2023 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
B. Brueggemann, 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 to the process and provide unique opportunities for collaborative and experiential learning.
The Change courses will convene both separately and together during the assigned class hours, with joint meetings allowing participants to address topics of shared concern. You may need to attend some Change events that take place outside the class period.
7035 Oral and Community Histories, Rhetorics, and Literacies
M. Robinson/M, W 2-4:45
This course will explore theories and methodologies of oral histories, community histories, oral rhetorics, community rhetorics, oral literacies, and community literacies and will culminate in a service-learning project where students engage in an oral community history collection project. Course goals include the following: developing a working theoretical definition of oral history; developing a vocabulary of oral history discourse; understanding, discussing, and interrogating texts that have been composed using oral histories as a source as well as texts that provide strategies and methodologies for oral history research; situating texts explored into historic and contemporary rhetorical culture; locating and establishing your positions as scholars and pedagogues as it relates to understanding oral history methodology.
Texts: Robin M. Boylorn, Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Peter Lang, 2013); Steve Estes, Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (U. North Carolina, 2007); Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations, ed. Jurgen Matthaus (Oxford, 2010); Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford, 2010).
7104 Transcultural Literacies
D. Wandera/M, W 2-4:45
Why is it that even when people speak the same language there is a possibility of miscommunicating? How might miscommunications manifest in a classroom as failure to see the other’s worldview? What is the connection between language, culture, and teaching? This writing course is constructed around the concept of languaculture to visualize interconnections between language and culture. With a focus on encounters between different worlds of meaning, participants are invited to disrupt their commonsensical literary ways of being and doing through critical reflection of self-and-other in the world. Course experiences will evoke conversations around the notion of “a world inscribed within language” to make sense of how access to cultural meanings of a text might enhance and/or impede learning in a language arts classroom. Through spotlighting how marginalized students struggle with identity and belonging, participants will explore how teachers can make a positive difference in the lives of the students they teach. Ultimately, participants will produce a multimodal reflexive piece of writing that showcases their appreciation of intrigues, intricacies, complexities, and resourcefulness of ethno-racial and linguistic diversity in the classroom.
Texts: Sonia Nieto, Language, Culture, and Teaching, Language, Culture, and Teaching Series, 3rd ed. (Routledge); Michael Agar, Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation (William Morrow); Allison Skerrett, Teaching Transnational Youth: Literacy and Education in a Changing World (Teachers College); Literacy Lives in Transcultural Times, Rahat Zaidi and Jennifer Rowsell, eds. (Routledge). Additional readings will be provided during the session.
7198 Creative Practice: Reimagining the Classroom
C. Maravich/M, W 2-4:45
In this course, you will identify, examine, and nurture your personal creative practices. Exploring creativity in your own life and bringing our attention to the space of the classroom, we will engage with various teaching artist pedagogies. In our working, we will discover how these practices can disrupt traditional educational spaces to create opportunities for learning that fosters belonging, values personal relevance and cultivates our imaginations. We’ll see how our creative practices can help build capacities necessary for addressing complex problems, transforming conflict, and shaping change in our classrooms. Participants will regularly lead engagements in class, share their teaching practices with one another and develop a lesson of study that will be implemented in their own communities during the academic year. While various artistic forms and practices will be central to our work and class time, no prior artistic experience or artistic teaching experience is necessary. (This course may be used to satisfy either a Group 1 or Group 6 credit.)
Texts: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Creative Fire: Myths and Stories on the Cycles of Creativity (Sounds True); Eric Booth, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator, iIlustrated ed. (Oxford, 2009); Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017). Additional texts will be from the following writers and thinkers: John Paul Lederach, Maxine Greene, Twyla Tharp.
7760 Disability Narratives in/as Conflict
B. Brueggemann/M, W 2-4:45
Disability (the actual embodied experience) and disability narratives (about the experience) engender and evince considerable conflict in at least three primary ways: 1) disability is often created from global (and national and local) conflicts; 2) disability occupies cultural, geographical, educational, institutional, and domestic spaces that are woven through the fabric of our political discourse, our public and social policies, our educational spaces and curricula, and our family/private/domestic space as well; 3) disability enmeshes with other oppression, social justice, diversity, and identity issues and markers: gender, race, geographic location, indigeneity, economic status. Take, as just one example, the responsibility of caregiving. In this course, we will engage literary texts (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, drama) and documentary films across the globe and in the U.S. as we explore disability and disability narrative in conflict and transformation. We will especially consider global disability narratives and issues in relationship to education and conflict transformation. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 5 requirement.)
(Updated March 14, 2023) Texts: Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (Graywolf); William Hay, “Deformity: An Essay” (1752); Bernard Pomerance, The Elephant Man: A Play (Grove); Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Knopf); Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Vintage); Paul and Judy Karasik, The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family (Washington Square); Ann Clare LeZotte, Show Me a Sign (Scholastic Gold); Emmanuelle Laborit, Cry of the Gull (Gallaudet University Press); PDFs of additional texts and other resources will be made available.
Group 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy
7000 Poetry Workshop: Poetry of Humanity and Hope
R. Forman/T, Th 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 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.
Texts: Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within (Norton); Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton); Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House); Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (Harper Perennial). Further texts will be added in spring 2023. Additional readings will be available in the summer.
7005 Fiction Writing
R. Makkai/S. Choi/T, Th 2-4:45
This workshop 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 be expected to share works in progress, provide constructive criticism to their fellow writers, generate new work in response to exercises and prompts, and complete reading assignments that will be provided by the instructor. This course will be taught in two three-week modules, one run by Rebecca Makkai and the other by Susan Choi.
7006 Mapping Vermont: Writing about the Green Mountains and Vicinity
R. Sullivan/M-Th 11:15-12:30
Do we write the world or does the world write us? This class will examine experimental creative nonfiction through a consideration of place. We will study different modes of creative nonfiction but focus on the calendar and the diary, each as a method of examining the landscape as it relates to time—and as a way of examining the idea of nature itself. Readings will include the Georgics, Walden, and My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. We will consider connections between the visual arts and nonfiction, looking, for example, at the work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, and John Cage. Students will be required to keep a weather log. There will be a film screening outside class time. Additional readings will be available during the session.
Texts: Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (Modern Library); Virgil’s Georgics, trans. Janet Lembke (Yale); Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille T. Dungy (U of Georgia); Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions); and numerous handouts and library holds.
7035 Oral and Community Histories, Rhetorics, and Literacies
M. Robinson/M, W 2-4:45
See description in Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum.
7040 Mapping Home: Writing about Local Landscapes
R. Sullivan/M-Th 8:15-9:30
How do we see where we live? In this course, students will examine various literary tools in addition to the tools of the geographer in order to construct their own place-based works or site histories, focusing on the places where they live or work (chosen in consultation with the instructor). In working toward that goal, we will look for inspiration in the way selected books and long-form journalism describe particular places, towns, cities, or regions, and we will consider the ways in which ongoing conversations about that place (political, social, environmental) figure into the landscape. We will look, too, at the way artists map places. There will be a film screening outside class time. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 4 requirement.)
Texts: John McPhee, The Pine Barrens (FSG); Ernest Thompson and Mindy Fullilove, Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power (New Village); Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille T. Dungy (U. of Georgia); and numerous handouts and library holds.
7090 Multimodal Pedagogy for Creativity and Inclusion
C. Medina/M-Th 9:45-11
This course asks how we can be creative to inspire our students with digital and multimodal writing in a post-online teaching world. What are our teaching philosophies when it comes to being inclusive and teaching multimedia texts as a part of the design of a class? How might traditional writing processes parallel the ways we compose multimodally, and how might we rethink assessment in anti-racist ways? What happens when we think of multimodal as beyond digital so that we might understand Indigenous traditions of writing? This course seeks to leverage the affordances of multimodal composing and online communities for creativity, the broadening of audiences, and re-envisioning writing through (re)mediation. Students will be asked to share multimedia and writing from diverse writers and media creators. We will engage with topics ranging from fan fiction to linguistic justice, Indigenous knowledge, anti-racist assessment, and reclaiming our voices.
Texts: Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Haymarket); Cheryl E. Ball, Jennifer Sheppard, Kristin L. Arola, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, 3rd ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s).
7104 Transcultural Literacies
D. Wandera/M, W 2-4:45
See description in Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum.
7105 Teaching African American Rhetorics
M. Robinson/M-Th 8:15-9:30
This course is designed to foster intellectual conversations about teaching texts that speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora. The course is designed to help teachers think critically about teaching works not just for their aesthetic value, as often is the case when teaching African American literature, but to teach texts that are doing the work of advocating for the conditions and experiences of Black Lives. The course will not only explore the rhetorical features of Black words, which are necessary for effective instruction, but also the strategies for facilitating difficult discussions and managing classroom tension when encountering challenging issues.
Texts: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: the Long Duree of Black Voices, eds. Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson (Routledge, 1st ed.); Keith Gilyard and Adam Banks, On African-American Rhetoric (Routledge,1st ed.).
7110 Histories of the English Language
M. Rasmussen/M-Th 11:15-12:30
In this course, we will study the histories of English from its distant origins in Indo-European to the present day. To learn more about the sources of the language and dialects we speak is to discover an important part of who we are and who we may become— as students, as teachers, and as human beings—engaged with the world. The course will focus on English in Great Britain, the United States, and beyond, with special attention to Old and Middle English, Early Modern English, American English and its dialects, African American English, language and prejudice, language and gender, English in education (including debates about correctness), and the futures of English in a postcolonial world.
Text: Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 6th ed. (Routledge). Additional readings will be provided during the session.
7112 Documentaries, Social Justice, and Ethics
J. Sanchez/T, Th 2-4:45
In this class, we will explore the history of documentaries and their influence on social justice and change. We will watch films about race and racism (Man on Fire and 13th), legacies of sexual abuse (Leave No Trace and Allen v. Farrow), institutional failure (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Forever Prisoner), and criminal reform (The Thin Blue Line). Together, we will discuss how documentaries frame and alter discourses of social justice and write about the various ethical concerns documentarians face when representing different forms of reality. Most screenings for this course will happen outside of class.
Texts: Students should plan on a cost of roughly $50 for renting copies of the course films. All readings will be available online during or before the session.
7198 Creative Practice: Reimagining the Classroom
C. Maravich/M, W 2-4:45
See description in Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum.
Group 2: British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century
7210 Chaucer
J. Fyler/M-Th 8:15-9:30
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 (Oxford or Houghton Mifflin); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Martino); Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford); Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen Barney (Norton).
7230 Ovid and Spenser
J. Fyler/S. Wofford/M-Th 11:15-12:30
This class will engage in a deep reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the parts of Spenser’s Faerie Queene that are the most Ovidian: probably Books 1, 3, and 4, selections from 6, and the Mutabilitie Cantos. The course will provide an in-depth understanding of these two works, along with explorations of other poems by these two authors (e.g., Ovid’s Fasti and Heroides, and Spenser’s “Epithalamion”). Ovid is the most powerfully influential Roman poet in European literature from the 12th century on; his Metamorphoses, an epic or anti-epic, 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 continuing interest in the tensions between permanence and change, reason and the irrational, the human and the natural world, the divine and the human. Spenser is one of Ovid’s most important poetic descendants. He in part reads Ovid through the perspective of earlier Ovidian writers (such as Dante, Chaucer, and Froissart), and we will look at them. We will also explore theories of allegory and the Elizabethan cultural and political context; the visual tradition of representing epic and romance, including mythological paintings (by Titian and others), emblem books, iconography, and Renaissance mythography. We will rethink the convergences and divergences of epic, allegory, romance, etiological myth, and origin story as they help to shape questions of gender, nation, ideology, and ethics. In preparation for our first meeting, students should read the first book of the Metamorphoses. They should also read Books 1 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid before the session begins (widely available in several translations, including those of Fitzgerald and Fagles), and Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” (available in modern translations if you don’t want to read Middle English). We recommend waiting to read Spenser until we meet. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 5 requirement.)
Texts: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (Norton); Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd ed. (Longman) (the first edition is also acceptable); recommended Pierre Grimal, Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Penguin).
7246 Exploring Shakespeare: Actor and Audience
B. Steinfeld/T, Th 2-4:45
In the opening chorus speech of Henry V, the audience is asked “gently to hear” the play that’s about to happen. This class will take on Shakespeare’s texts from the perspective of the actor and the audience—that is, by speaking and hearing the text out loud. We will look closely at scenes and monologues from a wide array of Shakespeare’s plays. Our deep dive into the structure of the language will reveal the substantive differences between verse and prose, as well as the potential for joy and revelation in both. Our aim will be to cultivate an understanding of the plays by exploring the massive amounts of information that they offer about how language can ignite the mind, body, and spirit. Using games, exercises, and rehearsal techniques pioneered by Cicely Berry, Fiasco Theater, and others, our approach will include multiple learning modalities, centering pleasure and process. Open to all; no previous experience in theater is necessary.
Texts: Students should have access to either a hard copy or digital copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
7257 Shakespeare’s Mediterranean
S. Wofford/S. Wofford/M, W 2-4:45
This class will look at Shakespeare’s comedies, romances, and one tragedy set in the context of the Classical and Early Modern Mediterranean—the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean, the Italian trading ports, the romance of sea, shipwreck, and pirates coming to Shakespeare from contemporary narratives of commerce; kidnapping and slavery; and ancient romance and comedy, including comedies by Plautus and Terence. We will give special attention to The Tempest, which will be staged at Bread Loaf this summer, and to its intellectual and performance history of adaptations, critiques, and reinterpretations, in particular Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Caliban (1971). Topics will include slavery and race in Roman comedy and the early modern world; early race studies; twins, twinning, and crossdressing; trans approaches to Shakespeare; genre and performance; and what all this suggests about Shakespeare’s late romances. Readings in early race studies will include criticism by Dan Vitkus, Emily Bartels, Geraldine Heng, Dennis Britton, Ian Smith, Noemie Ndiaye, Urvashi Chakrvarty, Kim Hall, Abdulhamit Arvas, and Madeline Sayet. Students are asked to read Comedy of Errors for the first class. Students should be prepared to attend three rehearsals of The Tempest and to write brief responses.
Texts: Recommended editions are listed below, but you can use any annotated modern edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, such as the Riverside (2nd ed.) or the Norton Shakespeare, or, for individual plays, the New Arden 3rd series, Norton Critical, Folger Library editions, Signet Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, or Bedford Texts and Contexts editions. There are other excellent online texts and resources, but everyone should have a printed text in hand for class discussions. Readings in Roman comedy: Plautus, The Rope (Rudens) and The Brothers Menaechmus; Terence, The Eunuch.
William Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, ed. Kent Cartwright (New Arden 3rd series) or (Signet Classics revised ed.); Twelfth Night, eds. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford World’s Classics) or ed. Keir Elam (Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series); Merchant of Venice, ed. Lindsay Kaplan (Bedford Texts and Contexts, Palgrave) or (Folger ed.); Othello, ed. Edward Pechter (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.); The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford World’s Classics) or ed. John Pitcher (New Arden 3rd series); Pericles (Signet Classics), (Folger), or ed. Suzanne Gossett (New Arden); The Tempest: An authoritative text, sources and context, criticism, rewritings, and appropriations, eds. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.); Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest;’ Adaptation for a Black Theatre, trans. Richard Miller (Theater Communications Group); Madeline Sayet, Where We Belong (Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama 2022); Roman Comedy: Five Plays by Plautus and Terence, trans. David Christenson (Focus Classical Library, includes all three plays), or Plautus, trans. E. F. Watling (Penguin), and Terence, The Comedies, trans. Peter Brown (Oxford World’s Classics).
7811 Performance and Dramaturgy
B. McEleney/7-10:30
See description in Group 6 offerings.
Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present
7312 Elements of the Ballad
I. Newman/M-Th 8:15-9:30
The ballad is one of the major poetic traditions of world literature. Precisely what a ballad is, however, remains a remarkably vexed question. For the literary scholar, “ballad” is often used to mean a narrative poem, but this definition does not do justice to a vastly more complex history, which traverses oral traditions, folklore, urban popular song, and cheap print. This course will explore various elements of the ballad both in print and performance, in an attempt to forge new connections between poetry and song. We will learn about the fascinating history of the popular ballad, and how it gave shape to English literature as a discipline. We will engage with ballad archives, which provide a fascinating glimpse into popular urban street song and the mentalities of ordinary people. The musically inclined are encouraged to bring instruments with them to campus, and everyone should come prepared to listen, learn, and sing together.
Texts: All texts will be available online but will include selections from the following: Websites: Bodleian Broadside Ballad Archive, English Broadside Ballad Archive, Vaughan Williams Memorial Library; Podcasts: Old Songs Podcast, Fire Draw Near (we will be particularly concerned with the “bonus episodes”), Dolly Parton’s America, episode 1, “Sad Ass Songs.”
7370 19th-Century British Novel
B. Black/M-Th 9:45-11
This course captures the range of formal and thematic experimentation that characterizes the 19th-century novel. We will begin with Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion. Then we will move from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a vexing but delicious text written by a true teenager, to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called a novel for genuine grown-ups. Our other three texts will be Charles Dickens’s “perfect” novel, Great Expectations; H. Rider Haggard’s weird bestseller, She; and Arthur Morrison’s fierce novel of London’s slums, A Child of the Jago. Queen Victoria once confided in her diary, “I never feel quite at ease or at home when reading a Novel.” Why did she say this? How do we make sense of her attraction to the uncanny wonders of the novel? Together we will examine the vertiginous amplitude of the novel in the century that ensured the genre’s astonishing popularity and witnessed its remarkable development.
Texts: Please use these editions: Jane Austen, Persuasion (Penguin); Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Norton); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World’s Classics); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford World’s Classics); H. Rider Haggard, She (Oxford World’s Classics); Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Broadview).
7401 Haunted
B. Black/M-Th 11:15-12:30
Ghosts fascinate us as present absences; they seem often there by our side. Our course will begin by surveying the global tradition of the ghost story and then move to two iconic works of haunting: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The ghosts in films such as A Ghost Story (2017) and Parasite (2020) will be of interest to us. Our theoretical framework will include Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. We will also study Maya Lin’s 2021 installation “Ghost Forest” and “What Is Missing?” Is it possible that being haunted captures what it feels like to exist now—in the wake of climate degradation, the pandemic, and racial inequality in a nation haunted by the ghosts of slavery? Along the way, we will read Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, and Vernon Lee—all writers who have felt … haunted.
Texts: Please use these editions: Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Penguin); Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Broadview); Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage). Streaming access to A Ghost Story and Parasite required. Additional course readings will be available on the course’s Canvas site.
7438 Contemporary Queer Writing from England, Scotland, and Ireland
T. Curtain/M-Th 9:45-11
In this course, we will discuss important works by queer writers who exemplify the (re)emergence of strong queer voices among contemporary writers in the United Kingdom. We will touch on the sociocultural, political, and economic conditions that inform each of the works.
Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (Riverhead, 2002), Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury, 2004); Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove, 2020); Paul Mendez, Rainbow Milk (Anchor, 2021); Alice Oseman, Heartstopper Vol. 1 (Graphix, 2019), Heartstopper Vol. 2 (Graphix, 2020); Juliet Jacques, Variations (Influx Press, 2021).
Group 4: American Literature
7040 Mapping Home: Writing about Local Landscapes
R. Sullivan/M-Th 8:15-9:30
See description in Group 1 offerings.
7507 Humbugs and Visionaries: American Artists and Writers before the Civil War
B. Wolf/M-Th 9:45-11
This course examines American literature and visual culture in the years before the Civil War, focusing on the ways that writers and artists not only anticipated but helped construct the modern era. We will look in particular at outliers, prophets, and self-promoters, from the radical Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to popular entertainers like P. T. Barnum. Topics include visuality and the public sphere; landscape and politics; genre painting and hegemony; race and identity; domesticity and sentimentalism. We will begin by asking how one talks about painting, and then proceed to juxtapose artists and writers in a larger—and ongoing—dialogue about the origins of modern American culture. Student writing will center on the creation of an “Imaginary Exhibition.” Writers include Bradstreet, Franklin, Wheatley, Emerson, Douglass, Poe, Dickinson, and Melville. Painters include Copley, Peale, Cole, Durand, Church, Gifford, Mount, Bingham, Woodville, Quidor, and Spencer, among others. We will also view one film, John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996), at the conclusion of the course.
Texts: Course readings will be available on the course Canvas website: Phillis Wheatley, selected poems; Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (parts I and II); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and “Experience”; Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice” and “William Wilson”; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845 version only—not the later versions); Anne Bradstreet, “Contemplations”; Emily Dickinson, selected poems; Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
7570 American Naturalism
K. Marshall/M-Th 11:15-12:30
This course traces a significant but often overlooked genre of American fiction. Naturalism was a key mode of literary representation in the Gilded Age, a time that many see as having important parallels with our own, and this course will undertake a comparative survey of key moments in the genre’s history through the present. Naturalism’s key texts have been central to our understanding of how fiction grapples with industrial capitalism and climate catastrophe; how journalistic points of view and scientific objectivity can be captured and criticized within the novel form; and how determinist thinking shapes narratives about race, gender, and poverty across historical periods. The readings move from turn-of-the-20th-century texts by Frank Norris and Stephen Crane to the neonaturalist fiction of a few decades later that operated alongside developments in modernist literary form (Gertrude Stein, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck), and will conclude with a look at naturalism’s postwar resurgence in the novels of writers including Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Jesmyn Ward. We will also discuss the return to these novels in early 21st-century films including There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Advance reading highly recommended.
Texts: Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Modern Library); Frank Norris, McTeague (Penguin); Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (Penguin); John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus (Penguin); Richard Wright, Native Son (Vintage); Ann Petry, The Street (Mariner); Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin); Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Vintage); Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury).
7625 Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen: Poetry, Religion, and American Folk Music
S. Goldman/T, Th 2-4:45
In this course we will study the words and music of two of the most influential songwriters and performers of the modern era. Our initial focus will be on the emergence of these artists in the context of the folk revival of the 1960s. Through our study of Dylan’s and Cohen’s own poetry and prose, we will examine the cultural forces that shaped them, and the emerging counterculture that they influenced. With the emergence of both singers as international stars in the late 20th century, and the 2016 award of the Nobel Prize to Dylan, Dylan and Cohen have achieved iconic status.
Texts: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster); Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Jeff Burger (Chicago Review); Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing (Ecco); David Hadju, Positively 4th Street (Farrar Straus & Giroux); Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Penguin); Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish and other Poems (City Lights); Liel Leibovitz, A Broken Hallelujah (Norton); Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (Plume).
Music: Harry Smith, Anthology of American Folk Music (84 songs); Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International (76 songs). Available as CD sets or on Spotify. Recordings will also be available on library reserve.
7686 American Print Cultures and the Art of the Book
K. Marshall/M, W 2-4:45
This course is a celebration of print technologies in American literature. We will undertake a comparative study of print, type, paper, and letterforms from early American letters to the contemporary “post-print” era. By doing so, we will explore why our love of books, paper, and print has returned so dramatically at the same time that digital reading technologies and platforms have proliferated. We will also look at contemporary artists and communities like the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective who are reframing print histories and practice as collaborative and pedagogical. The course uses an experimental structure: we split the week into intensive literary seminars and hands-on workshops. Students work with letterpress at the Bread Loaf Printer’s Cabin, learn basic bookbinding techniques, and work with early and late innovations in the book arts with Middlebury Special Collections. At the heart of our explorations will be the intense relationships that literary works have cultivated with their own materials and techniques of production. Advance reading recommended; please bring additional craft supplies (scissors, pens, binding, collage materials, etc.) if you can.
Texts: Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Caretta (Penguin); Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (first half) (Oxford); Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions), can substitute smaller Envelope Poems (New Directions); Susan Howe, That This (New Directions); Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (Cannongate); Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Penguin).
7689 Morrison and the Archive
K. Blockett/T, Th 2-4:45
This course will focus on Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, historical fictions that fill gaps of “known” history. We will play particular attention to the importance of archives to creating narratives. Using digital and special collections, students will learn how to mine paper repositories and material culture to craft a story. As an introduction to the course, students should first watch the Morrison documentary, The Pieces I Am. We will read A Mercy and then Beloved. Essays from Mouth Full of Blood will be assigned before and after each novel.
Film: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Toni Morrison, The Pieces I Am (2019).
Texts: Toni Morrison, A Mercy (Vintage), Mouth Full of Blood (Random House), Beloved. (Vintage).
Group 5: World Literature
7230 Ovid and Spenser
J. Fyler/S. Wofford/M-Th 11:15-12:30
See description in Group 2 offerings.
7456 Speculative Fiction: Expanding the Imaginary
C. Savageau/M-Th 9:45-11
In this class we’ll read science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, post/eco-apocalyptic, magical realism, and horror by Native and Indigenous writers, populations in diaspora, LGBTQ2+, and other marginalized populations. We’ll begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, arguably both the first science fiction and horror novel; and the Jewish folk story of the Golem. We’ll read Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler, who challenged the white male hegemony of sci-fi in the mid-20th century with stories that explored gender, slavery, patriarchy. We’ll read works from writers who have transformed familiar figures like vampires and werewolves and from writers who reclaim culture through mythos and language. We’ll look at dystopic visions and places of power. Students will also attend weekly viewings of films such as Frankenstein (1939) and Young Frankenstein; The Shape of Water; The Handmaid’s Tale; The Company of Wolves; Get Out; Like Water for Chocolate; and possibly a couple of animated films such as Coco or a Ghibli film. For the first class, read Shelley’s Frankenstein. Also, try to find and read at least one version of the out-of-print The Golem, either by Eli Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, or David Wisniewski.
Texts: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Warbler Classics); Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Puffin, Int’l ed.); Octavia Butler, Dawn: Lillith’s Brood 1 and Fledgling (Grand Central); Jewell Gomez, The Gilda Stories (City Lights, Expanded 25th Anniversary Ed.); Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels (William Morrow); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Anchor); Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate (Anchor); Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (DCB); Nnedi Okarafor, Binti: The Complete Trilogy (DAW).
7720 Cervantes’s Don Quixote: Text and Variations
S. Donadio/M, W 2-4:45
In recognition of its unpredictable shifts of tone and perspective, narrative disjunctions, self-reflexive unfoldings, and ambiguities of implication, Cervantes’s Don Quixote is generally thought to have established the repertoire of techniques and preoccupations associated with the modern novel. But indeed, in the view of Lionel Trilling, “it can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” The book’s far-reaching impact is evident in works by such 18th-century authors as Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, and subsequently in writings by Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, just to cite a few examples—not to mention its innumerable manifestations in the productions of visual artists and composers over the past four-hundred-odd years. After immersing ourselves in this enchanting work of fiction (which students are strongly encouraged to read in advance), we will turn our attention to three very different novels that reconceive and reconfigure some of the defining elements of Cervantes’s literary project. In doing so, we will seek to account for the work’s enduring influence on the artistic imagination and the persistence of its appeal to the general reader. Pondering these interrelated questions, one of Cervantes’s most acute biographers has observed that this is “a magic book, as close to being a living object as any work of art has ever been. It has a life of its own which is like our lives, when we think about it, a game of mirrors, an impression of receding depths, of truths just beyond our grasp, of planes of reality shifting and blurring. In all the garrulous annals of human expression, only a handful of characters … have so perfectly summarized areas of the human condition as to embed themselves as symbols in humanity’s unconscious. Of these, arguably none have lived so intensely on every level of experience as Cervantes’s knight.”
Texts: Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote De La Mancha, trans. John Rutherford (Penguin); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford World’s Classics); Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Emory Elliott (Oxford World’s Classics); William Faulkner, The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (Vintage International).
7751 War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov
M. Katz/M, W 2-4:45
This course offers students an opportunity to read two masterpieces of Russian fiction and world literature: Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863–69) and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–81). Tolstoy’s epic centers on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most memorable characters through love affairs, births, military battles, family struggles, and deaths, against a background of peasants and aristocrats, civilians and soldiers. Dostoevsky’s last novel centers on the problem of faith and the existence of evil as made manifest in the tale of the mysterious murder of a vicious, drunken, avaricious father and the complicated relationship of his three sons to the crime. It is a novel of parricide, suicide, and madness, culminating in a twisted, sensational trial. The course will also examine the role of these two major authors as touchstones in the Russian canon.
Texts: These editions only. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky (Vintage Classics); Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Michael R. Katz (Liveright/Norton). Please note that advance copy of The Brothers Karamazov will be available to registered students.
7755 Literary Criticism: Theory and Practice
M. Rasmusssen/M-Th 8:15-9:30
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. Students will each adopt a literary work they already know well as a test case for the theories we encounter. (The choice of work is open.) The course has two aims: first, to help us become more aware of what we do and why we do it when we study literature; and second, for us to become better literary critics ourselves, as we apply a range of methods to the works we study.
Text: Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed. (Norton). Additional readings will be provided.
7760 Disability Narratives in/as Conflict
B. Brueggemann/M, W 2-4:45
See description in Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum.
7810 The Major Works of Anton Chekhov
D. Clubb/T, Th 2-4:45
A study of Chekhov’s major dramatic works. Close analysis of the plays will be accompanied by a regular consideration of the ways Chekhov conceives and constructs character, self, time, action, and narrative. Of special interest will be the relation of his dramaturgy to contemporary ideas about theatrical realism, ideas that were to have an extraordinary impact on 20th- and 21st-century theater and filmmaking. Our work will include an examination of some of Chekhov’s most important short stories—astonishing works that add a crucial dimension to an understanding of his artistic achievement.
Text: Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (Signet Classics).
Group 6: Theater Arts
7198 Creative Practice: Reimagining the Classroom
C. Maravich/M, W 2-4:45
See description in Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum.
7811 Performance and Dramaturgy
B. McEleney/7-10:30
This course will give students an opportunity to act in this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest along with members of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble. Students who sign up for this course will be assured of casting in the production but will be expected to audition in the opening days of the session. They must be available for rehearsal at least three evenings a week, including Sunday evenings, and must keep a written journal that will be reviewed on a weekly basis by the instructor. Journal entries will chart emerging understanding of the text as it reveals itself through rehearsal and performance practice. Mentoring sessions will be arranged (in lieu of regularly scheduled class meetings) in consultation with students. (This course may be used to satisfy a Group 2 requirement.)
Text: William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Any edition will be fine.
7814 Theatrical Practice and Radical Empathy in the Classroom
A. Brazil/T, Th 2-4:45
Theater can offer students the opportunity to viscerally enter and deeply understand—and own—a text. This course will explore ways to use performance to excavate a text and will offer you some tools to do this work with your own students in your classrooms. Working collaboratively, we’ll employ a variety of theatrical techniques. The focus of our investigations will be twofold: first, to examine and challenge the ways in which performance can expand and deepen a reader’s experience with and comprehension of the written word; and second, to create literacy and increased competency around healthy classroom spaces, consent-based practices, and centering radical empathy for self and community as a core practice. We’ll be working in class with a variety of texts from which to create short in-class performances: short excerpts from novels and from contemporary poems, nonfiction, and original writing. Though performance is central to the course, the emphasis is not on acting. No previous acting experience is required. Please wear clothes to class that are comfortable to move in. You will perform on each class day. Weekly rehearsal time outside of class is necessary. The cumulative written project for this course is a detailed and specific unit plan for implementing this work in your own classrooms, or a proposed equivalent.
Texts: Eileen Landay and Kurt Wootton, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts (Harvard); Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things (Vintage).
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 1: Writing, Pedagogy, and Literacy
7977 Poetry Detective: Reading and Writing Poetry
G. Lewis/M-W 11-12:30
The detective or mystery genre is a key trope in modern popular culture. This workshop will use the tools of the sleuth as a way of approaching poems both as 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.” (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
7907 Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales
F. Leneghan/T, F 11-1
Toward the end of the 14th century, during an era of plague, war, social unrest, and revolt, Geoffrey Chaucer produced his enduring comic masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. Setting the work firmly in its continental literary context (e.g., Boccaccio, Dante, Le Roman de la Rose), we will explore how Chaucer wove together an astonishing range of literary genres into one complex, multivocal text, from the high style of courtly romance to the low bawdiness of the fabliau, from moral example to farce, from tragedy to fairy tale. Students will learn how to read and enjoy Chaucer in the original Middle English and will also have the opportunity to visit sites associated with Chaucer in Oxford and London.
Primary Texts: Either The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue, ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson (Norton Critical Ed., 2005), or The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, ed. David Lawton (Norton, 2019); Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch (Norton, 2007). Useful But Not Essential Text: The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson et al. (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Criticism: Helen Cooper, Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Clarendon,1996); Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (U. Georgia,1983); Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (Routledge, 1985); Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, 2019).
7916 Performing Disability in Early Modern Drama
K. Williams/T, Th 9:30-12
This course explores representations of disability on the English Renaissance stage through theories of disability in the present. We will consider how disability sparks aesthetic experimentation, reading plays by Anonymous, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and William Shakespeare alongside recent works about disability (by Mike Lew, Molly McCully Brown, and JJJJJerome Ellis, for example) and concepts from critical disability studies. As an identity category and register of embodiment—not merely plot device, trope, or character diagnosis—disability evokes the capacity of theater to shape experience. We will ask: how does disability theory illuminate ideas about bodyminds in the early modern theater? And what, in turn, do early modern plays reveal about disability as a resource for theatrical innovation? In addition to regular course meetings, students should plan to attend two extra sessions (during Week 2 and Week 5) for an archive session and project workshop.
Texts: William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Thomas Cartelli (Norton Critical Editions); Mike Lew, Teenage Dick (Nick Hern); William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger) or any scholarly edition of this play will work; need not be this specific edition; Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: Poems (Persea); Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. Michael Neill (Methuen New Mermaids). Further required reading—including the unattributed early modern play The Fair Maid of the Exchange (ed. Love) and critical and theoretical selections—will be available on the course Canvas site.
7921 British Theater: Stage to Page to Stage
S. Berenson/M, T, Th 10-12:30 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 exercises. 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.” Performance titles will be announced at a later date, when the summer theater season has been finalized. 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 3 credit.)
Group 3: British Literature: 18th Century to the Present
7921 British Theater: Stage to Page to Stage
S. Berenson/M, T, Th 10-12:30 and W full day (for performances and travel)
See description in Group 2 offerings.
7946 The Queer 1890s: Oscar Wilde and His Times
M. Turner/M, W 3-5
The 1890s was a decade in which conventional ideas about sexuality and gender were challenged in literature, art, and intellectual circles by a range of writers and artists. At the center of all of this was Oscar Wilde—aesthete, wit, brilliant writer, and criminalized queer man. This interdisciplinary course uses the life and writings of Wilde as an anchor to explore how gender and sexuality were imagined in this vibrant period. We’ll think about both Wilde and his contemporaries in relation to Aestheticism, decadence, radical politics, and sexual freedom. We’ll look at some late-19th-century paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, and we’ll also think about “queer Oxford” now and then. Alongside the British writings, we will explore some American and French works to think about how queer sexualities were represented transnationally. In addition to Wilde, writers and artists on the course include Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vernon Lee, Sarah Orne Jewett, Walt Whitman, “Michael Field,” Aubrey Beardsley, Simeon Solomon, JA Symonds, Charlotte Mew, and Kate Chopin. Core texts to purchase and read in advance are below. Short stories, essays, and poems will be provided during the summer. (This course carries one unit of Group 3 credit and one unit of Group 4 credit.)
Texts: Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays (Harper Perennial) (Read Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest in advance); Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (Oxford World’s Classics or any good ed.); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Classics or any good edition); Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford World’s Classics); Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (House of Pomegranates).
7969 From Steel Engraving to Photogravure: 19th-Century Women Poets and Illustration 1832–1898
I. Armstrong/W 11-12; 2-5 and Th 10-1
Image and text, verbal and visual, are particular preoccupations of women poets in the 19th century. What questions did poems ask of illustrations and vice versa? How did poets respond to new techniques (steel engraving, wood block, photogravure) of mass reproduction? And how did the pressing concerns of the time—from colonialism to women’s standing—penetrate both text and image? The convergence of the neglected poet Letitia Landon (“L E L”) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“E B B”) in the highly popular but often maligned “album books” of the 1830s initiates our study. Phoebe Anna Traquair’s late-century illuminations of EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) follows. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) and the pre-Raphaelite images for her Sing Song (1872) will be followed by Preludes (1875), the work of the feminist Alice Meynell, illustrated by her sister, and her prose poems, London Impressions (1898). Sight and Song (1892), by the same-sex lovers, aunt and niece, pseudonym “Michael Field,” concludes the course. These are the set texts: there will also be an opportunity to look at a range of illustrated texts—ballads by Jean Ingelow, Julia Margaret Cameron’s translation of Burger’s Leonora (1847). There will be a visit to the Bodleian Library’s print room where you will see how images are made and have an opportunity to print them yourselves.
Texts: Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book; With Poetical Illustrations by L E L (1832), Letitia Landon. Facsimile edition, Scholar Select, Milton Keynes, Lightning Source UK. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=findens%20tableaux&searchtype=all&ft=&setft=false. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Romance of the Ganges,” Finden’s Tableaux, 1838, p. 29: “The Romaunt of the Page,” Finden’s Tableaux, 1839, p. 1; Phoebe Anna Traquair, Sonnets from the Portuguese, https://digital.nls.uk/traquair/sonnets/index.html; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862), in Selected Poems, ed. Dinah Roe (Penguin Books, 2008); See COVE online: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Illustrations for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862). The above edition is a good edition of Rossetti’s works, but any edition of Goblin Market will do. Christina Rossetti, Sing Song, A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), illustrated by Arthur Hughes (Dover Books, 2003); Alice Meynell, Preludes (1875), facsimile edition (Creative Media Partners, 2018); Alice Meynell, London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure (1898), ebook download; Michael Field, Sight and Song (1892), facsimile edition. Note: You will see that many of the set texts are facsimile editions often reduced in size. This does enable you to study texts and image away from the computer. (You will find a magnifying glass useful.)
7975 James Joyce
J. Johnson/T, Th TBA
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 hours TBA; may fall occasionally on days other than T/Th.)
Primary 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 5: World Literature
7977 Poetry Detective: Reading and Writing Poetry
G. Lewis/M-W 11-12:30
See description in Group 1 offerings.
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 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 visions of the city. 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). Below are the core novels we’ll be reading (more or less in the order we’re reading them, and they’re mostly short!). Other materials listed will be provided during the session.
Texts: Andre Breton, Nadja (Grove,1928); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Mariner, 1927); Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (Vintage); Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl (Penguin); Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (FSG Classics, 1970); Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (Mariner,1977); David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Vintage,1991); Tommy Orange, There, There (Vintage, 2019).
7993 Global Caribbean, Migratory Texts
C. James/T, Th 11-1
Travel, migration, and global circulation are indispensable facets of the creation of the modern Caribbean. Understandably, concepts of mobility have also been vital to the production of Caribbean literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Focusing on London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, and New York as major conduits through which the migratory flow of Caribbean literary production takes place, this course will explore both foundational and emergent works of fiction from the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. We will also analyze relevant theoretical texts which address concerns of border crossings, transnational geographies, and the negotiation of diasporic identities. The French and Spanish texts will be studied in translation.
Texts: Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador); Gisèle Pineau, Exile According to Julia, trans. Betty Wilson (U. Virginia); Cristina García, Here in Berlin (Counterpoint); David Chariandy, Brother (Bloomsbury); Angie Cruz, Dominicana (Flatiron); Rita Indiana Hernández, Papi, trans. Achy Obejas (U. Chicago). Any edition of these texts will be fine. Additional readings (available during the sessions) will include essays and short stories by Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Sonia Rivera-Valdés and Edwidge Danticat.
Bread Loaf / California
Summer Institute in Global Humanities
Institute courses count for at least one unit of Group 5 credit. For group credits, see the descriptions below.
7147 Literacy and Decolonization: Theory and Practice
D. Baca/M-F 10-12
This course will examine the ways that literacy theorists and practitioners are decolonizing Eurocentric systems of meaning and recovering patterns of thinking, sensing, and being that have been buried by the spread of colonization. We will focus particularly on theories of literacy that have emerged within three parallel movements: Chicana feminist studies, Latin American subaltern studies, and Settler Colonial studies. Our aim will be to explore methods of representation articulated within non-Western/Other cultures and to consider how the understanding of those methods might productively disrupt the norms that currently define literacy and related educational practice. Students will have an opportunity to put the theory we consider into practice around their own decolonizing critical, pedagogical, and creative projects.
Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Ellen Cushman, Lewis Gordon, María Lugones, and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. All readings will be posted on Google drive before the session begins. (This course carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)
7245 Bringing Shakespeare to Life in Our Time
J. Fried/M-F 10-12
This course explores the process of bringing Shakespeare’s texts to life in 2023 and will do so by focusing on two principal areas of study. First, we will unpack the professional actor’s toolkit, specifically addressing Shakespeare’s texts, and delving into how students can use verse, rhythm, operative words, and breathing as tools for bringing life and clarity to a wide range of material from Shakespeare’s plays. Second, the course will explore how these texts can be adapted and personalized to the students’ own experiences and cultures. To this end, we will watch/read several powerful examples of contemporary adaptation including Haider by Vishal Bhardwaj; American Moor by Keith Hamilton Cobb; and Peerless by Jiehae Park. The class is designed specifically for nonactors; it is a no-judgment zone with zero theatrical experience required. It will be taught with an eye toward adapting these skills to Bread Loaf students’ classrooms. (This course carries one unit of Group 2 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)
7584 Ecopoetics, Black Aesthetics, and the End of the World as We Know It
E. Shockley/M-F 10-12
This course offers students the opportunity to study and interrogate the ways that anti-Black racism informs Western concepts of “nature” and modes of inhabiting the planet. We will approach these topics through readings of works of poetry which—through their settings and the locations touched by their authors’ heritages and lived experiences—together form a vast geographical web connecting the Caribbean nations of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago; the U.S. and Canada in North America; Australia; South Africa, Senegal, and Mali in Africa; and France and England in Europe, among others. With questions of Black aesthetics and a Black feminist theoretical framework to give shape to our engagements with these texts, we will consider together what Black poetry has to teach us about the ethics (and representation) of human relationships with other humans, with nonhuman life, and with the Earth/earth itself. In addition to the five book-length poems or poem-sequences listed below, we may also take up secondary readings by such scholars as Sylvia Wynter, Sonya Posmentier, Denise da Silva, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)
Texts: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke); M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Wesleyan); Ed Roberson, To See the Earth before the End of the World (Wesleyan); Yvette Christiansë, Castaway (Duke); Sylvie Kandé, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore (Wesleyan).
7721 Cultural Translation
J. Lezra/M-F 10-12
Cultural translation—yes, but what is culture? What sorts of works comprise it? Who—or what—owns it? Can it be transported, translated, adapted, used, appropriated? Who gets to translate, who doesn’t? And what do we mean by translation in each context? We attend first to the long history of these controversial questions, from Euripides through Ovid, Shakespeare, Lispector, Marcel Camus, Ishiguro, Sulayman al Bassam, and on to the debate concerning the translation of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Second, we study the critical literature regarding the concepts of culture, ownership and appropriation, translation and untranslatability, and adaptation. Here our archive includes Williams, Wimsatt/Beardsley, Foucault, Bhabha, Rivera Garza, Apter/Cassin, Sharpe, Pratt, and Campos. Students pick a case of “cultural translation” and prepare a presentation on it for the Institute Symposium (July 22). Films will be screened on 7/10 (Medea), 7/14 (Twelfth Night), and 7/17 (Orfeu Negro). Articles will be available during the session. (This course carries two units of Group 5 credit.)
Texts: Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford); Clarice Lispector, Family Ties (Lacos De Familia), trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Univ. of Texas, 1972); Cristina Rivera Garza, The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation, trans. Robin Myers (Vanderbilt, 2020); Euripides, Medea, in Medea and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (Penguin Classics); William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Arden Shakespeare; 3rd ed., 2008); Sulayman al-Bassam, “The Speaker’s Progress” at https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/the-speakers-progress-al-bassam-sulayman-2011/#video=the-speakers-progress-al-bassam-sulayman-2011 and “IMEDEA”, an unpublished performance script will be provided (the author will join us by Zoom to discuss both works); Ovid, Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics; reprint ed., 2004); Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021); NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setae Adamu Boaten (Wesleyan; 1st ed., 2011).
7783 Law and Literature: Reimagining Global Freedom
M. Jerng/M-F 9-11
This seminar reads the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Cherie Dimaline, N. K. Jemisin, Victor LaValle, and Rebecca Roanhorse. Their uses of historical speculation, post-apocalyptic worlds, time travel, technological creation fantasies and urban fantasy, among others, invite alternative knowledge structures, ways of being, and making (other) realities possible. They both question norms of freedom and personhood that perpetuate anti-Black and settler violence, and reimagine them toward building new futures, presents, and pasts. We will put this fiction in dialogue with legal cases, legal theorists, and critical race theorists centering on the law’s reproduction of norms of freedom and personhood, often based on property, contract, and corporations across global contexts. Throughout, we will decipher intersections across law and speculative writing in order to reimagine global freedom. (This course carries one unit of Group 4 credit and one unit of Group 5 credit.)
Texts: Octavia Butler, Kindred (Beacon Press, 2003); Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (DCB, 2017); Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (Boom! Studios, 2018); N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became (Orbit, 2020). Short stories by Ted Chiang and Rebecca Roanhorse, legal cases, and essays related to law and critical race studies will be available on Canvas.
Bread Loaf/Online
Critical Writing Tutorials (CWT)
Critical Writing Tutorials 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. Meeting times to be determined by the professor, in consultation with enrolled students. For further information, see https://www.middlebury.edu/school-english/locations/online-tutorials.
7010A Critical Writing Tutorial: Thoreau’s Walden
R. Johnson/TBD
In their Introduction to Material Ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann state, “meaning and matter are inextricably entangled, constituting life’s narratives and life itself.” While most of us likely agree with this statement, few of us devote our lives to exploring its implications as deeply as did Henry David Thoreau. In this course, we will develop our own critical writing skills while exploring a foundational work in U.S. environmental thought, Walden (1854). We also will delve into contemporary theoretical studies in nature’s materiality—reading in philosophy, literature, material-culture studies, natural history, ecocriticism, and the New Materialism. Along the way, we will pursue the question of how Thoreau’s mid-19th-century work may be relevant to our own era of biodiversity collapse and climate disruption. Participants will read, discuss, draft, dig, develop, revise, and refine, producing roughly 25 pages of writing. Course meetings occur online for approximately five hours each week. For the first day of class, please read at least 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/. Additional resources will be available on our Canvas course site. (This tutorial carries one unit of Group 1 credit and one unit of Group 4 credit.)
Text: Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 2016).
Directed Research and Writing (DRW) Projects
A closely mentored independent study, the remote 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.