Course Listings

Summer 2009 Courses

We may think of a place as having a certain character, an identity, a particular kind of order and stability. And yet we know that a sense of place can emerge most strongly when it is being threatened or otherwise contested. We take place as something “natural” and yet we also know that it is constructed and in history. We may think of writing about place as something that insiders are best able to do, but then again as something that outsiders—travelers, anthropologists, people from “off”—are in an even better position to do. Not surprisingly, the meanings of “place,” according to the OED, are, well, all over the place: “[T]he senses are numerous and…difficult to arrange.” In this writing class, we will enter this world of possibility through reading, field trips, music, and regular writing. The books we will read, in order, are below. Please read Welty before the first class.

Texts: Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Warner); “Saving the Life That Is Your Own,” “Beyond the Peacock,” “Zora Neal Hurston,” and “Looking for Zora” in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (Harvest); Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (HarperPerennial); Wilma Dykeman, The French Broad (Wakestone); James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Mariner); Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Jesse Stuart Foundation).


7120 Literacy and Race/Ms. Moss/M, W 9-11:45
Race and ethnicity are assumed to be powerful forces in group and individual literacy lives. Further, histories of literacy and literacy narratives cannot be divorced from a people’s racialized and/or ethnic identities. In this course, we will explore how literacies shape and are shaped by these racial and ethnic identities. We will look at how race intersects with ethnicity, class, and gender among other identity markers and how one’s “marked” body contributes to an understanding of literacy practices in racially marked groups. We will examine this topic from multiple research perspectives—historically, ethnographically, theoretically, to name a few. My major purpose is to begin a conversation about how scholars and teachers understand the role of race in literacy studies.

Texts: Making Race Visible: Literacy Research for Cultural Understanding, ed. Stuart Greene and Dawn Abt-Perkins (Teachers College); Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh); Catherine Prendergast, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education (Southern Illinois); Bob Fecho, “Is This English?” (Teachers College); Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education, ed. M. Kells, V. Balester, and V. Villanueva (Boynton/Cook); Second-Language Writing in the Composition Classroom, ed. Paul Kei Matsuda et al. (Bedford/St. Martin's); Elaine Richardson, Hiphop Literacies (Routledge).

Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

7240 Gender, Disorder, and English Renaissance Drama/Ms. Floyd-Wilson/T, Th 2-4:45
How did early modern audiences respond to the representation of women on the stage? Can we discern specific forms of female heroism in Renaissance drama? How does genre affect the representation of gender? How did the drama solidify or subvert the cultural categories of wife, maid, widow, whore, shrew, or witch? We will read a range of early modern plays by Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and others (including one early play by Shakespeare). Some discussion will be devoted to the various approaches of Renaissance feminist criticism as it has developed over the past thirty years. We will consider how the drama encodes or challenges women’s subordinate status in the society, and we will assess how the plays display (and interrogate) male anxiety over female authority. Other topics will include female spectatorship, the all-male stage, cross-dressing, the institution of marriage, gendered economics, and how constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality interacted in the period.

Texts: William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, ed. Frances Dolan (Bedford/St. Martin's). You may read the following plays in any edition, but I have made suggestions in some cases: Anonymous, Arden of Faversham; Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (New Mermaids); Ben Jonson, Epicoene (any edition); Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling (New Mermaids); Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl; Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan (New Mermaids); William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (New Mermaids). You might want to purchase Plays on Women, ed. Kathleen McLuskie (Manchester) since it includes four of the plays we’ll be reading (listed above). Other course materials will be available at Bread Loaf.

7245 Teaching William Shakespeare/Ms. Hendricks/T, Th 9-11:45
This course focuses on the pedagogy of teaching the works of William Shakespeare. The aim of this course is to work with teachers to develop methodological and interpretive approaches that are easily integrated into their syllabi. Students will be introduced to cultural, historical, aesthetic, and generic materials as part of the study of selected works. Issues to be explored include: how to read a Shakespeare script; Shakespeare’s themes—universal or parochial; film versus stage; and reading for the poetry and interpreting for the performance.

Texts: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. Braunmuller (Pelican); The Merchant of Venice, ed. Leah S. Marcus (Norton Critical Ed.); Macbeth, ed. Robert S. Miola (Norton Critical Ed.); The Tempest, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Norton Critical Ed.).

7252 Shakespeare and the Body/Ms. Floyd-Wilson/T, Th 9-11:45
How was identity experienced in the early modern body? With some attention to medical thought and social practices of the period, this course will focus on representations of the body in Shakespeare’s plays. Potential discussions will center on the body's perceived relationship to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class status. Since male actors played women and commoners played kings, performance questions will come into play. We will also consider the political and social implications of Renaissance notions of bodily health. What was the relationship between the physical body and the body politic? How did Shakespeare deploy the concept of the “King’s two bodies”? By looking to contemporary debates on the interaction between the body and the soul, we will strive to historicize Shakespeare’s interest in the function and significance of the body’s passions. Plays will include As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Othello, Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale.

Texts: The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Norton). Supplementary materials will be available at Bread Loaf.

7290 Teaching Poetry/Ms. Hendricks/T, Th 2-4:45
This course focuses on the pedagogy of poetry. Exploring various modes and forms of poetry across culture and time, students will develop models for teaching poetry in their courses. The course will emphasize close textual analysis in conjunction with the cultural context that redefined what writing poetry meant. Issues such as how students read or do not read poetry and how to teach the technique of poetic writing will be explored. As its principal aim, this course seeks to provide a way of engaging students in the cultural study of poetry just as they engage and respond to contemporary music and narrative. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Text: The Making of a Poem, ed. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (Norton).

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century) 

7290 Teaching Poetry/Ms. Hendricks/T, Th 2-4:45
See description under Group II offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.

7307a The Novel and “I” in the Eighteenth Century and After/Mr. Sherman/M, W 9-11:45
“I have discovered,” proclaimed the twenty-two year old James Boswell in 1762, at the start of his lifelong journal, “that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.” Many of Boswell’s contemporaries made similar discoveries, and early novels often read like maps of their explorations, setting forth the possibilities, consequences, and limitations intrinsic to this newly elastic sense of self. We’ll study some of the maps less traveled by (Roxana rather than Crusoe; Tristram, not Tom Jones; Burney’s late Wanderer in lieu of her early Evelina), alongside a few nonfiction documents of the “I” by writers whose work sometimes helped chart the novel’s route: essayists, philosophers, biographers, diarists (including Boswell himself). At course’s end, we’ll look at Middlemarch to see, in one spectacular instance, what the nineteenth-century novel did with the exhilarating, precarious notion that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose.

Texts: Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Oxford World’s Classics); Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works (Broadview); Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Oxford World’s Classics); James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal (Yale); Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford World’s Classics); Frances Burney, The Wanderer (Oxford World’s Classics); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin).

7400  Studies in Modern British Fiction/Mr. Donadio/T, Th 2-4:45
At a point early on in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the narrator observes that “a human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries.” Centered on a variety of highly accomplished and resonant works produced by English authors during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, this course will pay particular attention to the interplay between states of feeling and larger historical predicaments, exploring at close range experiences of personal frustration and visions of social fulfillment, moments of inescapable isolation and possibilities of intense intimacy.

Texts: Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster” and “The Secret Sharer,” in Typhoon and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics); Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (Penguin); E.M. Forster, Howards End (Norton Critical Ed.); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (Modern Library); D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love [Cambridge Ed.] (Penguin Classics); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway [Annotated] (Harvest); Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Back Bay); Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review of Books Classics); Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Anchor); Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (HarperPerennial).

7410 Ulysses/Mr. Sherman/T, Th 9-11:45
“Joyce,” declared Ernest Hemingway in a 1922 letter to a friend, “has written a most goddam wonderful book.” The book was Ulysses, and most of its readers in the decades since would probably endorse as accurate all three of Hemingway’s modifiers: the wonders of Joyce’s accomplishment, the sometimes curse-worthy intricacies of his text, and the sheer ambition of his intent to cram most if not all of human experience into one day, one book. In this course, we’ll hope to inhabit Hemingway’s whole description, moving chapter by chapter and hour by hour through Bloom’s (and Molly’s and Stephen’s and Dublin’s) long day, and drawing on all the resources available (Homer, maps, critics, biographies, recordings) in order to savor as much of Joyce’s most as we can manage.

Texts: James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler (Vintage); Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Revised and Expanded Edition (California).

Group IV (American Literature)

7583 Memory in African American Public and Literary Discourse/Ms. Moss/M, W 2-4:45
Though memory or “memoria” was one of the original five canons of rhetoric, until recently it was one of the forgotten canons. However, memory has reemerged as an important element in rhetorical studies, literary criticism, and other disciplinary areas. Of interest to many scholars is how memory is used in particular cultural texts. In this seminar, we will examine how the art and practice of memory functions in African American texts from a variety of genres and media. Specifically, we will look at contemporary black political discourse, novels, poetry, plays, and film. Students will be asked to think about how race as well as a community’s history, beliefs, and cultural practices shape the functions and uses of memory in a text. Questions that we will consider include: How is collective and/or cultural memory used as a persuasive device? What is the relationship between memory and political action? Who has the right to invoke memory? What impact might genre have on the place of memory in a text? Texts will include a course packet of critical readings on memory (from classical rhetoric to contemporary theories); political speeches from Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Jordan, Barack Obama (and others); and the works listed below.

Texts: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton Critical Ed.); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage); Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (film); August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (Plume); James McBride, The Color of Water (Riverhead); Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke (documentary; both this and Daughters of the Dust will be available for viewing at Bread Loaf, but I recommend that you try to see both if you can before the summer).

7591a Faulkner/Mr. Donadio/T, Th 9-11:45
An intensive reading of the major works.

Texts: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; Sanctuary; As I Lay Dying; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Wild Palms; Go Down, Moses; Collected Stories. Except for the Collected Stories (published in paperback by Vintage), these works are all included in the Library of America volumes devoted to William Faulkner: Novels 1926-1929; Novels 1930-1935; Novels 1936-1940; Novels 1942-1954. (There is also a fifth volume that includes works published in the author’s final years.) These Library of America hardbound volumes may be purchased from various sources at a considerable discount, and in the end they will prove far more durable and economical than the paperback editions of these individual novels, which may appear cheaper initially.

7648 Literature of the Civil Rights Movement/Mr. Sundquist/T, Th 9-11:45
The course will examine the role of literature in the American civil rights movement. The “second emancipation” of the 1950s and 1960s caused wrenching social and political upheaval and remains even now a matter of debate, both for its strategies and its ultimate results. Writing by both black and white authors, both nonfiction and fiction, played an essential role in motivating protest and shaping public views. Our readings will include literature whose popularity gave it a direct role in debates over race, rights, and freedom, as well as more reflective literature that sought to reinterpret African American history and create a new vocabulary of cultural pride. Course requirements will be two short papers, a class presentation, and a brief reading exam.

Texts: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper); Richard Wright, The Long Dream (Northeastern); John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (NAL); William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (Bantam); Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (Signet); Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Bantam); Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (Plume); selections from The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (Penguin).

7660 Modern American Autobiography/Ms. V. Smith/M, W 2-4:45
Critics have long described autobiography as a quintessentially American literary genre, largely because as a nation and as individuals, Americans have been preoccupied with beginnings and with the processes and possibilities of self-creation. From the conversion narratives, to the autobiographies of the “Founding Fathers,” to the antebellum slave narratives, in their autobiographical writing, Americans have explored private concerns with identity, family, and their relation to place, as well as broader issues such as the meaning of citizenship, freedom, and the power of language to imprison and to liberate. In this course we will read a series of pivotal autobiographical works published during the second half of the twentieth century. We will analyze them as experiments in form, structure, and strategies of characterization, and consider how they negotiate some of the pressing political questions of our time. Students will write analytical essays as well as an autobiographical exercise of their own.

Texts: Frank Conroy, Stop Time (Penguin); Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Penguin); Alice Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago); Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry (Simon Pulse); Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers); Rosemary Bray, Unafraid of the Dark (Anchor).

7690 Toni Morrison/Ms. V. Smith/M, W 9-11:45
Toni Morrison is perhaps best known for her lyrical, evocative, and nuanced novels. Yet the Nobel Prize-winning author has had a distinguished and profoundly influential career working across a wide variety of genres: as an editor, essayist, playwright, children’s book author, and librettist. In her work, the craft of writing and the art of reading are always politically engaged practices, entwined in a process of creating, producing, and circulating knowledge. In this course we will read six of her novels in relation to selected works of literary and cultural criticism (some by Morrison herself and some by other critics). By analyzing the significance of place and of history in her work, as well as her use of a range of techniques such as silences, imagery, point of view, and allusion, we will explore how Morrison exposes the power of language both to fracture our sense of common humanity and bind us into a shareable existence.

Texts: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage), Song of Solomon (Vintage), Beloved (Vintage), Jazz (Vintage), Paradise (Plume), A Mercy (Knopf).

Group V (World Literature)

7751 Tolstoy and/or Dostoevsky/Mr. Katz/M, W 9-11:45
In his classic study Aspects of the Novel (1950) E.M. Forster wrote: “No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy—that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky.” We begin our inquiry with an excerpt from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first literary offering, Poor Folk (1846), and trace its emergence from the works of Pushkin and Gogol. Then we turn to his philosophical treatise-cum-novel Notes from Underground (1864), viewed as a prelude to his five major works. We will study two of them: Crime and Punishment (1866), his first and arguably best novel, and The Adolescent (1875), an underrated, unjustly neglected, yet extraordinary work. Then we turn to Leo Tolstoy and sample his early literary works, including “Three Deaths” (1859), followed by a close reading of his masterpiece Anna Karenina (1875-77). Finally we survey Tolstoy’s late fiction, including “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) and “Alyosha Gorshok” (1905). Excerpts from critical essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959), and Joseph Frank “Tolstoyevsky” (1990) will be used to inform our discussions.

Texts: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Norton Critical Ed.), Crime and Punishment, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (Vintage), The Adolescent, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (Vintage); Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Short Fiction (Norton Critical Ed.), Anna Karenina trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (Penguin).

7768 Literature of the Holocaust/Mr. Sundquist/T, Th 2-4:45
The course will focus on reactions to, and representations of, the Holocaust in literature. In moving from the initial response of eyewitness testimony, through the emergence of fiction as one means to test the adequacy of historical accounts and memoirs, and on to more recent reflections on the problem of adequately “remembering” the event, we will consider how the Nazi genocide has entered into world consciousness. Why has the Holocaust assumed so significant a role in contemporary life that there are entire genres of literature and film devoted to it? What does it mean to have an artistic or aesthetic response to such an event? What role might literature play in helping us to understand the Holocaust and making us vigilant about new forms of genocide? Course requirements will be two short papers, a class presentation, and a brief reading exam.

Texts: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Bantam); Elie Wiesel, Night (Hill and Wang); Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone); Charlotte Delbo, "None of Us Will Return" in Auschwitz and After (Yale); Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin); Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky (Yale); W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Modern Library); selections from A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Behrman).