Literature

One of the goals of this course is to demonstrate the ways in which modern poetry originated in the Romantic period. In the wake of the French Revolution, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge invented a new kind of autobiographical poetry that internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inner life became the inescapable subject of the poem. In the second semester, we will trace the impact of Romanticism on subsequent generations of poets writing in English, from Walt Whitman to T. S. Eliot. Our preeminent goal will be to appreciate each poet’s—indeed, each poem’s—unique contribution to the language. Our understanding of literary and historical trends will emerge from the close, imaginative reading of texts. Authors will include, among others: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. Individual conferences will meet every week until October Study Days and every other week thereafter.

Autobiographies, biographies, diaries, and memoirs are all ways of capturing a life between the covers of a book. This FYS course in literature will examine various genres of life writing from the 19th through 21st centuries, from works that attempt to tell a full “cradle-to-grave” story of a life to experiments with shifting points of view or exploring nonhuman consciousness. We will read examples of life writing from the Victorian and Modernist periods, as well as more recent graphic memoirs and works of autofiction. Texts on the syllabus by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Orwell, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, and others reveal the expansiveness of life-writing genres. These texts will raise questions about how to distinguish truth from fabulation, whether it is possible to fully know ourselves or others, the degree to which an individual is shaped by his/her social environment, and the reliability of memory. We will look at how memoirists connect the introspective and personal to wider political and historical concerns and how biographers address both the triumphs and the failings of their famous subjects. Visiting speakers will discuss their experiences writing biographies and memoirs and what they have learned in the process about writing, researching, and publishing. Throughout the semester, students will engage in analytic and reflective writing that connects the course content to their own experiences and observations. For conference work, students will have a choice between three group conferences that will meet biweekly. Each conference group will focus on a distinct life-writing skill: reviews, interviews, and archival research. Conference projects will include the following options: 1) creating a review of books of recent biographies and memoirs; 2) contributing to an interview-based podcast series; and 3) making a digital project based on archival research. The goal of the course is to learn a range of writing and research skills while also tackling big questions about what it means to live a good life. Examining how to write a life, we will also explore how to make a life as a writer in college and beyond.

Afro-Latin American subjects have had a long tradition of employing literature, newspapers, and films to participate in national and international debates, such as the push for a republic in Brazil and progress in the Dominican Republic at the end of the 19th century, the integration and celebration of Afrodescendent culture in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, and the implementation of Afrodescendent-conscious initiatives in contemporary Colombian society. While these outlets certainly served as a vehicle to disseminate their thoughts on a variety of topics, their materiality also attested to the undeniable existence and agency of these subjects in such nations. In this course, we will explore and evaluate cultural artifacts that have impacted intellectual and artistic discourses in Latin American societies from the 19th century to today. Through poems, short stories, novels, newspaper articles, and films by cultural thinkers including Maria Firmina dos Reis, Salomé Ureña, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet, we will delve into the visions that these thinkers had for themselves and their respective societies. We will critically discuss their artistic and political achievements at both local and international levels to better situate their epistemology in the tradition of the African diaspora. Students will learn the principles of literary analysis and theory and employ them in written assignments and class discussions. We will ground our analysis of these cultural artifacts in their respective sociopolitical contexts. Another important aspect of this course is to facilitate students’ transition to college life. As a result, we will meet every other week in group conference to discuss topics related to this transition. The other weeks, students will meet individually with the professor to work on their conference projects. This course will be taught entirely in English.

This FYS course asks how three persistently messy topics—interpersonal desire, conjugal attachment, and gender identity—were articulated and explored in the literary arts across two centuries of cultural upheaval in England: the 1590s to the 1810s, the late Renaissance to the Romantic era. Our chief focus will be on drama, narrative poetry, and prose fiction; but we will also sample a range of other expressive modes, including sonnets, journalism, and life-writing. Along the way, students will be introduced to some of the most compelling figures in literary history: the renegade epic poet John Milton (we will read his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, in its entirety); Aphra Behn, England’s first professional female author; Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson, pioneers of the realist novel; the elegantly devastating verse satirist Alexander Pope; the cross-dressing memoirist Charlotte Charke; and Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founders of modern feminism. Bracketing the yearlong course will be comparatively extended coverage of the two most influential and dazzling authors of courtship narratives in English: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Additional attention will be paid to earlier writers on sexuality and marriage, such as Ovid and St. Paul, as well as to contemporary work in queer theory and gender studies and to a handful of early Hollywood films that are in dialogue with the readings. By the end of the year, students will have become measurably stronger at thinking and writing critically about the literature of the past and about cultural artifacts and practices more broadly. Please note that this course will necessarily include candid discussions of sensitive subject matter, including sexual violence. This course will have biweekly conferences alternating with some kind of small group activity at least for the first semester; the alternating small-group activity might be a lab, a workshopping session, an ongoing project, etc.

This course will examine literature written by late 19th- and 20th-century Italian women writers. In the newly unified Italy, middle-class women began in great numbers to access and contribute to literature as both readers and writers. The increasing presence of women writers caused great upheaval, as the male literary establishment viewed the potential for a disruption to the canon. The anxiety caused by their presence is visible in the manner in which they were dismissed as imitating male literary models, accused of excessive sentimentality and self-disclosure, or dubbed by critics il pericolo roseo, “the pink danger” (L. Zuccoli, Corriere della sera, March 24, 1911). Yet, many of these women writers reveal sophistication in their ability to experiment with genres and styles and engage with some of Italy’s literary movements (e.g., verismo, futurism, magic realism, neorealism) and intellectuals, as well as crucial historical events such as fascism and World War II. As we will see, they often question or reverse traditional depictions of femininity. They show an awareness of the social roles and expectations demanded of them and often interrogate such roles and some of the tropes present in the works of the time (e.g., the femme fatale, the self-sacrificing wife and mother). Many of them assert their own defiant voice and their own perspective as women writers, (re)claiming a place in the canon of Italian literature. In this course, we will explore how their works address social issues related to family, marriage, and women’s changing roles, as well as the place of women’s writing in the Italian literary canon. Our readings will include works by Marchesa Colombi (M. A. Torriani), Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia Deledda, Ada Negri, Rosa Rosà, Paola Masino, Renata Viganò, Joyce Lussu, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. These works will be examined in dialogue with the literary production and ideas of male or canonical authors. Primary sources will range from fiction (novels, short stories, and fictional diaries) to autobiographical texts, poems, plays, and newspaper articles; these sources will be supplemented by secondary readings on women’s literature and history and on occasion by films. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Students proficient in Italian may opt to read sources in the original. Conference topics may include the study of a particular author, literary text, or topic relevant to the course and that is of interest to the student. As an FYS course, students will meet individually in conference with the instructor/don every week until October Study Days and every two weeks after that.

Comedy is a startlingly various form that operates with a variety of logics. Comedy can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In the first semester of this course, we’ll explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list for the first semester includes some poetry, a book on the philosophy of humor; a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras); plays by Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Molière, and some 17th- and 18th-century British playwrights; and Fielding’s Tom Jones. In the second semester, we may read Jane Austen, Byron, Stendhal, Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard—and we’ll also look at some films and cartoons. Both semesters’ reading lists are subject to revision. Every student in this FYS class will have weekly conferences for the first semester and either weekly or biweekly conferences in the second semester. A conference is 30 minutes of one-on-one work, with a separate and probably unique reading list for each semester of conference work; and each semester’s conference work culminates in a substantial piece of writing. In a normal week, conferences are in addition to two 90-minutes classes.

Athens, London, Paris, Berlin, New York...the history of Western theatre has always been associated with cities, their politics, their customs, their geography, their audiences. This course will track the story of theatre as it originates in the Athens of the fifth-century BCE and evolves into its different expressions and practices in cities of later periods, all of them seen as “capitals” of civilization. Does theatre civilize, or is it merely a reflection of any given civilization whose cultural assumptions inform its values and shape its styles? Given that ancient Greek democracy gave birth to tragedy and comedy in civic praise of the god Dionysos—from a special coupling of the worldly and the sacred—what happens when these genres recrudesce in the unsavory precincts of Elizabethan London, the polished court of Louis XIV, the beer halls of Weimar Berlin, and the neon “palaces” of Broadway? Sometimes the genres themselves are challenged by experiments in new forms or by performances deliberately situated in unaccustomed places. By tinkering with what audiences have come to expect or where they have come to assemble, do playwrights like Euripides, Brecht, and Sarah Kane destabilize civilized norms? Grounding our work in Greek theatre, we will address such questions in a series of chronological investigations of the theatre produced in each city: Athens and London in the first semester; Paris, Berlin, and New York in the second.

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’ll begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine and go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy, and Hobbes. In the second semester, we’ll look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military metaphor; at Marxism, which remilitarized the language of political economy; at Byron’s mock epic, Don Juan; and at two 19th-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy—one of whom described war directly, and the other used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic, economic, and political life. We’ll conclude with a look at some 20th-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy.

In this course, students will first get a brief historical overview of postwar German history by watching a YouTube video and reading an essay about Germany’s defeat in 1945. Then, we will study several short stories about the war by Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most famous writer in postwar Germany; a play by Wolfgang Borchert about a German soldier coming home from the war and having no home anymore, in conjunction with the 1946 movie Murderers Among Us; Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit, together with Fassbinder’s movie, The Marriage of Maria Braun; Max Frisch’s parable about anti-Semitism; Jurek Becker’s novel, Jacob the Liar, about Jewish life and death in a ghetto; two narratives from Sebald’s The Emigrants, both of which are dealing with the aftereffects of traumatic experiences during World War II; Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light, a family novel covering East German history, in conjunction with movies about life in East Germany under constant surveillance by the secret police (The Lives of Others and Barbara); and Natascha Wodin’s novel about her family’s tragic history in both the Ukraine and postwar Germany. Thematically, all of these texts and movies are tied by one common theme: the question of how German writers and filmmakers were dealing with the legacy of both National Socialism and Stalinism from 1945 to today.

Do new media fundamentally alter the way we produce and consume works of art? This seems like a 21st-century question, but it was also a central preoccupation for modernist writers in the first half of the 20th century. How, they asked, can literature reach the distracted modern reader? Writers we will read this semester, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, rejected Victorian literary conventions, which they argued were no longer able to touch the modern reader’s senses directly; in doing so, however, they relied on techniques such as collage, allusion, stream of consciousness, and symbolism that often alienated the “common reader.” Other forms of entertainment were increasingly available to such readers: the cinema, the music hall, newspapers, radio, and (later) television. Literature was, for many, losing its audience to these other venues. Scholars have argued that modernism emerged as a reaction against the rise of mass culture; however, as we will see in this course, modernist reactions to media are, in fact, diverse and complicated. We will identify and explore a range of critical approaches and, in so doing, will detail the extent to which modernist aesthetics emerged alongside the rise of new forms of popular mass culture—whether as a negative, positive, or ambivalent response. We will also interrogate the enduring legacy of modernist approaches to media and question whether we have, in fact, moved beyond these concerns or whether they continue to define our literary and popular cultures. Working through a range of texts—including novels and stories, as well as radio plays, manifestos, and films—we will identify the intimate relationship between modernism and changing media.

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most creative encyclopedic work of the Middle Ages. Presenting the story of a unique religious pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, this epic poem envelops readers in a comprehensive education on everything from philosophy and theology to astronomy and geometry. The work teems with information on virtue and vice, as a reader of medieval spiritual texts might expect, but also surprises with debates on secular and sacred love; political theory; local and universal histories; and inquiries of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. This course will explore Dante’s “circle of knowledge,” as it emerges through the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of his poem. The study of intertextual figures will help to illuminate the subtle ways in which Dante promotes his understanding of the world. Works—including not only the three canticles of Dante’s The Divine Comedy but also excerpts from his New Life (Vita Nuova), Monarchy (De Monarchia), On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari eloquentia), and The Banquet (Convivio)—will be read in translation.

Are human beings capable of self-government? What does that require? As modern authoritarian movements imperil democratic institutions, norms, and the rule of law, ancient Greek tragedies illuminate values and aspirations underpinning democracy and modern liberal ideals of justice, equality, and universal human rights. Tragedy and democracy emerged simultaneously in ancient Athens in the late 6th century BCE and flourished throughout the 5th century BCE. Ancient Greece never achieved egalitarian politics or anything close to universal human rights, but Athenian tragedies emphasize the essential equality of all human beings in our vulnerability to suffering and death. Surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dramatize the costs of tyranny, anger, vengeance, and cruelty—to perpetrators, as well as to victims. Commending honesty, generosity, and compassion, tragedies locate nobility not in genetic inheritance, group affiliation, socioeconomic status, numerical superiority, or even moral or ideological convictions but, rather, in our conduct as individuals. Tragedies expose the consequences of human words and actions, as characters make choices conducive to success or failure for themselves and their communities. State-sponsored and publicly performed, tragedies made self-reflection and self-criticism a fundamental feature of Athenian democratic politics and society. “What should I do?” encapsulates the central question of every ancient Greek tragedy and every moment of our own lives. This course is designed for anyone interested in understanding the false promise of authoritarianism and appreciating the origins, goals, and possibilities for a free, humane, equitable democratic society.

This course explores contemporary world literature through themes of travel, migration, postcolonialism, globalization, nomadology, exile, fantasy, and bardo. If East-West is a rubric emerging out of Orientalist discourse, then the alternative to that might be envisioned in reading and writing practices based on Eastern philosophies that provide an orientation we might imaginatively call East by East. Theoretical concerns at the heart of this course focus on questions of imaginary identification, fantasies of statehood, split and dissociative subjectivities, the nature of illusion or reality, experimental approaches to genre, cultural histories of wandering (or the detour), decolonizing the mind, mapping the invisible, and storytelling. The reading list may include Antal Szerb, W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Ocean Vuong, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Theresa Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Christina Rivera Garza, Andre Aciman, Han Kang. This course will have biweekly conferences; for students in a first-year cohort, weekly conferences will be held in the first six weeks of the fall semester.

Powdered, ruffled, and bewigged, the ghosts of the 17th- and 18th-century playhouse still stalk the stages, screens, and red carpets of the global entertainment industry. After a period of suppression by a puritan government, London theatres came roaring back to life in the 1660s, thanks in part to England’s first professional female actors—by some accounts the original modern celebrities—and the reign of a king, Charles II, who was besotted with drama and the people who made it. Over the coming century, the practice and theory of the theatrical arts would be thoroughly and durably transformed, and a new dramatic canon would be consolidated through both print and repertory enactment. Theatre was not only big business in Enlightenment Europe but also, arguably, the representative art form of the age. Part of the public’s fascination with stagecraft lay in the unsettling questions it raised about the nature of performance itself, not only as a form of artistic practice but also as an element of social and political life: What if, for instance, our putatively God-given identities (king and subject, wife and husband) were merely factitious roles that could be adopted or discarded at will? This yearlong “large seminar” considers how authors and theatrical professionals from the 1660s to the 1790s imagined the potential of performance to transform—or sometimes to reinforce—the status quo, with a look ahead to major films, mostly from classical Hollywood, that inherited and adapted the legacy of Restoration and 18th-century entertainments. Our primary emphasis will be on plays, with a survey of major Enlightenment Era comedies (some of the funniest and most outrageous ever written), parodies, afterpieces, heroic tragedies, imperial pageants, sentimental dramas, and Gothic spectacles by authors such as William Wycherley, George Etherege, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, John Gay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. We will also consider nondramatic writing on performance and theatrical culture, including 18th-century acting manuals, racy theatrical memoirs, and a “masquerade novel” by Eliza Haywood, in addition to films by directors such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Oscar Micheaux, F. W. Murnau, Lois Weber, and Billy Wilder. Wigs are not required.

Against the backdrop of the bloodiest half-century in human history, Continental European culture produced an astonishingly rich and diverse body of lyric poetry. Robert Frost famously remarked that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But the unmistakable genius of modern European poetry survives its passage into English (inevitable losses notwithstanding), thanks in no small part to the inspired efforts of its translators. In this course, we will learn to hear the voices they have made available to English-language readers, often comparing multiple translations of a single poem or referring to the original in opposing-page editions. We will read selections from at least 12 poets translated from seven languages, including: Cavafy, Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Pessoa, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Cernuda, Montale, and Celan.

This course provides an introduction to the diverse field of literary theory. The elusive question—What is literature?—has been addressed in widely differently ways by linguists, historians, philosophers, writers, psychoanalysts, hackers, revolutionaries, and so on, and in different times and places. The concept of literature has at times been substituted by other words, such as text, writing, sign, machine, affect, performance, and network, to name a few, which necessarily require changes in our understanding of related concepts, such as author, audience, and context. We will explore experimental approaches to the writing of criticism as a part of our study of literary theory.

Theatre emerges from social rituals; and as a communal exercise, theatre requires people to work together toward a common purpose in shared and demarcated physical space. Yet, the very notion of “character,” first expressed in the indelibly defining mask of the ancient Greek protagonist, points paradoxically toward the spirit, attraction, and trial of individuation. And so we have been given Medea, Hamlet, and Tartuffe, among the many dramatic characters whose unique faces we recognize and who speak to us not only of their own conflicts but also of something universal and timeless. In the 19th century, however, the Industrial Revolution, aggressive capitalism, imperialism, Darwinism, socialist revolution, feminism, the new science of psychology, and the decline of religious clarity about the nature of the human soul—all of these, among other social factors—force the question as to whether individual identity has point or meaning, even existence. Henrik Ibsen, a fiercely “objective” Norwegian self-exile, and Anton Chekhov, an agnostic Russian doctor, used theatre—that most social of arts—to challenge their time, examining assumptions about identity, its troubling reliance on social construction, and the mysteries of self-consciousness that elude resolution. The test will be to see how what we learn from them equips us—or fails to do so—in a study of August Wilson, an African American autodidact of the 20th century, whose plays represent the impact, both outrageous and insidious, of American racism on “characters” denied identity by definition.

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic—and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels with which this course begins. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the novels we read in the first half of this yearlong course reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the 19th-century English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and James that we will study. They lead directly to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the modern novels that we will take on in the second half of the course, which range from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Love and romance are at the heart of the books that will dominate our reading, but so are laughs and gender politics in addition to the heartache that is part of any serious relationship.

What is the relationship between the language(s) we speak, the nation in which we live, and our understanding of ourselves? If language and place help shape our identity, what can we learn from those caught between borders and living in multiple tongues? This course examines transnational literary texts and films both to learn about the lived experiences and aesthetic experimentation of a variety of Japanese-language authors and directors and to explore how language, literature, and visual media are related more broadly to conceptions of “national belonging.” The works covered in this course highlight the destabilization of identity that accompanies both the act of border crossing and the geopolitical upheavals that cause those borders to shift and be redrawn, from the forced assimilation of colonial subjects during Japan’s imperial period, to the US military’s postwar occupation of Japan, to contemporary narratives of globalization, postmodern identity, and the internal borders that today demarcate Japan’s regional cultures and dialects. Through close readings of these texts and films, we will explore the ways that authors in Japan—who have historically been marginalized based on race and ethnicity, class, linguistic ability, and/or gender—have sought to challenge the Japanese national literary cannon and the very notion of “the nation” itself. Students are expected to develop a related research project over the course of the term through conference work that delves deeply into the production, circulation, and reception of some aspect of modern Japanese media.

Henry James called them “baggy monsters”; for the Vicomte de Vogüé, they were not Romans, but Russians. This course will argue that the Russian novel is marked above all by its persistent posing of the question of form. We will begin with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and also with Tolstoy’s essay, “A Few Words About War and Peace,” which claims that War and Peace is not a novel but only the latest in a long line of 19th-century Russian non-novels, including Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. We will read all of these works and more, as we attempt to answer the double question that Tolstoy raises—not just “What is the ‘novel’?” but also “What do we mean by ‘Russia’?”

From Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, I Hotel, to Emmanual Han’s photographic series, America Fever, contemporary Asian American artists and writers have often mined the historical record for creative inspiration. In this course, we will explore how 20th- and 21st-century Asian American novelists, poets, photographers, and painters have turned to the arts in order to reimagine major events in US history. Beginning with the Gold Rush (1848-1855) and concluding in the early 2000s, our chronology will be expansive, as we pay particular attention to how artists and writers have turned to their chosen media forms in order to craft more inclusive representations of American history. At the same time, we will interrogate the ethical implications and historical limitations of reconstructing and reimagining the past—especially in relation to themes of migration, violence, erasure, and identity. In reading across time periods and genres, students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of the key themes and methods that inform the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies. Likely artists will include: Stephanie Shih, Martin Wong, Zarina, Albert Chong, Hung Liu, Linda Sok, and Phung Huynh. Likely authors will include: C. Pam Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mohsin Hamid. Readings will be supplemented by primary sources and mini lectures, which will contextualize our creative readings within larger socio-historical frames.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, a small group of American writers published a series of books that, by virtue of their quality, brought a new richness to American literature. This American renaissance, as the literary historian F. O. Matthiessen called it, had at its center a belief in “the possibilities of democracy.” It was an undertaking that sought to fulfill the hopes unleashed generations earlier by the American Revolution. This course will focus on the prose masterworks of the American renaissance writers and two of their successors, Henry James and Mark Twain. We will begin with a memoir, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, continue with Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and then move on to four novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The aim of this course is to look closely at a set of representative texts and to see in them a modernity in which their central characters (in the case of Douglass and Thoreau, the authors themselves) defy the limits of the society in which they grew up and—in the extreme case of The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne, who has a child out of wedlock in Puritan New England—lose the right to privacy.

This seminar has one text at its center: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Perennially perched near the top of the English language’s greatest works, Hamlet has launched stage careers, inspired shelves of criticism, delighted readers and audiences, and spawned adaptations ranging from the serious to the downright silly. This semester, we’ll survey the creative and critical landscape surrounding Shakespeare’s most-famous play. We begin by reading all three early printed versions of the play—the quartos of 1603 and 1604 and the folio of 1623—along with some important sources and analogues. Our close attention to the textual differences of these early editions will foster study of early modern print and manuscript culture, as we trace these Hamlets’ journeys from pen to stage to print and back. With a detailed understanding of Hamlet, the seminar will then consider major approaches to the play across the centuries, studying commentary from William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dr. Johnson, A. C. Bradley, John Dover Wilson, and others. Near the end of term, our field of study will widen somewhat. We’ll read Tom Stoppard’s classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet (2019), and James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham (2022). Other readings may include Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Shakespeare’s early play, Titus Andronicus. Students will be expected to write a short close reading, a review essay describing two prewar productions, and a conference paper related to Hamlet. Prior experience with Shakespeare, while not required, is ideal. Curiosity about Hamlet is a must.

This course examines, through medieval texts and manuscripts, the complex imagination of animals and animality in the Middle Ages. Critical theories of the Animal Turn seek to reevaluate the relationship between animals and human beings, envisioning the history of the animal as not only environmental but also intellectual, cultural, technological, economic, and as a history of marginalization. Integrating our interdisciplinary study of medieval culture with these theories, we will consider textual and visual materials that recognize the essential, varied, and often surprising roles that animals play and that question an anthropocentric vision that has often otherized animals and animality. Online archives and other digital resources will help us navigate portrayals of animals found in bestiaries, romance narratives, and saints’ lives. In addition, students will learn about the critical importance of animal studies to current environmental justice issues. This course will participate in the Spring 2025 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and an involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

This course examines representations of disability in literature and other media while also exploring how disability shapes the experience of readers and audiences. Course readings will include stories such as H. G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind, novels like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and poetry collections like Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. We will also watch films such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Crip Camp. In addition to these works, we will read a range of secondary texts about the history of audiobooks for the blind and dyslexic, sign-language poetics, and legislation for closed captioning, among other topics. We will look at particular artists and their work to consider how a deaf playwright approaches writing for the stage, how a blind memoirist describes her experiences in art museums, and how an actor with cerebral palsy experiences the physicality of his craft. Conference work will include community engagement with the Wartburg Adult Care Community. You will be asked to consider the access needs of seniors at Wartburg and work together to help make literature, music, and film more accessible to them.

This course examines the literary representation of urban space throughout modern and contemporary Japanese literature, considering how the figure of the city serves as a literary technique through which authors navigate issues of modernity, personal identity, the nation, and the world. Through close readings of texts written by Japanese, Korean, and Asian American authors that traverse Tokyo, Osaka, Berlin, colonized Seoul, semicolonial Shanghai, and visions of the cosmopolis of the future, we will explore the city in literature as a space that complicates and even transcends the borders of the nation in its navigation of collective histories and personal memories—with a particular focus on how representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersect within the literary city. The course introduces basic concepts from urban semiotics and other philosophies of the production of space as a method for analyzing the uses of space in literature, as well as introducing recent scholarship in Japanese studies that presents new perspectives on the relationship of urban architecture, global and local geopolitics, and cultural production. We will explore a number of topics in modern, postwar, and contemporary Japanese history through the framework of “the city,” including early Japanese encounters with “the West” in the Meiji period, cosmopolitanism in the Japanese Empire, black markets in the aftermath of World War II, segregated spaces and the experiences of minority groups in the postwar period, and the social and material transformations of urban spaces in Japan after natural disasters such as the 3/11 Triple Disaster in 2011. We will also consider Japanese American engagement with the space of New York City. Through conference work, students will conduct individual research projects in service of extended creative and scholarly reflection on their own relationship to the urban space(s) they occupy and see represented in contemporary media.

Marches, walkouts, and occupations roiled the campus of San Francisco State University in the fall of 1968. Among the organizers’ demands was the institution of the first Black studies department in the country. More than 50 years later, Black studies has both reshaped existing disciplines and formed departments in colleges across the nation. How might returning to this history reshape our understanding of Black studies, of student movements, of American universities, and of history more generally? This interdisciplinary course seeks to answer these and more questions by studying the archival documents on Black studies at Sarah Lawrence alongside history, literature, film, and theory. In this course, students will participate in a traditional seminar and will spend one session a week in the campus archives. The latter will both engage students in rigorous archival research and result in a conference project helping to narrate the understudied history of Black Studies at Sarah Lawrence. Authors and filmmakers may include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zadie Smith, Spike Lee, Robin Kelley, and more.

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian and Soviet empires, as well as in the post-Soviet space, has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will draw on some historical context while centering our attention on the extraordinary flowering of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature. We will begin with the Polish context and Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem, Pan Tadeusz (1834), written at a time when Poland had been wiped off the map as an independent state. We will then shift to the 20th century to take in cultural production in and around World War II, still a touchstone for this part of the world, including the blend of the real and the fantastic in the short stories of Bruno Schulz, as well as Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then turn to the 21st century and two novels by the 2018 Nobel prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk: Flights (2007) and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). In our reading of Ukrainian literature, we will again start with a 19th-century poet, Taras Shevchenko, as well as Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian who has long been read as a canonical figure in the Russian tradition. We will then jump to the late 20th and early 21st centuries with Oksana Zabuzhko’s influential Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), as well as works by writers including Evgenia Belorusets, Serhiy Zhadan, and Andriy Kurkov. We will end the course with a brief look at the Belarusian tradition, starting with World War II and the short stories of Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykau (in Russian, Vasil Bykov), as well as Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko’s adaptation of Bykau’s The Ordeal in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by another recent Nobel prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich, before finishing with Alhierd Baharevich and the extraordinary decision of his translators to echo Baharevich’s own use of two different languages in Alindarka's Children (2014)—in Petra Reid and Jim Dingley’s 2020 translation, the Russian language of the novel is translated into English and the Belarusian into Scots.

From the years leading to World War II to its aftermath, French writers published some of the most important works of 20th-century Western literature; this course will explore several of these masterpieces in the cultural and historical context of that period, from existentialism in Sartre’s Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944), to the philosophy of the absurd in Camus’ The Stranger (1942) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949/1953), and finally the feminist revolution brought by Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949). Other extremely important questions will also be the focus of our discussions, such as the role and influence of the French Communist party, the colonial presence of France in Algeria (we will read Kamel Daoud’s 2013 The Meursault Investigation, a response to Camus) and the active participation of France in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. (We will read excerpts of Irène Nemirovsky’s novel Suite Française, which she was working on when she was arrested in 1942 and whose manuscript was only discovered and published in 2004.) Finally, we will also look into the importance of psychoanalysis, as developed by Jacques Lacan, and the rise of structuralism with Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, which is in part a response to Sartre’s 1948 What is Literature?

Nothing reflects the variety and moral consistency of 20th-century American literature so well as the coming-of-age novel. This course will trace the evolution of the coming-of-age novel in our last century by looking at a series of masterworks that begin with Willa Cather’s 1918 My Antonia and conclude with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. In its purest form, the coming-of-age novel is the novel of education, or Bildungsroman, which traces the life of a central figure from early childhood to early adulthood and typically ends no later than the central figure’s 30th birthday. In this course, the coming-of-age novels that we will look at do not always stick to this formula. They include a book such as The Grapes of Wrath, in which coming of age means learning to deal with a Great Depression society that is unexpectedly cruel. In an America in which the idea that all men are created equal is part of our civic religion, the coming-of-age novel brings with it cultural and political, as well psychological, implications. Inequality, whether rooted in gender, race, or economics—all three in the case of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—shapes most of the books that we will read and, in turn, challenges the heroes and heroines of these books—even when they are well off—to look beyond their own lives, as the Yale-educated narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby does when, on the first page of Gatsby, he repeats the advice his father gave him, “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.”

In 1593, a young man occasionally employed by the Elizabethan secret service was found stabbed to death in a tavern, allegedly during an argument over the bar tab. The victim, who was said to have once claimed, “All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools,” happened to be the most famous playwright in the country: Christopher Marlowe. Had Marlowe been more judicious in selecting his drinking companions, his upstart rival, a recent small-town transplant named William Shakespeare, may not have ever eclipsed his star. And yet, for all our certainty of Shakespeare’s position in the literary firmament, his work was often neglected in the century following his death. It was Shakespeare’s elegist and rival, Ben Jonson, whose plays were thought to be not of an age but for all time. This seminar reads Shakespeare alongside two of his most important competitors, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, in an effort to resituate Shakespeare’s work among his rowdy contemporaries. Encountering a new play each week, the seminar will cover every major genre over the course of the term, reading plays from 1587–1615. We’ll study tyrannical overreachers and their desire for power in Marlowe’s 1 & 2 Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth. We’ll consider queer possibilities in Marlowe’s Edward II, Jonson’s Epicene, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Over the course of the term, students will explore early modern theatrical practices, printing conventions, and cultural history. Students will leave the seminar with a rich introduction to Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists and a sense of why, after 400 years, Shakespeare has remained a persistent literary presence. In conference, students may work on any aspect of early modern English drama.

Throughout Chinese history, high literature and popular folklore shared a fascination with certain subjects, including ghosts and spirits, heroes and bandits, lovers and friends. Elite authors used these subjects as metaphors to contemplate and criticize their cultural, economic, and political traditions. In folklore, these subjects gave voice to non-elite concerns and preoccupations and merged with a variety of practices in popular culture (secular festivals, ancestor worship, and religious practices). Although technically and stylistically different, high literature and popular folklore enjoyed a continual interplay in which each redirected and influenced the other. This course aims to build different, and sometimes competing, conceptions of “tradition and culture,” “elite and folklore,” as well as to understand their continuing relevance today. To that end, we will focus on the close reading of short-story fiction, folktales, stage plays, opera, and religious practices from three pivotal periods in Chinese history: the Tang-Song period (eighth-12th centuries), the Ming-Qing period (15th-18th centuries), and the 20th century. Our approach will involve both literary and historical analysis, and our goals will be to discover continuities and transformations in both content and form and the interchange between elite and popular practices. Topics for class discussion will include: the nature and definitions of the individual; the relationships among the self, family, and society; changing notions of honor, virtue, and individualism; attitudes toward gender and sexuality; and the role of fiction and folklore in promoting or overturning cultural norms. This course is open to first-year students as a First-Year Studies course, as well as to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. For those first-year students, this will be a yearlong course that includes biweekly individual meetings to discuss students’ independent research projects. On alternate weeks, we will have group activities that will include research and writing workshops, film screenings, and field trips.

This course explores a variety of forms of traditional popular culture that continue to survive in China and abroad. Among the topics we will cover are: folktales (Mulan, Butterfly Lovers), festivals (New Year’s, Dragon Boat, Herdboy, and Weaving Maid), popular deities (Mazu, Guanyin), and religious practices (All Souls, Hell, ancestor worship). Our focus will be on their historical origins and transformations through a variety of cultural forms. Particular attention will be paid to their entertainment, political, ideological, and sociological functions. This course aims to build different—and sometimes competing—conceptions of “tradition” and understand their continuing relevance today. Since many of these practices and beliefs reside outside the lens of elite taste and political authority, our materials will include opera, drama, popular fiction, and visual arts.

The periodic table displays the chemical elements according to the structure of their atoms and, consequently, their chemical properties. The periodic table also represents a treasure trove of fascinating stories that span both natural and human history. Many of the elements on the table have influenced key historical events and shaped individual lives. In this course, we will tour the periodic table and learn how the stories of the discovery and investigation of the elements fuse science with human drama—from murders to cures for deadly diseases and from new technologies to the fall of civilizations. Our studies will include readings from traditional science textbooks and history books, as well as works of literature and poetry. This is a seminar course with two 90-minute class meetings per week. Individual conference meetings will be weekly during the first six weeks of the fall semester and biweekly thereafter.

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual!) In this lecture-seminar, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and wide-ranging tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of the course is to think and play across many disciplines. For class assignments, students may be asked to conduct scientific studies of audience laughter patterns, create works of art with punchlines, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags.

Thinking about exile and emigration, human history has always been characterized by the forced or voluntary migration of individuals or groups of people. In this lecture, we will analyze the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “exile” and “home” in a series of literary works and some movies, ranging from biblical stories to literature from Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century—a century whose upheavals led to different waves of voluntary or forced migration. Classical essays on the connections between exile and literature by Edward Said and Claudio Guillén will provide some critical vocabulary with which to speak and write about the interconnectedness of notions of exile, home, flight, diaspora, migrants, and refugees, while primary works will invite us to analyze these themes in various literary and philosophical genres. In addition to analyzing literary works and movies as representations of “real, historical” exile, another focus of this lecture will be on “exile as a metaphor” for the human, and especially the modern, condition. We will begin with the stories of Adam and Eve and their children, Cain and Abel, as the first humans to be banished from their original home, while later readings will include works by the Roman writers Ovid and Petrarch; Saint Augustine; Goethe; the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (along with an essay by Sigmund Freud on the Uncanny, a story by Franz Kafka, in connection with Murnau’s classic movie Nosferatu and a discussion of the Christian myth of the “Wandering Jew”); Hermann Hesse’s modern psychological novel, Narcissus and Goldmund; Anna Segher’s novel, Transit, about the dilemma of refugees from Nazi Germany being stuck in Marseille in 1942; two stories from The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald; and Natascha Wodin’s biographical novel about the tragic life of her parents, who were brought to Germany during World War II as slave laborers. Two fascinating movies will visually represent “exile”: Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (the famous 19th-century European “foundling,” who was locked up in a prison for the first two decades of his life) and the science-fiction movie The Wall, about a woman who is trapped by an invisible wall in the Austrian Alps and must survive alone with some pets. Students will earn three credits by taking this lecture, though German-language students have the option of taking this course for five credits, in which case they will also attend a weekly conference with the instructor.

In this course, students will first get a brief historical overview of postwar German history by watching a YouTube video and reading an essay about Germany's defeat in 1945. Then, we will study several short stories about the war by Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most famous writer in postwar Germany; a play by Wolfgang Borchert about a German soldier coming home from the war and having no home anymore, in conjunction with the 1946 movie Murderers Among Us; Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play, The Visit, together with Fassbinder's movie, The Marriage of Maria Braun; Max Frisch’s parable about anti-Semitism; Jurek Becker’s novel, Jacob the Liar, about Jewish life and death in a ghetto; two narratives from Sebald’s The Emigrants, both of which are dealing with the aftereffects of traumatic experiences during World War II; Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light, a family novel covering East German history, in conjunction with movies about life in East Germany under constant surveillance by the secret police (The Lives of Others and Barbara); and Natascha Wodin’s novel about her family’s tragic history in both the Ukraine and postwar Germany. Thematically, all of these texts and movies are tied by one common theme: the question of how German writers and filmmakers were dealing with the legacy of both National Socialism and Stalinism from 1945 to today. This lecture (three credits) is taught in English and open to all students; German language skills are not required. Advanced German students have the option of taking this lecture for five credits; during the extra meetings, we will work on all aspects of Advanced German—reading, speaking, and writing—by discussing (in German) the same and/or other postwar German texts not covered in this lecture, as well as reviewing grammar.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly group conferences for Intermediate Greek (see course description) and complete all assignments required for those conferences.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly seminar meetings for What Should I Do? Democracy, Justice, and Humanity in Ancient Greek Tragedy (see course description under Literature) and complete the reading assignments for that course. Students will also meet in group conference twice a week to read (in Greek) and discuss one ancient Greek tragedy selected by the group. 

South Asia, a region at the geographic center of the world’s most important cultural, religious, and commercial encounters for millennia, has a rich history of cultural exchanges. Its central location on the Indian Ocean provided it with transnational maritime connections to Africa and Southeast Asia, while its land routes facilitated constant contact with the Eurasian continent. The region has witnessed numerous foreign rules, from the early Central Asian Turkic dynasties to the Mughals and, finally, the British. After gaining independence from British colonial rule, the region was eventually partitioned into three different nations—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—each with its distinctive form of government. South Asia has produced a significant diaspora worldwide, preserving its cultural heritage and creating further cultural exchanges with the adopted nations, thereby influencing global culture. Despite facing development challenges and political instability, South Asia is rapidly developing within the capitalistic world economy and becoming an important player on the global scene, both politically and culturally. This course will provide students with a survey of South Asia from the era of the early Indus Civilization to the present. Lectures and sources will trace major political events and the region’s cultural, ecological, and economic developments that have significantly shaped South Asian history. Students will analyze both primary and secondary sources, enhancing their understanding of this diverse society. They are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in South Asian history and develop sound arguments.

Close your eyes and listen. The human experience is highly sonic. Along with touch, hearing is among the most personal of our bodily senses. Now, you may hear the sound of passing cars, a lawnmower outside, or the murmur of voices from the hallway. But does race have a sound? What does Jim Crow sound like? Are there sonic dimensions to Black Power? Can popular music propel social movements, or can we hear social change? This lecture guides students through a survey of color and sound. We will explore historical case studies where concepts of race and recorded music collide. Through a careful analysis of a variety of cultural texts—including memoirs from specific artists and critical reviews of albums—and a consideration of contextual historical events and phenomena, students will consider how popular culture and music have shaped concepts of race and ethnicity over the 20th century.

Marches, walkouts, and occupations roiled the campus of San Francisco State University in the fall of 1968. Among the organizers’ demands was the institution of the first Black studies department in the country. More than 50 years later, Black studies has both reshaped existing disciplines and formed departments in colleges across the nation. How might returning to this history reshape our understanding of Black studies, of student movements, of American universities, and of history more generally? This interdisciplinary course seeks to answer these and more questions by studying the archival documents on Black studies at Sarah Lawrence alongside history, literature, film, and theory. In this course, students will participate in a traditional seminar and will spend one session a week in the campus archives. The latter will both engage students in rigorous archival research and result in a conference project helping to narrate the understudied history of Black studies at Sarah Lawrence. Authors and filmmakers may include W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Zadie Smith, Spike Lee, Robin Kelley, and more.

Between the triumph of the Enlightenment in the mid-18th century and the rise of Romanticism in the 1790s lies a span of time, extending roughly from 1760 to 1800, populated by a variety of writers who foreshadowed the end of the Enlightenment without being truly “Romantic.” Many of the most exciting and influential works of literature and thought produced in the 18th century were products of this ambiguous period. For want of a better name, scholars have labeled some of these works “pre-Romantic.” It might be more useful to think of them as products of an “edgy Enlightenment”—a late, adventurous phase of the Enlightenment whose representatives had begun to question the Enlightenment’s own cherished beliefs and, in some cases, to discard them. In this course, we will read a number of the most famous texts produced by writers of the “edgy Enlightenment,” as well as two texts produced outside the period that are equally “edgy” in their own way. More than half of the works we are reading are narratives of travel—a genre of literature of which 18th-century Europeans were extremely fond. Three describe real journeys: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexander von Humboldt’s journal of his famous scientific expedition to the wilder parts of South America. Two other texts are accounts of imaginary journeys: Diderot’s comic novel, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, and Goethe’s novel of an aspiring actor’s personal development, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. I am also assigning two plays by the great German dramatist Friedrich Schiller, some amusing verses written in a mixture of Scots and standard English by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, and a couple of philosophical essays by Immanuel Kant. Students may pursue conference projects on a wide range of topics in European history, philosophy, or literature.

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, aims at providing a complete foundation in the Italian language, with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Group conferences (held once a week) aim at enriching the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and developing their ability to communicate. This will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. Conversation classes are held twice a week (in small groups) and will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program organizes trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. The course is for a full year, by the end of which students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language.

This course aims at improving and perfecting the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. All material is accessible on MySLC. Conferences are held on a biweekly basis; topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. Conversation classes (in small groups) will be held twice a week with the language assistant, during which students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

Queer Americans certainly, James, Stein, Cather, and Baldwin each fled “America.” James (1843-1916) and Stein (1874-1946) spent their adult lives in Europe. Cather (1873-1947) left Nebraska for Greenwich Village after a decade in Pittsburgh, with a judge’s daughter along the way. Baldwin (1924-1987) left Harlem for Greenwich Village, then left the Village for Paris. As sexual subjects and as writers, these four could hardly appear more different; yet, Stein described James as “the first person in literature to find the way to the literary methods of the 20th century,” Cather rewrote James to develop her own subjects and methods, and Baldwin found in James’s writings frameworks for his own. In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, James, Stein, and Cather witnessed the emergence of modern understandings of homosexuality and made modern literature, each pushing boundaries, always in subtle or dramatic ways. (Stein, for example, managed to parlay the story of her Paris life with Alice B. Toklas into an American bestseller in 1933.) In the second half of the 20th century, Baldwin began to dismantle modern understandings of sexuality and of literature. Examining the development of their works side by side will allow us to push the boundaries of lesbian/gay/queer cultural analyses by pursuing different meanings of “queer” and “American” through an extraordinary range of subjects and forms. Beginning with James on gender, vulnerability, and ruthlessness, this course will range from Cather’s pioneers and plantations to Stein on art and atom bombs and Baldwin on sex and civil rights. We will read novels, novellas, stories, essays, and memoirs by James, Cather, and Baldwin, plus Stein’s portraits, geographical histories, lectures, plays, operas, and autobiographies. Literary and social forms were both inextricable and inseparable from the gender and cross-gender affiliations and the class, race, and ethnic differences that were all urgent matters for these four. James’s, Stein’s, Cather’s, and Baldwin’s lives and works challenge most conventional assumptions about what it meant—and what it might mean—to be a queer American. Conference projects may include historical and political, as well as literary, studies, focusing on any period from the mid-19th century to the present.

Philosophy began with the Greeks as the pursuit of freedom of mind—as a rebellion against bondage to conventional belief. But is freedom of mind possible? And to what does it amount? This course, the first half of a yearlong sequence, focuses on the different ways the Greek philosophers and their Roman heirs understood freedom of mind. We will travel from the pre-Socratics through Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. Students will be expected to come to each class with a written question on the reading, which I may ask them to read aloud at the beginning of class in order to stimulate discussion. They may also be asked to participate in brief group presentations of the reading. The writing requirements for the class will have two components. The first of these will be made up of a short paragraph on the reading for each class and each group conference and should include the written question on the reading; the rest of the paragraph should either develop this question further or pose a further question or questions about the reading. At the end of the semester, you will be expected to submit a log of these short paragraphs, with your three favorites at the beginning of the document. The second writing requirement will be for a paper, or papers, outlining a portion of the reading and posing questions along the way. Through discussion, we will decide on the focus of these papers.

Nietzsche, in the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals, begins by attacking “English moralists.” By “English moralists” he means, I propose, David Hume in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. After reading the Preface and Part One of the Genealogy, we shall turn to Hume’s Enquiry in order to understand Nietzsche’s criticism and to see whether we think it is justified. Students will be required to bring a written question to each class and to present short sections of the reading. Writing requirements will consist of a log of the written questions, two outlines of portions of the reading that they present in class with questions and objections, and a conference paper.

Children’s books are an important bridge between adults and the world of children. What makes a children’s book attractive and developmentally appropriate for a child of a particular age? What is important to children as they read or listen? How do children become readers? How do picture-book illustrations complement the words? How can children’s books portray the uniqueness of a particular culture or subculture, allowing those within to see their experience reflected in books and those outside to gain insight into the lives of others? To what extent can books transcend the particularities of a given period and place? Course readings include writings about child development; works about children’s literature; and, most centrally, children’s books themselves—picture books, fairy tales, and novels for children. Class emphasis will be on books for children up to the age of about 12. Among our children’s book authors will be Margaret Wise Brown, C. S. Lewis, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, Matt de la Pena, Christopher Paul Curtis, E. B. White, and Vera B. Williams. Many different kinds of conference projects are appropriate for this course. In past years, for example, students have written original work for children (sometimes illustrating it, as well), traced a theme in children’s books, worked with children (and their books) in fieldwork and service-learning settings, explored children’s books that illuminate particular racial or ethnic experiences, or examined books that capture the challenge of various disabilities. At the end of each class session, we will have story time, during which two students will share childhood favorites.

In current global circumstances, Islam is all too frequently represented solely in terms of political and militant ideologies. For those who wish to dig deeper, there are the rich and varied traditions of classical religious scholarship and jurisprudence. But to look at Islam through these lenses alone is to miss alternate sensibilities that are just as important in providing the material from which many Muslims construct their identities. In 1988, the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz became the first Muslim writer to win the Nobel prize in literature. Although Mahfouz was one of the first to adopt the format of the novel, in recent years many new writers emerging from Muslim majority and minority areas around the world have found broad audiences. Their works embrace, resist, reject, transmute, and/or show nostalgia for the beliefs and practices with which the authors grew up or have adopted. As natives, immigrants, third culture, or converts, some of the writers to be explored here have actively promoted themselves as Muslim writers, while others question this label or view it as only one signifier of many. The writings that have been selected will be ones that deal substantially with issues of Muslim identity. All of them were either written in English or have been translated into English. No prior knowledge of Islam is necessary to take this course.

This course offers an introduction to the Spanish-speaking world through its popular cultures. Throughout the year, students without previous knowledge of Spanish will be continuously exposed to an array of authentic materials to help them comprehend and communicate at a novice proficiency level. Students will learn and reflect on the history of the Spanish-speaking world through a combination of authentic materials, such as songs, poems, short stories, and short films. Students will also develop the necessary skills to navigate basic, everyday situations while also developing the corresponding cultural competency. In each unit, the communicative and vocabulary-building exercises encapsulated in goal-oriented tasks will encourage students to engage with the language at various register levels. Group conferences will provide an opportunity to expand what we have learned in the classroom and address any additional questions or concerns that students may have on the materials presented thus far. Moreover, the weekly conversation sessions with the language assistant are an integral part of the course and will help students hone the work that we do in the classroom.

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, for social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.

This FYS version of Forms and Fictions begins with the reading and writing of folk and fairy tales; moves on to incidents, episodes, stories, poetic translations, frame stories, personal essays, graphic novels, and lyrics; and, finally, plans for a novel, its opening, end, and first chapter. The emphasis here is on trying on forms, learning which form works best for which kind of content, which works best for each student, what your aesthetic is, what you have to say, as well as how you might say it. There will be weekly readings and exercises in each form, in dialogue, pacing, editing, portraiture, plot and its philosophical underpinnings. Also, students will send each other 100-word pieces every week. Conference work will be planned, written, and revised over the course of the semester. The emphasis in conference work is on vision, revision, editing, finishing, and presentation, a process useful for any course or endeavor. In addition to classes, we will meet every other week for individual conferences and every week for a group session to talk about whatever comes up: campus activities, procrastination, New York City, dropping or adding classes, laundry, food, internships, sports, roommates, whatever students and their don need or want to explore.

A novelist once began a lecture by asking how many people in the audience wanted to be writers. When almost everyone raised a hand, he said, “So, why the hell aren’t you home writing?” The novelist was asking the right question. The only way to improve as a writer is to write a lot. You might have all the talent in the world, and you might have had a thousand fascinating experiences; but talent and experience won’t get you very far unless you have the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. Accordingly, my main goal is to encourage you to develop or sustain the habit of steady writing. You’ll be sharing a very short piece with the class every week in response to prompts that I’ll provide, and you’ll also be writing longer stories and essays that we’ll discuss in one-on-one conference meetings. In the fall semester, students will read and write short fiction; in the spring, students will read and write personal essays. Writers whose work we’ll study include James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Joan Didion, Jennifer Egan, Percival Everett, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Haruki Murakami, George Orwell, Philip Roth, George Saunders, and Zadie Smith. Given the range of writers that we’ll be reading, it’s safe to say that everyone in the class will be encountering stories they find disturbing and ideas they find objectionable at some point during the year. If you believe you can be harmed by exposure to points of view that differ starkly from your own, it would be best not to register for this class. We will meet in individual conferences every week until the October Study Days break, after which our conferences will meet every other week.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When we talk about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than the conscious mind. The villagers in Kafka’s A Country Doctor strip the doctor naked and place him in bed with his grotesquely wounded patient—an action with little clear connection to the conflicts established in the story and little to recommend it in regard to verisimilitude. And yet it is precisely weird, suggestive, and not entirely interpretable images such as this that make Kafka’s writing so feverishly compelling and grant it its measure of beauty and truth. During the first half of the semester, students will read, discuss, and write two- to three-page imitations of folk tales and myths, as well as short stories, by some of the great fabulists of the modern era, including Donald Barthelme, Teju Cole, Percival Everett, Nikolai Gogol, Allegra Hyde, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Karen Russell, Bruno Schulz, and Barry Yourgrau. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories. All readings will be from a PDF packet.

Toni Morrison once wrote, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” She referred to the interior life of her ancestors as being a large (perhaps the largest?) charge that she, as an author, faced; the characters she created—in part from pictures, in part from the act of imagination—yielded “a kind of truth.” We are experiencing a new age of Black artists and activists, charging the world to heed their truths; as writers, we’ll delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Ama Adjei-Brenyah brings magical realism to the doorstep of our daily lives; Edward P. Jones establishes setting as character, garnering comparisons to James Joyce. Ta-Nehisi Coates posits large questions about writing and Black identity, while Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses satire to address themes of class and culture; and both Danielle Evans and Jamel Brinkley write in a charged realist tradition that is RIEBY (my new acronym: right in everybody’s back yard!). Class readings will include essays on craft and technique, as well as short stories and memoir. This workshop will also have at its heart the discussion of student manuscripts and the development of constructive criticism. Talking about race, talking about craft, and talking about our own fiction should occur in an environment where everyone feels valued and supported. The road may be bumpy at times—but how else to get to that truth that Toni Morrison so prized?

What is a novel? Different writers have defined the form differently. D. H. Lawrence said that the novel is “the one bright book of life.” Stendhal said that a novel is “a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet.” Randall Jarrell, admitting that even the greatest novels are flawed in some way, said that a novel is “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” In this class, we’ll be reading a wide variety of novels published after 1970 in order to gain an appreciation of the richness and flexibility of the form. Writers whose work we’ll consider include Nicholson Baker, Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, Milan Kundera, Ben Lerner, Sigrid Nunez, Jenny Offill, Padgett Powell, Mary Robison, Fran Ross, and George Saunders. I don’t have a treasure chest of craft lessons to offer; my hope is that if we spend the semester reading ambitious novels and talking about them as fellow writers, we’ll all learn something by the end. In conference, we’ll be looking at your writing. You’ll be asked to give me a finished short story or novel excerpt every two weeks.

After reading a story by an older writer, the young James Joyce wrote, “Is this as near as [he] can get to life, I wonder?” You could say that Joyce was pointing toward a goal for which many great fiction writers strive: the goal of bringing to the page one’s unique way of apprehending life rather than relying on formula and convention. Something like this striving lay behind Chekhov’s revolt against traditional plot, Woolf’s search for new ways to render the subtleties of consciousness, Stein’s experiments with language, and Garcia Marquez’s adventures in magical realism. In this lecture class, we’ll read short stories old and new, with the aim of learning both from those who’ve come before us and those who are working now. Writers we’re likely to encounter include Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, and Virginia Woolf. Though formally a lecture, this will heavily be a discussion-based class; so please consider registering for it only if you’re interested in sharing your thoughts about the readings every week.

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, and the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level. Classes will be in both lecture and conversational mode, and group conferences will involve looking at our writing.

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this class, we’ll discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. You'll be asking to read excerpts from five books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s  Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta. Group conferences will function as writing workshops and to offer feedback on your letters in progress, in addition to various writing exercises. This is not a history or a literature class; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present.

This course is for students who want to break free of the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra. All other readings are in a photocopied handout.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges, from mental illness (as in Suzanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; the class will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’s “All of Me,” for example, reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, B. R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto,” his take on the novelists of the day, and James Baldwin’s book, The Devil Finds Work, about the movies of his youth.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives and read, as models, published examples of such works; for example, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays we will read for this unit are “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” For the third unit, The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic (or PCJ), a work in that genre combines personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject, such as a favorite movie or an event like 9/11—the interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements—for example, Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers.

From Milton (Satan) to Dryden to Dr. Johnson to Coleridge to De Quincey to Melville (Ahab) to Woolf to Auden to Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim to Kurosawa (Throne of Blood and Ran) to Peter Brook (The Mahabharata) to Julie Taymor to Taylor Swift...writers, artists, performers, and thinkers in the West, the East, and the South have gained enormous mileage by appropriating, purloining, replying to, adapting, being enraged by, and escaping Shakespeare—or merely by living under his shade. We will plunge into the enormous and still billowing artistic energy generated by this person. We will look at eight major plays, one a week, from every phase of his career—with a sampling of their critical and scholarly paraphernalia—and examine the writerly problems he faced and how he solved them and examine closely his incomparable rhetorical skills. We will try to pluck the heart out of the mystery of this most mysterious artist in order to help ourselves as artists. Conference projects, designed to be presented to the class, can comprehend poetic responses, fictive or dramatic responses, films and multimedia concoctions, or critical or essayistic responses to the entire body of work or to one of its many elements. It has been said that Shakespeare invented the idea of the human. We will think about this. Sonnet sequences are welcome.

The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included writing a postwar manual for the Army, called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. In much American poetry, the consequences of this project of domination are unseen. As is often not true elsewhere, the prison is seen (or unseen) from the point of view of the free. This course looks for the traces of this project of domination and asks what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the free from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it’s meant to be a poet elsewhere? Why hasn’t that been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? What might the poetry be that comes from it? Our text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nazim Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. You’ll be asked to do in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, and bring drafts to conference. Each term, you’ll be required to make an anthology and a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, we’ll look together for “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet”—aka “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.”