August 27-31
Introduction
There are few places in this country more congenial for fellowship and the pursuit of knowledge than the Alumni College at Bread Loaf. For more than three decades, alumni, parents, and friends of Middlebury College have come to the mountain campus to take courses with leading faculty at the College, to renew old acquaintances and begin new friendships, and to enjoy the late-summer beauty of Vermont.
1. Gangsters and Geishas:
Japanese Culture through the Contemporary Novel
Steve Snyder, Associate Professor of Japanese
In the past two decades, the focus of Western political and economic interest in East Asia has shifted to China, while the once-feared Japan has been recast as a relatively benign exporter of chic clothing, food, and baseball players—reflecting a marked rise in what the critic Douglas
McGray has called Japan’s “Gross National Cool.” This course will look at the literary aspect of this transformation and the ways works of translated fiction get onto our bookshelves and into our consciousness. We will be reading samples from recent Japanese popular fiction—a thriller, a mystery, and a rather odd romance—as well as things more highbrow.
The novelist Haruki Murakami is currently one of the most successful writers on the planet, with bestsellers in dozens of countries—his Kafka on the Shore was named one of the top five novels of 2005 by the New York Times. What explains Murakami’s enormous success with readers overseas? What does contemporary Japanese fiction as a whole tell us
about life in the world’s second-largest economic power? And what can an examination of the processes of translating and marketing fiction abroad tell us about the nature of global culture markets?
2. American Landscapes
John McWilliams, Professor of Humanities
The landscape, as Emerson insisted, is not a fixed place “out there,” but is constantly being reformed by each movement, and each choice, of our eyes. The same is true of the “landscapes” that have been created as hypothetically changeless records by painters and photographers.
We will explore selected paintings by Cole, Church, Homer, Inness, and Hopper, and photographs by Jackson, Adams, and Stieglitz. We will discuss the difficulties and advantages, aesthetic and conceptual, that arise when “the American landscape” ceases to be conceived as insight into primeval nature (our “virgin land”) and becomes peopled in imagination and in fact. A visit to the Middlebury Museum of Art to see the College’s collection of landscape paintings and photos is planned.
3. Vermont Forests and the Changing Climate:
Past, Present, and Future
Matthew Landis, Associate in Science Instruction in Biology
The unprecedented changes in climate over the coming century have the potential to change Vermont forests dramatically. How will they respond? How will climate interact with the other forces that shape forests, such as land management, natural disturbances, invasive species,
and air pollution? This hands-on course will focus on these questions through off-trail hiking and scrambling as we explore a variety of Green Mountain forests. Over four days, we will visit the wild, cold spruce-fir forests of the high terrain, the maple-beech-birch forests that dominate
the Green Mountains, and tiny pockets of warm-climate oak and hickory forests that formerly covered the Champlain Valley. We will spend four days developing our skills as ecological detectives to read the clues provided by the trees, including tree rings, stumps, and other evidence, to uncover how the forests around Middlebury have changed over time, and how they may change in the future.
4. Photographing Frost: Envisioning Poetry through
the Camera Lens (Limited to 15 participants)
Kirsten Hoving, Charles A. Dana Professor of History of Art and Architecture
In this studio workshop course, we will use photography to examine and interpret selected poems by Robert Frost. With the beautiful environs of Bread Loaf as our subject and the poems of Frost as our inspiration, we will look for ways to use photography to envision images and metaphors we find in poems. Students should provide their own cameras and have a thorough working knowledge of how to use them. Those people using digital cameras should bring a laptop and know how to download, resize, and save files to a jump drive or CD. We will make a daily run to Middlebury for students who are shooting film. Please note: This is not a course about how to use your new digital camera. It is a course about how to see creatively, how to go beyond the bounds of simple record making, and how to foster a poetic vision in our photographs
by thinking about the meanings and metaphors of Frost’s poetry.
5. The 2008 Presidential Election:
What Can Political Science Teach Us?
Matt Dickinson, Professor of Political Science
We are in the middle of one of the most exciting presidential elections in recent memory, as indicated by the overwhelming mainstream media coverage, higher than normal turnout in the nominating contests, and intense debate by the “punditocracy.” Unfortunately, much of this coverage
and analyses is characterized by misleading assumptions, incomplete data, and questionable conclusions. In this course, we draw on political science research to reexamine some basic issues related to the 2008 election. What determines election outcomes? How much do voters know? Is the media biased? Is the selection process in need of reform? The goal is to substitute more dispassionate analysis for the often partisan-driven commentary that dominates media coverage.
6. Early Christian Art: From the Catacombs to the Cathedrals
Larry Yarbrough, Pardon Tillinghast Professor of Religion
Though surveying a wide range of art in the early Christian movement, the course will focus on representations of Jesus. The driving question will be how texts and images exist in creative tension. We will see, for example, that although the earliest texts and liturgies emphasize the death and resurrection of Jesus, most early art represents him as “the
good shepherd.” As we move through the earliest period to the time of the emperor Justinian (100–600 ce), we will observe the ways models for the representation of Jesus change dramatically. We will read texts from scripture, liturgies, and sermons; the images we examine will range
from graffiti from the Palatine to the frescoes of the catacombs and the mosaics of Ravenna and Rome.
Please fill out the online registration form for the 2008 Alumni College at Bread Loaf.
Download the Alumni College Brochure pdf.
For more information regarding Alumni College, please e-mail Glenna Emilo at Middlebury College,
emilo@middlebury.edu, or call (802) 443-5335.