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, costumes, possibly scenery and lighting. Offstage we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we study all these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose life span is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare are our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I is our starting place. Seeing how these plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries is our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings— from within Shakespeare’s wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film—is our work.
Sophomores and above.
The Nonfiction Essay
Semester: Year
In the 1973 introduction to his anthology The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe wrote, “In the early 1960’s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the features statusphere. The discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would read like a novel.” Wolfe then went on to say, “Not even the journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him.” Wolfe’s history may be off slightly. One can see the kind of nonfiction writing he describes as far back as William Hazlitt’s early essays, and in the 1930’s and 1940’s, George Orwell and James Agee were practicing the new journalism. But Wolfe’s overall claim is on target. Since the early 1960’s, the nonfiction essay has flourished, and it has flourished by showing that the techniques of fiction and the traditional essay can be combined with great effectiveness. The aim of this course is to produce nonfiction as lively as fiction. This emphasis on writing technique should not, however, be taken to mean that this is a course in what is so often called “creative nonfiction.” While personal essays will be part of the work students do, this is not a course in self-exploration or covert autobiography. Students will take on specific assignments and be expected to report accurately on what they discover. The subtitle for this course might well be “the literature of fact.” The course will begin by emphasizing writing technique and the importance of rewriting and then place an increasingly heavy focus on research. Among the writers studied will be Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Henry Louis Gates, Joan Didion, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Students interested in the course must bring a sample of their writing to the interview. If admitted to the course, they should not be taking another writing course.
Seventeenth-Century English Literature: Tradition and Transformation
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
In the seventeenth century in England, the great ordering coherences of medieval and earlier Renaissance thinking seemed to disintegrate under the warring impulses of individualism and authority, empiricism and faith, revolutionary transformation and reinforcement of tradition. Yet even as monarchy and established church were challenged and torn apart, the seventeenth century produced an extraordinary flowering of drama, poetry, and prose that expressed the contradictory energies of the period. We will study English writing of the seventeenth century in a roughly chronological sequence. The first semester will explore the aesthetics and ideology of the Stuart courts and the robust and bawdy urban century of London through a reading of masques and plays by Jonson and Shakespeare and their contemporaries; dramatic experiments in “metaphysical” and moral verse by Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and other poets; various developments in scientific, philosophical, and meditative prose by Bacon, Burton, and Browne; and the early poetry of Milton. The second semester will be devoted to major writers during the periods of the English Revolution and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Our primary attention will be to the radical politics and the visionary poetics of Milton, particularly Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes; but we will also study the work of the cavalier and libertine court poets, as well as Andrew Marvell, Katherine Phillips, Aphra Behn, and John Dryden. John Bunyan’s spiritual allegory Pilgrim’s Progress and Behn’s colonial romance novel Oroonoko will provide a retrospect of the imagined and the social worlds we have traversed and a prospect of the worlds to come.
At least one year of college-level study in the humanities or a strong AP course in literature is a prerequisite.
Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Semester: Year
This course entails an intensive and close textual encounter with the novelistic worlds of the nineteenth-century realist tradition. The first fictional tradition to accept social reality as the ultimate horizon for human striving, the nineteenth-century novels we will study are all intensely critical of the severe limitations to human wholeness and meaning posed by the new social world they are confronting. At the same time that they accept the world as a setting and boundary for human life, they seek to find grounds for transcending its limitations. We will explore the tensions in these novelists’ work between accepting the world as given and seeking to transcend it. At the same time, we will try to understand why—in spite of a century and a half of great historical and cultural change—these novels continue to speak to the issues posed by the human condition with such beauty, depth, and wisdom. We will read in the works of such novelists as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Stendhal, Eliot, Austen, Dickens, Twain, and Goethe.
Not open to first-year students.
Inventing American Literature
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
In 1815 the Treaty of Ghent concluded the War of 1812 with England ending any external threat to a United States not yet forty years old. In 1830, Congress granted President Andrew Jackson the authority to make treaties for the “removal” of the eastern Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River, thus attending to a perceived internal threat and expanding the American nation. War with Mexico in 1848 expanded it even further adding lands in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In these years, a number of American authors set out to “invent” American literature as a specifically national literature rather than just an English literature written elsewhere. Thoreau began his experiment living at Walden Pond just exactly on July 4. Walt Whitman, in his Song of Myself, denominates himself “Walt Whitman, American,” an American bard, something like what Emerson had earlier called the “American Scholar.” All this, while the country founded on the premise that “all men are created equal” had to deal with the Constitution’s provision that some men were to count as only three-fifth of a man; the land of liberty was also a land of slavery, and the bloody Civil War of 1861-1865 again altered the possibilities and potentialities of an American literature. This course examines the invention of American literature from roughly the 1830’s to 1890, the year when Sioux Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee, and the year as well that the Bureau of the Census announced the “closing” of the American frontier. Our authors include Frederick Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, William Apess, Margaret Fuller, and Twain.
For sophomores, juniors, and seniors with some college background in literature.
American Literature: The Closed Frontier to the Great Depression, 1890-1929
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
In 1890, the Bureau of the Census declared the “close” of the “frontier”; America had manifested its destiny from sea to shining sea. But as the century turned, “America” was a very different place from what it had been before. The years 1880-1924 were the great age of immigration; more than three million people from China, southern and eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere arrived. These were also the years of continued adjustment to the implications of Darwinian theory and the new intellectual challenges of relativity and psychoanalytic theory. If Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman had struggled to invent a distinctive literature for America, many of the writers of this period had first to decide the question of what America actually was before they could produce its literature. This question became even more complicated after 1917, when young Americans who perhaps had gone no further than twenty miles from home suddenly found themselves in Paris (and elsewhere) during World War I. We will read short pieces by Stephen Crane, Sui Sin Far, Charles Chesnutt, and Abraham Cahan, moving next to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the early T. S. Eliot. We will consider what William Carlos Williams might have meant when he began a poem with the line, “The pure products of America go crazy,” and look at the “revolt against Americanism,” in part a reassessment of whether the country’s small towns and farming communities represented the heartland or merely the provinces. We will also look at the work of W. E. B. DuBois and his pronouncement that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” as well some of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Faulkner will be of interest in these and other regards. Although the stock market didn’t “crash” until 1929, The Sound and the Fury (1928) already marks a certain “great depression.”
For sophomores, juniors, and seniors with some college literature background.
The Historical Avant-Garde
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
This course provides a survey of the Modernist avant-garde and its legacies. We will focus particularly on its primary movements and their often polemical manifestos, in part to look at the ways in which manifestos do or do not generate corresponding artworks. Though assignments are made up mostly of literary texts, we will also consider the issue of which genres are privileged by different movements and why. Thus, the course will also include film, photography, painting, architecture, and theatre, in an attempt to cover a wide range of genres to best understand the pan-art quality of the avant-garde. After a brief look at some precursors, we will devote time to such integral twentieth-century movements as Italian Futurism, international Dadaism, French Surrealism, the German Bauhaus, and English Vorticism, as well as to some borderline cases and inheritors, such as Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Tadeusz Kantor, and the French experimental Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OuLiPo). Throughout the semester, we will continually consider how these artworks have been incorporated into mainstream or “high art” categories, in what ways they still defy classification, and how they inform and also prevent similar attempts today. Due to the dynamic nature of these movements, this course relies heavily on class participation and an adventurous spirit. Please consider this requirement when applying for the course.
Open to sophomores and above.