Course Listings

Group I (Writing and the Teaching of Writing)

7000a Poetry Writing/Mr. Huddle/T, Th 2-4:45
In this course, we'll attempt to be unusually productive. We'll look for assignments that will lead us into composing drafts of poems, we'll make contracts to write poems on specific topics and in specific forms, and we'll read and discuss a great deal of poetry in class. As much as possible, we'll attempt to save our detailed criticism for conferences and written exchanges. We'll look for some unconventional methods of encouraging each other to make poems that matter.

Texts: Marie Howe, What the Living Do: Poems (Norton); Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel: Poems (Graywolf); The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Sue Ellen Thompson (Autumn House); Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Knopf); Steve Scafidi, For Love of Common Words (LSU); Dorianne Laux, Smoke (BOA); J. Allyn Rosser, Foiled Again (Ivan R. Dee).

7000b Poetry Writing/Mr. Muldoon/M, W 2-4:45
A workshop devoted to close readings of poems by the participants, the course will be augmented by readings of, and formal assignments based on, a wide range of contemporary poets from Ashbery to Ali, Dickey to Dove, Larkin to Levertov, Olson to Oliver. Participants will be expected to have a firm grasp of poetic terms and of prosody and to be able and willing to discuss poetry with acumen and aplomb. Though the workshop will be at the heart of the course, two conferences will also be scheduled with each poet.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair; The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton); Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge).

7005a Fiction Writing/Ms. Tudish/M, W 2-4:45
This workshop will focus on close reading and discussion of student work, as well as the stories of published authors. We will practice the craft of fiction through short exercises that help to increase our awareness of such matters as narrative voice, story time, point of view, language, and character. Exploring the work of notable writers, from classic to contemporary, we will encounter a variety of voices, themes, and subjects—from the intensely personal to the political, from the realistic to the fantastic. And we will draft and revise original stories, discovering along the way our own particular voices and fictional worlds.

Texts: David Huddle, The Writing Habit (New England); Forty Stories: A Portable Anthology, 3rd ed., ed. Beverly Lawn (Bedford/St. Martin’s).

7005b Fiction Writing/Mr. Strong/M, W 2-4:45
This workshop will provide a forum for reading aloud and constructively criticizing each other's work with the goal of creating rounded life on the page in language natural to the writer. There will be deadlines, but the sole continuing assignment will be to write literary fiction: fragments, first drafts, false starts, longer works-in-progress, completed pieces—all will be acceptable and expected. We will read some essays on writing, but the focus, in class and conferences, will remain on the stories that only you can tell.

Texts: A packet of readings will be available in Vermont.

7006 Nonfiction Writing/Ms. Tudish/T, Th 2-4:45
In this introduction to literary nonfiction (also called narrative, or creative, nonfiction), we will read and discuss the work of published writers representing a range of nonfiction writing, including personal essays, memoir, and journalism. The main text for the class, however, will be the student writing discussed in the workshops. Each student will write three essays over the term, progressing from a personal essay to more complex assignments involving interviews and research. We will also write short, in-class exercises designed to hone writing skills and inspire new work.

Text: Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, ed. Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume).

7018 Playwriting/Mr. Clubb/M, W 2-4:45
This course concerns itself with the many ways we express ourselves through dramatic form. An initial consideration of the resources at hand will give way to regular discussions of established structures and techniques. Members of the class are asked to write a scene for each class meeting. Throughout the course we will be searching for new forms, new ways of ordering experience, new ways of putting our own imaginations in front of us.

7103 Evolving Forms of Literacy: Writing and Digital Media/Ms. Goswami, with Mr. Sax/M-F 11:15-12:15
In this workshop we will reflect on the forms writing takes in
digital environments, on the shifting relation of writing to image and page to screen, and on our own evolving literacy in the context of acquiring technical skills and participating in rapidly shifting writing communities. Working in small production teams led by experienced documentary filmmakers, class members will be introduced to an array of tools and techniques as they direct, shoot, edit, and screen a documentary short. Workshops will focus on social networking, digital storytelling, using wikis, blogging, and other digital practices that feature writing. Requirements include participating actively in workshops and documentary production, contributing regularly to an online journal, and presenting a multimodal essay (writing and image) on some aspect of the class theme, including but not limited to teaching writing and digital media. The course Web site will provide links to reading materials and media resources. Participants will be asked to commit additional hours to the course beyond the scheduled meeting time during the week of documentary production. No technology experience is required; equipment will be provided by Bread Loaf. Students who have previously taken "New Media and the Teaching of Writing" are welcome.

Texts: Robert Coles, Doing Documentary Work (Oxford); Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (Routledge); Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham (MIT); Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh).

7106 The Graphic Novel: Word, Image, Sound, Silence/Ms. Lunsford/M-F 11:15-12:15
This class will begin by addressing the transformations from "funnies" to "comics" to "graphic novels," asking how the definitions and representations of this genre have changed over the last century and examining the current controversy over the status of the graphic novel. We will also read/view parts or all of a number of graphic novels by artists such as Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Joann Sfar, Brian Selznick, Mat Johnson, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and Gilbert Hernandez. Each participant will carry out two major assignments: first, a research project that might, for example, examine the work of one graphic novelist; analyze a sub-genre of the graphic novel; trace the development of one theme in a number of graphic novels; analyze the role of concepts such as gender, race, sexuality, and/or class in one or more graphic novels; explore the relationship between verbal and visual texts in a set of graphic novels; or examine the transformation of graphic novel into film. The second assignment calls for each participant to create a set of materials (that could include assignments, classroom activities, unit plans, or BreadNet exchanges) for use in a class you will be teaching next year.

Texts: Gene Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second); Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly); Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis I (Pantheon); Art Spiegelman, Maus (Pantheon); Joe Sacco, Safe Area/Goražde (Fantagraphics); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Mariner); Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Jonathan Cape); Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Harper); Andrea Lunsford, The Everyday Writer, 4th ed. (Bedford/St. Martins).

7107 The Language Wars/Ms. Lunsford/M-F 10-11:00
While the United States was founded on principles of linguistic plurality (as every five-cent piece proclaims, “e pluribus unum”), the English language has long held dominance in the U.S. and, eventually, most power came to be associated with one particular form of English, often referred to as “standard” English, the most formal form of which is academic discourse. This seminar will examine the long struggle to share the wealth of linguistic power and to craft more inclusive theories of language use, asking how crucial questions of gender, race, and class have both shaped and responded to the “language wars” of recent decades. After surveying the effects of language loss throughout the world and the early struggles to legitimate vernacular languages (as opposed to Latin or Greek), we will consider more contemporary skirmishes around issues of English Only, Ebonics, and, especially, attempts to provide viable alternatives to traditional essay writing. In the case of academic essays, we will attempt to define a range of appropriate practices and articulate the characteristics they share. Along the way, we will consider powerful varieties of English at work in contemporary fiction and film as well as craft classroom activities designed to engage students in a wide range of writing practices. Readings will include the texts below as well as a series of articles I will provide.

Texts: David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge); John Baugh, Beyond Ebonics (Oxford); Andrea Lunsford, The Everyday Writer, 4th ed. (Bedford/St. Martins); David Crystal, The Fight for English (Oxford); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (Aunt Lute); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Mariner); Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown); Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverside).

7182 Describing the Imagination/Mr. Armstrong/M-F 8:45-9:45
In this collaborative workshop we examine the growth of imagination from infancy to adulthood. Our focus is on the creative work of children and young adults: their writing, art, music, dance, drama, photography, and film. We observe, describe, and interpret creative work in a variety of ways, constructing a model of the imagination at different moments of development. We study accounts of the imagination by writers, artists, critics, and philosophers. We examine the place of imagination in education and the relationship between imagination and assessment. We consider how to document imaginative achievement and how to promote and sustain imaginative work in school and beyond. Class members are expected to bring with them examples of the creative work of their students, or of their own children. Of particular interest is work that combines different art forms. We keep a class journal in which we document our own imaginative journey day by day. Class members are expected to contribute regularly to the journal, to write notes on class discussions, and to conduct their own inquiry into some aspect of the class theme.

Texts: Vivian Paley, Wally’s Stories (Harvard); Project Zero and Reggio Children, Making Learning Visible (Project Zero, Harvard); Reggio Children, Shoe and Meter (buy through http://learningma.accountsupport.com/store/); Sam Swope, I Am a Pencil (Owl); Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Vintage); John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Penguin); John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Jon Mee (Oxford); Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (Faber and Faber).

Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)

7203 The Subject of Romance/Ms. Wells/M, W 2-4:45
This course will explore the emergence of the genre of romance, ranging from one of the earliest Arthurian romances, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, to the culmination of the genre in Spenser’s magisterial The Faerie Queene. Since all the texts we will read draw on Arthurian material we will have the opportunity to consider the interdependence of romance and Arthurian myth, focusing in particular on the use of the quest narrative as a means to explore changing notions of subjectivity. How do these texts represent the subjects of these quests? How does the representation of interiority change from Chrétien to Spenser, or even within a particular text like Gawain and the Green Knight? As we consider the representation of chivalric masculinity we will also necessarily explore these texts’ complex engagement with gender and sexuality. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale places an Arthurian quest in the mouth of a noisily controversial “feminine” figure: Why? Why does the “heroic” male knight in her story turn out to be a rapist? And how should we read Chaucer’s answer to the proto-Freudian question he asks in this tale: “What do women most desire?” Spenser’s creation of a female knight, Britomart, in the third book of the Faerie Queene, will allow us to explore fully the complexity not only of this early modern construction of “female” subjectivity but also of its relation to the poet’s patron, Elizabeth I.

Texts: Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, trans. Burton Raffel (Yale); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. James Winny (Broadview); Chaucer, The Wife of Bath (Bedford/St. Martin's); Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser’s Poetry (Norton Critical Ed.).

7215 The King James Bible/Mr. Shoulson/M-F 10-11:00
It is impossible to overestimate the influence the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I has had over Anglophone culture. A masterpiece of style and rhetoric, the KJV or Authorized Version has, since its publication in 1611, done more to shape English language and literature than anything other than, perhaps, the works of Shakespeare. This course has two primary aims. First, we will examine the historical context of this translation and the process of its execution, considering the translators’ claim that their aim was not to make a wholly new translation, but rather to make “out of many good ones, one principal good one.” We will read documents in the early history and theories of translation, as well as the lively disputes prompted by the Reformation concerning the status of the biblical text and need for greater access and readability. Second, we will consider the KJV as a work of literature, reading it closely for its approach to style, narrative, and poetry. Extensive selections from the Old Testament and New Testament will provide us with the opportunity to think about literary aspects of the Bible and how diverse elements of theme and structure found expression in the “noblest monument of English prose.” (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: The Bible: King James Version with the Apocrypha, ed. David Norton (Penguin). Other editions of the King James Bible will serve, but please be sure they offer the original translation and not a modern revision or “The New King James Bible.” Students should also read Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (Harper Perennial) before the summer. Most of our supplementary material will come in the form of photocopies or files accessible online.

7246 Shakespeare, Nature, and the Human/Mr. Watson/M-W 2-4:45
This course will emphasize the literary interpretation of Shakespearean drama at the graduate level, with special attention to the way the plays analyze the human condition and the human relationship to the natural world. The works most likely to be discussed are: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Hamlet, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest. Probably we will not be able to cover two plays satisfactorily each week, so the list will be narrowed in consultation with the enrolled students. Students will be expected to read carefully the plays and a few works of criticism, contribute regularly to discussion, and write two papers—the first early in the course, and the second toward the end—on one of the plays or on a theme that illuminates several.

Texts: The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin) or another high-quality edition of the plays, either in a single volume or as individual works. Recommended: Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Bedford/St. Martin's).

7263 Shakespeare and Middleton/Mr. Cadden/M-F 10-11:00
Taking our cue from this summer’s Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, this course will focus on related plays by two of the greatest playwrights of Renaissance England. Although William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton shared a profession, a cultural milieu, and, occasionally, a company of actors, they are very different writers with very different visions. You’ve heard of the former, but perhaps not of the latter—a fact we’ll want to discuss. We will deploy the services of the Acting Ensemble to investigate both playwrights, with the hope that studying them in relation to one another will help us determine the identity and strengths of each. Required attendance at rehearsals of The Changeling will give students the opportunity to see just how contemporary theater practitioners lift this masterpiece of Renaissance drama from the page to the stage.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Othello (all Oxford World Classics); Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Women Beware Women; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling; Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (all Methuen/New Mermaids).

7275 Pulp Fictions: Jacobean Tragedy and American Film Noir/Mr. Cadden/T, Th 2-4:45
This summer’s Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble production of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s Renaissance classic The Changeling offers an occasion to think about two genres distant in time from one another but sharing a dark and violent imaginative space: Jacobean tragedy and classic American film noir. Looking at plays staged between 1603 and 1630 and movies produced between 1944 and 1955, we’ll focus on the alienated heroes, witty murderers, femmes fatales and other sexual outlaws they have in common, as well as their shared melancholia, louche locales, and moral ambiguities. The first half of the course we’ll concentrate on the plays, both as plays and within their historical contexts, with required attendance at some of the rehearsals of The Changeling; the second half, we’ll turn to the films, both as films and within contexts that might at first glance seem wildly different from that of the plays. But as in a noir film, nothing is what it seems! Students should come to the first class prepared to discuss John Marston’s The Malcontent. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: John Marston, The Malcontent; Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil; Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling; John Ford, Tis Pity She’s a Whore (all Methuen/New Mermaids). Films: Double Indemnity, Detour, Gilda, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly (all available on DVD).

7280 Metaphysical and Cavalier: Poetics and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England/Mr. Watson/T, Th 2-4:45
This course will focus primarily on the canonical figures of earlier seventeenth-century lyric poetry—Donne, Herbert, Jonson, and Marvell—with frequent reference to the works of less famous contemporaries such as Carew and Traherne (suggestions from members of the seminar will be welcome). Through careful reading and open discussion, we will attempt to understand not only what these poems say—often no small task—but also their place in the configurations of Jacobean and Caroline society. What tensions and changes in that culture, as well as in the lives of the poets, might these works have helped to negotiate? How and why did the Metaphysical and Cavalier modes emerge in a period of intense theological and political struggle, and what is the interplay of form, content, and meaning? What evidence do these poems offer about the personal psychology, sexual politics, ecological attitudes, and social competitions of the period? What kind of work are they doing, and how well are they doing it? What kinds of work should we do on them now? Students will be expected to serve as resources on key historical topics, to be aware of relevant literary criticism (including writing one book review), and to write brief response papers and a substantial final paper. Most important, students must come to each class prepared to raise questions of all sizes, and participate in an honest, energetic, courteous, and informed discussion of the assigned poems and their contexts.

Text: Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603-1660, ed. J. P. Rumrich and G. Chaplin (Norton).

7295 Paradise Lost and the Question of Context/Mr. Shoulson/M-F 11:15-12:15
This course undertakes an examination of John Milton’s epic in light of the problem of contextualization. A thorough appreciation of any literary text surely depends on some understanding of its context. In the case of Paradise Lost, the necessity of context(s) becomes especially acute. Should we read the poem in light of its biblical antecedents and/or its literary precursors? What bearing do the religious and theological controversies in which its author was embroiled have on Paradise Lost? How does a better understanding of the English Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration supplement a reading of the epic? How should we situate the epic with respect to the rest of Milton’s poetic corpus? Our entire summer will be devoted to a careful reading of Milton’s long epic in relation to its various contexts. Alongside each book of the epic we shall read texts that may offer greater insight into elements of the poem: portions of the Bible, selections from classical and Renaissance literature, theological and religious disputes between Milton and his contemporaries, polemics concerning the monarchy, prelacy and divorce, and perhaps some surprises.

Texts: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (Random House). Most of our supplementary material will come in the form of photocopies or files accessible online. Students will benefit considerably from reading Paradise Lost once through before the summer.

Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)

7300 The Comedy of Desire in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature/Mr. Noggle/M-F 11:15-12:15
In this course, we’ll discuss plays and other texts of the Restoration and eighteenth century that depict the funny ways in which desire is elicited and satisfied, often through expressly artificial means and modes of expression, verbal play, role-playing, disguise, fashion, gossip, insincerity, parody, imitation, and performance. The permutations and volatility of such desire, we will find, throw the supposed naturalness of lust, gender roles, heterosexuality, and sincere affection into question. We’ll focus on the comedies that establish the Restoration as a distinctive moment in English literary comedy, including The Man of Mode by George Etherege, The Country Wife by William Wycherley, The Rover by Aphra Behn, Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, The Relapse by John Vanbrugh, and The Way of the World by William Congreve, as well as other seventeenth-century texts, including poems by Rochester and prose by Hobbes and Collier. We’ll also read some eighteenth-century plays that extend and transform the Restoration comic mode, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and some short fiction by Eliza Haywood and Laurence Sterne. Alongside these literary texts, we’ll consider theories of desire by Plato, Freud, Jacques Lacan, René Girard, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler.

Texts: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, ed. Scott McMillin (Norton Critical Ed.); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Penguin); a selection of photocopies and pdf files will be available at Bread Loaf.

7307b The Rise of the Novel/Mr. Noggle/M-F 10-11:00
This course will survey some landmarks of English prose fiction from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our reading list will emphasize the diversity of themes, narrative techniques, pretenses, and readers’ appetites that helped the novel rise to its preeminence as a literary form in English, but a few motives will link together the fictions we read, including their interest in testing gender roles, depicting intense (often sexual) feelings, and drawing class boundaries. We’ll begin with Aphra Behn’s romance of slavery in the New World, Oroonoko, then read Daniel Defoe’s scandalous tale of a capitalist-prostitute, The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana). At the center of the course will stand a parody of the class and gender anxieties that occupy the novel’s burgeoning readership, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews; and a parody of fiction-writing itself, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. We’ll conclude with Frances Burney’s comedy of class and manners, Evelina, and a sample of the Gothic mode in fiction, The Monk by Matthew Lewis.

Texts: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works (Penguin); Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Penguin); Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford World Classics); Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Penguin); Frances Burney, Evelina (Oxford World Classics); Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford World Classics).

7362 Things, Artefacts and Art Objects in the Nineteenth-Century Novel/Ms. Armstrong/M-F 10-11:00
The nineteenth-century novel is crowded with things and humanly made artefacts. The aim of the course is to explore this universe of things in different texts, considering the peculiar ways in which each writer represents things and the many functions of objects in narrative. In particular we will be interested in the way the world of things is conjured through language. We will look at illustrated catalogues and handbooks to the Exhibition of 1851, the moment of a nascent commodity culture. Freud, Marx, Walter Benjamin, and phenomenologists such as Hannah Arendt all had different theories of the object. We will engage in close readings of the novels listed below, along with the early chapters of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (who initiated an obsession with things). Students will keep a learning journal and submit two pieces of written work, a short and a long essay, the latter of which will form the basis of assessment along with contributions to class discussion. Please bring an object with you on the first day of class and be prepared to talk about it.

Texts: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Henry James, The Golden Bowl (all in Penguin). Some short stories by Thomas Hardy and others will be handed out during the course.

7430 Virginia Woolf and the Art of Bloomsbury/Ms. Green-Lewis/T, Th 2-4:45
In 1904, Virginia Woolf and her three siblings took up residence in the then unfashionable area of Bloomsbury, London. No one defining set of ideas or politics or aesthetic beliefs can sum up the intellectual and creative life that began there, although G.E. Moore comes close with his assertion that "personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest . . . goods that we can imagine." This course will explore Woolf’s four experimental novels in light of the variety of form, style, and subject matter produced by assorted members of the Bloomsbury circle, and will make "personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments" the focus (and perhaps consequence!) of our study. There will be astonishing amounts of secondary reading assigned, and students will also be asked to spend a lot of time looking at paintings by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry. To safeguard pleasure and sanity, therefore, please read the four assigned novels before the session begins.

Texts: All novels are published by HBJ/Harvest (and all are in paper); please note edition dates: Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1950); Mrs. Dalloway (1990); To the Lighthouse (1989); The Waves (1950); A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago); Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury (Princeton); The Bloomsbury Group, ed. S.P. Rosenbaum, rev. ed. (Toronto); Clive Bell, Art (Dodo); Roger Fry, Vision and Design (out of print; available on reserve, but please purchase used copy if you can).

7437 Trauma and the Literature of Survival/Ms. Sokoloff/11:15-12:15
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear or read about the struggles of American soldiers returning home from Iraq. This current obsession with veterans and their readjustment to civilian life has reawakened an interest in homecomings and the dynamics of survival that has preoccupied artists and writers since ancient Greece. In this course we will examine the relationship between trauma and representation by examining the archetypal figure of survival, the returned soldier. Our study begins with the First World War, when the term “shell shock” was coined, and extends to more recent times when the broken-down World War I soldier and his descendants continue to animate the literary imagination. In his own historical context, the shell-shocked soldier unraveled traditional notions of war, social class, manliness, and mental illness. As a literary figure, he becomes a site for contesting fundamental assumptions about home, memory, ordinary experience, and literary representation itself. Through supplementary materials and student research reports, the course will provide opportunities for us to juxtapose historical/medical representations of shell-shocked soldiers with poetic/literary ones and to probe the similarities among the literatures of various wars. While we will focus primarily on World War I, we will necessarily find echoes of “shell shock” in the PTSD syndromes of today. Please read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory before the session begins. We will also draw heavily on Jonathan Shay’s two books, Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America, throughout the summer, and you should read them before you arrive at Bread Loaf. Finally, Regeneration is the first of a trilogy and The Road Back is the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front. It will be helpful to read these series of books in their entirety.

Texts: Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Norton); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Broadway); Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back (Ballantine); Pat Barker, Regeneration (Penguin); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (Random House); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt); Toni Morrison, Sula (Vintage); Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Vintage).

7439 The Poetry of W.B. Yeats/Mr. Luftig/M, W 2-4:45
Yeats was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and also one of those most deeply engaged in the political and cultural practicalities of his time. We’ll read all of his “lyrical” poems and a few selections from his prose and drama, with a focus on the consequences of Yeats’s work for his culture and for poets who have followed him. No particular prior knowledge about Yeats, Ireland, or poetry is necessary, but if you’re going to enroll you should want to read a lot of Yeats’s poems, a bit about Ireland, and a few examples of related poems by other people. For the final project, each student will assemble a body of materials relating to a single poem by Yeats, with an eye towards using the poem to produce a particular effect, whether in a classroom, a political debate, a public service setting, or some other situation in which much is at stake. For the first class meeting, please find and read Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” and also read Yeats’s “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” and all of Richard Killeen’s brief and handy book.

Texts (to be consulted simultaneously rather than consecutively): Richard Killeen, A Short History of Ireland (Gill & Macmillan); William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard Finneran (Simon & Schuster/Scribner); Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed. James Pethica (Norton Critical Ed.). Note: We will make much use of Norman Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats, now out of print; find and bring a used copy if you can.

7452 The Age of Hitchcock/Mr. Freedman/T, Th 2-4:45
In this course, we'll look at some of the most famous films of Alfred Hitchcock—and some contemporary revisions of them—not only as vivid and entertaining works in their own right, but as foundational documents in the psychic and social work accomplished by twentieth-century entertainment industries at large. Foregrounding ostensibly "perverse" forms of sexuality, blurring the lines between these psycho-sexual inclinations and the "normal," raising questions about the nature of spectatorship (cinematic and otherwise) and surveillance alike, placing entertainment in a larger context of social practices and perversities, Hitchcock's films have served as objects of imaginative and critical response that has extended the ways we think not only about film as film, but the cultural and historical institutions that shaped the film industry and that the industry has shaped in turn. Hitchcock films to be viewed include: The Lodger, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Notorious, Spellbound, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest; we'll also consider the Wachowski brothers' Bound, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, and Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Windows as providing consequential variations on Hitchcock's themes. I'll ask students to read some essays in the theory of film and visuality at large; also some classic essays on Hitchcock. But the main work of the course will be viewing and responding in an adult and critical manner to the films themselves. To that end, students will be required to keep a viewing journal, as well as to write two papers over the course of the summer.

Texts: A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Blackwell). There will also be some essays and excerpts from other books on reserve at the library. Students who are curious may want to purchase and read (or read in) François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon & Schuster); Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius (Da Capo); Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (Routledge); and Hitchcock's America, ed. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (Oxford) before the summer begins. Although we will have regular screenings during the summer, students should see as many of the films listed above as possible during the year so as to prepare for the focused, disciplined viewing that will be an important component of the course.

Group IV (American Literature)

7275 Pulp Fictions: Jacobean Tragedy and American Film Noir/Mr. Cadden/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 IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.

7515 Identities in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction/Mr. Nash/M-F 11:15-12:15
This course turns on the fundamental questions of how nineteenth-century writers both chronicle and help create the processes by which Americans articulate various types of identity, from the personal to the communal to the national. In pursuit of some answers, we will read the following primary texts in the order listed below.

Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “Fate,” and “Experience” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Random House); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Modern Library); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton); selected poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Copies of the Whitman and Dickinson poems will be part of a substantial packet of secondary readings to be assigned in Vermont. Students are strongly encouraged to acquire a working knowledge of nineteenth-century American history prior to the start of the course; I recommend Daniel Walker Howe's What God Hath Wrought (Oxford), James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford), and Rebecca Edwards's New Spirits: America in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (Oxford) as starting points.

7584 African American Poets of the Modern Era/Mr. Stepto/M-F 10-11:00
This course principally studies eight African American poets: Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Analysis of their work will suggest how African American poets have (1) debated the uses and risks of simulating folk speech in written art; (2) practiced forms such as the ode, sonnet, ballad, and narrative poem; (3) based a written art on vernacular forms and performance models such as blues forms and sermonic performances; (4) aligned themselves with artistic, cultural, and social movements and, in so doing, ventured definitions of the African American practices of modernism. Our discussions will engage poems by other modernist poets and converse with music and visual art by other American and African American modernists. To give a few examples: We will discuss T.S. Eliot and Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Philip Levine, Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and a variety of African American Civil War/Civil Rights poems, while taking a serious look at the art of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden and the music of masters from Sousa to Lady Day to Coltrane. I will bring to Vermont a variety of materials including editions of verse, examples of book ornamentation and illustration, photographs, and correspondence. Students are encouraged to bring to the class any materials, literary, visual, or musical, that they feel engage the poems we are committed to study. Students will be expected to complete two writing assignments and to contribute regularly to the class journal kept in the library. Students will also participate in one or more presentation groups. Reading ahead before the summer term is strongly advised.

Texts: We will work principally with an anthology, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, ed. Michael Harper and Anthony Walton (Vintage). Also required: Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Third World); Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon); Robert Hayden, Collected Poems (Liveright); James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones (Penguin); Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan/New England). There will be additional materials in photocopy form.

7591b William Faulkner/Ms. Wicke/M-F 11:15-12:15
This course concentrates solely on the work of William Faulkner, focusing on his major novels, key stories, and several essays, letters, and autobiographical sketches. Rather than providing a survey of Faulkner's writing alone, we will use the selections to be able to explore crucial critical perspectives and investigate fresh vantage points that affect the understanding of Faulkner's importance today. Among the questions this reading will allow us to pose are Faulkner's role in modernism; Faulkner as a Southern writer in what is sometimes termed "the global South"; Faulknerian regionalism and international modernism, especially in relation to James Joyce; Faulkner and race; memory and trauma in Faulkner's haunted histories; Faulkner and the gothic; gender and desire in Faulkner's language; Faulkner and cartography, mapping, and space; print culture, mass media, and the divide between speech and writing in Faulkner; Faulkner's folk culture, mythography, and ties to oral culture; Faulkner's literary "world" and alternative modernity. We will watch two films made from Faulkner's work: "The Tarnished Angels" (1957), directed by Douglas Sirk and based on Pylon (1935), along with "The Long Hot Summer," an adaptation of Faulkner's 1940 The Hamlet. An exceptional Web site will give us access to Faulkner's handwritten manuscript copies along with memorabilia that plays a large part in his highly material fiction-making, and allow a virtual "tour" of his beloved Rowan Oak, a self-created haunted house. We will draw connections to contemporary literature of the global South that stems from Faulkner, in particular the writing of Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, and trace the critical paths that emanate from Faulkner to such critical writing as that of the Caribbean theorists Edouard Glissant and Ferdinand Retamar.

Texts: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); Sanctuary (1931); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Go Down, Moses (1942) (all Vintage); short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” will be available at Bread Loaf in photocopied form. I will also assign some brief personal papers and essays, including Faulkner's "Nobel Prize Award Speech" of 1949, to be read at Bread Loaf; these will be available online in the William Faulkner Collection site of the University of Virginia's Small Collection.

7625 Religion and the Twentieth-Century American Novel/Ms. Hungerford/M-F 8:45-9:45
Beginning with Harold Frederic’s realist masterpiece The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and ending with the apocalyptic fiction of Cormac McCarthy (The Road [2006]), we will study a century’s worth of American novels for which religion is central to theme and narrative form. Our questions will include: How is literature imagined in religious terms? How does American religious history inflect the development of the American novel in the twentieth century? How is the Bible folded into fiction? How does Catholic and Jewish thought emerge in Protestant America? How is religious life imagined in the context of American pluralism? The course requires one short paper, one longer paper, and student presentations. The seminar will include brief introductions to a few authors not on the syllabus (Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo) to broaden the context and as a resource for further study.

Texts: Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination (Penguin); William Faulkner, Light in August (Vintage); James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (Dial); Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (Penguin); J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Back Bay); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (HarperPerennial); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Picador); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Vintage). A course reader including William James, Philip Roth, material from the Baldwin archive at Yale, and other prose and criticism will be required in Vermont. Please read Theron Ware and as much as possible of Light in August before you arrive.

7638 Twentieth-Century African American Narrative/Mr. Nash/M-W 8:45-9:45
This course provides an aesthetic/cultural-historical examination of representative twentieth-century African American narratives. We will discuss developments in African American literary culture such as the Harlem Renaissance, social realism, universalism, and the Black Arts Movement. We will supplement our reading of fiction with considerations of visual art, music, and film.

Texts: James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (Vintage); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Rutgers); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (HarperPerennial); Richard Wright, Native Son (HarperPerennial); Ann Petry, The Street (Mariner); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Vintage); James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (Dell); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Penguin); Winston Napier, African American Literary Theory (NYU). Students are strongly encouraged to acquire a working knowledge of African American history prior to the start of the course; I recommend Darlene Clark Hine’s The African American Odyssey (Prentice Hall, 3rd ed., 2005).

7650a The Contemporary American Short Story/Mr. Huddle/M-F 8:45-9:45
Among the considerations of this discussion-oriented class will be strengths and weaknesses of stories, collections, and authors from 1985 to the present. Along with speculating about what contemporary fiction can tell us about contemporary culture, we will address specific curriculum issues as they apply to the contemporary short story and the general topic of literary evaluation. Students will be asked to give brief class presentations.

Texts: Tobias Wolff, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries); Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (Vintage Contemporaries); Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son (either HarperPerennial or the new Picador ed.); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Vintage); Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (HarperPerennial); Greg Bottoms, Fight Scenes (Counterpoint); Annie Proulx, Fine Just the Way It Is (Scribner); Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad); Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

7665 History and Memory/Ms. Maddox/M-F 10-11:00
In this course we will explore the seemingly paradoxical proposition that history must be turned into fiction before it can be considered true. We will explore the ways in which modern and contemporary American writers have approached the problem of representing both personal and communal histories, especially disruptive histories, in various kinds of texts. We will consider these and similar questions: Why is it necessary to represent history, and why is that representation so problematic? What does it mean to say that history has to be authored? What is the relationship between historical perspective and narrative form? How useful is the concept of cultural memory in approaching literary texts?

Texts: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Broadway); William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage); Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Vintage); Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (Penguin); W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (New Directions); E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Random House); Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Picador). There will be a few additional secondary readings provided at Bread Loaf.

7691 Realism and the Documentary Impulse/Ms. Blair/M-F 10-11:00
The invention of photography in 1839 opened radically new possibilities for documenting everyday as well as hidden and distant realities. Yet even as documentation became a central project of modernity, those realities—social and scientific, personal and collective—seemed less knowable, more mysterious, and the problem of the truth of visual and narrative representations to contemporary life has remained a matter of debate. This course will consider a number of modern figures who engage histories of documentary expression so as to borrow, contest, or rethink its effects. It is not a course in the history of documentary photography or film (although both will figure in our work). Rather, it aims to explore certain persistent questions animating broader responses to modernity: What kind of truth or knowledge does direct observation produce; what kind of power or agency does it involve? To what degree is realism a visual project, or one founded on visual technologies? What are the uses of realist or documentary modes in changing social contexts? In addition to the texts below, we’ll consider shorter writings by Émile Zola, Zitkala-Sa, and Ralph Ellison; such films as Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962); and the work of an array of photographers (including Fox Talbot, Timothy O’Sullivan, Félice Beato, Edward Curtis, Walker Evans, Keydou Sëita, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Liu Zheng), with help from such theorists as Roland Barthes and Sergei Eisenstein. Requirements include class presentations, two short response essays and a longer essay. Many of our resources, including shorter texts, will be available on our online BreadNet conference; depending on availability of visual materials, readings may be subject to change. Please note: This class presumes no previous experience with visual materials, although those with such experience are welcome. Students who have previously taken "Through a Glass Darkly" are also welcome. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group IV or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (out of print, but available online at http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html); Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices (Basic); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Mariner); William S. Burroughs, Junky (Penguin); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (Harper); W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (New Directions); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Broadway).

Group V (World Literature)

7215 The King James Bible/Mr. Shoulson/M-F 10-11:00

See description under Group II offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.

7691 Realism and the Documentary Impulse/Ms. Blair/M-F 10-11:00
See description under Group IV offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group IV or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.

7750 War and Peace/Mr. Armstrong/M-F 11:15-12:15
This course is devoted to a single work, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which we will read in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The focus of the class will be on the close reading of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Our interpretations of the text will be supported by an examination of the historical and cultural context in which Tolstoy wrote. We will consider the place of the novel in Tolstoy’s developing oeuvre, its critical reception during the century and a half since its first publication, its contemporary significance, and the challenge it presents to an understanding of narrative and the relationship of fiction to history and philosophy. A daily class journal will record our critical responses as we read, and class members will select some aspect of the novel to explore in a final long essay. It is important to have read the whole novel before the class begins.

Texts: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (Vintage); Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Picador). A comprehensive collection of relevant literature will be held on reserve in the library.

7780 The Twentieth-Century Global Novel/Ms. Wicke/T, Th 2-4:45
This course emphasizes and explores a genre that we will call the “global novel.” While there is significant overlap of this category both with postcolonial writing of the second half of the twentieth century through the twenty-first and with world English literature of the past fifty years, not all the global novels we will read emerge from postcolonial situations, nor will they all have been written originally in English, although everything will be read in English translation. The lineage of the global novel comes from those works—whether British, American, European, or non-Western—that deliberately set their narratives in motion within a global frame, even if the story unfolds locally, to take account of such questions as global ethics, experiences of migration and travel, issues of identity and human rights, and with a focus on memory, mourning, and the retrieval of a shared humanity after trauma accomplished through the art of the novel. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the genre of the novel was the “most expansive, most inclusive, and most revolutionary” of all genres, including as it did a “heteroglossic” or many-tongued voicing of the human. This course investigates a second “rise of the novel” over the recent half century and into the present day, a rise it will track as the rebirth of the global novel. Georg Lukacs famously claimed that the nineteenth-century novel expressed the “transcendental homelessness” of humanity; the global novel seeks to address this in a new way by giving voice to a literature at home in the wide, shared world.

Texts: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Penguin Classics Deluxe ed.); Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (Vintage); Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Penguin); Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin); Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Toni Morrison, A Mercy (wait for paperback, which should be available by summer 2009).

7790 Varieties of Modern Indian Prose/Ms. Sabin/T, Th 2-4:45
Novels, memoirs, and nonfiction reportage by Indian authors have become best sellers and prize-winning favorites of readers outside as well as within the Indian subcontinent. In this course, we will read some of these contemporary writers, while also looking back to earlier examples of what now begins to make up a tradition of modern Indian literature in English. We will also read selected short texts translated from Indian vernaculars both because they are good and because they introduce further perspectives on the diversity of modern Indian literature and on controversial questions about modernity itself. What is “authentically” Indian? To what extent does Rushdie’s phrase “handcuffed to history” characterize the vision of these writers? What do they embrace as valuably new? What features of tradition retain value? To whom? Why? What roles do women play in this literature—as authors and as figures within it? The course will include consideration of religious, historical, and political contexts, but the focus will be on the literary texts themselves, plus a few films. Some short selections will be distributed in photocopy during the session. Reading of the longer texts in advance is strongly advised—crucial in the case of Midnight's Children and Maximum City.

Texts: The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (Vintage); R.K. Narayan, The Guide (Penguin); Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin); Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines (Mariner); Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (Penguin); Truth Tales: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of India, ed. Laura Kalpakian (Feminist); Rohinton Mistry, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories (Vintage); Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Vintage).

Group VI (Theater Arts)

7800 Directing Workshop/Mr. MacVey/M, W 2-4:45
A study of the problems a director faces in selecting material, analyzing a script, and staging a theatrical production. Some consideration will be given to the theater's place in society and the forms it can take. Each student will direct two dramatic pieces for presentation before the class. This class is also a good introduction to the wide spectrum of activities theater includes: script analysis, acting, design, staging, etc. There will be no final exam, but the last class will run until 11 p.m. on the final Tuesday of the session.

Texts: Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Touchstone). Additional articles will be on reserve.