Vermont Campus, 2013 Courses
Group I (Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy)
7000b Poetry Workshop/R. Forman/M, W 2–4:45
In this workshop we will explore poetry of humanity and hope while incorporating tai chi, qi gong, and communal principles to bring a focused energy of flow to one’s writing life. Each session starts with centering, engages deep discovery and ends with a clearer understanding of writing technique. We'll examine how and why we are moved 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, this course focuses on energetic flow and what this can bring to the page, the discussion of published poems, and critique of student work. Students will complete weekly exercises designed to generate new writing and will submit a final portfolio of revised poems at the end of the term.
Texts: Lucille Clifton, Voices (BOA); Martin Espada, Alabanza (Norton); Naomi Shihab Nye, Transfer (BOA); Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House); Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within (Norton); Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial). Additional readings will be provided during the session.
7005a 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).
7005b Fiction Writing/R. Paris/T, Th 2–4:45
In this workshop we'll read, write, revise, and critique stories. As we do this, we’ll consider elements commonly associated with craft (plot, point of view, character development, dialogue, setting). We'll also consider how our identities (race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, language) are entangled with craft—how who we are may impact the types of stories we tell and the ways we tell them. While writing, reading, and responding to fiction are crucial in developing craft, perhaps also critical is articulating our reasons for writing. With this in mind, students will also write a statement of aesthetics about their writing: What stories do we want to tell and why? At the end of the course, students will organize their writing into a portfolio, and we’ll have an informal reading from revised work.
Texts: Junot Díaz, Drown (Riverhead); Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead);Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (Cleiss); Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (Vintage). Additional readings will be provided during the session.
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 stories 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 andthese stories from The Juniper Tree: “The Three Feathers,” “The Fisherman and his Wife,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Juniper Tree.” The artistically inclined should bring their art supplies with them to campus.
Texts: George MacDonald, The Light Princess (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, trans. Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell, illus. Maurice Sendak (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); Vivian Paley, Wally's Stories (Harvard); Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder Book (Dover); Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (Puffin); Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins); E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (HarperCollins).
7119 Reading and Writing in the Digital Age/D. Goswami and A. Lunsford/M–Th 11–12:15
This course, conducted as a workshop, will begin with an inquiry into the use of digital media by several writers, including Julia Alvarez and Sherman Alexie. How do these authors use digital tools to build interpretive communities (and market their books)? After exploring LibraryThing, Zines, and several other online literary communities, students in production groups of three or four will prepare digitized case studies of one of the writers under consideration, analyzing the web of relationships between readers, texts, and the ways meanings and literary values circulate at a time of rapid technological change. Each member of the class will compose a digital essay using color, images, sound, video, hyperlinks, and other forms of multimedia to achieve their purposes and effects. Students will examine a number of "animated" essays as they compose their own. This course is designed to help students develop their own digital-writing voice and persona, develop an understanding of the rich tradition of experimental essay-writing, and think critically about new platforms for reading and writing in the digital age. Another goal is to develop critical media production and pedagogical skills.
Texts: Andrea Lunsford, Beverly Moss, et al., Everyone's an Author, with Readings (Norton; also available as an e-book), with accompanying e-site: everyonesanauthor.tumblr.com; Julia Alvarez, A Wedding in Haiti (Algonquin) and Return to Sender (Yearling); Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown).
7146 Multilingual Writing: Pedagogies and Practices/D. Baca/M, W 2–4:45
What is the relationship between knowledge production and English education? How should questions of "critical" or "resistant" pedagogies be decided, and by whom? What is the role of classroom teachers in these debates? We will consider responses to these questions by analyzing recent pedagogical work on the concepts of hegemony, transformation, justice, democracy, functional literacy, and linguistic plurality. Instead of simply comparing pedagogies, we will take on the question of the legitimacy and social reality of teaching writing across communities in theU.S.and beyond. Through investigating the ways multilingual writers merge their own languages and world views into standardized English, we will collectively explore new possibilities for writing and the teaching of written language.
Texts: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (Aunt Lute); Norma González and Luis Moll, Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households and Classrooms (Lawrence Erlbaum); Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora, Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism (Multilingual Matters); Suresh Canagarajah, Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (Routledge); bell hooks, Writing beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (Routledge).
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. AlcuinBlamires (Oxford).
7247 “Remember Me”: Making History in Shakespeare’s Plays/C. Bicks/M–Th 9:35–10:50
History may be written by the winners, but the stories that get passed along by everyone else often don’t support the official 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. What does the act of remembrance demand of us? What (and whom) do we have to forget in order to move forward with a certain version of history? What are the ethics of remembering and forgetting? We will be reading in the following order: Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III. In conjunction with each play, we will be reading scholarly articles to supplement our thinking. Throughout the term you will be working with the actors from the Acting Ensemble to develop a group off-stage scene from one of the plays.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Susanne Wofford (Bedford/St. Martins); All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford); Othello, ed. Kim F. Hall (Bedford St. Martin’s); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Mario DiGangi (Bedford/St. Martins); Titus Andronicus, ed. B. Mowat and P. Werstine (Folger); Richard III, ed. Thomas Cartelli (Norton Critical).
7260 A Midsummer Night's Dream on the Page and Stage/A. MacVey/M, W 2–4:45
In this course we will explore a single great play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. 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 simply, script in hand, and present it at the end of the term. All students in the class will participate in the reading. (Students who have taken either of Professor MacVey's courses on The Tempest or The Merchant of Venice should not register for this class.)
Texts: William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Arden); Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Touchstone); selected articles and reviews on reserve.
7290b Reading Poetry/R. Watson/M–Th 11–12:15
The first half of this course will focus primarily on canonical figures of late-Renaissance English lyric verse—Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell—with frequent reference to the works of their less famous contemporaries. The second half will range through mostly brief, mostly British poetry of the centuries that follow, up to the present. As we analyze, through close reading, the interplay of form and content, we will also explore what kinds of work these poems are doing, and what the poems tell us indirectly about tensions in the authors and cultures that produced them. Students will write short response papers and a substantial final paper; they will also each lead discussion on a modern poem of their own choosing. Most important, students must come to each session prepared to raise questions of all sizes, and participate in an honest, energetic, and informed discussion of the assigned poems and their contexts. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group II or a Group III requirement.)
Text: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Full 5th Ed., ed. Margaret Ferguson, M. Salter, J. Stallworthy (Norton).
7292 Male, Female, Other/C. Bicks/M–Th 11–12:15
This course explores how gender norms have been contested and developed from the sixteenth century forward in primarily British literature. What makes someone male or female? Is gender marked by bodies, clothes, behavior, an unseen sense of who we feel we are? What if people don’t fit into the categories of masculinity and femininity that their culture has prescribed? How do bodies that confound these divisions expose these mechanisms and their faultlines? We will consider 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 Macbeths; the Amazons; The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna); those whose bodies blur the biological markers of difference (Herculine Barbin and Frankenstein’s monster); the fin de siècle “New Woman” (Chopin’s The Awakening) and the suburban middle-aged man (Dickey’s Deliverance); and we’ll end with a narrator whose gender remains ambiguous throughout his/her story of love and desire (Winterson’s Written on the Body). Please read as much of the primary material as possible before arrival and prepare Laura Gowing’s Gender Relations in Early Modern England for 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: Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Longman); William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. William Carroll (Bedford/St. Martins); Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling (Manchester; Revels Student Ed.); Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin, trans. Richard McDougall(Pantheon); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2nd ed., ed. J. Paul Hunter (Norton Critical); Kate Chopin, The Awakening, ed. Margo Culley (Norton Critical); James Dickey, Deliverance (Delta); Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (Vintage).
7295 Milton's Poetry/L. Engle/T, Th 2–4:45
In this course we will read John Milton's Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained. We will also touch on Milton's Masque (a.k.a. Comus), some of his prose works,and a number of his shorter poems, including his pastoral elegy Lycidas. Though Milton's career as a poet was not continuous, and for long periods of his adulthood it was in abeyance due to other commitments, it is nonetheless exceptionally unified. Milton's vocation, style, personal anxieties, political dreams, and sublime imagination are on display from his college poems to the masterpieces of his blind old age. This range makes him a rewarding poet to read and teach. Students will post notes, will lead one class discussion, will participate in a reading event, and will also write a shorter and a longer paper in the course of the summer session. Please come to the first meeting prepared to discuss "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity."
Text: The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (Modern Library). Recommended: The King James Bible.
Group III(British Literature since the Seventeenth Century)
7290b Reading Poetry/R. Watson/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.
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. Students who have taken 7274 should not enroll in this class.
7311 Romantic Poetry: Vision and Optical Culture/I. Armstrong/M–Th 8:10–9:25
Light, darkness, shadows, phantoms, phantasmagoria, the magic lantern, the spectrum, the telescope, the microscope, rainbows, stars, optical illusions, reflections, refractions. New technologies released new images for the nature of images themselves, and re-explored the nature of vision and the visionary in this period. We will look at the key poems of vision across the range of poetry by men and women from 1790–1830. We will also look at some of the prose texts that brought vision into question, writing by Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, and Joseph Priestley, among others. To prepare, please read “The Tyger,” from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Wordsworth’s Prelude, Book 1; Shelley’s "Prometheus Unbound,” particularly the first act; Anna Barbauld’s "Summer Evening’s Meditation"; Charlotte Smith’s "Beachy Head.” Students will submit two pieces of written work, a short and a long essay. In addition to formal presentations and discussion you will be asked to bring imaginative and analytical thought to interpretation of the texts through a number of means—for example, dramatization, movement, drawing. Think seriously about joining this course if you are not comfortable with these methods.
Texts: William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford Student Texts, 1990); William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Penguin); The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D, The Romantic Period, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (Norton). A collection of the prose works will be available at Bread Loaf.
7362 Things, Artefacts and Art Objects in the Nineteenth-Century Novel/I. Armstrong/ M-Th 9:35-10:50
The nineteenth-century novel is crowded with things and humanly made artefacts. The aim of the course is to explore this universe of things in different texts, considering the peculiar ways in which each writer represents things and the many functions of objects in narrative. In particular, we will be interested in the way the world of things is conjured through language. We will look at illustrated catalogs and handbooks to the Exhibition of 1851, the moment of a nascent commodity culture. Freud, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and phenomenologists such as Hannah Arendt all had different theories of the object. We will engage in close readings of the novels listed below, along with the early pages of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (who initiated an obsession with things). Students will submit two pieces of written work, a short and a long essay. Please bring an object with you on the first day of class and be prepared to talk about it. In addition to formal presentations and discussion you will be asked to bring imaginative and analytical thought to interpretation of the texts through a number of means—for example, dramatization, movement, drawing. Think seriously about joining this course if you are not comfortable with these methods.
Texts: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (all in Penguin).
7371 A History of Poetics: From Plato to Wilde/H. Laird/M, W 2–4:45
This course will trace conversational threads in the history of Western poetics (including Socratic dialogues, the ars poetica, “apologies” for poetry, discours, and other genres), from Plato through the nineteenth century. It will focus on how these early theorists of poetry constructed “the poet,” defined literature (e.g., mimesis), and debated with one another about literature’s purpose and aesthetic issues generally. While tracking socio-historical congruities and conflicts in the history of poetics and these poetics’ varying aesthetics, we will also see what happens when we apply these thinkers’ concepts to their own writings. We will interlace these readings with three plays that supply provocative examples of poetic achievement and alternative poetics. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement.)
Texts: The Critical Tradition, 3rd ed., ed. David Richter (Bedford/St. Martin’s); Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin); William Shakespeare, Hamlet, rev. ed. (Signet); Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (Black Box).
7372 Against Human Flourishing/T. Curtain/M, W 2–4:45
What, if anything, do literary texts allow us to say about human flourishing? This course will read selected dialogues from Plato, along with Aristotle’s Poetics and the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to make sense of key terms that have been used to define human flourishing. Each week we will discuss a central concept—from appearance to beauty, from science to wisdom, from virtue to excellence, from Eros to pleasure; and from friendship to flourishing. With Plato and Aristotle as our guides, we will discuss fate against the mayhem of Beowulf, follow Moore and Hobbes into an argument about character and utopias, happen upon Edmund Burke and Virginia Woolf sitting dejectedly, longing for perception and the sublime. We will listen to Plato’s expert witnesses on Eros as we are pulled into the plague of despair and desire of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The class will be asked to entertain the question, what if we think of literature as a case against human flourishing? How then do we answer the questions: Why write? read? love? or desire? (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement.)
Texts: Plato, Complete Works, J. Cooper (Hackett); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Hackett); Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (Penguin); Thomas Moore, Utopia (Dover); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hackett); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford); Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Clayton Koelb (Norton).
7402 “Written by Herself”/H. Laird/T, Th 2–4:45
In 1952, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “But first we must ask: what is a woman?” This course asks what “women” (and its corollary, “men”) have become, and what has become of women during the last century in the context of “women’s writing.” Focusing on the herstories of fiction in and associated with England, we will ask how such writings have reproduced, troubled, or re-mixed gender and text? How does genre—from autobiography and memoir, through dream fragment and epiphany, to historical anecdote and lecture—come into play? We will also keep in mind de Beauvoir’s critical point that “no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other against itself.” What other “others” are involved in these texts, and how/where do they intersect? Recommended contemporary critical/theoretical discussions will be available on reserve.
Texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Norton Critical); Dreams, Visions, and Realities: An Anthology of Short Stories by Turn-of-the-Century Women Writers, ed. Stephanie Forward (Continuum); Gertrude Colmore, Suffragette Sally (Broadview); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Mariner); Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton Critical); Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (Vintage); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (Lynne Rienner); Meera Syal, Anita and Me (New Press); Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Love in a Headscarf (Beacon). Please read Jane Eyre for our first week.
7405 Teaching Modern Irish Literature/V. Luftig/M–Th 11–12:15
We will study literary, historical, and critical texts preparatory to teaching a survey of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Irish literature for advanced high school or undergraduate students. We will consider too what's gained and lost in teaching these texts (by internationally renowned Irish and by those little known outside Ireland) either in a course bounded by the Irish national tradition or in courses that also consider British, transatlantic, and/or postcolonial contexts. No previous background in Irish literature is required—the course will be an introductory survey at the same time it considers ways of teaching such a survey—but having read a bit of Joyce, Yeats, Heaney, etc., can't hurt. We will give particular attention to texts by women writers and to depictions of recent immigrants. Discussions of teaching will focus on course design, not classroom pedagogy. Please read Dubliners for the first class session. (Students who have taken 7976 with Professor Luftig should not enroll for this course.)
Texts: The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, ed. RoyFoster (Oxford); James Joyce, Dubliners: Text and Criticism; rev. ed., ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (Viking); An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Belknap); William Butler Yeats, Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, ed. James Pethica (Norton Critical); Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed., ed. John Harrington (Norton Critical); The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, ed. Anne Enright (Granta); The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh (Dramatists Play Service); Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (Graywolf).
7445 Modernist Short Fiction/V. Luftig/M–Th 9:35–10:50
The period’s short stories make for a good introduction to literary modernism because they offer interesting test cases for some very grand ambitions. We’ll take those ambitions seriously while also considering the constraints of the form, reading stories in relation to the magazines in which they originally appeared, historical events and social patterns to which they responded, and the broader literary experiments of which they were a part. We’ll study important collections—by Joyce, Hemingway (please get a used edition of In Our Time), and Waldron—and individual stories by Crane, James, Wharton, Conrad, Lawrence, O’Connor, Woolf, concluding with each student’s focusing on (and offering a presentation in class) on a story by Katherine Mansfield.(This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.)
Texts:James Joyce, Dubliners: Text and Criticism; rev. ed., ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (Viking); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical); Stephen Crane, Great Short Works of Stephen Crane (Harper Perennial); Henry James, Tales of Henry James (Norton Critical); Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (Mariner); Eric Walrond, Tropic Death (Liveright); Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Norton Critical).
7455 Fiction of Empire and the Breakup of Empire/M. 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 related to what was British India, before breaking up into the several independent nations of South Asia. Novels and short stories, mostly written in English but with a few outstanding stories in translation, will be considered for their own merit, but also in relation to critical and theoretical controversies in current literary studies. We will discuss the participation of English fiction 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, so it will be crucial for you to have done a substantial amount of the primary reading before arrival, at least: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Passage to India, Clear Light of Day, and The Inheritance of Loss. Specific assignments in critical reading and a few films will accompany the primary texts, along with extracts from some primary readings unavailable for purchase in print. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement.)
Texts: Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Penguin); Rudyard Kipling, Selected Stories (Penguin); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harvest); V. S. Naipaul, Area of Darkness (Vintage); Saadat Hasan Manto, Selected Stories, trans. Khalid Hasan (Penguin); Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day (Vintage); Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines (Mariner);Kiran Desai, Inheritance of Loss (Grove); Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton).
Group IV(American Literature)
7385 Fictions of Finance/J. Freedman/T, Th 2–4:45
What is the relation between literature and its ambient economic world? This question will be at the center of our inquiry this summer, as we survey a number of works that look to the interplay between imaginative expression and material practices in America between, roughly, 1850 and 1920. Particularly interesting to us will be fictions that take the new, globalizing ambitions of finance capitalism seriously and that attend to the emotional, imaginative consequences of such a massive new economic force and its ancillary institutions (the stock market, the corporation). Readings will include some poems and a bit of economics (e.g., Marx, Schumpeter) but will mainly focus on the novels listed below. Students will write one short paper and one longer one.
Texts: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Scribner); Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Penguin); Frank Norris, The Pit (Penguin); Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (Plume); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner); W. E. B. DuBois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (Northeastern; try to buy this out-of-print edition used, or buy any edition new).
7445 Modernist Short Fiction/V. Luftig/M–Th 9:35–10:50
See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group IV requirement.
7458 Film as Film/J. Freedman/M, W 2–4:45
Cinema as an art has developed with remarkable rapidity from its origins (roughly the end of the nineteenth century) to the present day, and along the way has developed the capacity to comment on its own techniques, practices, institutions, past, present, and future. We will survey the ways film has persistently interrogated itself in a variety of venues and by a number of means, touching on some of the major texts in film criticism by way of comparison or contrast (hint: the films themselves often turn out to be more trenchant than the works that attempt to define, critique, or arraign them). While I’d be happy to have cinephiles and film experts in the class, the class is primarily intended as an introduction to film aesthetics for teachers interested in building cinema into their curriculums and/or for people interested in becoming more enlightened consumers. Assignments: journals, one short paper, one long one. (This course may be used to satisfy either a Group IV or Group V requirement.)
Films: selected early films from George Melies and G. A Smith; Martin Scorsese, Hugo; Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window and Vertigo; Akira Kurosawa, High and Low; John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Roman Polanski, Chinatown; Sergie Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin; Pedro Almodóvar, Broken Embraces; Jean Renoir, La Grande Illusion; Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard; David Lynch, Mulholland Drive; Quintin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds. Texts: V. Perkins, Film as Film (DaCapo). Plus essays by Laura Mulvey and Tania Modleski and selections from Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, available at Bread Loaf.
7511b Reading Slavery and Abolitionism/W. Nash/M–Th 11–12:15
This course is a study of black and white writers’ responses to, and efforts to eradicate, the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. We will work chronologically and across genres to understand how and by whom the written word was deployed in pursuit of physical and mental freedom and racial and socioeconomic justice. We will start by reading a short history, to ensure that we have common ground for beginning our conversations, and we will expand and deepen our study of historical context as the course progresses. Drawing on the substantial resources of Middlebury’s special collections, students will have the opportunity to engage in archival work.
Texts: Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World (Bedford/St. Martin’s); Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Lowance (Penguin); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, ed. Joel Myerson and Len Gougeon (Yale); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself and Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (both in one vol., Modern Library); Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Dover); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton); William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (Penguin); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Penguin).
7586 American Artists and the African American Book/R. Stepto/M–Th 9:35–10:50
This seminar studies the visual art, decoration, and illustration of African American books (prose and poetry) since 1900. Topics will include book art of the Harlem Renaissance (with special attention to Aaron Douglas and Charles Cullen), art imported to book production (e.g., images by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Archibald Motley), children’s books (e.g., by Langston Hughes, Tom Feelings, and Marilyn Nelson), photography and literature (e.g., Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Cabin and Field, with Hampton Institute photographs; Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices). The seminar may include sessions at Middlebury’sMuseum ofArt and Davis Family Library.
Texts: Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Kansas); Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Norton Critical); The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (Touchstone); James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones (Penguin); Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (Basic Books); Maren Stange, Bronzeville (New Press; out of print, but used copies available from online sources); Langston Hughes, The Dream Keeper (Knopf); Romare Bearden, Li’l Dan, The Drummer Boy (Simon & Shuster; out of print, but used copies available from online sources); Tom Feelings, Middle Passage (Dial); Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration (HarperCollins); Nella Larsen, Quicksand (Penguin); Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day (Penguin/Puffin); Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till (Houghton Mifflin) and Carver: A Life in Poems (Front Street); Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece, Incognegro (Vertigo).
7591b William Faulkner/J. Wicke/M–Th 11–12:15
This course concentrates on William Faulkner’s 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 questions we will pose are: Faulkner's literary “world” and his relation to modernism, his place as a Southern writer in "the global South," as regional writer, and as an exponent of what he calls “global literature.” We’ll consider the issues of race, gender, memory, and trauma; Faulkner's haunted houses (lineages) and history; the gothic; cartography, mapping, and space; print, mass media, and oral culture in Faulkner’s work. We will watch films written by Faulkner in his Hollywood period, and films adapted from his work, among them The Tarnished Angels (1957), based on Pylon (1935); and The Long Hot Summer, an adaptation of Faulkner's 1940 The Hamlet. A website will give us access to Faulkner's handwritten manuscript copies, memorabilia that plays a large part in his highly material fiction-making, and 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) (all Vintage). Short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning”; brief personal papers and essays, including Faulkner's "Nobel Prize Award Speech" of 1949 (available online in the William Faulkner site of the University of Virginia's Harrison Small Collection); and critical essays on Faulkner’s work will be available at Bread Loaf.
7588 Modernist American Literature/A. Hungerford/M–Th 8:10–9:25
This course explores the Modernist literary innovations of the early twentieth century, focusing on American writers. We will take a long view of Modernism, one that stretches from Gertrude Stein’s stories and Robert Frost’s narrative poetry through Thornton Wilder’s plays, ending with Alison Bechdel’s reflections on Modernist storytelling. In honor of the staging of Our Town this summer, we will study the play and look at the ways Modernist aesthetic forms shaped how writers represented American social life at the small scale. As we consider this shared subject, we will read in multiple genres: short and long-form fiction; lyric, epic, and prose poetry; drama; and graphic narrative. Students will prepare two papers and a presentation, choosing between critical and pedagogically oriented options. The pace will be brisk, so you should read some of the longer and denser material (especially Stein, Faulkner, Anderson, and Eliot) a first time before you arrive inVermont.
Texts: Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909) and Tender Buttons (1914; both in Digireads.com); Robert Frost, North of Boston (1914), in North of Boston and A Boy’s Will (Dover Thrift); Sherwood Anderson, Winesberg, Ohio (1919; Signet); Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; Liveright, new ed.); T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land [1922] with Eliot's Contemporary Prose,2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Rainey (Yale); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925; Scribner); Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928; Harper Perennial); William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930; Vintage); Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938; Harper Perennial); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2004; Mariner); a packet of supplemental readings available at Bread Loaf.
7650 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 curricular 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); Edith Perlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (Lookout); Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall (Scribner); Junot Díaz, This is How You Lose Her (Riverhead); Castle Freeman, an untitled manuscript of a work in progress (purchase through Middlebury Bookstore). One additional text may be selected for this course at a later date.
7673 Mexican American Literature/D. Baca/M–Th 9:35–10:50
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 aesthetic expression? What are the literary possibilities as well as limits of "mestizaje," the fusion and fissure of Mesoamerican and Western cultures? Given the fact that Mexican American writing easily weaves between Western configurations such as fiction, autobiography, poetry, pictography and art, what counts as Mexican American literature? How do Mexican American literatures 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); Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (Vintage); Demetria Martínez, Mother Tongue (One World/Ballantine); Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway (Back Bay); Stella Pope Duarte, If I Die in Juárez (Arizona); Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me Ultima (Warner). Students should also read Damián Baca, Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (Palgrave Macmillan), which will be on reserve at Bread Loaf.
Group V(World Literature)
7371 A History of Poetics: From Plato to Wilde/H. Laird/M, W 2–4:45
See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement.
7372 Against Human Flourishing/T. Curtain/M, W 2–4:45
See the description under Group III offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement.
7455 Fiction of Empire and the Breakup of Empire/M. Sabin/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 V requirement.
7458 Film as Film/J. Freedman/M, W 2-4:45
See the description under Group IV offerings. This course can be used to satisfy either a Group IV or a Group V requirement.
7717 Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition/J. Fyler/M–Th 9:35–10:50
Ovid is the most powerfully influential Roman poet in European literature from the twelfth century on. His erotic poems—the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris—fully explore the pathos and comedy of love, and make Ovid the Freud of the Middle Ages: he provides the most elaborate and memorable terminology for describing the uncertain stability of the lover’s mind. The Metamorphoses, an epic or anti-epic, serves as a bible of pagan mythology for later poets. We will look in detail at these poems and at excerpts from Ovid’s other works, especially the Heroides. We will also consider some of the most memorable examples of their later influence, mainly in the English but also in the French tradition.
Texts: Ovid, The Love Poems, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford); Ovid, Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (Penguin); Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Penguin); Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, trans. Burton Raffell (Yale); Andreas Capellanus, De Amore (On Love), trans. P. G. Walsh (Bristol Classical); Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford); Pierre Grimal, Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology; Ovid, Metamorphoses, either Allen Mandelbaum’s trans. (Harcourt) or Stanley Lombardo’s (Hackett); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books 3-4 and Book 6 and the Mutabilitie Cantos (both Hackett); Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Penguin).
7787 Global Modernism: Modernist World Fiction 1890-1936/J. Wicke/T, Th 2–4:45
This course will confront several myths about modernism: that modernist literature was written by and for elite Western audiences, that it is entirely Eurocentric, or Western, in its origins, and that it stays removed from the world and reflects on its own artistic experimentation. Modernist literature, however, was a world literature: it was written by authors who were involved with global exchanges or who themselves came from the so-called “ends of the earth,” and it emerged as an aesthetic and material practice informed and shaped by global locations and awareness. In a real sense, the global made modernism. This course looks freshly at both major modernist works for the global presence within them and also at modernist texts from around the world that have now come to be central to our understanding of a global modernism. We will also investigate the critical roots of the global to be found in early twentieth-century essays on world empire by J. A. Hobson and Vladimir Lenin, along with global theories of modernity from Chakraborty, Said, Fanon, and Freud. The goals of this course are three-fold: to expose students to a key body of literature in a globally-attuned way, to explore the global literary culture of modernism, and to present an open and exciting model for globally-oriented courses that students will themselves be prepared to teach.
Texts: Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883; CreateSpace or free e-book at Gutenberg.org); Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; Penguin—out of print, but used copies are for sale or you can read the free e-book at Gutenberg.org); Natsume Soseki, Sanshiro (1903; Penguin); James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; Dover Thrift); Katherine Mansfield, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” and “The Garden Party” in The Best Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Enda Duffy (Dover); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; Penguin or Mariner); Claude McKay, Banana Bottom (1934; Harvest); Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935; Penguin); Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935; Anchor); Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; Mariner). Secondary materials will be available at Bread Loaf.
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,InvisibleCities, 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 (Harvest); 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 (Vintage).
7791 Horror/T. Curtain/M–Th 9:35–10:50
The world is filled with terror and horror. Do we need literature to tell us this? Shouldn't we be reading works that offer roadmaps to right action? In times like these, shouldn't teachers of literature be discussing great works that offer solace in the midst of cultural decline—give us moral direction in times of corruption and toxic self-interest? Yes. The great works of literature are frequently horror stories—and deeply moralistic stories at that. We will study books or films from Chinese, South Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Italian horror traditions, as well as more familiar British and American gothic and splatter—while looking too at passages from such texts as The Unfortunate Traveller (Nashe), Titus Andronicus, The Duchess of Malfi, Book VI of De Rerum Natura, and Beowulf. From Lot's wife to Salem's Lot, we will discuss horror-as-morality. Be prepared on day one to discuss two short stories: Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" and Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The opening topic: the horrors of democracy. Come prepared to reason.
Texts: Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories (Library of America); Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie: A Novel (Ecco); Stephen King, Carrie and The Shining (both Anchor); Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (Pantheon); David Wong, John Dies at the End (St. Martin's Griffin); John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (St. Martin's Griffin). A packet of short stories will be made available at Bread Loaf. We will have a weekly screening of movies, including Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968); Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976); Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980); Hideo Nakata’s リング (Ringu, 1998); Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977); Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980); Larry Yust, The Lottery (1969); Tomas Alfredson’s Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2008); Takashi Shimishu, 呪怨 (Ju-on, 2000), among other works.
Group VI(Theater Arts)
7260 A Midsummer Night's Dream on the Page and Stage/A. MacVey/M, W 2–4:45
See the description under Group II offerings. The course can be used to satisfy a Group II requirement.
7807 Drama in the Classroom/C. MacVey/T, Th 2–4:45
This course is intended for teachers who want to use dramatic techniques in their English classrooms. You will learn how to explore texts by getting your students involved in some kind of performance—process drama, theater games, choral work, improvs, monologues, scenes, teacher-in-role—just to name a few. Every approach will involve being physical and being vocal. You’ll experience dramatic activities as both audience and actor and study approaches that will give you structure, technique, experience, confidence, and a set of skills with which to develop strategies for teaching various literary genres. We’ll work on Shakespeare texts from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet and on short stories, myths, poetry, nonfiction, and contemporary plays. We’ll also observe evening rehearsals of this summer’s production of Our Town and consider the Acting Ensemble’s approaches to classroom work. Bring copies of texts you teach since you’ll be able to reference those in some of your activities. Since most of the work will be collaborative, you must be available to rehearse with classmates several evenings and weekends. The final projects will be presentations, so you must attend the last class. No previous theater training is necessary. Please read the introduction to Impro before the first class.
Texts: Thornton Wilder, Our Town (Harper Perennial Classics; use this edition to follow rehearsal script); Keith Johnstone, Impro (Routledge); William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet (any edition); Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater, 3rd ed. (Northwestern); Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, intro. Tony Kushner (New Directions, deluxe; this ed. required because of important introductory essay); Oedipus in Ellen McLaughlin, The Greek Plays (Theater Communications Group).