Literature

The literature discipline introduces students to the history of written culture from antiquity to the present day, as well as to methods of research and textual analysis. Course offerings cover major works in English and other languages in addition to literary criticism and theory. Some courses focus on individual authors (Virgil, Shakespeare, Woolf, Murakami); others, on literary genres (comedy, epic), periods (medieval, postmodern), and regional traditions (African American, Iberian). Students are encouraged to employ interdisciplinary approaches in their research and to divide their time between past and present, as well as among poetry, prose, drama, and theoretical texts.

Literature 2023-2024 Courses

First-Year Studies: An Introduction to German Literature and Film From the Late 18th Century to the Present

FYS—Year | 10 credits

In this course, students will learn about the major cultural and historical developments in Germany since the late 18th century through an in-depth analysis of masterpieces of German literature (novels, stories, plays) and film. In the fall semester, we will analyze some German “classics,” such as The Suffering of Young Werther; Romantic tales, along with a famous text by Sigmund Freud; and some modern prose by Hesse, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Rilke, and Irmgard Keun. We will also watch and discuss several Expressionist movies from the 1920s (among them, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dracula, and Metropolis) and finish the term with a reading of Feuchtwanger’s novel, The Oppermans, to understand the main ideological tenets of National Socialism. In the spring semester, the seminar will focus entirely on postwar German literature and film after 1945 and, especially, the question of how writers and intellectuals have dealt with the Holocaust, National Socialism, the Communist dictatorship, and German reunification since 1990. Films such as The Murderers Are Among Us, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Lives of the Others, Good Bye, Lenin, and Barbara will give students visual representations of the most important cultural and historical issues since 1945. Along with these stories, plays, novels, and movies, students will have to read some “historical” materials (essays and selected chapters from history books) to gain a fundamental understanding of German history. Since this is a First-Year Studies class, other important goals include helping students with the transition to college life, developing good study habits, and improving their critical writing skills. For this reason, biweekly individual conferences will alternate with biweekly group conferences, during which we will explore “student-life” issues and develop some group identity.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Literatures of the Spanish-Speaking World in Context

FYS—Year | 10 credits

In this course, we will examine fictional works from all over the Spanish-speaking world, as well as a small number of representative Luso-Brazilian texts originally written in Portuguese. We will begin our exploration by reading pioneering works by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) and Emilia Pardo-Bazán (Spain). We will then proceed to study the legacy of foundational authors of the Latin American canon, including Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), and María Luisa Bombal (Chile). As we read, we will analyze the sociopolitical and aesthetic implications of a number of concepts associated with the literatures of the Spanish-speaking Americas—such as the notion of “magical realism,” a term that needs careful deconstruction since it has profound connections with forms of fantasy practiced globally in different literary traditions. We will pay careful attention to the African and indigenous roots of the Latin American imagination as it blended with the legacy of European literature. Fiction written by women authors will constitute one of our main lines of investigation. In this context, we will study fictions by Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico), and Rosario Castellanos (México), among others. The essential goal of this course is to acquire and develop critical reading and writing skills. Active participation in class debates on the different literary texts under study will be an essential factor of the course work. Throughout the semester, you will be required to keep a handwritten journal in which you will record your trajectory in the class. Periodically, you will write short, formal reflections and analytical commentaries discussing aspects of the books read (frequency to be determined). We will meet in individual conferences on a weekly basis in the fall and biweekly in the spring. Each term, you will work on a specific project whose nature and scope will be discussed with me at the beginning of each term. At the end, you will produce a paper in the form of an essay (length to be determined). After a thorough examination of canonical texts in the fall, the spring semester will center on the study of recent Latin American literary works and their connections with fiction produced in other parts of the world.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Deconstructing the Western Idea of Nature

FYS—Year | 10 credits

As our societies and communities are starting to address the challenges of climate change, it is particularly important to explore the implications of the concept of “nature” in the Western and Judeo-Christian tradition that is dominant in the United States. In this class, we will look critically at this Western idea of nature by confronting it with representations of natural environments and the animal realm coming from Indigenous, African American, and Asian and Pacific Islander traditions. For example, comparing stories of world creation from Indigenous nations with narratives taken from the Bible and Greek and Roman classical texts will allow us to better grasp how language in the European tradition functions as a deep divider between humans and other living creatures. We will try to better understand how the romanticized conception of wilderness in America is in close relation to the presence of enslaved Black bodies on its land in addition to the erasure of the existence of Indigenous nations. Going in a different direction, we will analyze how contemporary feminism and gender studies provide crucially important models to invent a new way for the West to relate to nature. Animals will also be a focus of our discussions, from classical representations of animals as machines, to the use of models like the burrow imported from the animal realm by philosophers, to the possibility of shifting from a humanistic understanding of nature inherited from European Renaissance, to new forms of ecocentric expression. This class will take place in and outside the seminar classroom, as we will regularly observe nature on campus and engage in concrete projects such as growing herbs and vegetables. A few trips will allow us to explore local natural areas, including along the Hudson River. As part of this First-Year Studies class, students will be encouraged to work on personal projects that link the material seen in class to any personal interests that they have. This could be very concretely in relation to nature, plants, and wildlife on campus or as part of the work that local organizations around the College are developing on environmental issues and social justice. Other students may want to incorporate into their research elements of popular culture, such as horror movies, video games, or anime series such as Avatar. In addition to class, students will meet individually with their professor every other week. On alternating weeks, we will engage in group work related to sustainability on campus—including hands-on projects and gardening.

Faculty

Shakespeare and the Semiotics of Performance

Open, Lecture—Year | 10 credits

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, costumes, possibly scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we study all of these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare are our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I is our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries is our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings—from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film—is our work.

Faculty

High Romantic Poetry: Blake to Keats

Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

This course focuses on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential poems written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new mode of autobiographical verse that largely internalized the myths they inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem (a legacy that continues to this day). We will be exploring ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political and spiritual impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another.

Faculty

The Empire’s New Groove: The Global 19th-Century Novel

Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot...those are the names that might first come to mind when we think of the 19th-century novelistic tradition, at least in part due to some masterful television programming by the BBC. In Western culture, we are less familiar with names like Rabindranath Tagore, Izumi Kyoka, and Amy Levy. The focus of this course will be on expanding our shared understanding and enjoyment of 19th-century narratives to also encompass the names and narratives of authors who lived and wrote in places remote from the BBC-venerated British Isles and from white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. This two-semester course will explore the development of 19th-century global prose fiction and its impact on contemporary narrative modes. While the majority of the texts that we read will be novels, we will also consider some short stories and narrative poems. The first semester of the course will use a range of global texts to investigate the ways in which canonical British fiction interacted with and interpreted (or misinterpreted) cultures from around the world. We’ll begin by studying the inadvertently comic results of mistranslations even among people who speak the same language, with the clash of American sense and British sensibility in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.” We’ll then read British texts that implicate and explore international and colonial identities, including Wilkie Collins’ twisty detective novel, The Moonstone; Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet; and Charlotte Brontë’s fever-dream of a novel, Villette. To counterpoint and contextualize our understanding of the languages and global locations canvassed in these three British texts, we’ll undertake forays into 19th-century Indian, American and African American, and French-language narratives. We’ll read the short stories of Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore alongside The Moonstone. We’ll study The Bondswoman’s Narrative, by African American writer Hannah Crafts, as well as the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to inform and augment our understanding of A Study in Scarlet. And we’ll examine works of short fiction by Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant alongside Villette. Our second semester will be a deeper dive into fictional narratives outside the traditional Western canon. We will begin back in London with a study of Jewish identity in the 19th century as we read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, as well as lesser-known Victorian Jewish author Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs. We’ll then investigate 19th-century South American novels, including works by Argentine author W. H. Hudson, Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, and Chilean novelist Albert Blest Gana. From there, we’ll turn to Japanese prose narratives in the second half of the 19th century, including works by Ichiyo Higuchi, Kenjiro Tokutomi, and Izumi Kyoka. We’ll conclude by circling back to Britain and comparing Gothic themes in Izumi Kyoka’s work to similar themes in Elizabeth Gaskell's haunting short stories, “Lois the Witch” and “The Doom of the Griffiths.”

Faculty

Cold War Black Feminism

Open, Lecture—Fall | 5 credits

When Black feminist writing boomed in the 1970s, the United States was squarely in the middle of the Cold War. Accordingly, Audre Lorde decried the United States invasion of Grenada, June Jordan railed against the Vietnam War, and Assata Shakur penned her autobiography in asylum in Cuba. Yet, Black feminism has primarily been considered a domestic affair. How might we better understand Black feminist literature by reading it in the context of the Cold War? This course aims to answer this question first by reading proto-Black feminist authors writing in the early Cold War and then returning to the famous authors of Black feminism to consider their portrait of international affairs. Authors may include Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and others. Along the way, we will read recent scholarship to understand the historical context in which those texts were written. In so doing, we aim to better understand the Cold War’s effect on Black feminism and what those canonical texts of Black feminism can tell us about American foreign policy. Short assignments may include brief historical essays, short close readings, and response papers.

Faculty

Forms and Logic of Comedy

Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits

Comedy is a startlingly various form and operates with a variety of logics: It can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In 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 includes a Platonic dialogue and moves on to Aristophanes’ Old Comedy, Plautus’ New Comedy, Roman satire, Shakespeare, Molière, Fielding, Byron, Stendhal, Dickens, Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Joseph Heller, Tom Stoppard, some cartoons, and some film comedy. The syllabus is subject to revision.

Faculty

Writing the Interval: Movement, Perception, and the Bardo of Living

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

This course explores writing practices based on principles of Eastern philosophy in dialogue with contemporary critical theory (feminist, queer, postcolonial). The fall semester will focus on relations of space (travel, migration, place, culture, identity), with an emphasis on change, impermanence, and the central notion of bardo. (Readings may include: Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Undercommons, Caliban and the Witch, Wild Things, Transcending Madness, Natural Liberation.) The spring semester will focus on perception of objects (subject, object, contact, sensation, sense, sign, image, affect), as they appear, move, dissolve, transform. (Readings may include: Cinema I and II, Empire of Signs, Unthought: Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Cybernetic Brain, Writing-Machines, Notes on Gesture, Pleasure of the Text, Image Music Text, Practical Philosophy, Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness, Myth of Freedom, Existence: A Story). The course approaches writing not through literary genres or histories but, rather, through a series of experiments that investigate the nature of mind, self, experience, world. We will explore writing as a time-based medium not only for recording but also for directly perceiving movements of the mind. Working with images, sense perceptions, emotions, concepts, dreams, and other mental formations, we will explore ways of writing not based primarily on realist narration. Diverging from familiar literary chronotopes, we will assemble our own tropes of bodies, movements, gestures, signs, and intervals of time and space. We will also explore how to incorporate experimental writing into other genres, such as art criticism, travelogue, ethnography, memoir, and fantasy—as well as into other media, such as photography, video, and other visual and performance arts. Students will be asked to establish a regular (preferably daily) practice of writing and to sustain consistent engagement with practice-oriented writing projects. We will take several field trips and many local excursions during the year. Students will compile archives of their own multimodal compositions throughout the course, which will be showcased in a group festival at the end of the year.

Faculty

Dial G for Gothic: Alfred Hitchcock and the Literature of Fear, Enlightenment to the Present

Open, Large seminar—Year | 10 credits

Our current decade, with its global ambience of claustrophobia and dread, is on its way to becoming the most Hitchcockian on record. More than 40 years after his death, prolific British and American filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) remains one of the world’s most recognizable, most imitated, most studied, most parodied, and most divisive entertainers in the history of media. Known during his heyday in Hollywood as the “master of suspense,” Hitchcock developed a distinctive visual and narrative style that became synonymous with a set of unnerving affects and experiences (paranoia, guilt, abject terror, mistaken identity, transgressive desire, watching and being watched), as well as with the director’s own personality—made famous through his iconic cameos on film and television, where he appeared as a droll and dapper provocateur. At the same time as Hitchcock became a shaping influence on several generations of filmmakers, including several who repudiated that influence, and the basis for scores of biopics and spinoffs (Bates Motel is one recent example), he has attracted intense interest from a diverse range of scholars—including historians of popular culture and specialists in queer theory, gender studies, narratology, and psychoanalysis—in some cases through work that has defined its disciplinary field and introduced analytic concepts, such as the “male gaze,” into the mainstream. Now, even as well-substantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against Hitchcock by the actor Tippi Hedren have encouraged debates over his legacy, the fascination he exerts over his worldwide audience has seemingly only deepened. Neither a celebration nor an exposé, this large seminar turns a critical eye toward several of Hitchcock’s major works from both his British and American periods, including landmark achievements such as Blackmail, Rope, Rear Window, and The Birds. We will approach these films both as singular cultural artifacts and as parts of the long and still robust tradition of uncanny storytelling that we call the Gothic, which we will trace from its origins in Enlightenment- and Romantic-era Britain (Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen) to its later incarnations on both sides of the Atlantic in the work of neo-Gothic masters such as Edgar Allen Poe (a favorite of Hitchcock’s), Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, and Toni Morrison, as well as through its elucidation by theorists from Sigmund Freud to Lee Edelman. We will end by considering a few key figures in contemporary cinema—Jordan Peele, Pedro Almódovar, and Bong-Joon Ho are likely choices—who have engaged in complex dialogue with Hitchcock’s films and have helped to guarantee, for better or worse, that his stylistic fingerprints will remain traceable on the cultural history of the coming century.

Faculty

What is the Renaissance? European Literature From the Rebirth of Humanism to the Age of Discovery

Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Sometime in 1345, so the story goes, Francesco Petrarca found something he wasn’t even looking for. In the cathedral library in Verona, Petrarch (as he’s commonly called) stumbled upon a manuscript copy of Roman politician, orator, and philosopher Cicero’s Letters. Long thought to be lost, Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Letters inaugurated a period of unmatched literary and artistic flourishing called the Renaissance, as artists and writers engaged with a newly rediscovered classical legacy. This year, we’ll follow the spread of Renaissance humanism and the literature it inspired outward from Italy into France, Germany, the Low Countries, Spain, and eventually England and beyond. Reading in English translation from the 14th century through the dawn of the 18th, this seminar aims to understand the Renaissance as a multinational cultural phenomenon—a scope that will allow us to address the question that this course takes as its title: What is the Renaissance? In addition to Petrarch, texts will include Machiavelli’s The Prince, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, selections from Martin Luther, John Donne’s Meditations, the Essays of Montaigne and Bacon, and Pascal’s Pensées. We will attend to the literature of discovery, reading More’s Utopia, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s complicated History of the Conquest of New Spain, Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. We’ll read tales from Bocaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, selections from Rabelais’ satiric Gargantua and Pantagruel and the whole of Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote. Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna and Punishment Without Revenge will round out a year of considerable variety. Our own backyard is positively brimming with Renaissance treasures; should funding permit, we will make two trips into New York City to study Renaissance material culture firsthand. If our time in seminar privileges breadth, conference work will allow students to focus on narrower interests. Students will be expected to produce one research paper per term (i.e., two over the year) on any aspect of the course.

Faculty

Elective Affinities in Contemporary Poetry

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

The canonical status of contemporary literature is always up for grabs. In this seminar, we will spend roughly two-thirds of the academic year reading a sequence of eight of my “elective affinities”—my favorites—among poets whose lives have overlapped with my own: Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Jay Wright, Mark Strand, and Anne Carson. The coincidences of another reader’s taste and judgment—yours, for instance—might generate a very different list of contemporary poets. Generating such a list will also be our task: in conference, students will be asked to focus on a contemporary poet or group of poets not included in the syllabus. From their work, an ad hoc syllabus will be culled for the final sequence of class readings, commencing after Spring Break.

Faculty

Romance and Realism, Experiment and Scandal: The 18th-Century Novel in English

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

The 18th century introduced the long, realist prose fictions, printed and marketed to readers on a large scale, that we now call novels. As often with emergent literary forms, the novel arrived with an unsavory reputation; and its early practitioners labored, often unsuccessfully, to distinguish their work from ephemeral printed news, escapist prose romances, and pornography. It was not until the defining achievements of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, at the beginning of the 19th century, that the novel achieved a status as polite and even prestigious entertainment. This yearlong course looks at the difficult growth of the novel, from its miscellaneous origins in the mid-17th century to the envelope-pushing experiments of the early 1700s and the eclectic masterpieces of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Austen, and Scott. Other authors may include Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Tobias Smollett, Matthew Lewis, Frances Burney, Charles Brockden Brown, and Maria Edgeworth. Everything that we read will be arresting and restlessly experimental; much of it will also be bawdy, transgressive, and outrageously funny. Topics of conversation will encompass the rise of female authorship, the emergence of Gothic and courtship fiction, the relationship between the novel and other literary genres or modes (lyric and epic poetry, life-writing, allegory), novelists’ participation in the leading debates of their time (those over slavery, empire, and revolution), the reinvention of the novel in North America, the representation of consciousness, and the meaning of realism. We may also consider films adapted from 18th-century fiction, such as Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones and Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

Faculty

Celebrity, Spirituality, and the Cult of Sainthood in the Middle Ages

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

The saint was the celebrity of the Middle Ages. The rise of pilgrimage, the fascination with relics, and sensational tales of martyrdom and miracle popularized individual saints across Europe and England. This course will focus on texts interested in the heroism, intercession, and sacrifice of saintly figures, as well as spiritual biographies and autobiographies that made bold claims to mystical authority and described fearless navigations of a shifting religious landscape. We will consider how the paradox of saints—disembodied yet concretely present between Heaven and Earth—transformed conceptions of the spiritual life. Special attention will be given to narratives of female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, as well as the lives and records of heroic women saints including Joan of Arc and St. Katherine of Alexandria. Other works, such as The Life of Christina of Markyate and Chaucer’s “saintly romances,” will ask us to challenge the generic distinction between literature and saint’s life. To complement our study of the textual remains of saints, this course will encourage visits to local collections of reliquaries and other saintly artifacts, as well as explorations of digitized illustrations of medieval religious subjects.

Faculty

Care Work

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

How might we care for each other in the midst of accelerating planetary change? This course provides us with the theoretical frameworks to grasp the long and multifaceted history of environmental crisis on this continent and, likewise, to grasp the diversity of critical, careful responses to imposed disaster. The course begins with the proposition that dominant structures of care in the settler colony—afforded by the nuclear family, the state, and private enterprise—depend upon and reproduce racialized and gendered exploitation bound to the same systems that make environmental crisis inevitable. Throughout the semester, we will explore other literary and scholarly theorizations and enactments of care work that move outside dominant care regimes and that have always been responsive to environmental crisis in its long history. The reading for the course moves from Indigenous studies to queer studies to the energy and environmental humanities, illuminating critical intersections of use to a student interested in any one of those fields. Primary and secondary texts include works by José Esteban Muñoz, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Natalie Diaz, Sophie Lewis, Kim TallBear, Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, Samuel R. Delany, and Dean Spade, among others. Assignments for the course encourage students to take inspiration from the texts on our syllabus. In other words, you may present your work in creative as well as critical forms. Podcasts, manifestos, websites, –zines…are all more than welcome.

Faculty

Ancient Eros: Love in Classical Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

The theme of love in classical literature is a profoundly influential topic, appearing in genres as diverse as epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, philosophy, and even the earliest novels. The attitudes toward love expressed in these texts vary considerably: Sometimes, it is personified as a beautiful and playful god; often, too, it appears as a powerful, destructive force that can lead to irrational behavior and life-changing disaster. The literary motif of love is a catalyst, as well as a resolution of many narrative and poetic arcs; its transformative nature is deeply engaged with aspects of gender, sexuality, and identity throughout the Classical era. In this course, we will read a wide-ranging selection of ancient texts, as well as look ahead to the reception of the theme of Classical Eros in later art and literature. Along with readings, assignments will include regular low-stakes writing practice, a presentation to the class, and a major conference project. Conference work may take the form of a paper or a creative writing project. The reading list will be selected from the following works in English translation, sometimes comprising the entire work and sometimes parts TBD): Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho; Euripides, Hippolytus, Euripedes; Symposium, Phaedrus, Plato; Argonautica, Apollonius of Rhodes; Idylls, Theocritus; Eclogues, Catullus, Vergil; Amores, Ovid; Golden Ass, Apuleius; Apology, Apollonius; late antique era love spells, letters, and curse tablets.

Faculty

Double Thoughts and Double Consciousness: Russian and African American Literature

Open, Large seminar—Fall | 5 credits

The Russian and African American literary traditions are marked by intersections as well as by affinities. As the African American press was already well aware in the 19th century, the great Russian poet and founder of the Russian literary tradition, Alexander Pushkin, was of partly African descent—a fact that he celebrated in his own writing. As, again, both Russians and African Americans recognized, the parallel institutions of serfdom and slavery ended at almost the same time: Serfs in Russia were emancipated in 1861; slaves in the United States, in 1863. In the 20th century, the Soviet experiment proved enormously appealing for African Americans seeking to escape the limitations of American racism; and, while Soviet writers explored issues of blackness, Black Americans traveled to the USSR. As significant as these points of intersection are, the two traditions are most strikingly marked by a similarly complicated approach to literary identity—what Fyodor Dostoevsky called “double thoughts” and W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” Just as African American writers in the 20th century wrote from a position on the margins of American culture, so Russians in the 19th century wrote from the edge of a European tradition that didn’t—and, in many respects, still doesn’t—include them. Besides Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Du Bois, writers/cultural figures considered in this class will include Nikolai Gogol, Edward P. Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Paul Robeson. Note: As part of this “large seminar,” students will meet for biweekly conference in groups of three-to-five to pursue a course of reading intended to extend and deepen our class work. While students will be invited to offer their own suggestions, topics for small-group conferences might include: Serfdom and Slavery (Peter Kochin, Orlando Patterson, serf and slave narratives); Folk Authenticity (Gogol, I. S. Turgenev, Charles Chesnutt, Hurston); Black Americans and Red Russia (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, the 1936 Soviet film Circus, M. I. Tsvetaeva, M. A. Bulgakov); Russian Revolution and Utopian Dreams (N. G. Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, A. Platonov); More Dostoevsky and/or Dostoevsky in other comparative contexts, including Richard Wright and French Existentialism; War and Peace and Russian identity; Ukraine/Eastern Europe Writes Back (A. Kurkov, S. Zhadan, E. Belorusets, O. Tokarczuk, S. Alexeivich, V. Martinowich)....

Faculty

Energy and Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

How might we read literary history as energy history? Literature and energy are inseparable—energy features in literature not just as foreground content and not just as background context and not just as an aesthetic (a vibe) but also as material possibility. Energy literally fuels culture, and no fuel has fueled culture more vigorously than petroleum. In this course, we approach the enmeshment of energy and literature from a number of different vantage points, with particular attention paid to global anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries (in this historical moment of energy crisis/impasse/possibility). Likely themes include: pleasure, grief, optimism, despair, booms, busts, petrocultures, renewability, sacrifice, nuclearity, occupation, mining, waste, toxicity, labor, masculinity, and sabotage. We’ll be reading poetry, novels, nonfiction, short fiction, and comics. Likely authors include: Ursula K. Le Guin, Carmen Maria Machado, Italo Calvino, Amitav Ghosh, Abdul Rahman Munif, Leslie Marmon Silko, China Miéville, Paolo Bacigalupi, Pablo Neruda, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ruth Ozeki, Ogaga Ifowodo, Linda Hogan, Sherwin Bitsui, Warren Cariou, and Kate Beaton.

Faculty

Documenting Asian America

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

This course will introduce students to the major themes and methods of Asian American cultural studies. Each week, we will revisit a key “site” of Asian American history—the sugarcane plantation, the shoreline, the railroad, the internment camp, and the protest—and explore how Asians in America have differently documented themselves in relation to those spaces through art and literature. We will ask questions, including: How might a poem, photograph, or film differently represent the experience of migration? What common images emerge in the literature and art surrounding a particular historical event? What power or authority does the “documentary” hold in relaying the lived experiences of Asians in America? In answering these questions, course discussions will center on themes of memory, testimony, identity, and the power of representation. The course will also include field trips to area collections in documentary photography and filmmaking. Other assignments will include visual and literary analysis essays and creative-writing responses, as well as a curatorial project where students will have the opportunity to research Asian American documentarians and pitch artworks for exhibition at the Hudson River Museum.

Faculty

Writing Women: Women Writers in the English Renaissance

Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Mary Herbert (née Sidney) was the most influential single figure in the English Renaissance literary world. As a translator, her psalms caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth I and her closet drama, Antonie, influenced Shakespeare; as an editor, she brought into print her brother’s posthumous Defense of Poetry, the greatest piece of early modern literary criticism; as a patron, she sponsored and encouraged some of the late Elizabethan world’s most talented poets. She remains understudied. This seminar, in part, looks to correct that imbalance, resituating Mary Herbert and women like her in the constellation of Renaissance writers. This term, we’ll examine the wide corpus of women’s writing (and writing about women) produced in Renaissance England and its New World colonies. While a few men will appear on the syllabus, women authors will account for the majority of primary texts. During the term, we’ll ask: How did early modern English women write their own experiences? How were women represented in popular drama? In poetry? What kind of legacy did those women leave Renaissance literature? Readings will begin with Anne Askew's Examinations (1546), a meditation on her faith written while awaiting execution for heresy, and continue through Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). During the term, we’ll encounter work by Jane Anger, Anne Bradstreet, Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Dorothy Leigh, Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, and others—alongside some familiar texts, including Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Ben Jonson’s comedy Epicene, and John Knox’s polemic against his own queen. Such an assembly of authors ensures that we will read prose and poetry, meditations, court proceedings, and Queen Elizabeth’s own address to her troops as they steeled themselves against invasion. In conference, students may work on any aspect of any text on the syllabus or, with approval, on another early modern text consistent with the themes of the course.

Faculty

Interrogating God: Tragedy and Divinity

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

The Greek gods attended the performances at the ancient theatre of Dionysos, which both recognized and challenged their participation in human affairs. The immediacy of divine presence enabled a civic body, the city, to enter into conversation with a cosmic one—a conversation whose subject was a shared story about the nature of experience and its possible significance: tragedy. Divinity is less congenial about playgoing in later periods but seems to have lent tragedy both a power to be reborn and a determination to address the universe even as Christianity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Age reimagine it. In this course, we shall read essential Western texts in which the constant of human suffering is confronted and the gods are called into question even as they shift their shape. Among our authors are Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Ibsen, Beckett, Susan Glaspell, and August Wilson.

Faculty

The Marriage Plot: Love and Romance in American and English Fiction

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

“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 tumultuous. With the publication of Jane Eyre, we have moved beyond the marriage-plot novel, in which a series of comic misunderstandings pave the way for a happy wedding; but what remains is a rich, marriage-plot series of novels in which joy is mixed with sadness. This course will explore six marriage-plot novels: three of them American, three of them English. The three English novels are Jane Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The three American novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. We will begin our reading in the early 19th century and end at the start of the 20th century. The six novels make compelling reading on their own, but their link to the question of what makes a good marriage adds a crucial social and political element to the course. Nobody enters a marriage believing that it will end, and nobody leaves a marriage—which is, after all, a legal as well as a personal commitment—without being changed. As Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else.”

Faculty

Emersonian Quartet: Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

In an 1842 lecture, Emerson lamented that no American poet had yet emerged who could answer the rich legacy of European literary tradition with an originality and genius commensurate to a new civilization. Whitman would later remark that he had been “simmering, simmering, simmering” until Emerson’s injunctions brought him “to a boil.” The outcome was his sublime, democratic, discontinuous, homoerotic national epic, “Song of Myself” (the “greatest piece of wit and wisdom yet produced by an American,” Emerson immediately judged it). In unique but related ways, Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens also set out to answer Emerson’s call. Like Whitman at the end of “Song of Myself,” their most inventive poems seem always out in front of us, waiting for us to arrive. We will do our best to catch up—to conceptualize and paraphrase their rhetorical tropes, while acknowledging the inevitable failure of merely discursive language to transmit a poem. Our central task will be to interpret and appreciate the poetry we encounter through close, imaginative reading,; informed speculation, and an understanding of historical contexts.

Faculty

Modernism Across Generations

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

I grow old...I grow old...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Modernism is growing old. What does it mean for a movement that once rallied around Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new” to become a thing of the past. In this course, we will explore the enduring legacy of a movement that celebrated its 100th birthday. The year 2022 marked the centennial of the modernist “annus mirabilis,” or “miracle year,” when James Joyce published Ulysses, T. S. Eliot published The Wasteland, and Virginia Woolf published Jacob’s Room. Do modernist works like these still speak to new generational concerns, tastes, and values? Scholars have argued for fresh approaches to modernist texts, most notable in the “new modernist studies” that challenged earlier interpretations of “high modernism” as apolitical, elitist, and Eurocentric. Instead, these scholars emphasized the diverse and unwieldy political commitments that underlie modernism, its close interrelationship to popular culture and mass media, and its underlying transnationalism. This scholarly trend began at the start of this millennium and is now, itself, growing into middle age. In this course, we will examine changing approaches to modernism while also exploring how generational conflict and contact drives the narratives of many modernist novels. In these novels, the “revolutionary generation” confront their late-Victorian elders with new ways of understanding the world informed by Freudian psychology, scientific and technological change, and political radicalism. We will read Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable as novels that dramatize generational contact zones. The novelists themselves are originally from Poland, Ireland, Dominica, England, and India. Generational divisions in their novels also expose geopolitical conflicts and political divides as a younger generation faces the consequences of nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and religious moralism while navigating a world scarred by war, economic collapse, and inequality. The question that we will return to throughout the semester is whether this world looks so very different from our own. As part of this course, we will partner with the Wartburg Adult Care Community to read several texts with our neighboring elders, who themselves grew up in the shadow of modernism, for a series of intergenerational discussions.

Faculty

What Is Literature: Seminar on Literary Theory

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

This course explores a small selection of contemporary films (1990s to the present) from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Thailand. Despite the regional organization of films and the continued importance of national histories, our discussions will tend to emphasize transnationalism, intertextuality, and the global circulation of media. Our venture will be to explore emergent troves of myth, fable, fantasy, image, and meme, as they form new imaginariums of cultures evolving with globalizing economies. We will watch two or three films per week, with an accompanying selection of supplementary critical readings.

Faculty

Global Surrealisms

Open, Large seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The surrealist movement emerged in France in the early 1920s, when a group of writers questioned the narrative of reason, progress, and tradition that had long defined European culture. In exploring the potential of the unconscious, the surrealists endeavored to create an avant-garde artistic and political revolution motivated by desire, madness, and dreams. The concepts and techniques developed by the French surrealists would go on to have an enormous influence on writers, artists, and filmmakers across the globe. This course will explore some of the key ideas, practices, and figures in the history of surrealism. The first portion of the semester will focus on the group’s origin in France: We will read several of its foundational texts and study many of the strategies that the surrealists invented for artistic creation. From there, we will examine the legacy of surrealism in a variety of locations—from Latin America and the Caribbean to Egypt, Japan, and the United States—in order to see how the movement’s message of revolution and nonconformity has been adopted and adapted by writers and artists up through the present day. Topics addressed will include automatic writing, dream work, mad love, the marvelous, games and chance, urban flânerie, gender and surrealism, anticapitalist and anticolonial surrealism, and reality itself. Although our first focus will be on the literature of surrealism, this will be a very interdisciplinary course: Students will see how surrealists made use of many types of media and expression (drawing, painting, collage, photography, film). For conference, students will follow the collective model of the movement and pursue small-group projects that will carry on the creative and critical legacy of surrealism.

Faculty

Colette, Duras, Ernaux

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

At first glance, the grouping of these three French female writers might seem just to be the arbitrary product of alphabetical order. They come from three different generations, after all, and their works perhaps present more aesthetic differences than similarities. Thus, part of our goal in this class will be to understand the unique role that each has played in the history of modern French literature. The preeminent woman of letters of the first half of the 20th century, Colette, depicted the social and sexual mores of her time in a sophisticated and wry prose. Marguerite Duras, one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the postwar era, pushed the boundaries of the novel’s form through experimentations in dialogue, character, and narrative. Annie Ernaux, the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, has long dissected the nature of personal memory with an approach closer to sociology than creative literature. A separate aim of the course will be to understand the connecting threads between and among the three. Most significantly, we will see how Colette, Duras, and Ernaux all draw on the material of their own lives in their writing, blurring the line between autobiography and fiction. We will also explore a set of shared preoccupations in their work, including the tensions of domestic life, the enduring influence of maternal figures, the power of female sexuality and desire, the transformations of the aging body, the relationship between memory and history, and the determinative role of social class. We will ask, finally, why each of these authors has been regarded as “scandalous” in some way and also why each is having a “translation moment” of sorts in the present-day anglophone world. We will read full works in English translation; qualified students of French may read works in the original and do their conference work in French.

Faculty

Contemporary Native American Literature

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The (failed) colonial desire to perpetrate Indigenous elimination has resulted in a fraught relationship between indigeneity and contemporaneity. As the narrator in Tommy Orange’s There There puts it: “We’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive …” (p. 141). In this course, we’ll read across late-20th- and 21st-century Native American literatures to address this loaded question of “the present.” We’ll also think about urbanity, futurity, environmental injustice, climate crisis, solidarity, identity, kinship, and decolonization. With novelists, poets, and storytellers such as Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Natalie Diaz (Mojave), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), Jake Skeets (Diné), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay), and Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho), students will be introduced to the reading methods associated with Indigenous literary studies, as well as the multisited and multidisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous studies more broadly. This course will fully participate in the Spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong 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.

Faculty

Bedford Hills: African American Prison Literature

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Prerequisite: Students must be 21 years of age.

This class combines Sarah Lawrence students and students from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility; all class sessions and conference meetings will take place at Bedford. Consequently, all students must be at least 21 years of age.

From Frederick Douglass’ description of his time incarcerated, through Angela Davis’ representations of prisons in the 1970s, to Tayari Jones’ award-winning An American Marriage, the prison as an institution has long loomed large in the African American literary tradition. How, then, has incarceration shaped African American literature? And how has African American literature sought to represent the prison? This course seeks to answer these questions by proceeding chronologically, beginning with narratives of incarceration pre-Emancipation like those of Abraham Johnstone. We continue through accounts of convict leasing in the late 19th-century and mid-20th-century representations of incarceration by social realist authors like Richard Wright. We turn to Black feminist and Black arts representations of the prison by authors such as James Baldwin, Etheridge Knight, and more. And we end with the contemporary, considering how recent accounts of incarceration descend from a longer lineage of African American prison writing. Along the way, we will think closely about the relationship between legal citizenship, gender, race, sexuality, class and the prison. Additionally, throughout the course, short writing assignments aim to hone our skills as analysts.

Faculty

The Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones: Black Literature of the Ocean

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

From Olaudah Equiano’s 18th-century recounting of the Middle Passage through John Akomfrah’s 21st-century cinematic representations juxtaposing whaling with slavery, the Atlantic Ocean has loomed large in cultural production by Black artists, directors, and writers across the world. It is at once the site of the past trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing trauma of rising tides, of the freedom offered Black mariners like Frederick Douglass and transatlantic intellectuals like Richard Wright and Stuart Hall, and more. This course will seek to unpack this tangled knot, to understand what role the ocean has played in Black thought and to consider what Black thought might offer to the ongoing climate crisis by engaging with representations of the Atlantic in visual art, literature, and film by Black cultural producers across the world. Beyond those named above, authors and artists may include Zora Neale Hurston, C. L. R. James, Mati Diop, M. Nourbese Philip, Abdulruzak Gurnah, and others. Additionally, this course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong 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.

Faculty

The Music of What Happens: Alternate Histories and Counterfactuals

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The alternate history, which imagines a different present or future originating in a point of divergence from our actual history—a branching point in the past—is both an increasingly popular form of genre fiction and a decreasingly disreputable form of analysis in history and the social sciences. While fictions of alternate history were, until very recently, only a subgenre of science fiction, celebrated “literary” novelists (Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, and Colson Whithead, among others) have, within the last decade and a half, written well-regarded novels of alternate history: The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and The Underground Railroad. Similarly, while counterfactual historical speculation is at least as old as Livy, academic historians have, until recently, scorned the practice as a vulgar parlor game; but this is beginning to change. In the early 1990s, Cambridge University Press and Princeton both published intellectually rigorous books on alternate history and counterfactual analysis in the social sciences. More recently, Cambridge published a volume analyzing alternate histories of World War II. And in 2006, the University of Michigan Press published an interesting collection of counterfactual analyses, titled Unmaking the West. This course will examine a number of fictions of alternate history, some reputable and some less reputable, and may also look at some of the academic work noted above. We shall attempt to understand what it might mean to think seriously about counterfactuals;, about why fictions of and academic works on alternate history have become significantly more widespread; and about what makes an alternate history aesthetically satisfying and intellectually suggestive rather than ham-fisted, flat, and profoundly unpersuasive.

Faculty

From the Earth to the Moon: Science and Literature From Lucretius to the English Renaissance

Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

The first treatise on a scientific instrument written in English, a kind of how-to guide for the astrolabe, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer—an author better known today for his Canterbury Tales than for his stargazing. This seminar considers science and literature not as disciplinary antagonists but, rather, as intellectual compatriots mutually supporting avenues of inquiry that are attempting to understand the universe and our place in it. Over the term, we’ll read from Lucretius’ first-century BCE On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), to Galileo’s observable cosmos, to Milton’s heavens. Our journey’s first steps will be small—impossibly small—as we look at the atom. Like these fundamental particles, literature is known for its density and for its ability to pack myriad meanings into small textual spaces. Once we’ve mastered the atom, the course will consider progressively larger worlds, how they are constructed and how they interact with one another, looking at the concerns governed today by scientific disciplines ranging from astronomy to zoology. Traditional understandings of outer worlds inspired the classical conceit of man as a “little world,” and it was widely held that the physical interactions that governed natural bodies also influenced human bodies. We will then leave terra firma behind for our nearest celestial neighbor, the moon. Along the way, the course will consider scientific works by Bacon, Galileo, and Newton alongside literary texts from Donne, Marlowe, Milton, and Shakespeare in an effort to discover how the discourses of science and literature exist as a part of a continuum of human exploration. Consistent with the themes of the course, individual conferences will provide students with the opportunity to investigate new connections between science and the humanities.

Faculty

Wilde and Shaw

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

Toward the end of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde stated repeatedly that he was “an Irishman”—and, therefore, beyond good and evil as defined by gentlemanly codes—while George Bernard Shaw deemed nationalistic allegiances absurd and prophetically, given the wars of the 20th century, lethal. In their stances, we can begin to see how the complexities and paradoxes of Irish identity—ethnic marginalization, religious zeal (secularized), linguistic play, knowing laughter—informed their ultimate self-definition as citizens of the world and thereby enabled them to fashion distinctively challenging art. It is also no exaggeration to say that each left the English language not as he found it. Wilde’s life was short, and we shall read a good deal of his oeuvre: his fairy tales, his plays, his novel, much of his poetry, many of his essays. Shaw’s life was long, and we shall focus on his plays written before World War I, along with two brilliantly painful postwar works: Heartbreak House and Saint Joan. And, in both, we shall see how revolution can come disguised in conventional forms, as both playwrights transform drawing-room comedy into political commentary whose implications have yet to be resolved.

Faculty

First-Person America: Two Centuries of Classic American Literature

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

America’s writers have been at home writing in the first person since the early nineteenth century. The result is a body of literature that is both highly personal and diverse.  This course will begin with three nineteenth-century books: Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Then we will then move into the early twentieth century and the rethinking of the American Dream in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We will next look at the age of Roosevelt with two American odysseys, The Grapes of Wrath (a book in which Steinbeck makes his presence so heavily felt that he might as well be writing in the first person), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  We will conclude the term with two self-critical, coming-of-age novels that take place in post-World War II America—J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.  The aim of this course is to capture the full range of American literature and explore why so many unconventional narrators—from an ex-slave to a failed suicide, to cite two examples—play such an important role in American writing.

Faculty

Anthropology and Images

Open, Seminar—Fall

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world.—Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual or acoustic in nature, made by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization. Readings will include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine.

Faculty

Ethnographic Writing

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Transnational migration, human-animal relations, and American community life are but a few of the cultural realities that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic writing is generally considered one of the best ways to convey a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of people’s experiences in life. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of ethnographic writing, students in this course will try their hands at a concerted work of ethnographic writing. Along with undertaking a series of ethnographic writing exercises, students will be encouraged to craft a fully-realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of a particular world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of the craft of ethnographic writing from the use of field notes and interviews, the interlacing of theory and data, the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others. This seminar will work best for students who already have a rich body of ethnographic research materials to work with, such that they can quickly delve into the intricacies of writing about their chosen subject.

Faculty

The Age of Arthur

Open, Seminar—Fall

The fate of the western Roman provinces during and after the collapse of the imperial center in the fifth century remains a major concern for historians of Late Antiquity, yet no single former Roman province has proven to be as obscure and resistant to serious historical study as Britain. Through much of the 20th century, a substantial body of historical research was devoted toward developing the figure of Arthur, a post-Roman ruler or warlord who strove to preserve something of Roman imperial order and culture while stemming Germanic or Anglo-Saxon settlement. More recently, however, the tide of scholarship has turned against a historical Arthur. The fact remains that Arthur is unattested in any historical sources of the late antiquity or early medieval periods. Nor is there much evidence that Anglo-Saxon settlement was effectively shaped or contained by native Romano-British resistance. Consequently, the course will examine the origins of Arthur as a figure of legend rather than of history, and we will examine the factors that led to Arthur being accorded historical status—first in the early medieval period and then in modern scholarship. At the same time, we will attempt to establish the basis for a genuine dynastic and political history of Britain from the fifth to the seventh centuries.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Hollywood From the Margins

FYS—Year

In the last 10 years, a wave of online movements, sexual harassment cases, and studio worker strikes have exposed the systemic forces of exclusion and exploitation that shaped and still shape the US film industry. But how do we grapple critically with the ongoing material impact of Hollywood’s aura? What do we do with leftover myths and “beloved,” but horrifying, classics? Do we suppress them? Contextualize and critique them? Or disrupt their coherence and dismantle their authors by reappropriating them for art and other uses? This FYS seminar pairs 1930s-60s Hollywood films with novels, memoirs, essays, and experimental films about Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives of film history and explore alternative modes to critique and reactivate classical Hollywood cinema. Course sessions will include a highly interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research, drawing on scholarship from across the humanities and a range of media—from films and texts to studio maps and fan magazines. During the first semester, we will reframe the history of the dream factory by deflating the romance of the male auteur and highlighting the role of marginalized labor on the studio lot. Starting with singular individuals with exceptional careers— like Dorothy Arzner, the studio system’s lone female director, and Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star—we will move on to culturally invisible studio workers: cutter girls, leader ladies, secretaries, extras, stunt doubles, custodians, and voice actors. During the second semester, our focus will shift from workers to spectator perspectives and experiences marginalized by the film industry, highlighting film criticism and experimental films by female, POC, and queer scholars and artists that propose subversive tools to change how we view and interpret classical Hollywood films. Topics to be discussed during the second semester include fan studies, gossip as film history, segregated storytelling, queer Hollywood “dream texts,” and “oppositional” Black looks. During the fall semester, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alternating with small group conferences dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and fieldwork: We will learn how to use the library, analyze media ephemera, explore SLC’s 16mm film collection, and take field trips to local film archives and museums. In the spring, conferences will continue to take place biweekly without the alternating group conferences.

Faculty

Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

Faculty

Intermediate French I (Section 2): Scène(s) de littérature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also learn to begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. Over the course of the year, we will study a series of scenes from French and francophone literature from its origins to today. From the 11th-century Chanson de Roland and 12th-century “lais” and fables of Marie de France to 20th-century works by Aimé Césaire, Aminata Sow-Fall and Annie Ernaux, we will look at scenes specific to literature. What is it about literary scenes that differs from those created in other media? And what happens when we encounter them as part of a class rather than on our own? Where possible, our discussion will include points of comparison with scenes in visual media such as theatre and photography. Readings will include excerpts from Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (Madame de Sévigné), Madame de La Fayette, Gustave Flaubert, or Léon-Gontran Damas. At regular intervals, we will also study the headlines of Libération, a major Parisian daily. In this part of the course, we will consider the way climate change, food, or secularism are discussed, as well as aesthetic and ethical choices in presenting the news. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II courses in French are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

Faculty

Beginning French

Open, Large seminar—Year

This class is designed primarily for students who haven’t had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from French and francophone cultures. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level. The class meets three times a week, and a weekly conversation session with a French language tutor is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Students who successfully complete a beginning and an intermediate-level French course are eligible to study in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

Faculty

Intermediate French II: Colonialism and its Legacy: The Relationship Between France and Sub-Saharan Africa

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will analyze the relationship between France and its former colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. We will look at works written by thinkers of the time that analyzed questions of value and morality regarding the colonial project. Students will have the chance to get familiar with the different eras of colonialism, including the moment of decolonization and the postcolonial era. How can we view the colonizers all these years later? In what ways does the legacy of colonialism continue to affect Sub-Saharan Africa? Theoretical texts, film, and literary texts will be used to further the students’ knowledge of this topic through written and oral assignments.

Faculty

Advanced French: Writing the Modern Self: Autobiography, Autoportrait, Autofiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing (such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs) and more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics to be addressed will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied could include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Edouard Louis. We might also screen several autobiographical films that help us understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside our study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

Faculty

Beginning Greek

Open, Small seminar—Year

Why learn Ancient Greek? This subject represents a mode of learning that not only passes on the knowledge of a gloriously colorful era but also has been powerfully effective, even for hundreds of years after the end of its civilizations, in developing students’ abilities. When we learn Ancient Greek, we relearn language in a way that is analytical—applying a framework to examine language structure as we absorb it. By internalizing paradigms of forms and inflections, by using flash cards to memorize vocabulary, we are stretching and strengthening our memory; when we learn grammatical concepts and how these forms fit into them, our brains are forging new connections that will help us learn any other language. The study of Greek reveals that linguistic concepts transcend word-for-word translation, and no translation can ever be truly complete in expressing the original idea spoken. Participation in class and regular practice every day are crucial. Written, digital, and oral homework is regularly assigned. There will periodic quizzes and two in-class translation tests each semester. For conference work in the fall semester, each student will develop a research topic on one special author or figure of classical culture and present the topic to the class either as an oral presentation or a shared paper. In the spring, as we continue our study of grammar in class, we also will begin a close reading of Plato’s Apology in conference. This text represents a famous moment in the history of philosophy and may be Plato’s closest representation of his teacher Socrates, who offers his defense to the Athenian court before he’s sentenced to the hemlock. The final exam for the year will include an essay section on the Apology.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: “We Carry It Within Us”: Culture and Politics in US History, 1776–1980

FYS—Year

“History is not merely something to read,” James Baldwin wrote in August 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” This course is focused not only on history— what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but also on the acquisition of skills that will help you both as a college student and in life. Using the voices of the actors themselves, we will study the political and cultural work of Americans in order to read better, think better, write better, and articulate our ideas better. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course takes up the popular and the obscure, looking into the corners of American life for ideas, thoughts, and experiences of all kinds. Our focus will be on the themes of gender, race, and class but also will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes. The course will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that you will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what you do not know and then find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, memoir—mostly, but not exclusively, published sources—where authors work to change the minds of their readers. Those primary sources will be buttressed by articles and chapters from history textbooks. It will be challenging! This course will ask you to read more substantial work more carefully than perhaps you have before. We will discuss this work in seminar in both small groups and large; and at the end of each semester, there will be an oral exhibition pulling together the themes of the course in a meaningful way. This intellectual practice will ready you for your college career to come. In the fall, we will cover the period from the late-18th century to the late-19th; in the spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoir, letters, and (in the spring) film. Examples in the first semester include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the seduction novel Charlotte Temple by Suzanna Rowson, poetry by Phillis Wheatley, an unpublished novel on gender fluidity titled The Hermaphrodite by Julia Ward Howe, short stories by Herman Melville, Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott, and Ragged Dick, by Horatio Alger. The spring book list will reflect the interests of the students. Writing will be ample and consistent—thought pieces, along with short essays—with regular feedback so that you grow as a reader and writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in the fall, to 1890; in the spring, all the way to the present. Along the way, we will try to make sense of the way we carry history, the way that it is present in all that we do. Conferences will be weekly until October Study Days, with the option of being biweekly thereafter.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Romantic Europe

FYS—Year

Between the 1790s and the middle of the 19th century, European culture was powerfully shaped by the broad current of thought and feeling that we know as “Romanticism.” This course will examine the rise of the Romantic sensibility in the decades between the 1760s and 1800 and survey diverse manifestations of Romanticism in thought, literature, and art during the subsequent half-century. We will pay particular attention to the complex relations between Romanticism and two of the most portentous historical developments of its era: the French Revolution and the rise of national consciousness among Germans, Italians, and other European peoples. Readings will include prose fiction by Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Sir Walter Scott, and Edgar Allen Poe; poetry by Wordsworth, Shelley, Hölderlin, and Mickiewicz; works on religion, ethics, and the philosophy of history; and political writings by the pioneers of modern conservativism, liberalism, and socialism. We will also look at Romantic painting and other forms of visual art. Students will meet individually with me every week during the fall term and every other week during the spring term. I will advise you about the conference project that you will be undertaking each semester and will offer you what help I can in navigating life at Sarah Lawrence College.

Faculty

The Disreputable 16th Century

Open, Seminar—Year

Sixteenth-century Europeans shared a variety of fundamental beliefs about the world that a secular-minded Westerner of today is likely to find “disreputable”—intellectually preposterous, morally outrageous, or both. Almost all well-educated people believed that the Earth was the unmoving center of the universe, around which the heavenly bodies revolved; that human destinies were dictated, at least to some extent, by the influence of the planets and stars; that the welfare of their communities was threatened by the maleficent activities of witches; and that rulers had a moral duty to compel their subjects to practice a particular religion. In this course, we will examine 16th-century ideas on these and other topics and see how those beliefs fit together to form a coherent picture of the world. We will also look at the writings of pioneer thinkers—Machiavelli, Montaigne, Galileo—who began the process of dismantling this world-conception and replacing it with a new one closer to our own. It is not only ideas, however, that render the 16th century “disreputable” to modern eyes. Some of history’s most notorious kings and queens ruled European states in this period—Henry VIII of England with his six wives; Mary Queen of Scots with her three husbands; Philip II of Spain, patron of the Inquisition. In the spring semester, therefore, we will look at the theory and practice of politics in 16th-century Europe. Since most European states were monarchies, we will start by examining 16th-century ideas about princes and their courts. How should princes be educated for their role? How, and to what ends, should they exercise their power? What were the qualifications of the ideal courtier? We will go on to consider the actual lives and policies of a number of European princes: the Tudor kings and queens of England; the monarchs who ruled France during the religious wars that convulsed that kingdom between 1562 and 1629. Later in the semester, we will consider what to us may appear to be the most exotic of 16th-century European states. This was not a monarchy at all but a republic: the splendid and idiosyncratic Most Serene Republic of Venice. We will examine, along with its institutions, the revolutionary developments in painting that unfolded there. Students will have great freedom in the choice of conference paper topics. Depending on their interests, they can pursue research in political or religious history, literature, philosophy, or art.

Faculty

Documenting Asian America

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will introduce students to the major themes and methods of Asian American cultural studies. Each week, we will revisit a key “site” of Asian American history—the sugarcane plantation, the shoreline, the railroad, the internment camp, and the protest—and explore how Asians in America have differently documented themselves in relation to these spaces through art and literature. We will ask questions, including: How might a poem, photograph, or film differently represent the experience of migration? What common images emerge in the literature and art surrounding a particular historical event? What power or authority does the “documentary” hold in relaying the lived experiences of Asians in America? In answering these questions, course discussions will center on themes of memory, testimony, identity, and the power of representation. The course will also include field trips to area collections in documentary photography and filmmaking. Other assignments will include visual and literary analysis essays and creative-writing responses, as well as a curatorial project where students will have the opportunity to research Asian American documentarians and pitch artworks for exhibition at the Hudson River Museum.

Faculty

Beginning Italian: Viaggio in Italia

Open, Seminar—Year

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, aims at giving the student 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.

Faculty

Intermediate Italian: Modern Italian Culture and Literature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

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.

Faculty

Pretty, Witty, and Gay

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

Are you ready to review your cultural map? As Gertrude Stein once said, “Literature—creative literature—unconnected with sex is inconceivable. But not literary sex, because sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.” More recently, Fran Leibowitz observed, “If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” We do not have to limit ourselves to America, however. The only question is where to begin: in the pantheon, in prison, or in the family; in London, Paris, Berlin, or New York; with the “friends of Dorothy” or “the twilight women.” There are novels, plays, poems, essays, films, and critics to be read and read about, listened to, or watched. There are dark hints, delicate suggestions, positive images, negative images, and sympathy-grabbing melodramas to be reviewed. There are high culture and high camp, tragedies and comedies, the good, the bad, and the awful to be enjoyed and assessed. How has modern culture thought about sexuality and art, love, and literature? How might we think again? Conference work may be focused on a particular artist, set of texts, or genre or on some aspect of the historical background of the materials that we will be considering.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: An Introduction to German Literature and Film From the Late 18th Century to the Present

FYS—Year

In this course, students will learn about the major cultural and historical developments in Germany since the late 18th century through an in-depth analysis of masterpieces of German literature (novels, stories, plays) and film. In the fall semester, we will analyze some German “classics,” such as The Suffering of Young Werther; Romantic tales, along with a famous text by Sigmund Freud; and some modern prose by Hesse, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Rilke, and Irmgard Keun. We will also watch and discuss several Expressionist movies from the 1920s (among them, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dracula, and Metropolis) and finish the term with a reading of Feuchtwanger’s novel, The Oppermans, to understand the main ideological tenets of National Socialism. In the spring semester, the seminar will focus entirely on postwar German literature and film after 1945 and, especially, the question of how writers and intellectuals have dealt with the Holocaust, National Socialism, the Communist dictatorship, and German reunification since 1990. Films such as The Murderers Are Among Us, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Lives of the Others, Good Bye, Lenin, and Barbara will give students visual representations of the most important cultural and historical issues since 1945. Along with these stories, plays, novels, and movies, students will have to read some “historical” materials (essays and selected chapters from history books) to gain a fundamental understanding of German history. Since this is a First-Year Studies class, other important goals include helping students with the transition to college life, developing good study habits, and improving their critical writing skills. For this reason, biweekly individual conferences will alternate with biweekly group conferences, during which we will explore “student-life” issues and develop some group identity.

Faculty

Shakespeare and the Semiotics of Performance

Open, Lecture—Year

The performance of a play is a complex cultural event that involves far more than the literary text upon which it is grounded. First, there is the theatre itself—a building of a certain shape and utility within a certain neighborhood of a certain city. On stage, we have actors and their training, gesture, staging, music, dance, costumes, possibly scenery and lighting. Offstage, we have the audience, its makeup, and its reactions; the people who run the theatre and the reasons why they do it; and finally the social milieu in which the theatre exists. In this course, we study all of these elements as a system of signs that convey meaning (semiotics)—a world of meaning whose lifespan is a few hours but whose significances are ageless. The plays of Shakespeare are our texts. Reconstructing the performances of those plays in the England of Elizabeth I and James I is our starting place. Seeing how those plays have been approached and re-envisioned over the centuries is our journey. Tracing their elusive meanings—from within Shakespeare’s Wooden O to their adaptation in contemporary film—is our work.

Faculty

Mirrors, Labyrinths, and Paradoxes: Mathematics and Jorge Luis Borges

Open, Seminar—Spring

Many of the works of Jorge Luis Borges—the highly influential, 20th-century Argentine writer and oft-cited founder of the magic realism literary genre—mirror mathematical concepts in profoundly intelligent and strikingly imaginative ways. Borges’ writings—primarily short fictions but also essays and poetry—often introduce alternate realities that warp standard notions of time, space, and even existence. Borges' works serve to uncover intriguing frictions between competing notions in the foundations of mathematics: the sensible vs. the paradoxical (logic), the infinite vs. the infinitesimal (set theory), the discrete vs. the continuous (analysis), the symmetric vs. the distorted (fractals and chaos), the convergent vs. the divergent (limits), and the likely vs. the impossible (probability). Not restricting itself to mathematics, this course will also explore themes and images in Borges’ works from philosophical, mythological, historical, scientific, psychological, and literary perspectives. Student conference work may focus upon other explorations at the intersection of literature, magic realism, mathematics, philosophy, etc. This course is intended for the student who is curious and open-minded though had never planned to study mathematics at the college level.

Faculty

Punk

Open, Large Lecture—Spring

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will investigate the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s—in dialogue with and opposition to other musical genres, such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists like the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continue to resonate in punk and rock music. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk, with readings by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Theodor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various sub-genres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry while remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as a catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk and in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music, students who want to incorporate creative work will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the abundant documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week.

Faculty

Philosophy and the Founding of the Modern World

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Where does the modern world come from? In large part, it is the product of philosophy that took on a political role it had never had before: the role of founding a new social order organized around science and technology and which, it was hoped, would tame the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries. We will begin by reading Francis Bacon’s Preface and Proemium to the Grand Instauration, as well as parts of his Advancement of Learning, in which he sets out the plan for the new science and technology and seeks to make it politically and religiously acceptable, and his New Atlantis, a sketch of the new scientific-technological order. Then, we shall go on to read Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which he combines the plan for a new physics and a new technological order with a new metaphysics of God and the soul and a new ethics of self-determination—different from the ethics of the ancient Stoics and Skeptics on which it draws, as well as from the ethics of Aristotle, Plato, and Epicurus and from Christian conceptions of virtue and vice. We shall then study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, which is at once a scientific study of religion and a proposal for a new social order, in which religion will serve simply to support morality and obedience to the law while not interfering with science and philosophy. In group conference, we will study the ancient philosophy from which the moderns take their departure: selections from Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Seneca. In the spring semester, we will turn to modern reactions to the earlier modern attempts to remake the world. We will begin with Shaftesbury, who seeks to save Plato’s defense of moral teleology from both Christian rejection of the world and the attacks of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza by appealing to comedy and the sense of the beautiful. We will then turn to Hume, who seeks to invent a new common sense based on custom and feeling. Finally, we will consider Rousseau’s attack on the arts and sciences and his attempt to reconstruct the doctrine of political right without appealing to the natural order. In group conference, we will continue reading the ancients, especially Plato and Lucretius, to consider how those authors draw on them and react against them.

Faculty

Philosophy Through Film

Open, Lecture—Fall

You care about movies (I presume). Why do you care about movies? Because they entertain you? Because they are beautiful? Because they are informative? Because they make you feel things? The guiding thought of this class is that we care about movies, because they participate in the practice of philosophy (or at least they have that potential). Of course, this also presumes that we care about philosophy (a claim that will take some time to defend). To test that hypothesis—that films have the potential to participate in the practice of philosophy—we first need to consider what the practice of philosophy is. Then, we will need to say something about what film is. And then, we can examine whether film can do philosophy. In the first part of the course, we will analyze the medium of film in order to clarify the characteristics of film that would allow it to be philosophical. In the second part of the class, we will explore how those characteristics of film contribute to how we think philosophically about our lives. In particular, we will explore problems pertaining to subjectivity (What it is to be a human being?) and to ethics (How do I know the right thing to do?). Each week we will watch a film (including Jeanne Dielman, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Get Out, and Spring Breakers) and read a philosophical text (including Aristotle, Cavell, Merleau-Ponty, Parfit, and Adorno) with the aim of placing the two in conversation.

Faculty

Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

This reading seminar will consist of a close study of one book, A Thousand Plateaus, which was coauthored in 1980 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari.A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of their magnum opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia—the founding text of a movement of thought called “poststructuralism”—is among the most influential books of 20th-century philosophy. As its name suggests, the book presents a vision, or visions, of the world and of history as multilayered and multiplex rather than homogenous and linear. The book teaches us to look and to think of things and of ourselves from a variety of new and shifting angles, with the aim of providing means of resistance, empowerment, and sometimes escape against capitalism, fascism, and forces of normalization. To do this, Deleuze and Guattari draw on a broad range of philosophical, literary, and artistic texts and on modalities of experience that have traditionally been associated with madness. Their writing style is bold and dazzling, full to the brim with new terminologies (many of which have since become common tropes in the humanities and the social sciences); it is also challenging and dense. Engaging their work fruitfully requires a mind that is, like theirs, open and adventurous, willing to take risks and follow unpredictable turns. We will proceed in workshop fashion, reading 30-40 pages a week in advance of each class, writing short analyses throughout the semester, and coming to class prepared and eager to work together toward increased understanding. In addition to the prerequisite, students enrolling in this class should, more importantly, have a philosophical passion and commitment, a diligent work ethic, and a spirit of camaraderie, collaboration, and generosity.

Faculty

Literature, Art, and (Environmental) Ethical Attention

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course explores the ways that narrative and creative expression can shape our ethical perspective on the world—particularly around ethical questions related to nature, nonhuman animals, environmental justice, and climate change. First-person narratives, novels and fiction, film, art, dance, and other creative expressions are significant for shaping the way that we understand ourselves and what it means to be in ethical relation with the world around us. Together, we will explore the ways in which these forms of expression shape ethical decision-making and ethical theory by centering values of care, reciprocity, community, and attention. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong 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.

Faculty

Perspectives on the Creative Process

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

The creative process is paradoxical. It involves freedom and spontaneity yet requires expertise and hard work. The creative process is self-expressive yet tends to unfold most easily when the creator forgets about self. The creative process brings joy yet is fraught with fear, frustration, and even terror.The creative process is its own reward yet depends on social support and encouragement. In this class, we look at how various thinkers conceptualize the creative process—chiefly in the arts but in other domains, as well. We see how various psychological theorists describe the process, its source, its motivation, its roots in a particular domain or skill, its cultural context, and its developmental history in the life of the individual. Among the thinkers that we will consider are Freud, Jung, Arnheim, Franklin, and Gardner. Different theorists emphasize different aspects of the process. In particular, we see how some thinkers emphasize persistent work and expert knowledge as essential features, while others emphasize the need for the psychic freedom to “let it happen” and speculate on what emerges when the creative person “lets go.” Still others identify cultural context or biological factors as critical. To concretize theoretical approaches, we look at how various ideas can contribute to understanding specific creative people and their work. In particular, we will consider works written by or about Picasso, Woolf, Welty, Darwin, and some contemporary artists and writers. Though creativity is most frequently explored in individuals, we also consider group improvisation in music and theatre. Some past conference projects have involved interviewing people engaged in creative work. Others consisted of library studies centering on the life and work of a particular creative person. And some students chose to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center and focus on an aspect of creative activity in young children.

Faculty

Children’s Literature: Psychological and Literary Perspectives

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

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 storytime, during which two students will share childhood favorites.

Faculty

Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

Faculty

People of the Book: Jews and Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall

Across the ages, Jews have maintained an intimate relationship with the written word. From the destruction of the Second Temple through the chaos of modernity, reading and writing have grounded and animated Jewish life and practice. Together, we will embark on an examination of critical Jewish and human issues mediated through short stories, novels, and plays. By exploring the deep textual history embedded within Jewish culture, we will wrestle with topics as varied as romantic love and marriage, the encroachment of the secular world, cross-cultural conflict and exchange, and evolving concepts of gender and sexuality. Alongside our literary journey, we will engage with an array of artistic adaptations like music, film, and visual art. Accompanied by authors—including Yiddish luminaries Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, American pioneers Philip Roth and Anzia Yezierska, and more recent visionaries Etgar Keret, Tony Kushner, and Dara Horn—we will interrogate the many ways that Jews both accommodated and broke convention.

Faculty

Documenting Jewish Lives: Past as Prologue

Open, Seminar—Fall

Time: a concept that has stymied many readers, authors, and thinkers alike. Measuring change over time, however, is central to Jewish thought and practice, as well as to the historian’s craft. From weeks to months, season to season, and across the stages of the lifecycle, Jews have historically engaged with time religiously, spiritually, philosophically, and practically. Human life, when mediated through the written word, leads to a rich portrayal of life's internal complexities and inconsistencies. In this class, we will attend to the poetics of time as it shapes human lives and to human lives as they shape the poetics of time. Specifically, we will explore Jewish lives, defined broadly, to examine the intricacies of everyday experience, innermost thoughts and feelings, and interactions with the Jewish and non-Jewish world. Beginning with Baruch Spinoza, the infamous Jewish maverick, and time-traveling forward through a selection of biographies, memoirs, and fiction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious Jewish jurist, we will pursue our quest to discern—and tell anew—what makes a Jewish life.

Faculty

Jews of New York

Open, Seminar—Spring

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” So wrote Sephardic New York Jew Emma Lazarus in 1883, putting her stamp on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and forever intertwining Jewish history with the professed American ideals of freedom, equality, and inclusivity. Whether as insult, compliment, or casual observation, the conflation of Jews and New York has become permanently entrenched in the American imagination. But how did we get from 23 Jewish refugees landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the New York City of Streisand, Sondheim, and Seinfeld? This course will explore 370 years of Jewish history steeped in the urban environs of the Empire State that millions elected to call home. From Lyman Bloomingdale’s retail empire to Mount Sinai Hospital’s pioneering medical research and from the groundbreaking literature of Chaim Potok to the feminist and queer activism of “Battling Bella” Abzug, the Jewish footprints on the streets and avenues of the city remain readily apparent. We will examine socialist Jews who demanded a brighter future for all, working-class Jewish women who rioted over the exorbitant price of kosher meat, and Jewish radicals who broadened the parameters of religious observance. Recognizing New York as the crucible of United States citizenship and a major center of the Jewish world, we will interrogate how—from generation to generation—the Jews shaped New York and New York shaped the Jews.

Faculty

Jewish Mystics, Rabble-Rousers, and Heretics

Open, Seminar—Spring

Does God exist? How should one read the Bible? Who should read the Bible? How can humans connect with the Divine? How does Judaism relate to social justice? How do we reconcile the dichotomy of reason and revelation? What makes one Jewish? What does it mean to live Jewishly? These questions—and still others—represent but a smattering of those with which the Jews whom we will study have grappled, both philosophically and practically, throughout history. From the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to the musical spirituality of Debbie Friedman and with a host of radical thinkers, rule-breakers, and religious innovators in between, this class will explore the myriad ways in which Jewish luminaries have broken with convention and disrupted the status quo. These individuals provide a lens into the humanity that undergirds the Jewish thought and ritual that, on the one hand, we take for granted and that, on the other, shocks or even appalls us. Drawing from an array of historical sources—including philosophical treatises, religious texts, and literary classics—we will explore how those Jewish pathbreakers have engaged with these questions across the ages and, in turn, offer our own responses.

Faculty

Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

Faculty

Advanced Intermediate Spanish: The Caribbean Beyond the Tropics

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

What is the reality of the Caribbean beyond stereotypes of a tropical paradise for vacationers from abroad? What can the region teach us about art, politics, and revolution? In this class, we will consider different definitions of, and approaches, to the Caribbean and its positioning in relation to Latin America, Europe, and the United States regarding questions of race and ethnicity, colonialism and slavery, revolution, gender and sexuality, migration, and diaspora. We will analyze literature, theory, art, film, and music by the likes of Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, Wilfredo Lam, and Sarah Gómez. This discussion-based course is intended for students who wish to further hone their communication and comprehension skills through advanced grammar review.

Faculty

Advanced Spanish: Latin American Female Artistic Productions

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

In this seminar, we will analyze how Latin American women reflected on traditional gender roles, heteronormative standards, intricate racial systems, class dynamics, technology, and environment concerns in their literary and cinematographic works. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Readings include texts by Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Cristina Cabral, Gabriela Mistral, and María Fernanda Ampuero; films include La ciénaga, El último verano de la Boyita, and Fever Dream, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

Faculty

Painting Pop

Open, Concept—Fall

In this experimental studio class, we will explore how to digest, appropriate, reconfigure, and rewrite popular media using mostly, but not limited to, painting, drawing, and collage and open to video, animation, sculpture, and performance. We will examine how artists operate as consumers, catalysts, motors, and destroyers of TV, film, music, social media, and advertisement. Slideshows, readings, and presentations will exemplify the tight relationship between art and popular media throughout history and contemporary art and will serve as inspiration for students to create their own works. Students will be encouraged to deconstruct their own spectacles of adoration and critique and celebrate images that are impactful to them. We will promote generative group conversations, studio time, experimentation, collaboration, creativity, and improvisation.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Poetry: The Human Song

FYS—Year

In this FYS class, we will study the art, the mystery, and the power of poetry. In our first semester, we will learn to pay attention. We will become intimate with the skills of the art: with the sounds of sense, the way a word feels in the mouth, the where-it-is in a sentence (diction, syntax). We will wonder: What is a line of poetry? What part does silence play in a poem? How is poetry experienced out loud—or read silently to oneself? Why use a metaphor? How important are forms? How do we know when a poem is “finished”? How do we write into what we don’t know? We will read the work of many published poets. We will read essays, watch films, take field trips, and meet in weekly poetry dates and in conferences. You will write a poem every week and bring it to class to share; then, you will revise each poem that you bring. At the end of the first semester, you will collect your revised poems into a chapbook. Expect to spend a great deal of time every week reading the poems written by other people—both dead and living. Expect to read the poems of your class community. Expect to spend time dwelling with your own writing—without preoccupations. In our second semester, we will concentrate on ecopoetry, poetry that concerns itself with the living world and the current planetary emergency. We will read ecopoems in order to come to an understanding of the possibilities. Each of you will choose a topic to learn about (an animal? a river? a forest?) and write into that knowledge, into a new understanding. At the end of the second semester, you will collect your poems into a chapbook. We will create a community together of trust and care so that every writer feels free to share work. We will delight in each other’s voices, in reading together, in wandering into the power of poetry. And we will have a wonderful time. This course will have biweekly conferences. During conferences, we will check on your well-being, go over your recent poems and revisions, review your responses to your reading of weekly poetry packets, and take a look at your weekly observations.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Literature of Fact: Reading and Writing the Nonfiction Essay

FYS—Year

We are living in an era in which the literature of fact is thriving both online and in print. Writers have found, as the late Tom Wolfe observed, that it is possible to turn out nonfiction as lively as fiction and, in the process, capture the history of one’s own times. The aim of this course is to explore nonfiction in a variety of forms and for students to write nonfiction of their own on a steady basis. Class will be used to go over assigned reading and as a workshop for student writing. Students should be prepared to have their work read both in early drafts and in completed drafts. The course is structured around six sections: basic reporting, memoirs, op-eds, reviews, profiles, and long-form journalism. The writing that we do for class will parallel the writing that we are reading at the time. We will begin with short assignments that emphasize writing techniques and move on to longer assignments in which research, interviews, and legwork play an increasingly important role. The writers we study will be a mix of old and new and range from George Orwell and Joan Didion to James Baldwin and Zadie Smith. We will meet weekly in individual donning and academic conferences until October Study Break, then biweekly for the rest of the year.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Where Was It One First Heard of the Truth?

FYS—Year

In this omnibus nonfiction writing class, we will encounter and examine over the course of a year a range of literary, artistic, social, and historical phenomena—from plays by Shakespeare and poems by Whitman, to selections from autobiographies of Gandhi and Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, to films and memoirs of identity and gender liberation, to a classic documentary about the terminal ward of a great Northeastern-seaboard hospital, to an oral history of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, to artwork in New York museums and current art exhibits in Chelsea, to sports events and contemporaneous political conflicts, to masterworks of modernist nonfiction experimentation. In response to this range and overflowing variety of material, students will be asked to write accurately and cogently, in the tradition of various nonfiction genres, designed to capture one aspect or another of these encounters with reality. We will write impersonal work—reportage, reviews, journalistic profiles, editorials; and we will write highly personal pieces involving the life experiences of each of us in relation to what we encounter—personal essays, memoir fragments, hybrid pieces that experiment with form, that create their own genre, that allow us to fully explore our subjectivity and our unique points of view. We will work out the rhetorical and investigative techniques, whereby the truth of experience is represented on the page. We will also look at the many ways in which language can be used to distort, obscure, and evade the truth. We will think practically and will think philosophically about representing reality. We will develop our voices and our control of words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units. Our biases will tend toward clarity of thought and beauty of expression. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

Faculty

Children’s Literature

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

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.

Faculty

The Enemies of Fiction: A Fiction-Writing Workshop

Open, Seminar—Year

The late novelist John Hawkes said that he began writing fiction with the assumption that its “true enemies” were “plot, character, setting, and theme.” This same quartet seems to dominate the conversation in writing workshops. We like to “vote” on the plot’s efficiency, the theme’s effectiveness, the characters’ foibles. If we are not careful, our discussions can descend to the level of a corporate focus group, a highly effective forum for marketing laundry detergents but maybe not for making art. This yearlong workshop will attempt, in its own small way, to see the fiction of both published masters and participating students through a wider lens. In the first semester, we will read across a wide range of styles and aesthetics and will write in response to weekly prompts designed to encourage play. Issues of language, structure, and vision will be honored right alongside Hawkes’ imagined enemies. In the second semester—provided all goes well—each student will workshop two stories. Our reading list will include several short and unorthodox novels (possibilities include Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector) and weekly short stories by writers both well-known and ignored. These may include Robert Coover, Dawn Raffel, Etgar Keret, Julio Cortazar, Ottessa Moshfegh, Donald Barthelme, Harlan Ellison, and Carmen Maria Machado. We will also regularly read essays that challenge us to think about what art is and why anyone would want to make it. I am looking for generous students interested in fiction-as-play. The model here is counterpoint, so it may help if you have already taken a fiction-writing workshop—though the course is offered (generously) to writers of all backgrounds.

Faculty

Fiction Workshop: The Short Story

Open, Seminar—Year

Frank O’Connor claims that the short story is a form characterized not by its length but by its subject matter—by its habitual interest in what he calls “submerged population groups,” people for whom a “normal society” is the “exception” rather than the “rule”—in short, outsiders, losers, the marginalized, the dispossessed. In this yearlong course, we will begin with O’Connor’s description and then move on to examine canonical, as well as contemporary, examples of the form in hopes of generating a portfolio of stories about a “submerged population group” of our own. Our readings may include Edward P. Jones, Raymond Carver, James Alan Macpherson, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Sherman Alexie, and Charles Baxter, among many others. We will divide our time between reading published works and examining each other’s efforts through workshops, critical and generative writing exercises, and one-on-one conferences. The fall semester’s reading will be taken from an anthology, so as to give students a survey of the form’s depth and breadth; in the spring semester, we will examine single-author short-story collections. Throughout, we will ask questions not only about craft and technique in short-story writing but also larger questions about the form itself and the traditions in which short-story writers are all necessarily enmeshed.

Faculty

Writing and Reading Fiction

Open, Seminar—Year

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; 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 story with the class every week in response to prompts that I’ll provide, and you’ll be producing an additional longer story for conference every two weeks. We’ll also be learning from writers who have come before us, reading a mix of classic and contemporary writers that include Anton Chekhov, Jennifer Egan, Percival Everett, ZZ Packer, Philip Roth, and Virginia Woolf.

Faculty

Episodes

Open, Seminar—Fall

The use of the episode is both ancient and modern and is central to storytelling in everything from The Arabian Nights to telenovelas, from The Canterbury Tales to Netflix, from comics to true-crime podcasts. Episodes differ from chapters in a novel and from short stories and can have many changing characters and plot lines. Episodes are disinclined toward resolution but love time, hunks of it, and do well depicting both the daily, including work, and the historical. We will be reading, looking at, discussing, and writing episodes in several forms and, for conference work, writing or rewriting six or so related episodes supported by small brainstorming conference groups as we go forward.

Faculty

Fiction Workshop: Asian American Writing

Open, Seminar—Fall

This fiction workshop seeks to draw inspiration in both our reading and writing from the work of Asian American writers. In addition to coming together to support one another in a writing workshop environment—discussing matters of “craft,” “technique,” and the like—we’ll also spend our time discussing questions about race, immigration, nationality, and storytelling (in addition to any other questions) as they arise through the fiction of Asian American writers. We’ll begin with Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) and work our way “forward” to a reading list that may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R Zamora Linmark, Amy Tan, Don Lee, Anthony Veasna So, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, David Wong Louie, K-Ming Chang, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Akhil Sharma, Paul Yoon, Jenny Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ayad Akhtar, among others. To be clear, this is a writing class and not a critical survey of Asian American literature and literary history—at least not in the manner that my colleagues in the literature program might be able to provide. Nevertheless, Asian American fiction will constitute the common source material from which, I hope, students might derive their pleasures (and lessons) as aspiring fiction writers regardless of their chosen subjects. In addition to actively participating in class discussions and providing their peers with constructive feedback for their work, students will be expected by the end of the semester to develop and produce—through the conference system—a portfolio of short fiction.

Faculty

Speculative Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Fall

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.

Faculty

Forms and Fictions

Open, Seminar—Spring

Whatever short form you are interested in— episode, story, reflection, memoir, essay, tale—you will find in this course, both for reading and writing. We will talk about how different forms open the door to different takes on experience and how content or change can become more or less accessible in different forms. We will write 100-word pieces each week to learn to edit ourselves and to search through our minds for what’s there. We will practice pacing, dialogue, scene, portraiture. We will discuss what our favored forms say about our lives and the people in them. We will be writing and reading short pieces all semester, then editing, redrafting, and arranging them for conference work.

Faculty

Words and Pictures

Open, Seminar—Spring

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read all kinds of narratives, children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, graphic novels...and try our hand at many of them. Class reading will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students have created graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures. There will be weekly assignments that involve making something. This course is especially suited to students with an interest in another art or a body of knowledge that they’d like to make accessible to nonspecialists.

Faculty

Speculative Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Spring

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.

Faculty

Nonfiction Laboratory

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course is for students who want to break free from 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 by writers such as Claudia Rankine, Nathalie Sarraute and George W. S. Trow. These readings will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments that will be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces that 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 the PDF packet.

Faculty

Nonfiction Workshop: Reading and Writing Personal Essays

Open, Seminar—Fall

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 instance, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, called 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.” The third unit is called The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic (PCJ); a work in that genre combines personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject—for example, 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; an example: Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie, The Searchers.

Faculty

Dream Logic

Open, Seminar—Spring

Dream logic 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 apprehended more easily by the unconscious rather 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 that 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 Gogol, Kafka, Garcia-Marquez, George Saunders, Jeanette Winterson, Helen Oyeyemi, and Karen Russell. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.

Faculty

Nonfiction Workshop: The World and You

Open, Seminar—Spring

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, such as Melissa Febos’s “All of Me,” which 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, James Agee’s essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” about silent-film comedians and Toni Morrison’s (very) short book, Playing in the Dark, about race as it pertains to Early American literature.

Faculty

Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

Faculty

Details Useful to the State: Writers and the Shaping of US Empire

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Are you going to ask where I am? I'll tell you—giving only details useful to the State... —Pablo Naruda, Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, 1948.

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? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what they may write? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? 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 four books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ 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; Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta; and Dionne Brand’s Inventory. This is not a history or 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. Although this is a lecture class, with a limit of 30 students, you’ll be asked to participate, improvise, and do some class reading and writing, work with a partner, as well as participate in one group conference a week often focused on in-class writing exercises. The only prerequisite is the courage to think out loud with other people; aka, the courage required to learn.

Faculty

On Collecting/Collections

Sophomore and Above, Small seminar—Spring

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and reattaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

I’m always looking for new lenses to use with the writing and reading of poetry. As poets, we are natural collectors—collecting images, bits of dialogue, phrases, titles. In this poetry workshop, we will discuss and write about our collections (collections of facts, objects, memories) while looking at how collections of poems and prose are constructed/corralled/arranged. Books discussed will include, among others, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Obit by Victoria Chang, Frank Sonnets by Diane Seuss, Hoarders by Kate Durbin, The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy, and various essays and handouts on collecting and artists who use collection as part of their practice. This semester, you might collect dreams or facts or an object that you regularly encounter on the street. How this informs your writing can be organic. You might become obsessed with a collector’s collection and write about it. You might use your collected delights to add a new color to your emotional palette. You might start looking at the objects in your poems in a different way, writing about them with greater specificity. Most weeks, there will be a collecting or poem prompt. Each student will give a 10- to 15-minute presentation on one of their collections.

Faculty