Vermont Campus, 2012 Courses
Group I (Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy)
7000a Poetry Workshop/T. Smith/M, W 2–4:45
In this workshop, we will explore different ways that the writing of poems can constitute a path toward fresh discovery. We'll examine how and why we are moved, surprised and—in the best of cases—changed by the poems we read, and participants will be encouraged to enact similar strategies in their own work. Logistically speaking, this course will focus equally on the discussion of published poems and the critique of student work. Students will complete weekly exercises designed to generate new writing, and submit a final portfolio of revised poems at the end of the term.
Texts: Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires (Knopf); Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House). Additional readings will be provided by the instructor.
7000b Poetry Workshop/T. Smith/T, Th 2–4:45
See description for 7000a, above.
7005b Fiction Writing/D. Huddle/T, Th 2–4:45
This workshop will emphasize student writing: producing, reading, discussing, and revising stories. Exercises and assignments will explore aspects of memory and imagination, point of view, structure, and prose styles.
Texts: The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Stories since 1970, ed. Lex Williford and Michael Martone (Touchstone).
7018 Playwriting/D. 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.
7019 Writing for Children/M. Stepto and S. Swope/M, W 2–4:45
Stories for children, like stories for adults, come in many colors, from dark to light, and the best have in common archetypal characters, resonant plots, and concise, poetic language. Using new and classic texts as inspiration, we will try our hands writing in a variety of forms. The first half of the course will be workshop-intensive. In the second half, in the light of critical reading and with an eye to shaping a final project, students will revise what they have written. Among the critical questions considered will be: How do you write authentically for a child? What is a children's story and what is it for? What sorts of stories do children themselves tell? What view of the child and childhood do children's stories take? How can the children's story be made new? Students should come to the first class having read The Light Princess and Wally's Stories. The artistically inclined should bring their art supplies.
Texts: Vivian Paley, Wally's Stories (Harvard); George MacDonald, The Light Princess (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (Puffin); James Barrie, Peter Pan (Puffin); Janet Schulman, You Read to Me & I'll Read to You (Knopf); William Steig, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (Aladdin); Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (HarperCollins); Molly Bang, The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher (Aladdin); Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg (Random); Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen (both HarperCollins); Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder Book (Dover/Evergreen); Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (Puffin); Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins); E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (HarperCollins); Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me (Yearling).
7103 Critical Media Literacy: Teaching the Word and the World/D. Kirkland/M, W 2–4:45
In contemporary society, media are ubiquitous and play a key role in defining one’s sense of identity. Critically analyzing media is absolutely necessary in the process of struggling for liberation. However, there are fault lines in the crust of media literacy that carve the geographical, social, cultural, and political boundaries that split tongue and history, meaning and identity, structure and society. Media bend and break thought as they consist of the strain of the here and now, the stretch of history and its colossal segments of what Michel Foucault terms the “politics of truth.” This course will introduce students to critical social, cultural, and literary theories and pedagogies for approaching media texts. These approaches focus on interactions among word/world and social/symbolic associations that play out in everyday lives within digital and physical contexts. Students will understand critical literacy practices useful for analyzing the media that saturate them, and textual practices that employ multiple media to compose transformative content raising multiple and complex awarenesses critical of a variety of social issues, particularly human injustices. In so doing, the course will address the following questions: What are media literacies? Why are they important to the teaching and learning of language and literacy in postmodern society?
Texts: Adolescents’ Online Literacies, ed. D. Alvermann (Peter Lang). Additional readings will be available via e-mail and BreadNet.
7112 Hip Hop and Youth Culture as Social Justice Texts/D. Kirkland/M–Th 9:35–10:50
Teaching hip hop and youth culture as social justice texts can facilitate the development of critical consciousness in youth and transform the experience of schooling. Analyzing the critical social commentary produced in such texts, for example, may lead to consciousness-raising discussions, essays, and research projects that attempt to locate an explanation of the current state of affairs that resituates the mainstream discourse. How can the knowledge reflected in such texts engender discussions of esteem, power, place, and purpose and encourage students to further their own knowledge of society and politics? How can such texts help youth make sense of the world along unique lines of intellectual analysis and in ways that correspond to the processes needed for ensuring fuller, more just democratic participation? This course has been designed to address such questions, but in ways that view hip hop and youth culture—their texts and languages—as valuable resources worthy of serious study. You will learn to teach by learning from such resources, learning about such resources, and learning through such resources. The goal of the course will be to help you move beyond the oppressive strictures of traditional pedagogical formulations and toward broader, culturally responsive, more inclusive, and critical approaches that allow you to interrogate, both question and comment upon, the various literatures, languages, cultures, and agenda from which we as citizens passionately and impassionately have come to view ourselves and others, the word and the world.
Texts: M. L. Hill, Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life (Teachers College). Additional readings will be available via e-mail and BreadNet.
7114 Visual Literacies: Writing beyond the Alphabet/D. Baca/T, Th 2–4:45
Common assumptions about written communication depend upon the alphabet as a precondition for literacy. When alphabets are privileged, however, pictographic and nonverbal writing systems become obscured. In order to account for a plurality of transmission practices, this class will forward a broad definition of "writing," notably including Aztec pictography, the Andean khipu system of knotted cords, and digital media communications. The class will offer a new, historically sound perspective on approaches to writing, paying particular attention to how recorded information changes across cultures and time in Mesoamerica and beyond. Moving beyond emerging trends in Internet studies, we will investigate "new" ways of reading, writing, and learning, with the aim of fundamentally altering the character of twenty-first-century education.
Texts: The Disappearance of Writing Systems: Perspectives on Literacy and Communication, ed. John Baines (Equinox); David Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Moctezuma’s Mexico: Visions of the Aztec World (Colorado); Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (City Lights); Amalia Gnanadesikan, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (Wiley-Blackwell); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Michigan).
7182 Describing the Imagination/M. Armstrong/M–Th 8:10–9:25
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 many different ways, visually as well as verbally. We study accounts of the imagination by writers, artists, critics, and philosophers. We examine the role of imagination in education, and we consider how to recognize, promote, support, document, and value imaginative achievement, in and out of school. A guiding text throughout the workshop will be John Dewey’s Art as Experience. Class members are expected to bring with them examples of the creative work of their students or of their own children, or of the students or children of friends. 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 reflections on class discussions, and to conduct their own inquiry into some aspect of the class theme.
Texts: John Dewey, Art as Experience (Perigee); Vivian Paley, A Child’s Work (Chicago); Reggio Children, Shoe and Meter (buy through http://learningma.accountsupport.com/store/reggio_children_product_page.html); John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Penguin); John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Jon Mee (Oxford); Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (Vintage); Paul Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Wiley-Blackwell). Other readings will be available at Bread Loaf.
Group II (British Literature through the Seventeenth Century)
7210b Chaucer/J. Fyler/M–Th 8:10–9:25
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, that are of perennial interest.
Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson (Houghton Mifflin or Oxford); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Prentice Hall); Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford).
7247 “Remember Me”: Making History in Shakespeare’s Plays/C. Bicks/M–Th 9:35–10:50
What does the act of remembrance demand of us? What (and who) do we have to forget in order to move forward with a certain version of history? When the ghost of Hamlet’s father orders his son to “Remember me,” which memories does he hope Hamlet will mark down and act upon? What has Ophelia seen that we haven’t, and who listens to her? History may be written by the winners, but the stories that get passed along by everyone else often don’t support the authorized account. In this class, we’ll be exploring the multiple ways in which Shakespeare dramatizes the complexities of writing history and telling tales—the stories of countries, spouses, leaders, and children that everyone needs and desires, but upon which no one can agree. We will be reading in the following order: Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale. In conjunction with each play, we will be reading scholarly articles (available online) to supplement our thinking about the topic. We will be working regularly with the actors from the Acting Ensemble as well and following their process as they work through this summer’s production of Hamlet. Please read and be ready to discuss Hamlet by the first class.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Susanne Wofford (Bedford/St. Martins); Titus Andronicus, ed. B. Mowat and P. Werstine (Folger); Richard III, ed. Thomas Cartelli (Norton Critical); All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford); Macbeth, ed. William Carroll (Bedford/St. Martins); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Mario DiGangi (Bedford/St. Martins).
7270 Jews, Turks, and Moors in Early Modern English Literature/J. Shoulson/M–Th 9:35–10:50
This course examines how early modern English society grappled with its increasingly fraught, intimate, and prolonged encounters with religious and ethnic Others. Our focus will be on the varied representations of Jews, Muslims (identified as “Turks” during the period, despite the imprecision of this ethno-geographic designation), and Africans (often misnamed “Moors”) in English writings of the period. We shall examine these depictions in relation to popular stereotypes and beliefs about these groups (and their historical roots). The course will address such questions as: To what extent did early modern writers—dramatists, poets, polemicists, travel writers, and others—undermine or support stereotypical conceptions of the English Other? In what ways are the conflicting representations of these different religious and ethnic minorities interrelated and mutually constitutive? How do the multiple discourses of alterity constitute essential components of the evolving sense of (masculine, bourgeois) Englishness in the early modern period?
Texts: Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (Penguin); William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Lawrence Danson (Longman); Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England, ed. Daniel Vitkus (Columbia); Three Turk Plays, ed. Daniel Vitkus (Columbia); Shakespeare and Elizabeth Carey, Othello and the Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Clare Carroll (Longman). (Please note: Since these editions include essential additional readings, it’s important that you obtain these specific versions of the texts.) Additional materials will be available at Bread Loaf.
7276 Shakespeare’s Hamlets/S. Wofford/M, W 2–4:45
This course will place Hamlet in the context of the plays Shakespeare wrote in the later 1590s and early 1600s, in an effort to understand what is distinctive about Hamlet, and what is Hamlet-like in other plays often seen as opposed in spirit. The course will focus on two specific sets of relationships: that between Hamlet and the two comedies written and performed closest in time to it (As You Like it, Twelfth Night), and that between Hamlet and the Henriad, the sequence of history plays (Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V) that Shakespeare was concluding just as he wrote Hamlet (we will focus on the last three of these plays). We will also read Dekker’s prose commentary on the death of Elizabeth and arrival of the plague in London in 1603 (The Wonderfull Yeare). We will look briefly too at the worlds of Hamlet adaptation, considering both Suleiman Al-Bassam’s play The Al-Hamlet Summit (2007), and perhaps Michael Almereyda’s film adaptation of Hamlet (2000). Topics for study will include memory and performance; mourning and melancholy; comedy in/and the tragic; history and the fiction of subjectivity, interpretation and the "interrogative mood" of Hamlet. We will work closely with the actors in the Acting Ensemble, and class members will be asked to attend some rehearsals during the summer to learn more about interpretation on stage.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. S. Wofford (Bedford/St. Martins) or Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden, 3rd Series); Twelfth Night, ed. R. Warren and S. Wells Oxford); As You Like It, ed. A. Brissenden (Oxford); Henry IV, Part 1, ed. S. Kastan (Arden); Henry IV, Part 2 (Signet); Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge); Suleiman Al-Bassam, The Al-Hamlet Summit (Hertfordshire). Modern editions of Shakespeare with footnotes are acceptable, including collected works such as The Norton Shakespeare. Recommended: Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor (Arden, 3rd Series); James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599; Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory and Will in the World; Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet; and Richard Halpern, “Hamletmachines” in Shakespeare among the Moderns (1997).
7292 Male, Female, Other/C. Bicks/M–Th 11–12:15
Gender is a notoriously complicated thing to pin down. Is it marked by our bodies, our clothes, our behavior, our private and unseen sense of who we are? What if people don’t fit into the categories of male and female that their culture has prescribed? This course explores how ideas about transgender and transsexual figures have developed from the sixteenth century forward in British literature. How do these crossed and crossing bodies help us think about gender norms in different time periods? We will consider medical, legal, religious, and literary accounts of cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, “manly” women, and “womanish” men. We’ll study figures who violate the norms of feminine and masculine behavior (Queen Elizabeth and King James; the Amazons; the women in Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure; and the men in Marlowe’s Edward II); people who cross-dress to explore unconventional roles and desires (Shakespeare’s Viola, Hannah Snell’s Female Soldier, and eighteenth-century Molly House patrons); and those whose bodies confound biological markers of sex (Herculine Barbin and Jacob’s tract on hermaphrodites). We’ll consider the fin de siècle “New Woman” (Chopin’s The Awakening) and we’ll end with a twentieth-century narrator whose gender remains ambiguous throughout his/her story of love and desire (Winterson’s Written on the Body). Additional materials will be available at Bread Loaf. It will be helpful to read as much of the primary material as possible before arrival. Please read Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body by the first class. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement. Students who have taken 7274 should not enroll in this class.)
Texts: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Bedford/St. Martins); Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Johns Hopkins); Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Mathew Martin (Broadview); Giles Jacob, Tractus de Hermaphrodites; Or, A Treatise of Hermaphrodites (Dodo); The Lady Tars: The Autobiographies of Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy, and Mary Anne Talbot (Fireship); Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite), trans. Richard McDougall (Pantheon); Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margo Culley (Norton Critical); Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (Vintage); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body (Basic).
7295 Milton, the Bible, and Cultures of Violence/J. Shoulson/M–Th 11–12:15
Though it can be cited for its celebrations of peace, the Bible can just as readily be cited for its extensive accounts of violence in the service of, prompted by, or attributed to God. It is difficult to think of an English writer more profoundly influenced by and engaged with the scriptural tradition than John Milton. It is also difficult to imagine a period in English history characterized by more religiously motivated violence than the years between 1637 and 1667, precisely the same time that Milton wrote nearly all of his extensive oeuvre. From his earliest lyrics to his monumental final poems and throughout his forays into prose polemics, Milton’s career is characterized by an intensive reading and rewriting of biblical texts, many of them fraught with violence. This course will read selections from Milton’s poetry and prose in tandem with portions of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. We shall consider the representations of violence in biblical texts (to include portions of Genesis, Numbers, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, Psalms, Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Galatians, and Revelation) in their own right, as well as in light of their presence within Milton’s writings. Secondary readings will be available at Bread Loaf. Students wishing to get a head start would do well to read at least some of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes in advance. (The course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group V requirement.)
Texts: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (Random); 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 that they offer the original translation and not a modern revision or “The New King James Bible.”
Group III (British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7292 Male, Female, Other/C. Bicks/M–Th 11–12:15
See the description under Group II offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement.
7370 On the Harms of Literature/Mr. Curtain/M–Th 9:35–10:50
Can words harm? Can sentences, narratives, or novels cause injury, damage, or pain? Is it more than just metaphor to claim that literature tears the social fabric? In this course we will explore what is meant by the harms of literature. We will start with eighteenth-century British legal understandings of harm against the backdrop of a reading of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9), and then move on to key nineteenth and twentieth-century legal philosophical and literary texts. The notion of harm is central to how those cultures understood texts to do things: make people, inculcate beliefs, corrupt cultures, exemplify morals, shatter minds, or create worlds. We will use our readings to reflect on our own tacit understandings of how words both mean and do, and on the role of the writing, reading, and teaching of books.
Texts: John Milton, Areopagitica in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford); John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford); James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Yale); J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford); selections from H. L. A. Hart, Causation in the Law (Oxford); Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie (Ecco); selections from Marc Lange, The Philosophy of Physics (Blackwell). Additional readings will be available at Bread Loaf.
7405 Wit and Terror in Modern Irish Literature/M. Sabin/T, Th 2–4:45
There hasn’t been much to laugh about in the modern Irish situation: the nineteenth-century famine and its aftermath in death and emigration; the grinding poverty that the creation of the Irish Free State did not alleviate; the repressiveness of colonial and religious authorities; the violence of civil war; the depredations of alcoholism that somehow increased rather than relieved these woes. Yet modern Irish writing is also famous for its wit: from the subversive hijinks of Oscar Wilde and James Joyce to the bleak humor of Samuel Becket and the macabre comedy of Martin McDonagh. In theater, especially, but also in prose narratives, films, and poems, Irish writers have found ways of transforming grim realities into unaccountably cheering if also controversial performances. This course will explore the intriguing combination of woe and wit in twentieth-century Irish literature, often a self-conscious reaction against the stereotyped melancholy of the Celtic school popular at the turn of the century. What social and psychological function does wit serve as a substitute for gentle melancholy? How have religious and political authorities both suppressed and inadvertently fostered Irish wit? How has a special relationship to the English language shaped Irish humor? In addition to the required texts, some poems and excerpts from longer works as well as some readings in psychological and cultural analysis will be distributed during the session. Selected films and visits from the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble will supplement the written texts and bring out the performative nature of this material.
Texts: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Avon); J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape in Modern Irish Drama, ed. J. P. Harrington (Norton Critical; out of print, but used copies available from online sources); Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies in Three Novels (Grove); Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (Penguin); Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays (Vintage).
7430 Woolf and the Movement of Modernism/J. Green-Lewis/T, Th 2–4:45
While modernism is defined by movement of all kinds, including spatial, mnemonic, and temporal, ambivalence about movement is also one of its constants. In fact, some of the most memorable scenes in modernist works are those in which movement ceases completely. In this course we will focus on the representation of both movement and stasis during the early decades of the twentieth century, and we will consider how Virginia Woolf makes use of each to conceptualize and make visible the experiences of memory. For the first class, please read, and bring, James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”
Texts: James Joyce, "The Dead" (any edition); Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford), Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves (all HBJ/Harvest), The Years (Mariner). There will be some secondary reading assigned as we go; please read as many of the novels in advance as you can.
7437 Trauma and the Literature of Survival/M. Sokoloff/M–Th 9:35–10:50
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear or read about the struggles of American soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. 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 the ancient Greecian era. 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, identity, ordinary experience, and literary representation itself. Through supplementary materials and student 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.
Texts: Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back (Ballantine); Pat Barker, Regeneration (Plume/Penguin); Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body? (Harper); Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (Modern Library); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt); Toni Morrison, Sula (Vintage); Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (Penguin).
7453 Modern British and American Poetry/M. Wood/M–Th 11–12:15
Taking as its starting point the extraordinary cluster of poems that appeared in the late 1940s (works by Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, and others), this course explores a variety of developments and voices in British and North American poetry. The idea is to identify different traditions where they exist—confessional poetry versus something like its opposite, for example—but mainly to allow a whole set of poems to talk to each other across cultures and idioms, and to listen carefully to the conversation. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.)
Texts: Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Robert Lowell, Life Studies and for the Union Dead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); John Ashbery, Notes from the Air (Ecco); Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems (Yale); Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (Vintage); Paul Muldoon, Maggot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
7454 Science Fiction’s Counterfactuals/Mr. Curtain/T, Th 2–4:45
Science fiction is a genre that is riven by a deep contradiction—a crack in its foundation. The word “science” makes a claim about the real and how we can come to know it; “fiction” is a refusal, however tentative and hedged, of the real. Both words, though, make some claim on truth. What sort of claim? Science might productively be thought of as a procedure for generating a catalog of justified true facts. Fiction, on the other hand, can be imagined as a weaving of narratives that run counter to the real. To say that a knowledge practice is “scientific” is to show two things: that it generates (in a regular way) predictions about the future state of the world and, second, that those predictions come to be. Physics is often the gold standard against which all other knowledge is measured. When teachers of literature are asked about the value of what we do, one important story that we tell is that value inheres not in prediction but in explanation. We make sense of our world by making sense of stories. How we anchor truths in stories is a vexed question. We say that stories tell us that the world might be otherwise than what it is. This course will offer students a way to talk about what fiction does and what science does that doesn’t imagine that there is a necessary divide between ways of speaking about the two—and, indeed, that there is a logic shared by both. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.)
Texts: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (Dial); Richard Morgan, Market Forces (Ballantine); China Miéville, Embassytown (Del Rey); Frank Herbert, Dune (Ace); R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before (Overlook); K. J. Bishop, Etched City (Spectra); C. S. Friedman, Black Sun Rising (DAW). Films: Alien and Aliens (20th Century Fox); Starship Troopers (Sony); Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Warner). A course packet will be available for purchase online from the Middlebury Bookstore and will include excerpts from David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Blackwell) and On the Plurality of Worlds (Blackwell); Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett); Marc Lange, Laws and Lawmakers (Oxford) and The Philosophy of Physics (Blackwell); Tyler Curtain, An Introduction to Counterfactuals (ms.); as well as essays by Ned Hall, L. A. Paul, and others.
7589 Transatlantic Modernism/J. Wicke/M, W 2–4:45
See description under Group IV offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.
Group IV (American Literature)
7453 Modern British and American Poetry/Mr. Wood/M–Th 11–12:15
See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.
7454 Science Fiction’s Counterfactuals/Mr. Curtain/T, Th 2–4:45
See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.
7515 Ideas of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century American Literature/W. Nash/M–Th 11–12:15
This course considers how authors represent the quest for mental, physical, and social emancipation that characterized nineteenth-century American life. Working thematically rather than strictly chronologically, we will consider how contemporary conceptions of race, gender, and class both shape and are shaped by this monumental struggle.
Texts: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Bedford/St. Martins); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Norton); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Concord Library/Beacon); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton); Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (California); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Norton). The reading load is substantial and the pace is brisk, so please complete as much of the reading as possible before the session begins. Students are also strongly encouraged to acquire a working knowledge of nineteenth-century American history prior to the start of the course.
7589 Transatlantic Modernism/J. Wicke/M, W 2–4:45
This course follows the transatlantic and transnational literary traffic of Anglo-American modernist fiction from 1900 to the 1930s, as it travels through the U.S., the Americas, and the Caribbean to and from Ireland and the British Isles, and finally makes a circuit of the entire globe. We will concentrate on major authors and canonical works of fiction that look very different when seen as part of a cross-cultural movement of modernism, a modernity in motion, and also will explore less well-known modernisms that become visible when their traveling value is recognized. Modernism is usually explored in national compartments, but when the back and forth movement of people, of audiences, and of cultural forms is recognized, the shape of even familiar works appears in a new light. Given the development of mass media and modern transportation there was rapid communication of the “newness” of modernity and the artistic experiments that accompanied it; in addition, the pressures of empire and the arrival of modern “total war,” as it has been called, affected artists across the Atlantic in equal measure. We’ll consider Kate Chopin, Henry James, Jean Toomer, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner, while investigating the circulating modernism of such figures as James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, in such works as The Awakening, The Portrait of an Artist, Jacob’s Room, and The Rainbow. The class will focus on a geography of modernism that tracks the relationship between Anglo-American modernist works and authors in counterpoint, and will use the lens of movement, space, and relationship to ask what defines modernism on the page and in its cultural passages from one place, nation, or cultural identity to another. Key issues of transatlantic modernism include the fluidity of identity, the relationship between language and place, the role of mass culture and modernism as traveling testimony, and the ethical impact of modernist styles on structures of authority, violence, and mourning as modernism envisions a world culture. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.)
Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1898; Dover); Henry James, In the Cage in Turn of the Screw and In the Cage (1898; Modern Library); Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1900; Barnes & Noble); D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915; Modern Library); James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915; Dover); Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919; Signet); Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922; Dover); Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; Liveright, New Ed.); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Penguin); Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925; Wilder); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926; Scribner); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930; Vintage, Corrected Ed.); Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; Norton); Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936; New Directions).
7591b William Faulkner/Ms. Wicke/M–Th 11-12:15
This course concentrates 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 explore crucial critical perspectives and investigate fresh vantage points that affect the understanding of Faulkner's global importance today. Among the topics we will cover are: Faulkner's literary “world” and his relation to modernism; Faulkner as a Southern writer in "the global South" and as regional writer and exponent of what he called “global literature”; Faulkner and race, gender, memory, and trauma; his haunted houses (lineages) and history; Faulkner and the gothic; cartography, mapping, and space; print, mass media, and oral culture in Faulkner’s work, and its relation to modernity. We will watch films written by Faulkner in his Hollywood period, and films adapted from Faulkner's work, among them "The Tarnished Angels" (1957), based on Pylon (1935), along with "The Long Hot Summer," an adaptation of Faulkner's 1940 The Hamlet. A website 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 will allow a virtual "tour" of his home Rowan Oak, a self-created haunted house.
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); The Reivers (1962) (all Vintage); short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” and critical essays on Faulkner’s work will be available at Bread Loaf. I will assign brief personal papers and essays, including Faulkner's "Nobel Prize Award Speech" of 1949, to be read at Bread Loaf; these are available online in the William Faulkner site of the University of Virginia's Harrison Small Collection.
7635 The Poetry of Robert Frost/J. Elder/T, Th 2–4:45
Robert Frost's lyrical power, psychological intricacy, and naturalist's eye made him one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. Beyond pursuing close readings of many poems by Frost, we will explore connections between the landscape around Bread Loaf and his creative vision.
Texts: Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (Henry Holt/Owl); Jay Parini, Robert Frost, a Life (Picador).
7650b The Contemporary American Short Story/D. Huddle/M–Th 8:10–9:25
Among the considerations of this discussion-oriented class will be strengths and weaknesses of stories, collections, and authors from 2007 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, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (HarperCollins); Greg Bottoms, Fight Scenes (Counterpoint); Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (Harper Perennial); Maile Meloy, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead); Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (Random); Suzanne Rivecca, Death Is Not an Option (Norton); Ann Beattie, Walks with Men (Scribner); Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Edith Perlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (Lookout); Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall (Scribner); Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Random).
7656 African American Poetry since 1960/R. Stepto/M–Th 9:35–10:50
Our discussion begins with a review of what modernist poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes ventured and accomplished in their last decades of writing. Then we turn to the following poets: Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Michael Harper, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Trethewey. We will study how these contemporary poets (1) create odes, sonnets, and ballads; (2) pursue a written art based upon vernacular and performance models; and (3) align themselves with artistic, cultural, and social movements. In 2012, special attention will be given to contemporary practices of the history poem (heroines, heroes, the wars, civil rights, migrations, the “Black Atlantic,” etc.). Visual art and music will always be near at hand (to quote Michael Harper, “the music, jazz, comes in”). Students are encouraged to bring to the class any literary, visual, or musical materials that they feel engage the poems we are committed to studying. Students will be expected to complete two writing assignments and to contribute regularly to the class journal. Everyone will also participate in one or more presentation groups. Reading ahead before the summer is strongly advised.
Texts: Throughout, we will work in the anthology, The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, ed. Michael Harper and Anthony Walton (Vintage); Derek Walcott, Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Amiri Baraka, The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (Thunder’s Mouth); Audre Lorde, Undersong (Norton); Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats (BOC); Michael Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree (Illinois); Marilyn Nelson, The Fields of Praise (Louisiana State) and A Wreath for Emmett Till (Houghton Mifflin/Graphia); Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan); Rita Dove, Selected Poems (Vintage); Elizabeth Alexander, American Sublime (Graywolf); Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (Mariner).
7669 Urban Black America: Texts and Contexts/W. Nash/M–Th 8:10–9:25
This course will explore and problematize the idea of the “ghetto” as it has been constructed around urban African American communities through literature, film, music, and television. We will take up this concept as it relates to actual geographic spaces and also to an “imaginative geography,” or a socially constructed set of ideas about urban African American spaces and communities that is forged, contested, and revised through art. We will combine critical textual analysis with fundamental concepts from human geography and social history to explore the evolution of the American idea of “the ghetto,” consider its impact on urban African American space, and examine how urban black American artists’ responses affect, resist, and change its imaginative geography.
Texts: Richard Wright, Native Son (Harper Perennial) and Twelve Million Black Voices (Thunder’s Mouth); an electronic reserve pack (available through the Middlebury College Library website) containing (1) extensive excerpts from Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville and In the Mecca; (2) a broad selection of poems by Black Arts Movement writers; (3) Ronald Fair’s We Can’t Breathe; and (4) numerous secondary resource materials. We will also be watching the films Cooley High and Candyman, along with episodes of television programs like Good Times and The Wire, and listening to a range of African American music, focusing primarily on the genres of soul and hip hop. Students need not pre-view the films before arriving in Vermont.
7673 Mexican American Literature/D. Baca/M–Th 11–12:15
This class will examine the production of U.S. Mexican American literature with a focus on how English language texts respond to dominant power structures and contribute to the construction of Mexican American cultural subjectivity. Mexican American literature is a dynamic aesthetic intervention that will structure our guiding inquiries: What constitutes effective Mexican American literary and aesthetic expression? What are the literary possibilities as well as limits of "mestizaje," the fusion and fissure of Mesoamerican and Western cultures? Because Mexican American written expression easily weaves between Western configurations such as fiction, autobiography, poetry, pictography, and art, what counts as Mexican American literature? How does Mexican American literature respond to dominant presumptions of universal hegemony over intellectual production, cultural meaning, and historical narrative?
Texts: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute); Damián Baca, Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (Palgrave Macmillan); Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek (both Vintage); Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juárez (Arizona); Demetria Martínez, Mother Tongue (One World/Ballantine); Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway (Back Bay).
7678 Hollywood and American Identities/J. Freedman/T, Th 2–4:45
In this course, we’ll be studying the way that the Hollywood film industry continues to intersect with the transformation of U.S. society in the twentieth century. An industry that was founded by immigrant and second generation Jews, an industry that rose to social power and prominence in the boom years of the 1920s and the bust years of depression, the Hollywood studio system gave Americans a series of narrative forms with which to respond to their rapidly changing culture: narratives we know as the Western, or the gangster film, or even the soap opera. Through those stories, American attitudes towards immigrants, or race, or gender, or sexuality, were all reconfigured—cultural anxieties given form, difficult issues represented, resolutions for problems that seemed all-too insoluble proposed on an imaginary level even when those resolutions seemed impossible to achieve on an actual one. And then, later in the century, filmmakers explored the changing world in which they lived by questioning, revising, parodying, or remaking these very narrative forms. In this course we’ll be studying both the rise (and fall) of the Hollywood film industry and the career of some of these narratives through a variety of means: historical readings; novels and stories; and most importantly the films themselves. Specifically, we’ll be concentrating on three genres: the Western (e.g., Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Lone Star); the gangster film (Scarface, The Big Heat, Once upon a Time in America); and the so-called women’s picture (Imitation of Life, All That Heaven Allows, Far from Heaven). We’ll then turn to films that play even more explicitly with genre in the context of contemporary ethnic self-fashioning (Chan is Missing, Smoke Signals) as well as postmodern culture critique (Magnolia, Mulholland Drive). I'll ask you to keep a journal of film viewings and to write two papers.
Text (for background): Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (Vintage). The main work of the course: to see as many movies as possible, and think hard about them.
Group V (World Literature)
7295 Milton, the Bible, and Cultures of Violence/J. Shoulson/M–Th 11–12:15
See the description under Group II offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group V requirement.
7715 Vergil and Dante/J. Fyler/M–Th 9:35–10:50
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. Please read Brucker before the session begins.
Texts: Vergil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Vintage); Reading Vergil's Aeneid, ed. Christine Perkell (Oklahoma); Dante, The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, ed. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (all Anchor); Gene Brucker, Florence: The Golden Age, 1138-1737 (California).
7740b Listening to Literature/P. Wood Uribe/T, Th 2–4:45
This course takes as its starting point the musical re-telling of literary texts, in opera, song, madrigals and symphonies. On the one hand, the recasting of stories in music can be seen as a way of reading, explaining, or interpreting them. On the other hand, what we hear in music also acts as an immediate and intuitive way of knowing or understanding something inaccessible by other means; that knowledge in turn can be used to shed new light on the music’s literary originals, view them from new angles, and set elements into relief that might otherwise go unnoticed or unexamined. In addition to close reading and study, music offers a further means of exploring and discussing key literary texts. No prior knowledge of music is necessary.
Texts: Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. A. D. Melville (Oxford); Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin); William Shakespeare, The Tempest and Othello (either Oxford or Arden for both); Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Norton Critical); J. W. Goethe, Faust, Part 1 (Penguin); Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (Knopof/Vintage). Listening to include: Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, dir. René Jacobs (both CD and DVD), Book IV Madgrigals, The Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley (CD); C. W. Gluck, Orphée et Eurydice; Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Sarah Connolly as Dido (both CD and DVD); G. F. Handel, Alcina, William Christie, Renée Fleming as Alcina (CD); W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, with Bryn Terfel and Renee Fleming, Die Zauberflöte; Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens; Charles Gounod, Faust; Giuseppi Verdi, Otello, with John Vickers and Renata Scotto (DVD), or Placido Domingo and Renée Fleming (DVD); Igor Stravinsky, A Soldier’s Tale. Students can listen to the music in any relatively recent version, but those specified are especially good.
7752 Proust/Mr. Freedman/M, W 2–4:45
We’ll spend six and a half weeks reading and discussing Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past. Proust’s work is alternatively profound and gossipy; trenchant and infuriating; socially panoramic and psychologically acute; narratively propulsive and langorous; elegiac, ironic, and trenchant. Our goals will be, of course, to experience this masterpiece as much as we can in the time we have available; but we will also use it as a way of interrogating Proust’s thinking about narrative, history, temporality, and identity, and a way of understanding the larger literary and cultural movement known as “modernism” to which his work made such a profound contribution. I’ll ask you to keep a reading journal while you’re at Bread Loaf, to write two short papers, and to read, read, read. In order to make the course viable in the time we have, please try to read as much of the first volume, Swann’s Way, as you can before you arrive at the beginning of the summer. Absolutely no knowledge of French is required for the class. Alert curiosity, on the other hand, is always welcome.
Texts: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, in Six Volumes, trans. C. K. Scott Moncriff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (Modern Library).
7755 Thinking Theory/M. Wood/M–Th 8:10–9:25
In the 1960s and 1970s "theory" in literature came to mean many things, among them a series of approaches to works of the imagination through their relations to other disciplines and modes of thought. The course studies some founding texts and later instances of the series. Our emphasis will be on theory as itself a practice of writing and the aim will be to see firsthand how theory thinks, and to make up our minds about its implications and challenges. We’ll also read two Greek tragedies for their own theoretical interest and as recurring touchstones for some of our many questions.
Texts: Sophocles, The Burial at Thebes, trans. Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. C. K. Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Penguin); Sigmund Freud, On Dreams (Dover); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harvest); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken); Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Hill and Wang); Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (New York Review of Books); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (Columbia).
7765 Chekhov and the Drama/M. Katz/M, W 2–4:45
A study of Chekhov's major dramatic output with an attempt to situate him in both the Western and Russian context. We begin with Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country (1850) and Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884). We turn to Chekhov’s early work, his so-called “jokes” or vaudevilles, including The Bear (1888), The Proposal (1888), and The Anniversary (1891). Then we concentrate on his four major plays: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1889; 1897), Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1903). In addition to reading and analyzing these works, students will act out short scenes from the plays, view excerpts from Russian, British, and American productions, and discuss selected critical essays. We then return to the Russian and Western contexts with Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes (1919). Finally, the class will present a staged reading of Boris Akunin’s contemporary play, The Seagull (2000), a wicked and witty reworking of Chekhov's original as a mystery in the style of Agatha Christie.
Texts: Rose Whyman, Anton Chekhov (Routledge); Ivan Turgenev, A Month in the Country, trans. Isaiah Berline (Penguin); Henrick Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. Michael Meyer (Norton); Anton Chekhov, The Plays of Anton Chekhov, trans. Paul Schmidt (Harper); George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (Penguin); Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths and an anthology of critical articles, in a course packet available through Middlebury Bookstore.
7789 The Fantastic and the Marvelous: Exploring the Fictional Worlds of Italo Calvino/M. Armstrong/M–Th 11–12:15
This class is devoted to the novels, stories, and essays of the great Italian novelist, Italo Calvino. We will start with his early neo-realist novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, and go on to study six of his major works: Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Mr. Palomar. We will also look at Calvino’s collection of Italian Folk Tales; his anthology of the fantastic literature of the nineteenth century, Fantastic Tales; his critical testament, Six Memos for the Next Millennium; and his autobiographical essays, The Road to San Giovanni. We will examine Calvino’s literary, ethical, social, and political values, his formal means, his thematic interests, and his place in the history of narrative in the twentieth century. Members of the class will contribute to a class journal, write brief essays on particular stories, and explore some aspect of Calvino’s work for presentation in a final project. Class members are urged to read as much of Calvino’s work as possible before the course begins, using the editions cited below.
Texts: Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (Harper Perennial); The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount (Mariner); The Baron in the Trees (Mariner); Cosmicomics (Harvest); Invisible Cities (Harvest); The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Mariner); If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Harvest); Mr. Palomar (Mariner); Italian Folk Tales (Mariner); Fantastic Tales (Vintage); Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage); The Road to San Giovanni (Penguin).
Group VI (Theater Arts)
7807 Using Theater in the English Classroom/A. Brazil/M, W 2–4:45
Theater can offer students the opportunity to viscerally enter and deeply understand—and own—a text. In the tradition of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, this course will explore ways to use performance to excavate a text, its end goal being for students to have the tools to do this work with their own students in their year-round classrooms. Working collaboratively as actors, we'll employ choral readings, work with the rhythm of language, find and theatricalize events, find where a piece hits us emotionally, and create its physical life from there. We'll be working with a variety of texts—Poe short stories, a public lecture, poems, a narrative, fairy tales, a short portion of The Scarlet Letter, some original writing. Taking our cue from this summer's production of Hamlet, all texts we encounter will center on the theme of revenge. Though performance is central to the course, the emphasis is not on acting. Students must be available to rehearse a great deal outside of class.
Texts: A course packet containing all texts will be available for purchase online through the Middlebury College Bookstore, and at the onsite Bread Loaf bookstore.
