Course Listings

Bread Loaf / Vermont

Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum
Group 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy
Group 2: British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century
Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present
Group 4: American Literature
Group 5: World Literature
Group 6: Theater Arts

Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum

M. Robinson, curriculum coordinator

The Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum centers on theories and practices for approaching conflict as an opportunity for promoting understanding and positive change. Developed as part of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, its aim is to cultivate strategies and pedagogies for working across differences and toward social justice. The Change courses put storytelling—narrative, language, theater—at the center of the process to provide unique opportunities for collaborative and experiential learning. In addition to class meetings, Change participants may need to attend a few special events outside the regular class hours.

7107 Teaching Literacies across Difference
D. Wandera/T, Th 1:45–4:45

In our globalizing world, classrooms and communities continue to be increasingly diverse. How might educators be sufficiently prepared to support learners from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to thrive in school and beyond? Various forms of diversity in contemporary classrooms can provide opportunities to teach and learn across and within differences. Informed by the audacity of bell hooks’s notion of “teaching to transgress,” this course takes a multiliteracies perspective. The course will explore the social context and aims of literacy teaching and learning within intersections of cultures, families, and heritage; it will also look at language processes and development. Participants will deepen their culturally responsive and social justice pedagogy and practices by scrutinizing instruction, intervention, assessment, and classroom-level approaches. The course will employ interactive activities and reflective discussion to animate pedagogical opportunities and creative solutions as participants strive to meet the needs of all learners.                  

In addition to a class presentation, students will participate in critical evaluations of case studies, undertake a culturally responsive reading of literacy materials typically found in ELA classrooms, and produce a culminating multimodal self-designed artifact that showcases application and continued learning of course principles. (This course carries one unit of Group 1 credit.)

Texts: bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge); Carla Shalaby, Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School (The New Press); Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (CreateSpace); William Howe and Penelope Lisi, Becoming a Multicultural Educator: Developing Awareness, Gaining Skills, and Taking Action (Sage Publications, 3rd ed.); Durthy A. Washington, Culturally Responsive Reading: Teaching Literature for Social Justice (Teachers College Press). Additional readings will be provided during the session.

7111 Race, Rhetoric, and the Literature of Protest
J. Sanchez/M, W 1:45–4:45

This course investigates the intersections of protest, literature, and rhetoric in public discourse and through a racial lens. Students will analyze discursive and nondiscursive forms of protest on local and international levels and will also read various fiction and nonfiction protest literature. Overall, this course aims to teach students the methods of protest and how literature can shape protest futures.   

Students will write two major papers: 1) a rhetorical analysis of a protest act and 2) a literary analysis of fictional protest literature. They will also attend a couple of film screenings, write weekly short analyses of our readings, and create a treatise on climate change protest. Finally, students should read the selected chapters from Rhetoric, Agitation, and Control on Canvas for the first day of class ahead of time. (This course carries one unit of either Group 1 or Group 4 credit.)

Texts: Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (One World); Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (Vintage); Richard Powers, The Overstory (Norton). In addition, students will have access to the following texts in Canvas before the session begins: John W. Bowers, et al., Rhetoric, Agitation, and Control (Waveland PR Inc); Unruly Rhetorics: Protest, Persuasion, and Publics, ed. Jonathan Alexander (University of Pittsburgh Press); Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Verso).

Films (screenings on campus): Paul Schrader, First Reformed; Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing.

7812 Solo Performance
J. Fried/M, W 8:30–11:30

This course will use the actor’s tools and process to build, rehearse, and perform a 10-minute solo play. You will base your script on a topic of your choice and on readings chosen in consultation with the professor before the session begins (at least a month). We will use a communal approach to individual work, so students can benefit from a range of perspectives. During the session you’ll work on your own, with your classmates, one-on-one with your professor, and with the full class to develop your character and story. The readings are your starting point: you will write your own scripts, using theatrical language and structures to create an experience that is emotionally, intellectually, and dramatically credible and engaging. The course is specifically designed for non-actors: no experience necessary. Specific requirements: a script you will create, rehearse, and perform for the BL community; three hours a week of rehearsal with classmates and the professor outside of class. (This course carries one unit of Group 6 credit.)

Film (viewed with class): Streaming National Theatre at Home series, Uncle Vanya, Andrew Scott, One-Man Vanya (National Theater, 2023–2024).

7580 Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist, Folklorist, Novelist, Change Agent
M. Robinson/T, Th 8:30–11:30

In this course, we will collectively explore the work and life of Zora Neale Hurston. The lived experiences of Hurston are paramount to understanding the cultural context of her work, and so both will be course content. Hurston was an anthropologist, and though she made her living as a writer (much of that writing fiction) her professional lens with the cultural context of people was always present. This course will focus on that lens as well as on the controversy that Hurston’s work generated among her peers. Alice Walker purchased a marker for Hurston’s grave that reads “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South, 1901–1960, Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist.” This course will explore and interrogate these titles and make meaning of Hurston’s work among them. Ultimately, we will explore whether Zora Neale Hurston was a Change Agent for the people and cultures represented in her work. (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit.)

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): Zora Neale Hurston, Novels and Stories: Jonah’s Gourd Vine/Their Eyes Were Watching God/Moses, Man of the Mountain/Seraph on the Suwanee/Selected Stories, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (Library of America)*; Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Amistad); Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir (Amistad/Modern Classics; copies may be available to borrow from Prof. Robinson); Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, reprint ed. (Amistad)*.

Group 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy

7000 Crafting Place: Poems Rooted in Landscape and Memory
J. O’Neil/T, Th 8:30–11:30

This craft-focused poetry course explores how place—shaped by geography, memory, and imagination—inspires and informs poetic creation. Students will experiment with traditional forms like pantoums and villanelles, while trying more modern forms such as the American sonnet, duplex, mirror poem, and prose poetry. Through workshops, readings, and craft discussions, we’ll investigate the tools that bring landscapes and histories to life in verse. The semester culminates in a mini portfolio of poems, along with short critiques on current poetry collections. This is a hands-on, creative deep dive for those ready to map their own poetic terrains. 

Texts: Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton); Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (Ecco); Nicole Cooley, Breach (LSU); Dorianne Laux, Finger Exercises for Poets (Norton).

7005 Fiction Writing
R. Makkai/S. Choi/T, Th 1:45–4:45

This course will focus on the craft of fiction through examination of student work, analysis of exemplary published works of fiction, and completion of exercises spotlighting such aspects of craft as characterization, plot, narrative voice, dialogue, and description. Students will share works in progress, provide constructive criticism to fellow writers, generate new work in response to exercises and prompts, and complete reading assignments provided by the instructors. In addition to regular reading assignments and short exercises, each student will complete two full short stories and revise one of them. Part seminar and part workshop, this class is appropriate for students with all levels of experience. This course will be taught in two three-week modules, the first run by Rebecca Makkai and the second by Susan Choi.

Text: Bret Anthony Johnston, Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (Random House).

7107 Teaching Literacies across Difference
D. Wandera/T, Th 1:45–4:45
See description in Change offerings.

7111 Race, Rhetoric, and the Literature of Protest
J. Sanchez/M, W 1:45–4:45
See description in Change offerings.

7113 Digital Cultural Rhetoric: Pedagogy and Social Justice
C. Medina/T, Th 8:30–11:30

This course asks: how do we teach in relation to the rhetoric of the culture where we work, and how does digital rhetoric mediate our interactions with issues of social justice? Our rhetorical “home places” include the cultures of our communities that we identify and take part in. How might we be able to draw on diverse cultural practices to help us understand our relationships with new media? This course looks at how internet interfaces and communities are impacted by design. It considers how the genres and platforms through which we interact perform culturing while building communities and how they share information and build knowledge. We will also consider: how will we ask students to develop as critical thinkers as more creativity, design thinking, arguments, logic, and opinions are off-loaded onto AI? What happens when we think of multimodal as beyond digital so that we might understand Indigenous traditions of writing? Students will be asked to share multimedia and writing from diverse writers and media creators. We will be composing with online literacies to critique online literacies.

Text: Cindy Tekobbe, Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces (University of Utah Press).

7050 Writing the Body in Place
R. Johnson/M, W 8:30–11:30

Neurologists tell us we hold places in our memories like we hold trauma in our bones. Our bodies are water and air, hill and hollow, and they are diseased and healthy, wounded and healing, resilient and unraveling—like the landscapes that hold us. In this course, we will write creative nonfiction about our bodies and the places that have made us. For inspiration, we will read essays by writers such as Annie Dillard, Camille Dungy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jamaica Kincaid, J. Drew Lanham, and E. B. White. We will also read about craft. We will meet outside when we can, relishing where we are. 

In addition to engaging in short writing exercises, participants will produce two full essays, workshop them, revise one, and give a final reading. The course serves new and experienced writers. Students will need a writing journal (size and design is their choice). For our first class meeting, please read Molly McCully Brown’s Places I’ve Taken My Body.

Texts: Molly McCully Brown, Places I’ve Taken My Body (Persea, 2021); Dara McAnulty, Diary of a Young Naturalist (Milkweed, 2021). Additional readings will be available on Canvas in the spring. 

7150 Short Form: Creative Writing about the Teaching Life
S. Swope/M, W 8:30–11:30

A teacher’s life is profound, often absurd, and filled with fantastic stories that rarely get written down. We’ll mine your experience as we experiment with short-form nonfiction and fiction. New pieces will be workshopped in each class, so you’ll generate a ton of material and be encouraged to take risks. Your pieces will be short—really short—so our primary concern will be clarity and economy. Because concise writing’s best friend is a fierce editorial eye, we’ll cheerfully challenge every sentence, phrase, and word. By the session’s end, you’ll be an economical wordsmith with a nice collection of writing inspired by teaching. In advance of the initial class, read all of Writing with Style by Lane Greene. (Students who have received credit for ENGL 7190 may not enroll in this course.)

Text: Lane Greene, Writing with Style: The Economist Guide (The Economist Books).

Group 2: British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century

7210 Chaucer and the Questions of Gender
M. Rasmussen/T, Th 1:45–4:45

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer creates a cast of astonishingly vivid female characters. Six hundred years before Judith Butler, he imagines gender and sexual identity as constructed and performed, by women, men, and the sexually indeterminate Pardoner. Yet Chaucer is a man of his own place and time: England in the late 14th century. How, and what, can we learn from him today? In this course, we will seek to respond as fully as possible to Chaucer’s representations of gender and sexuality in the Tales, taking into account scholarship and criticism from the 20th century to the present day, as well as such recent adaptations as Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden (2023). Assignments include two short papers and a final project: the final project may be an analytical essay, a research paper, or a creative work.

Texts (all are required editions): Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Seventeen Tales and the General Prologue, eds. V. A. Kolving and Glending Olson (Norton, 3rded.); Gloria K. Fiero, Wendy Pfeffer, and Mathé Allain, Three Medieval Views of Women (Yale University Press, 1st ed.); Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden, (Penguin 1st ed.).

7251 Slow-Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets
L. Engle/T, Th 8:30–11:30

This course focuses on Shakespeare’s sonnets as instances of an enduring form, as expressions of feeling, as assertions of selfhood, as constituents of a pseudo- or quasi-autobiographical sequence, and as objects of sustained critical attention. At times we’ll read lyrics by other poets for comparison. At times we’ll note affinities with other works by Shakespeare. Students will write a sonnet of their own to get a feel for the form. We’ll look at major commentators like Stephen Booth, Helen Vendler, and William Empson. The focus, however, will be close reading and detailed discussion of these poems. Students should bring a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays, if they own one already, as well as Colin Burrow’s edition of the poems. They should read through the sequence once before the course begins. Course requirements include weekly reading notes, a short paper, a sonnet of your own, a teaching segment, and a longer paper due at the end. 

Texts: William Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford). Students need the corrected edition (2002 or after).

7256 Thinking with Tragedy: Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy
S. Wofford/M, W 1:45–4:45

This course will focus on key examples of Greek tragedy that illuminate Shakespeare’s tragic works. It will set up dialogues between pairs of plays, while also providing an opportunity for students to consider and possibly write on modern responses or adaptations. Athenian State Theater developed a dramatic form—tragedy—that paid its dues both to epic and to ritual, and formalized a space for exploring the complex relations of kinship, eros, gender, the polis or state, thought and desire. The idea of “Thinking with Tragedy” is to explore Shakespeare’s plays (Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale) in the context of Greek tragedy (The Oresteia, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Electra, Ajax, The Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcestis), to discover the exfoliations of tragedy into other genres and forms, and to speculate on the generative power of tragedy for aesthetic and dramatic theory.

Modern adaptations which students might explore include Sartre, Les Mouches (The Flies), adaptation of Electra; Ellen McLaughlin, An Oresteia; Ajax in Iraq; Luis Alfaro, Oedipus el Rey; Sulayman Al Bassam, The Al Hamlet Summit; Bhardwaj’s film Haider; José Cruz González, Invierno; Beckett, Endgame; Kurosawa’s film Ran.

There will be two papers, one analytical and one that may be creative. Students are required to attend three rehearsals and one final performance of the play staged by the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble (on campus) this summer. Students should read the Oresteia (all three plays) for the first class; they should also read some of the Greek plays before the session. Further information about texts and assignments will be sent to registered students before the session. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 5 requirement.)

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): Aeschylus, Aeschylus II: The Oresteia, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith et al. (Chicago, 3rd ed., 2013); Sophocles, Sophocles I: The Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith et al. (Chicago, 2013)*; Sophocles, Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith et al. (Chicago, 3rd edition, 2013); Euripides, Euripides V: Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith et al. (Chicago, 2013)*; William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Mowat and Werstine (Folger Shakespeare Library edition, Simon and Schuster, 2012)*; King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes (The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, 3rd edition, May 9, 1997)*; Coriolanus The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Peter Holland (The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, 3rd ed., 2013)*; Antony and Cleopatra: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Ania Loomba (The Arden Shakespeare, 1st ed., 2011)*; The Winter’s Tale (The Pelican Shakespeare), ed., Frances E. Dolan et al. (Penguin Classics, 2017)*. Students may also want to read Euripides, Euripides I: Alcestis, Medea, The Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, ed. and trans. Mark Griffith, et al. (Chicago, 2013). 

Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present

7311 Romantic Nature
I. Newman/T, Th 8:30–11:30

What goes into making Nature beautiful? British Romanticism has long been associated with “Nature” and the development of new aesthetic categories for understanding the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque in the apprehension of natural landscapes. More recently those discussions have been framed in terms of environmental change, with the new apprehension of nature being itself a reaction to the environmental destruction wrought by industrial revolution. These understandings will inform our class discussions, but we will be pursuing a more specific question: how might an understanding of the bucolic splendor of the Bread Loaf campus itself inform the way we understand the Romantic Period’s reinvention of Nature? We will attend to the meadows, woods, and farmlands of the Green Mountains and to the political and aesthetic decisions that have made Vermont possible, and we will read these concerns back into the writings of British Romanticism. Along the way we will touch upon such varied topics as the Anthropocene, ruins, Indigenous rights, botany, rowing, the eugenics movement, hunting, and the relationship between thinking and walking.              

Students may choose between writing three shorter assignments, forming a portfolio of writing (which might include books reviews, public-facing articles, lesson plans), or writing one longer cumulative research paper that will be submitted at the end of the course. We will be immersing ourselves in the environment around the Bread Loaf campus; this will include some optional hiking. A good pair of hiking boots would be a good idea.

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford); William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford)*; Jane Austin, Mansfield Park, ed. Jane Stabler and James Kinsley (Oxford); William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford)*; Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford).

7371 The Wild(e) 1890s
B. Black/M, W 8:30–11:30

The 1890s in England was an infamous decade. Its preoccupations will be this course’s focus: gender and sexuality, theater and theatricality, empire and culture, the city and decadence, socialism and aestheticism. We will read widely in the corpus of Oscar Wilde, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wilde’s vexed and vexing letter from jail, De Profundis. While Wilde is the course’s presiding genius, we will also study such works as Olive Schreiner’s Dreams, a feminist utopian vision that imagines a better way beyond the era’s unjust gender and race politics, and several of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories that speak to anxieties pertaining to home, family, and nation. Be prepared to encounter Margaret Harkness’s strangely affecting melodrama A City Girl, Michael Field’s queer poetics, Aubrey Beardsley’s art of the grotesque, and H. G. Wells’s vision of the apocalypse as we aim to reanimate the vitality of the decade’s literary culture.

There will be a short paper at the session midpoint and a final seminar paper with a research component at the summer’s end. Students will sign up to do seminar presentations on key figures and theoretical, literary, or cultural concepts throughout the term. Please read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde prior to the initial class. 

Texts (all are required editions): Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Penguin); The Fin de Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford); Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford); Aubrey Beardsley, The Best Works of Aubrey Beardsley (Dover); Margaret Harkness, A City Girl, ed. Tabitha Sparks (Broadview); Olive Schreiner, Dreams, ed. Barbara Black, Carly Nations, Anna Spydell (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings (Penguin).

7454 No Place for Us: Actual Counterfactual Worlds and Other Utopias
T. Curtain/M, W 1:45–4:45

This course will (re)introduce students to the academic study of science fiction by identifying and coming to a critical account of how science-fiction books create spaces for imagining the world other than what it is. We will start with Sir Thomas More’s foundational text Utopia (1516) and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), then move to contemporary utopia fiction with Ursala K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel Surface Detail (2010). I may assign short stories or other works as our discussions unfold. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 5 requirement.)

Texts: Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Create Space); Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (Penguin); Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Adamant Media); William Morris, News from Nowhere (Martino Fine Books); Ursala K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Harper); Iaian M. Bank, Surface Detail (Orbit).

Group 4: American Literature

7111 Race, Rhetoric, and the Literature of Protest
J. Sanchez/M, W 1:45–4:45
See description in Change Curriculum offerings.

7504 The Visual World of Moby Dick
B. Wolf/T, Th 1:45–4:45

This class will read Moby Dick over the course of the summer, pairing chapter-by-chapter readings of the novel with discussions of the social, cultural, and visual histories that the chapters allude to. Focusing on painting, sculpture, and vernacular art, we will recreate the visual environment that undergirds Melville’s epic, from tavern signs and scrimshaw to images of slavery, the landscape, and everyday life in America. In addition to Moby Dick and several short stories by Melville, we will study 19th-century landscape and genre painting; slavery and race in antebellum society; commerce, industry, and early “globalism”; gender and class; Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Art Spiegelman (Maus); and Hollywood versions of Moby Dick.       

As their course project, students will create an “imaginary exhibition” in three phased assignments. Phase 1 centers on a close reading of an image or object from the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Phase 2 focuses on the writing of an introduction to the catalog accompanying your exhibition. Phase 3 involves the final packaging of the exhibition with sample wall labels, a list of objects, and a map of the exhibition layout. The exhibition might feature the works of a single artist or group of artists, or it might focus instead on a particular theme or topic—sentimental culture and domestic life, or sublime landscapes, or whaling in antebellum America, or virtually any topic of your choosing. 

Texts: Herman Melville, Moby Dick (preferably with a glossary of nautical terms); Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Pantheon).

7578 Willa Cather, In Place
K. Marshall/M, W 8:30–11:30

Bread Loaf students often hear stories of Willa Cather’s summer teaching in the school’s first decade. Cather’s work is ripe for reexamination as many of her novels, including 1925’s The Professor’s House, reach their centennial this year. In this seminar we will survey five key texts from Cather’s oeuvre, as well as a biography, and we will do so by asking how any author-focused study can change in our century. Our work will be enlivened by deep engagement with the artists and writers situated in the key geographical sites central to Cather’s fiction, from Nebraska to New York to Mexico. These voices will anchor our discussions of Cather’s work with place, landscape, and indigeneity.        

Students are encouraged to read the biography and novels ahead of the summer and should expect to spend two class sessions in Middlebury’s libraries. We will proceed through the novels in chronological order, with additional short readings. Course requirements include a class presentation and a menu of writing options, long and short, research and creative, from which students will choose to complete 4,000–5,000 words over the term.

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives (Knopf)*; Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Vintage); My Ántonia (Vintage); One of Ours (Vintage); The Professor’s House (Vintage); Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage).

7580 Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist, Folklorist, Novelist, Change Agent
M. Robinson/T, Th 8:30–11:30
See description in Change Curriculum offerings. 

7610 Canon/Counter-Canon Drama
O. Eustis/M, W 1:45–4:45

This course will examine some of the canonical texts of American drama, starting in the early 19th century and reaching to the present day, and pair them with text which, while not canonical, could be in a different world. My hope is to both provide the class with vigorous and insightful discussions of plays which they have often encountered and introduce them to thrilling works which have not been widely read or embraced. The plays themselves will be the focus, but inevitably we will examine what cultural factors lead some works to be central to a culture’s identity and others to be marginalized.

Texts: Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays (Liberty Fund); Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon (Kessinger); William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., The Independence of Eddie Rose (TCG); George Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the play) (Dodo); James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (Penguin); Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (Nick Hern); Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude (Vintage); Arthur Miller, All My Sons (Penguin); Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Yale); Sam Shepherd, Buried Child (Dial Press Trade); Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginial Woolf (Berkley); Ossie Davis, Purlie Victorius (Concord Theatricals); Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions); Lorraine Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (Concord Theatricals); David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (Grove Press).

In addition, students will have access to the following texts in Canvas before the session begins: Richard Nelson, Conversations in Tusculum; Branden Jacobs Jenkins, An Octoroon; John Augustus Stone, Metamora or The Last of the Wampanoags; Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing!; Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play; John Leguizamo, Other Americans; Luis Alfaro, Oedipus El Rey.

7645 Musical Theater and America
B. Steinfeld/T, Th 1:45–4:45

The American musical theater, like many art forms created here, reflects much of America’s mythology about itself. This course will look at the ways in which both the history and content of musicals from Show Boat to Hamilton reflect (and try to rewrite) the dreams, possibilities, and contradictions of how we tell our stories through song. We will learn from and about the giants of the musical theater world, and we will also explore the craft and structure of writing and performing this genre, with students having the opportunity to work creatively, along with visits from the BLSE acting ensemble. Among the musicals we’ll explore: Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Assassins, and Ragtime. Students will complete individual and group projects. Librettos and other readings will be provided; and students may need to attend screenings of some musicals outside of class time. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 6 requirement.) 

Group 5: World Literature

7256 Thinking with Tragedy: Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy
S. Wofford/M, W 1:45–4:45
See description in Group 2 offerings.

7454 No Place for Us: Actual Counterfactual Worlds and Other Utopias
T. Curtain/M, W 1:45–4:45
See description in Group 3 offerings.

7706 Greek Tragedy
D. Clubb/M, W 1:45–4:45

This course takes a close look at seven plays written by the three ancient Greek tragedians: Aeschylus (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides), Sophocles (Antigone, Electra), and Euripides (Electra, The Bacchae). Among the greatest dramas ever written, these plays investigate some of the world’s most difficult ethical questions with complexity, ferocity, subtlety, and compassion. Close textual analysis will be supplemented with historical, theatrical, and philosophical considerations. Especial attention will be paid to the writers’ dramatic methods and the relation of their dramaturgy to the profession of theater-making. Course requirements: three to four short essays and a course journal due at the end of the semester. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 6 requirement.)

Texts (all are required editions): Greek Tragedies I, eds. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most (U of Chicago, 3rd edition); Greek Tragedies II, eds. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most (U of Chicago, 3rd edition); Greek Tragedies III, eds. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most (U of Chicago, 3rd edition). Recommended: Pierre Grimal, The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Penguin).

7710 The Bible as Literature
S. Goldman/T, Th 1:45–4:45

In this course we will study the poetry and prose of Genesis and Exodus. Our emphasis will be on the literary and historical aspects of biblical narrative. Requirements include a short paper, due mid-session, and a longer research paper, due at the end of term.

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): The Oxford Study Bible, ed. Suggs, M. J. et al. (Oxford, 1992)*; R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books); The Art of Biblical Poetry (Basic Books).

7722 Inner Lives
S. Donadio/M, W 1:45–4:45

Focusing our attention on a sequence of consequential autobiographical writings in various traditions ranging from late antiquity to the modern era, we will attempt to trace the changing terms of self-affirmation and self-judgment, alternating patterns of disclosure and evasion, the nature and impact of relationships with other people, and the limitations on—and opportunities for—self-realization associated with past and present historical circumstances, whether personal, generational, or communal.

Participants in this course can expect to be engaging in some related independent reading and research; for a final essay, they will be asked to undertake a comparison between one of the works we are reading together and another work of their own choosing that is not included on our reading list. 

Texts: St. Augustine, Confessions (Penguin Classics); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford World’s Classics); John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (Penguin Classics); Helen Keller, The Complete Story of My Life (Sea Wolf Press); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford World’s Classics); Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Vintage International); Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (Schocken).

7755 Literary Criticism: Theory and Practice
M. Rasmussen/M, W 8:30–11:30

In this course, we learn how to use literary theory to see more in the works we study and love. We begin with classic statements by authors from Plato to Susan Sontag, because so much of the conversation begins with them. Then we turn to 20th- and 21st-century critical approaches, from the New Criticism, beginning in the 1930s, to such contemporary methods as gender studies, queer theory, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, the new historicism, and ecocriticism. Each student will adopt a literary work they already know well as a test case for the theories we encounter. Students will produce a short paper midway through the term and a longer paper at the end. In the second half of the term, student groups will lead class discussion.

Text (required edition): The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (Norton, 3rd ed.). Additional readings will be provided.

7757 Plays and Politics on the Global Stage
T. Wolff/T, Th 1:45–4:45

What makes a play political? When and why does producing political theater matter? In this course, we will look at contemporary and canonical plays from across the globe that take on various political crises (e.g., Argentina during the “Dirty War”; South Africa under Apartheid; the Liberian Civil War; Eastern European Communist censorship). Analyzing plays as texts and performances, we will consider what makes theater a useful medium to respond to conflict and social trauma. We will explore how playwrights around the world have aimed to create social change through dramaturgy.    

Students will be expected to complete short, informal responses (300–500 words) about the work we are discussing the following class, as well as prepare a presentation and produce one longer paper or project. For the first class, please read Sophocles’s Antigone, and the Brecht, Boal, Kirby, and Pinter excerpts (all will be available on Canvas this spring). (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 6 requirement.) 

Texts (all are required editions): Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman: A Play (W. W. Norton & Company, 2nd ed., April 17, 2002); Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (Theatre Communications Group, TCG ed., December 1, 1994); Brian Friel, Translations (FSG Adult); Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (Anchor; 1st ed., September 1, 1993); Lola Arias, Minefield (Oberon Books, November 2, 2017); Danai Gurira, Eclipsed (Theatre Communications Group, 2nd ed., March 14, 2017); Heather Raffo, Nine Parts of Desire (Northwestern, 1st ed., November 13, 2006); Griselda Gambaro, Information for Foreigners (Northwestern, 1st ed., March 1, 1992); Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends (PAJ Publications; new edition, June 20, 2017); Caryl Churchill, Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (Theatre Communications Group, April 1, 1996); David Greig, The Events (Faber & Faber, main edition, August 15, 2013). If registered students have trouble securing print editions of these texts, they should write blse@middlebury.edu.

The following will be available on Canvas: Sophocles, Antigone, ed. Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1st ed., January 3, 2000); Bertolt Brecht, Antigone: In a Version by Bertolt Brecht, ed. Judith Malina (Applause Theatre Books, First Applause Printing, 1990); Chiori Miyagawa, Red Again: Antigone Project (NoPassport Press); Athol Fugard, John Kani, Winston Ntshona, The Island (Theatre Communications Group).    

7811 Production and Dramaturgy
B. McEleney/T, Th 8:30–11:30
See description in Group 6 offerings.  

Group 6: Theater Arts

7645 Musical Theater and America
B. Steinfeld/T, Th 1:45–4:45
See description in Group 4 offerings. 

7706 Greek Tragedy
D. Clubb/M, W 1:45–4:45
See description in Group 5 offerings

7757 Plays and Politics on the Global Stage
T. Wolff/T, Th 1:45–4:45
See description in Group 5 offerings.

7811 Production and Dramaturgy
B. McEleney/T, Th 8:30–11:30

This course will give students an opportunity to work as actors alongside members of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble as they rehearse and perform a production of Curse of the House of Atreus, an original adaptation of three Greek plays (Electra by Sophocles, Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, and Agamemnon by Aeschylus). Students enrolled in the course will be guaranteed speaking roles in the production; they will, though, be required to participate in auditions. No acting experience is necessary. Class time will involve discussion of methods of adaptation and textual analysis as well as issues of acting, directing, and staging practice. 

In addition to class time, students must be available at least three evenings a week for rehearsals (which run generally Sunday–Thursday, 7:00–10:30 p.m.) and must keep a written journal that will be reviewed on a weekly basis by the instructor. Weekly journal entries (of at least 500 words) will chart emerging understandings of text and performance as they reveal themselves through rehearsal. Students should be familiar with each of the three Greek plays before coming to Bread Loaf. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 5 requirement.)

Texts (any edition/translation): Sophocles, Electra; Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis; Aeschylus, Agamemnon.

7807 Theatrical Practice and Building Community in the Classroom
A. Brazil/M, W 1:45–4:45

Theater can offer students the opportunity to viscerally enter and deeply understand—and own—a text. Working collaboratively, we’ll investigate the ways in which performance can expand and deepen a reader’s experience with and comprehension of the written word. We’ll also create literacy and increased competency around healthy classroom spaces and consent-based practices, and center radical empathy for self and community as a core practice. We’ll work in class with a variety of texts from which we’ll create short in-class performances; texts chosen will be in conversation with the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble’s summer production, The Revenge of the House of Atreus. Though performance is central to the course, no previous acting experience is required. You will perform on each class day and will be required to rehearse outside of class one to two hours weekly. The final project is a detailed and specific unit plan for implementing this work in your own classrooms.

Text (required edition): Eileen Landay and Kurt Wootton, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts (Harvard University Press, 2012).

7812 Solo Performance
J. Fried/M, W 8:30–11:30
See description in Change offerings.

Bread Loaf / Oxford 

Group 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy
Group 2: British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century
Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present
Group 5: World Literature
Group 6: Theater Arts

Group 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy

7939 British Biography as Literature and Craft
A. Swan/M, W 10:30–12:30; T 2:00 additional sessions offered
See description in Group 3 offerings.

7977 Poetry Detective: Reading and Writing Past Fear
G. Lewis/M–W 11:00–1:00

The detective or mystery genre is a key trope in modern popular culture. This workshop will use the tools of sleuth as a way of approaching poems both as a reader and writer. The application of the principles of detection offers a useful way into otherwise daunting works of art. The course will focus on reading and writing as ways of generating new texts. Each class will include writing exercises—to be done either in class or as homework—designed to explore methods raised by the readings. Class readings will be drawn from a wide range of periods and traditions; texts will be supplied in class. Students will be expected, initially, to examine some of the foundational detective genre texts, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and Thomas de Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Major requirements include a critical paper plus a poetry portfolio of original work. (This course carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)

Group 2: British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century

7908 Ovid and Chaucer
J. Fyler/M, W 9:30–Noon 

Ovid is the most powerfully influential Roman poet in European literature from the 12th century on; his Metamorphoses serves as a major source of mythology for later poets and painters, who also show their great debt to his style, his focus on the pathos and comedy of love, and his interest in the tensions between permanence and change, reason and the irrational, the human and the natural world, the divine and the human. Among the many English poets who are indebted to him—among them Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—Chaucer is preeminent, and their unusually close affinity has long been recognized. This course will explore the Metamorphoses along with Chaucer’s greatest poem, Troilus and Criseyde, a tragic love story set near the end of the Trojan War. There is one notable advantage to our reading Ovid in Oxford: Titian’s great series of paintings on Ovidian subjects—including Ariadne and Bacchus, Actaeon, Callisto, and Venus and Adonis—are nearby in London, where we will be able to see them up close. Our readings of the two poems will also be up close; and our reading of Ovid will sharpen our understanding of Chaucer’s meaning. The course requirements include two eight-to-12-page papers and at least one field trip to London. (This course carries one unit of Group 2 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.) 

Texts (all are required editions): Ovid, Metamorphoses: A Norton Critical Edition, trans. Charles Martin (Norton); Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1–5, ed. W. S. Anderson (U of Oklahoma); Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 6–10, ed. W. S. Anderson (U of Oklahoma); Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Stephen Barney (Norton).

7918 Trans/Queer Shakespeare
A. Joubin/T, Th 10:00–Noon

Shakespeare’s plays, originally written for all-male casts, are trans and queer on many levels, as evidenced by the early modern cross-gender stage practices. In the early modern world gender was more complex than a male and female binary. Modern performances also engage regularly with early modern notions of genderplay. Artists used Shakespeare to understand trans histories even before trans and queer studies were formalized fields of study. The idea of transness refers not only to a spectrum of experiences associated with gender identity, but also to movement through space-time or residing in transitory social spaces. The kinetic prefix trans- and the verb queer evoke transgression, transience, transition, gender as a translational practice, and transformation. Taking an intersectional approach, we will apply trans and queer theories to interpretations of Shakespeare and to topics within and beyond traditional gender studies, such as critical race, disability, and ecological studies. Assignments include short written responses to the weekly readings and a final project of either research paper or creative praxis as research.

Texts: Alexa Alice Joubin, Introduction to Critical Theory (open access, https://criticaltheory.info); Alexa Alice Joubin, Screening Shakespeare (open access, https://screenshakespeare.org); Melissa Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory (Arden Bloomsbury, 2019); Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest (Folger edition, open access https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works).

An excerpt from the following will be provided: Melissa Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory (Arden Bloomsbury, 2019).

Optional: Gary Taylor, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Film: John Madden, Shakespeare in Love (Universal Pictures, 1998); please view the film on your own before the session.

7921 British Theater: Page to Stage
S. Berenson/M, T, Th 10:00–12:30 and W full day (for performances and travel)
See description in Group 6 offerings.

Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present

7939 British Biography as Literature and Craft
A. Swan/M, W 10:30–12:30; T 2:00 additional sessions offered

This class is a look at, and celebration of, the tradition of British biography, beginning with James Boswell’s intimate portrait of 18th-century literary lion Samuel Johnson and his world. We will read Lytton Strachey’s stiletto-sharp takedown of the eminent Victorians and Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of Oscar Wilde, that most famous (and doomed) of late-Victorian figures. We’ll also read biographies that bend the form—Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life; A. J. A. Symons’s Quest for Corvo, a biography masquerading as a detective story; and Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage, about Vita Sackville-West, his philandering, aristocratic mother, his father Harold Nicolson—and Virginia Woolf. We will use these as models for studying and practicing biographical or memoir writing.               
There will be short written responses to the weekly readings, a class presentation, and a final project; these will include both critical and creative writing. We will also explore, in short field trips outside of regular class, the literary sites of Oxford (i.e., where Oscar Wilde and Samuel Johnson lived as students, etc.). Preparation for the first class: Reading Christopher Hibbert’s introduction to the Penguin edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson. (This course carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 3 credit.)

Texts (required editions noted with an asterisk): James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, intro. Christopher Hibbert (Penguin Classics, abridged)*; Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life (Vintage); Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Penguin Classics); Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (Vintage); A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (New York Review Books), Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage (University of Chicago Press).

7941 Romantic Ireland
D. Dwan/T, Th 10:30-12:30

In a famous poem first published in a newspaper in 1913, W. B. Yeats declared “Romantic Ireland” to be dead and gone. However, the funerals for Romantic Ireland had been proceeding for well over a hundred years—every burial being an attempted resurrection—and would continue throughout the 20th century. Drawing on a range of major writers (Joyce, Synge, Bowen, Heaney, Boland), this course considers why Ireland was repeatedly configured and reconfigured as a “romantic” country. It examines the ambivalence about “modernity” that was expressed in the conceit, the kind of politics it conditioned—nationalism in particular—and the literary and cultural practices that both fed the myth and critiqued it. While we will be situating these texts within intricate historical and ideological contexts, we will also focus on what makes them aesthetically distinctive and challenging. 

The course is assessed through one final research paper (approx. 5,000 words). Students will build towards this with a 1,500-to-2,000-word formative essay and a 1,000-word final essay plan. Try to get as much reading as possible done before the summer. By the time of our first meeting, you should definitely have read Yeats’s collection Responsibilities (in The Major Works) and J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. 

Texts: J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Methuen); W. B. Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford); James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (Penguin); Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (Vintage); Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Collected Poems, 1966–1996 (Faber); Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems (Carcanet).

7944 On Middlemarch
D. Russell/M, W 1:00-4:00

This course will focus on what many have claimed is the greatest novel in English: Middlemarch, by George Eliot. The novel was published in Britain between 1871 and 1873, and we will also take our time with it. We will read through this novel slowly together, considering historical contexts, critical approaches, and the philosophical importance of the novel. Only the primary text will be required for this course; additional material by and about Eliot will be supplied as the course progresses. Major requirements include one prospectus and one longer research paper.

Texts: George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Russell (Oxford World’s Classics, 3rd edition).

7975 James Joyce
J. Johnson/T, Th TBD

Students will engage in intensive study of Ulysses in its Hiberno-European, Modernist, and Joycean contexts. We will begin by reading both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and Joyce’s poetry, critical essays, Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Finnegans Wake will all be incorporated into discussions), but the course will be primarily devoted to the reading and study of Ulysses. This work’s centrality to, yet deviation from, the aesthetic and political preoccupations of modernism will be explored. (Class meetings may fall occasionally on days other than T/Th.)

Texts: James Joyce, Dubliners (any ed.), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (any ed.), and Ulysses, ed. H. W. Gabler (Vintage). Supplementary texts: Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, Finnegans Wake, and Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson (Faber). Students are not expected to buy the supplementary texts.

Group 4: American Literature

7983 The City in the 20th Century: Vision, Form, Politics
M. Turner/M, W 10:30–12:30

Throughout the 20th century, “the city” was one of the great subjects for writers and artists who sought to make sense of the shifting nature of contemporary life. This interdisciplinary course investigates a number of the most significant topics in urban cultural production in Europe and America. In wandering intellectually through major cities including London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Prague, and Lisbon, we will think about topics related to literary and cultural form and politics, such as urban aesthetics; identity; textualities and sexualities; dystopias; the city and memory; the “mass.” The emphasis throughout will be on the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks used to provide distinct, politically engaged visions of the city. Some of the writers we’ll read include Le Corbusier, Woolf, Aragon, Baldwin, Dos Passos, Hrabal, Didion. 

In addition to a final essay, there will be oral presentations, a psychogeography project, and a few film screenings to attend outside class. We also may try to arrange a relevant visit to London, possibly to visit Tate Modern (but we’ll decide this among us). (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)

Texts: Andre Breton, Nadja (Grove); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Penguin); Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (Vintage); Irmgard Keun; The Artificial Silk Girl (Penguin); Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (FSG Classics); Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (Mariner); Tommy Orange, There There (Vintage).

Group 5: World Literature

7908 Ovid and Chaucer
J. Fyler/M, W 9:30–Noon
See description in Group 2 offerings.

7977 Poetry Detective: Reading and Writing Past Fear
G. Lewis/M–W 11:00–1:00
See description in Group 1 offerings.

7983 The City in the 20th Century: Vision, Form, Politics
M. Turner/M, W 10:30–12:30
See description in Group 4 offerings. 

Group 6: Theater Arts

7921 British Theater: Page to Stage
S. Berenson/M, T, Th 10:00–12:30 and W full day (for performances and travel)

Using the resources of the British theater, this course will examine imagery in dramatic literature. We will attend performances in London and Stratford. In addition to weekly theater attendance and travel time, the class will include discussions, lectures, two writing projects, and collaborative on-your-feet assignments, which will require group preparation outside of regularly scheduled class hours. No previous acting experience is required. This is a class for students who love the theater and understand that the word “image” is the root of the word “imagination.” 

Theater performances have not been finalized but will include both classic and contemporary texts. Enrolled students will be charged a supplemental fee of $850 to cover the costs of tickets and transportation. A questionnaire, a schedule of plays, and a reading list will be circulated in the spring. (This course carries one unit of Group 2 credit and one unit of Group 6 credit. For future planning, please note that the group designation for this course may change from year to year, depending on what performances are covered.)   

Bread Loaf / California

Summer Institute in Global Humanities

Each of the Institute courses counts for at least one unit of Group 5 credit. For group credits, see the descriptions below. All classes meet M–F 10:00–Noon.

7003 The Poetry of Peace
R. Forman

In this workshop we will explore global poetry of peace 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 and energetic exercises, engages writing and critique, and ends with a clearer understanding of writing technique. Together, we will focus on energetic flow and what this can bring to the page, the discussion of moving texts/published poems, and critique of student work. Students will regularly engage in exercises designed to generate new writing, and everyone will submit a final portfolio of revised work at the end of the session. (This course carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)

Texts: Any edition, though print preferred. Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within (Norton, original ed.); Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton, 1st ed.); Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, reprint ed.). Additional readings will be provided during the session.

7476 Environmental Literature and the Global Imaginary
D. Denisoff

The natural world remains beyond humans’ scientific and imaginative grasp, and our efforts to control it have often been driven by profit and assumptions of our species’ superiority. Concepts such as sustainability, land management, and the granting of personhood are problematic ideas rooted in traditions that continue to institutionalize human privilege. Historically, it has been primarily white European colonizers who have benefited most from these actions, but questions of complicity and acquiescence also need to be addressed. Two hundred years of English scholarship, literature, and film from Britain and other countries such as Australia, Canada, Kumeyaay Nation, New Zealand, and Nigeria will help us gain awareness of the diverse politics—including those of race, gender, desires, ethnicity, class, and labor—behind humans’ understanding of ourselves and the ecologies of which we are a part. Please try to read the short novels and book of poetry and view the films before classes begin. Students will prepare three short reflection pieces, a workshop session, and a major project. (This course carries one unit of Group 3 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)

Texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Penguin); Patricia Grace, Potiki (U of Hawaii); Helen Habeli, Oil on Water (Norton); Tommy Pico, Nature Poem (Tin House Books).

Film (required and available on streaming sources): Bill Forsyth, Local Hero (1983).

7589 American Literature in a Global Context
M. Burnham

Traditional histories position American literature within a national narrative. This conventional story obscures the fact that American literature is and always has been global, from its very beginnings. In the colonial period, Virginia imagined itself in relation to Dutch and Portuguese colonies in Indonesia and India, while New England Puritans sustained connections to Nicaragua, Madagascar, and Malaysia. The first novel set in America borrowed from a global network of castaway stories that begin in the Islamic Middle East. Just after the American Revolution ended, a French navigator sailing around the world stopped in Monterey, California, and described in his journal the area’s Spanish and Indigenous inhabitants. Monterey’s most famous author, John Steinbeck, wrote about U.S. migrant workers in a moment of labor unrest that spanned the globe. This course provides students with strategies, tools, and frameworks to read, teach, and understand American literary texts in the context of the world. We will also take advantage of both digital and local archives to engage in the global possibilities of literary exploration.   

Major requirements include one final independent project and one class presentation. There will be field trips to visit local archives such as the Monterey Public Library and the National Steinbeck Center (the number of visits and destinations TBA). For the first class meeting, read the introduction to The Female American. (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)

Texts (all required editions): Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym; anonymous), The Female American (Broadview Press, 2nd ed.); Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Penguin Random House); Jean François de la Pérouse, Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786 (Heyday Books); John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (Heyday Books); Susanna Rowson, Slaves in Algiers (Broadview Press). Selected secondary readings will be available on Canvas in the spring. 

7621 Latinx Literature and Global Production
D. Baca

In this seminar we will analyze contemporary works by Latinx authors of Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, and Mexican origin. We will examine how our authors advance significant contributions to global literature and to the transnational reception of their cultures’ literary production. Latinx writing arises from intertwining Indigenous, Iberian, African, and American contexts shaped by colonial power and U.S. expansionism. We will read both with and against dominant historical narratives of nations, subjectivities, and aesthetic configurations. This course will further investigate the relationship of late global capitalism to Latinx identity formation, multilingualism, family networks, wars of occupation, the political economies of migration, and responses to demographobia. A final seminar essay will be required at the end of the course. (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit. Students who have taken 7620 previously should not enroll in this course.)  

Texts: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute); Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books); Saraciea Fennell, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora (Flatiron Books); Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin).

7787 Crime Fiction as Global Literature
M. Wood

Crime fiction is often thought to be an Anglo-American invention that recently spread to many countries around the world. There is an element of truth in this notion, but we do need to remember earlier Chinese examples and the murder mystery associated with Oedipus. This course will ask if and how the genre of crime fiction, having become international, has become global too, a set of scenes connected rather than separated by their diversity. There are really two reading lists for this course, one short and the other almost infinite. The first names the works we shall discuss closely this summer: further suggestions are very welcome. The second contains all the crime stories we ever read or want to read and that will, in their way, be part of our conversation. This course will require a major final paper. (This course carries two units of Group 5 credit.) 

Texts: Dorothy Hughes, In a Lonely Place (New York Review Books); Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own (New York Review); Natsuo Kirino, Out (Vintage); Mukoma wa Ngugi, Nairobi Heat (Melville International); Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (Vintage); Ian Rankin, Even Dogs in the Wild (Back Bay Books).  

Bread Loaf/Online

Critical Writing Tutorials (CWT)

Critical Writing Tutorials (CWTs) give you an opportunity, in a small group setting, to concentrate on your critical writing as you simultaneously explore a focused area of literary study. The CWT will address key areas of writing practice, including developing a research question and writing voice, framing your argument, revising your prose, and integrating historical, critical, and other scholarly materials into your essay. It will also guide you in the exploration of a select set of primary and secondary readings, opening an illuminating window on a text, author, or idea and providing the ground for your own independent research and writing. For further information, see https://www.middlebury.edu/school-english/locations/online-tutorials.

7010 A Critical Writing Tutorial: On Matter, Nature, and Meaning: A Study of Thoreau’s Walden
R. Johnson/ T, Th 5:00-7:30 EDT

In this course, we hone critical writing skills while exploring a foundational figure in social-activist and environmental history: Henry David Thoreau. We delve into Walden (1854) and historical essays on chattel slavery, the forced migration of Indigenous peoples, and civic activism. Twenty-first-century writings help us explore the relevance of Thoreau’s master work to our own era of systemic racism, political violence, and climate crisis. Synchronous course meetings occur on Zoom. In addition to leading discussions of two secondary essays, participants will read, discuss, draft, workshop, revise, and refine, producing roughly 25 pages of writing. During the last meeting, participants will share their final work with peers. For the first day of class, please read the first two chapters of Walden (“Economy” and “Where I Lived…”) and listen to (or read) Daisy Hildyard’s “War on the Air: Ecologies of Disaster,” Emergence Magazine, 27 June 2022: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/war-on-the-air/. (This tutorial carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 4 credit.) 

Texts (this edition required): Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, introduction by John Updike (Princeton University).  

7010 B Critical Writing Tutorial: Jane Eyre’s World
B. Brueggemann/TBD in consultation with enrolled students

We will be entering and exploring the World of Jane Eyre, published by Charlotte Brontë at the age of 31. Jane Eyre is one of the most enduring, enigmatic, engaged texts in the English language. Through discussions and writing, we will consider its genre, style, structure, character development, symbolism, thematic elements; its adaptations (to other media); its feminist and disability studies and autobiographical critical approaches; its enduring appeal and questions. The primary reading is, of course, Jane Eyre (the novel). Students will also be expected to view several media adaptations (the most recent 2011 film, the BBC series, rogue but relevant media, etc.) and individually read and summarize (in a shared annotated bibliography) about three additional secondary sources. Each week will also have a focus on an aspect of writing: literary analysis, critical-creative writing, finding and annotating sources, etc. Five brief weekly writing engagements (250–500 words) and a more extensive final critical-creative engagement project (requiring about 10–15 hours of sustained intellectual labor) are expected. (This tutorial carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 3 credit.)

 Text: Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Norton, 4th ed., 2016).

7010 C Critical Writing Tutorial: Disability in Classic American Children’s/YA Literature
B. Brueggemann/TBD in consultation with enrolled students

Disability angles, characters, foci have been prolific in the last 15 years of children’s and young adult literature—and we’ll explore why. This course draws from some classic “disability literature” in children’s/YA literature and covers several genres/forms, disabilities, and social-cultural issues. Our discussions will center on four primary aspects: the historical context for each text’s approach to disability; the ways that genre matters in how we think and approach disability and embodied difference; what it means (and troubles) to represent disability; how this material might be presented to middle or high school students. Each class will be equally devoted to close textual work centered on three texts and related cultural reproductions and to discussion of writing strategies, development, and research strategies (using library and other resources). 

In addition to attending class meetings, students are expected to sign up for at least two individual conferences related to their work in the course. Four writing engagements are required—one for each text and then a summative or targeted research focus on a single text or across themes/connections. (This tutorial carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 4 credit.)

Texts: Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Harper Collins Harper’s Classics, 2010); John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (Penguin, 1993); Cece Bell, El Deafo (Abrams Fanfare, 2014).  

Directed Research and Writing (DRW) Projects

A closely mentored independent study, the online Directed Research and Writing (DRW) gives students the latitude to work from any location, the flexibility to set meeting times, the freedom to shape their own course of study, and the choice of earning one or two units of credit.  

Available to returning students and ideal for those in their final Bread Loaf summers, the DRW allows students a sustained opportunity to design and pursue a major critical, creative, or pedagogical project, under the direction of a faculty advisor.