Group I (Writing and the Teaching of Writing)
Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
Group IV (American Literature)
Group V (World Literature)
Group VI (Theater Arts)
SUMMER 2008 COURSES
Group I (Writing and the Teaching of Writing)
7000b Poetry Writing/Mr. Muldoon/T, Th 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).
7000c Poetry Writing/Mr. Huddle/M, W 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 (Norton); Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel (Graywolf); Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Knopf); Ted Kooser, Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon); The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, ed. Sue Ellen Thompson (Autumn House).
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.
7005c Writing Fiction/Ms. Powell/T, Th 2-4:45
Although this workshop involves quite a bit of reading, it is primarily a writing workshop. Each class will be spent examining stories submitted by its members. These stories, fragments, portions of a novel will have been copied by the authors and made available several days prior to each session. Everyone should provide extensive written comments on each submission in addition to giving honest, detailed, and tactfully phrased criticism in class.
Texts: Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 6th ed. (Longman).
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.
7102 New Media and the Teaching of Writing/Ms. Goswami with Mr. Sax/M-F 11:15-12:15
How might teachers of writing support young people in becoming effective, confident, ethical, and literate users and producers of digital media in classrooms and in communities? Focusing on documentary production, we will consider how digital tools provide opportunities to engage students in inquiry, creative expression, collaboration, community action, and critical reflection. We will examine curricula and student-produced media from several youth media organizations, including Appalshop (Kentucky), the Educational Video Center (New York City), Students at the Center (New Orleans), and Youth Radio (Oakland). Working in collaborative production teams and using the Bread Loaf campus as a sample community, course participants will produce documentary projects that they will present to a public audience at the end of the summer session. All participants will gain hands-on experience in shooting digital video; capturing digital still images and audio; editing; and preparing content for the Web. The course Web site will offer electronic links to the syllabus, reading materials, and media resources, and will enable course participants to share narratives and reflections. In a final project for the course, each participant will develop a plan to facilitate a digital exchange of student work with another course participant during the subsequent academic year. No technology experience is required. Equipment will be provided by the Bread Loaf School of English. Participants will be asked to commit additional hours to the course beyond scheduled meeting times in the service of the documentary production process.
Texts: Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds/Possible Worlds (Harvard); Robert Coles, Doing Documentary Work (Oxford); Steven Goodman, Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change (Teacher's College); Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (Penguin); Kathleen Tyner, Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information (Lawrence Erlbaum).
7105 Writing Race, Writing Culture, Writing Identity/Ms. Dixson/M-F 10-11:00
In this course we will examine the ways that people engage in writing about race, culture, and identity. We will explore ways of writing that can also engage us in thinking about how we are raced, cultured, and identified, and also how we race, culture, and identify ourselves. We will use a variety of texts and genres—novels, autobiography, poetry, essays—to frame our work in this course. Students in this course will participate in a variety of speaking and writing events in an effort to think both more broadly and substantively about the nuances of literacy generally and writing specifically. We will spend a significant amount of time thinking about and discussing how these issues can inform and even transform our pedagogy.
Texts: Arnethla Ball and Ted Lardner, African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom (Southern Illinois); The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity, ed. J.L. Carlacio (NCTE); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Plume); M. Kells, V. Balester, V. Villanueva, Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education (Boynton/Cook); Race, Rhetoric, and Composition, ed. Keith Gilyard (Boynton/Cook); What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies, vol. 2), ed. Jabari Mahiri (Peter Lang); photocopied materials available at Bread Loaf.
7110 Writing and Urban Popular Culture/Ms. Dixson/T, Th 2-4:45
This course will draw on multigenre writing that situates writing within the urban context and the experiences of African Americans and Latinos. Students in this course will have opportunities to explore the ways in which urban popular culture can inform and enrich writing and the teaching of writing.
Texts: Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Victor Villanueva (NCTE); Elaine Richardson, African American Literacies (Routledge); Elaine Richardson, Hip Hop Literacies (Routledge); What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies, vol. 2), ed. Jabari Mahiri (Peter Lang).
7172 Storytellers/Mr. Armstrong/M-F 11:15-12:15
This course explores narrative art and thought. We study storytelling as a critical and creative practice that begins in infancy, and we follow its development through childhood into maturity. We reflect on our own narrative practice and examine theories of narrative. We look at historical as well as fictional narratives and investigate the relationship among narrative, truth, and reality. We consider oral and literary traditions, examining stories of diverse genres from diverse cultures. We read stories by children, our own stories, folk tales and fairy tales, contemporary short stories, classic literary tales, writers’ reflections, and theoretical essays. We explore narrative in art and film. We seek to understand the relationships among different kinds of storyteller, different narrative traditions, and different moments in narrative experience. Course members contribute to a class journal, write interpretive essays, and undertake a study of some aspect of narrative of their own choice. Course members are invited to bring with them examples of their own stories and of their students’ or children’s stories.
Texts: Vivian Paley, Wally's Stories (Harvard); Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (Harvest) and Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage); Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (Vintage); Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Pimlico); Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (Harcourt); David Thomson, People of the Sea (Canongate); Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (North Point); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard); Richard Kearney, On Stories (Routledge); Henry James, In the Cage (Hesperus); Thomas Hardy, The Fiddler of the Reels (Penguin); James Joyce, Dubliners (Penguin).
7182 Describing Imagination/Mr. Armstrong/M-F 8:45-9:45
In this workshop we examine the growth of imagination from infancy, through childhood and youth, into adulthood. The focus of inquiry is on the creative works of children and young people: their writing, art, music, dance, and drama. 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 the imagination in education and the relationship between imagination and assessment. We consider how to document and value 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 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 and reflections on class discussions, and to conduct their own inquiry into some aspect of the class theme.
Texts: Project Zero and Reggio Children, Making Learning Visible (Project Zero, Harvard); Reggio Children, Shoe and Meter (Olive); Vivian Paley, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (Chicago); Sam Swope, I Am a Pencil (Owl); 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); Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Harvard); John Dewey, Art as Experience (Perigee).
Group II (English Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7210b Chaucer/Mr. Fyler/M-F 8:45-9:45
This course offers a study of the major poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. We will spend roughly two-thirds of our time on the Canterbury Tales, and the other third on Chaucer’s most extraordinary poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer is primarily a narrative rather than a lyric poet: though the analogy is an imperfect one, the Canterbury Tales is like a collection of short stories, and Troilus like a novel in verse. We will talk about Chaucer’s literary sources and contexts, the interpretation of his poetry, and his treatment of a number of issues, especially gender issues, that are of perennial interest.
Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. R. Green (Dover); Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford).
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 the 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, poetry. Extensive selections from the Old Testament, Apocrypha, 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., intro., and notes by David Norton (Penguin). Students should also read Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperPerennial) before the summer. Most of our supplementary material will come in the form of photocopies or files accessible online.
7252 Shakespearean Choices/Mr. Cadden and Mr. McEleney/T-Th 2-4:45
This course will ask students to investigate Shakespeare as a theater writer by exploring personal choices they might make as actors, directors, and designers in relation to his plays in order to move them from the page to the stage. Shakespeare does not seem to have been greatly interested in a readership; he wanted an audience and wrote the fact of performance into every play. Focusing on Richard III, Twelfth Night (the Acting Ensemble’s summer production), Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale, students will learn how to make individual interpretative choices that are both fully theatrical and fully supported by the Shakespearean text. Everyone in the class must be willing to function in the roles of actor, director and designer—for their own projects and those of their classmates. Students should come to the first class ready to discuss all four plays.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Richard III, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale (all Oxford World's Classics).
7257 Shakespeare and the Mediterranean/Ms. Wofford/M, W 2-4:45
This course will examine Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays in relation to the cultural geography of the period. We will look briefly at Renaissance fictional accounts of the Mediterranean (the tales of Alatiel, Day 2, #7; and Bernabo and Ginevra, Day 2, #9 from Boccaccio’s Decameron); at the relation of romance, tragicomedy, and novella in the sources for Twelfth Night; at pirate narratives and accounts of captivity; at the early Orientalism of the Turkish Tale including the "Captive’s Tale" from Cervantes’ Don Quixote; and at representations of religious and cultural divides between the Christian and the Muslim worlds in Early Modern maps and prints. We will read in the following order: Comedy of Errors (along with Plautus’ Menaechmi), The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. Students will be asked to read on their own either Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1624) or Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Parts 1 and 2.
Texts: William Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors (Signet Classics; includes the Plautus); Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts, Bedford Texts and Contexts Series, ed. M. Lindsay Kaplan (Bedford/St. Martin's); Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, ed. Bruce Smith (Bedford/St. Martin's); Much Ado about Nothing (New Cambridge Shakespeare); Othello, ed. Norman Sanders (New Cambridge Shakespeare; updated ed., 2003); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford World Classics). Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford World Classics); Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (Columbia; includes Massinger’s The Renegado); Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (Columbia). Recommended: Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed., 2001 (Bedford/St. Martin's); Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (either Signet or Penguin).
7260 The Merchant of Venice on the Page and Stage/Mr. MacVey/M, W 2-4:45
In this course we will explore a single great play, The Merchant of Venice. We will spend some time on critical interpretations and on the play's cultural history to help us make decisions about how to stage the work. But our primary focus will be on the text as a blueprint for performance. We will examine its language to be certain we know what is actually being said, to whom it is being spoken, and why the speaker might be saying it. We'll explore the poetry and consider its rhythm, imagery, and structure; we will make use of tools such as scansion to help us fully understand the verse. We will examine every scene from a theatrical point of view, exploring structure, action, events, reversals, and ways of staging that will bring it to life. We will stage the play very simply, script in hand, and present it during the last week of classes. All students in the class will participate in the reading. Students should plan to be on campus through the afternoon of Wednesday, August 6 for the final presentation. (Students who have taken either of Mr. MacVey's courses on The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream should not register for this class.)
Texts: William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Arden); Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Touchstone); selected articles and reviews on reserve at Bread Loaf.
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? 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.
7297 Comedies of Error/Mr. Cadden/M-F 8:45-9:45
Taking a cue from this summer’s Acting Ensemble production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, this course will examine the tradition in which the play participates—the comedy of mistaken identity. We’ll begin with Plautus, who provided the template for the mayhem to follow—a heritage of long-lost children (and their parents), twins (of the same or opposite sexes), disguise, crossdressing, and love and/or sex at first sight. Central to our project will be the question of how and why comic writers use these and other conventions to explore and explode the mysteries of identity. (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.)
Texts: Plautus, The Brothers Menaechmus in Four Comedies, trans. Eric Segal (Oxford World's Classics); Anon., Gli Ingannati (available as a handout at Bread Loaf); John Lyly, Gallathea in Selected Prose and Dramatic Work (Fyfield/Routledge); William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night (both Oxford World's Classics); Hannah Cowley, The Belle's Stratagem, in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists (Oxford); Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (New Mermaids); Tom Stoppard, Travesties (Grove); Billy Wilder, Some Like It Hot (MGM DVD; will be shown at Bread Loaf); Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw in The Complete Plays (Grove); Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine in Churchill: Plays One (Routledge); Angela Carter, Wise Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Group III (English Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7297 Comedies of Error/Mr. Cadden/M-F 8:45-9:45
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.
7385 Fictions of Finance/Mr. Freedman/T, Th 2-4:45
Nineteenth-century England, France, and America witnessed the transformation of the capitalist enterprise: both moved from societies dominated by industrial production to those in which finance capital generated vast new fortunes—and vast new possibilities as well of social disequilibrium. At the same time, the realist novel emerged as the dominant social form, defining the lineaments of experience for an enlarging middle-class readership eager to understand the complexities of this brave new world. What, this course wonders, do these two phenomena have to do with each other? What new plots get created, what new character-types get shaped, in the realist novel to register, manage, negotiate the transition into this new world? How do authors respond to their own role, as authors, in this sphere? How do changing notions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racial, and national (or even, in James, global) identity get made and remade in this fictional encounter? These will be some of the questions we discuss as we make our way through a number of great, complex, and long novels that redefined as they participated in the fictions—and the facts—of finance. Students will be required to write two papers, one short, one long. Please read Our Mutual Friend before the summer begins, since we'll really have only a week to devote to it. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)
Texts: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Penguin); Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (Penguin); Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low (Penguin); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Scribner); Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Penguin).
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/M-F 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); Pat Barker, Regeneration (Penguin); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (Random House); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt); Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back (Ballantine); Toni Morrison, Sula (Vintage); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Broadway). The following books will be on reserve at Bread Loaf; they will also be ordered for the bookstore, but purchase is optional: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford); Jonathan Shay Achilles in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster) and Odysseus in America (Scribner).
7455
Fiction of Empire and the Breakup of Empire/Ms. Sabin/T, Th 2-4:45
Through close study of selected Victorian, modern, and contemporary texts, the seminar will examine continuities and ruptures between colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. Novels and short stories will be considered in relation to a variety of critical and theoretical controversies in current postcolonial studies. We will discuss the participation of the English novel in the construction and also the critique of imperialism, the ambiguous status of the English language in the turn against the colonialist mentality, and more recent questioning of the term “postcolonial” itself. This course moves fast, especially at the beginning. It will prove very important to have done a substantial amount of the primary reading before arrival, at least The Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Passage to India, The Inheritance of Loss, The Romantics, and A Bend in the River. Specific assignments in critical reading will accompany the primary texts during the course, along with photocopied extracts from some contemporary primary readings unavailable for purchase in print. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)
Texts: Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Penguin); Rudyard Kipling, Selected Stories (Penguin); E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harbrace/Harvest); Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics (Anchor); Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Ed.); Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Fawcett/Anchor); V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (Vintage); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child (Heinemann); Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood (Vintage); Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (Longman).
7460 Poetry and Its Uses/Mr. Luftig/M, W 2-4:45
When mtvU announced that it would feature excerpts of John Ashbery’s poetry in short promotional spots, one of his publishers expressed the hope that poetry would thus be made “hip” for college students but admitted, “it’s very hard to tell what exactly is going to come of all this.” We will study and evaluate occasions when poetry became conspicuous in education, politics, and popular culture; and we will study arguments by poets and others on behalf of poetry’s importance. The period 1880-1950 will be represented by Rubin’s recent study; Rich's What Is Found There will give us a wide range of recent poems; in the Norton anthology we’ll read selections from W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, American “confessional” poets, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and others, alongside selected essays and prose excerpts. Each student will analyze a poem in the light of an essay or historical incident pertaining to its “use”; in the final paper, each student will make a case for the way a poem might be used in a contemporary classroom, political, or other setting. For the first class, please read Part I of the Rubin book, and use the Norton anthology to sample poems by the poets she mentions. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)
Texts: Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Harvard/Belknap); The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair, Jahan Ramazani (Norton); Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, expanded ed. (Norton).
Group IV (American Literature)
7385 Fictions of Finance/Mr. Freedman/T, Th 2-4:45
See description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.
7460 Poetry and Its Uses/Mr. Luftig/M, W 2-4:45
See description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III 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 this 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. A substantial packet of secondary readings will be assigned in Vermont.
7582 African American Literature from Chicago/Mr. Nash/M-F 8:45-9:45
This course follows the evolution of Chicago’s African American literary community throughout the twentieth century; as we follow a chronological thread, we will also consider how social, historical, economic, and geographic circumstances work to shape both the subject matter and the style of Chicago’s black writers. Our ultimate goal will be to gain some understanding of what one might call a black Chicago aesthetic. In pursuit of this goal, we will read the following primary texts in the order listed below.
Texts: Frank Marshall Davis, Black Man’s Verse in Black Moods (Illinois); Theodore Ward, “Big White Fog” (text will be provided at Bread Loaf); Richard Wright, Lawd Today! (Northeastern), Native Son (HarperPerennial), Twelve Million Black Voices (Thunder's Mouth); Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville in Blacks (Third World); Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage); Frank London Brown, Trumbull Park (Northeastern); Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean-Eaters, In the Mecca both in Blacks (Third World); Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Lushena); April Sinclair, Coffee Will Make You Black (Harper). In addition, we will read extensively in Richard Guzman’s anthology Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? (Southern Illinois). A substantial packet of secondary readings will be assigned in Vermont.
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, 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.
7585 Early Twentieth-Century Native American Fiction/Mr. Womack/M, W 2-4:45
The course covers E. Pauline Johnson's The Moccasin Maker, Mourning Dove's Cogewea, D'Arcy McNickles's The Surrounded, and John Joseph Matthews Sundown. Secondary readings will be drawn from Robert Warrior's Tribal Secrets and Lucy Maddox's Citizen Indians. Students should have read these two secondary texts before the summer course begins. A major area of discussion will be the possible relations between federal policies and the themes of the works of fiction in this course.
Texts: E. Pauline Johnson, The Moccasin Maker (Oklahoma); Mourning Dove, Cogewea (Nebraska); D'Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded (New Mexico); John Joseph Mathews, Sundown (Oklahoma). Secondary texts: Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets (Minnesota); Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians (Cornell).
7645 Jazz Literature/Mr. Womack/T, Th 2-4:45
Primary required texts for Jazz Literature will be E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Toni Morrison's Jazz, Ralph Ellison's Living with Music, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. These works will be read along with a required course reader that will include literary and jazz criticism, autobiographical essays, theoretical pieces, short stories, and poems by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Stanley Crouch, Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, and others. The course will be organized in relation to five time periods: Ragtime (1900–1915), Traditional Jazz (Dixieland) (1915–1940), Swing (1940s), Bebop (1945-1960), and Free Jazz (1960s). A major concern will be whether or not narrative can effectively represent music, with strong attention to the music itself as much as its written depictions.
Texts: E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Random House); Toni Morrison, Jazz (Vintage); Ralph Ellison, Living with Music (Modern Library); Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Penguin); a course reader available at Bread Loaf.
7650 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: Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (Amistad); Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner); Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (HarperPerennial); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Vintage); Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Scribner); Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (HarperPerennial); and Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad). At least three additional texts will be added to the list before the 2008 session begins.
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); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage); M. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (New Mexico); Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Picador); Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (Penguin); E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Random House). We will also make use of the Library of Congress’s American Memory site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), and there will be a few additional secondary readings provided at Bread Loaf.
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.
7455 Fiction of Empire and the Breakup of Empire/Ms. Sabin/T, Th 2-4:45
See description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.
7715 Vergil and Dante/Mr. Fyler/M-F 10-11:00
This course will focus on two major texts in the European literary tradition, Vergil's Aeneid and Dante's Commedia. The two are linked because "Virgil" is Dante's guide on his journey into Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory; he is the guide because Aeneid 6 describes an earlier trip to the underworld, but even more because Dante has the whole Aeneid very much in mind throughout his own great poem. We will also look at a number of allusions to these texts in English and American literature.
Texts: Vergil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage); Reading Vergil's Aeneid, ed. Christine Perkell (Oklahoma); Dante, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, ed. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Anchor and Doubleday); Gene Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age, 1138-1737 (California).
7755 Thinking Theory/Mr. Wood/M-F 11:15-12:15
"Theory" in literature has come to be the collective name for a whole range of thoughts and practices; the aim of the course is to read closely a number of major works in this rather loose tradition. The selection of texts seeks to represent something of the richness of the possibilities but the general idea is not so much to survey the field as to gain real knowledge of particular instances and make up our own minds about the challenges they represent.
Texts: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken); Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Harvest); Roland Barthes, S/Z (Hill and Wang); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago); Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem (Stanford); Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim (Columbia).
7767b Modern European Fiction/Mr. Wood/M-F 8:45-9:45
Beginning with Dostoevsky's complicated and subversive fidelity to realism, this course will trace major developments in modern fiction, both realistic and otherwise, from the 1860s to the 1990s. We shall look in close detail at six novels (written in Russia, Austro-Hungary, France, England, and Spain), paying particular attention to changes in literary form as well as in historical and personal preoccupations.
Texts: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (Vintage); Franz Kafka, The Castle (Schocken); Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (Penguin); Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Harvest); Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (Godine); Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (New Directions).
7770 Latin American Literature: Fantasy, Resistance, History/Mr. Lezra/M-F 11:15-12:15
Careful readings in the poetry and fiction of Latin America in the twentieth century. Among the topics we'll treat: Latin American modernism and post-modernism; the novel of the dictator; the "boom" novels; writing and resistance; writing and Latin American musical traditions. The books will be read in translation; fluent readers of Spanish (or Portuguese, in Lispector's case) should try to read the works in the original (if there's enough interest, we'll hold extra classes to discuss the Spanish as well).
Texts: Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Avon); Julio Cortázar, Blow-up and Other Stories (Pantheon); Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New Directions); Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Clarice Lispector, Family Ties (Texas); Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (Grove); Rosario Castellanos, The Nine Guardians: A Novel (Readers International); Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Stephen Tapscott (Texas Pan American Series).
7775 Caribbean Literature/Ms. Powell/M, W 2-4:45
This course investigates many of the thematic concerns that dominate contemporary Caribbean literature, matters such as immigration and displacement; history and the preservation of culture and ancestry; language and oral storytelling; class, race, gender, and other shifting identities; as well as the authors' stylistic contributions to the craft of writing.
Texts: Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (Penguin); V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (Vintage); Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (Vintage); Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (Plume); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Vintage); Our Caribbean: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave (Duke); Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A packet of essays will be made available at Bread Loaf.
7785 Through a Glass Darkly: Modernity, Photography, and the Art of Seeing/Ms. Blair/M-F 10-11:00
This course will focus on the power of the camera, understood as a central instrument, fact, and symbol of modernity. For literary as well as visual artists confronting a radically changing social landscape, photography remains both a troubling model and a powerful resource. Making possible ever more life-like reproductions, replacing reality with the reality effect, radically altering our experience of history (and of experience itself), photography records the very changes that define the modern—and in so doing helps inaugurate them. Our goal will be to explore both the affirmative and the destructive possibilities of photography, reading widely across cultural contexts. We'll begin with critical guides to the venture offered by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Walter Benjamin, accompanied by exploration of bodies of photographs (European, American, Latin American) that interest them. We'll continue with a series of literary texts and photographs read in dialogue: Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and the daguerreotype images of Mathew Brady and J.T. Zealey; Franz Kafka's stories and the portrait catalogues of August Sander and Lewis Hine; the modernist photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the American portraiture of Esther Bubley, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, and other viewers from underground, the margins, and below. The last part of the course will be devoted to texts that rethink relations between visuality and social visibility, and to the work of contemporary photographers like Dawoud Bey, Pedro Meyer, Sebastiao Salgado, Sune Woods, and Nikki S. Lee. Throughout the course, our emphasis will be on generating strategies for the critical reading of visual texts; no previous experience with photographs or visual studies is necessary. Requirements will include active class participation, several short response papers, and a final long essay.
Texts: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang); Susan Sontag, On Photography (Picador); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Bantam, or any volume based on the 1895 ed.); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Mariner). Other materials—including images, short fiction, and secondary readings—will be available as photocopies at Bread Loaf and on our BreadNet-based course Web site.
7805 Acting Workshop/Ms. MacVey/T, Th 2-5:00
This workshop course is designed for those with little or no acting training or experience who nonetheless feel a "hunger for the fire." Students will participate in exercises and scenes designed to stimulate their imagination, increase their concentration, and develop the skills needed to act with honesty and theatrical energy. An equally important and demanding part of the course work will be journal writing. Students should read the Herrigel book before class. There will be a final exam involving a performance and a critique: this will consist of acting scenes on the final Monday night, followed by a required critique on Tuesday, at the regular class time. Students need to be available to rehearse with partners during the evenings and on weekends, except for midterm recess.
Texts: Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, trans. Carol MacVey (a photocopy will be available for purchase in the Bread Loaf bookstore); Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (Random House); Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares (Theatre Arts); Michael Shurtleff, Audition (Bantam).