Reinventing Literary History
A. Legacy of the Mediterranean I
B. Americas I
Special Topics
Ethnicity and Social Transformation
Families, Feminisms and States
Technology and Society: Past/Future Visions
Reinventing Literary History
Sections of Reinventing Literary History are grouped in four clusters: Seminars on the Legacy of the Mediterranean feature classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture, as well as excursions to the opera, the theatre, and museums. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, seminars on the Americas, Women and Culture, and Global Literature cross national boundaries, exploring the literary history of the Americas, the role of women in other cultures, and various approaches to global literature. http://www.barnard.edu/english/reinventingliteraryhistory/
A. Legacy of the Mediterranean I
The course investigates key intellectual moments in the rich literary history that originated in classical Greece and Rome and continues to inspire some of the world's greatest masterpieces. A lecture series featuring distinguished Barnard and Columbia professors provides a general historical framework, leaving time in the seminars for close readings of individual texts. Trips to museums and the opera situate the works in an interdisciplinary context available only in New York City. Texts include Euripides, The Bacchae; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Homer, Odyssey; Vergil, Aeneid; Dante, Inferno; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe; Shakespeare [selection depends on NYC theatre offerings]; Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Cleves.
FYSB BC 1156
Stefan Pedatella, English
TR 1:10-2:25
FYSB BC 1169
Cary Plotkin, English
TR 4:10-5:25
FYSB BC 1186
Scott Failla, English
MW 2:40-3:55
The course transcends the traditional and arbitrary distinction that separates North and South American literatures. The Americas emerge not as a passive colonial object but as an active historical and aesthetic agent. Emanating from what might be called the geographical site of modernity, American literature is characterized by unprecedented diversity and innovation. In addition to classic American novels, short stories, and poetry, the multicultural curriculum features genres ranging from creation myths and slave narratives to Gothicism and magic realism. Texts include: Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, Royal Chronicles; Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, selected poetry; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno"; William Apess, A Son of the Forest.
FYSB BC 1269
Linn Cary Mehta, English
TR 9:10-10:25
Literary history often portrays women as peripheral characters, confining their power to the islands of classical witches and the attics of Romantic madwomen. This course offers a revisionist response to such constraints of canonicity, especially as they pertain to the marginalization of female subjectivity in literature and culture. We will therefore explore a more diversified range of intellectual and experiential possibilities. The curriculum challenges traditional dichotomies--culture/nature, logos/pathos, mind/body--that cast gender as an essential attribute rather than a cultural construction. Texts include: Aeschylus, Oresteia; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book; Marie de France, Lais; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, selected poetry; Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; and Lady Hyegyong, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong.
FYSB BC 1164
Georgette Fleischer, English
TR 4:10-5:25
FYSB BC 1332
Manya Steinkoler, English
MW 4:10-5:25
The Caribbean Diaspora
Historically, Caribbean cultures have been profoundly affected and shaped by the massive displacement and migration of their populations. In this course, we will examine how this condition of displacement is articulated in the writings of the Caribbean diaspora and how these literary representations of mobility, migration, and intercultural contact reflect current globalizing processes and discourses. Texts will be drawn from the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanic Caribbean diaspora. These include the novel The Mimic Men by the recent Nobel-Prize-winning Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul; the novel Lucy by the Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid; and short stories by Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat, writers of Dominican and Haitian descent respectively, the latter a Barnard graduate. These readings will be complemented by essays from critics such as Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, and James Clifford.
FYSB BC1583x
Maja Horn, Spanish and Latin American Cultures
TR 1:10-2:25
In these seminars, students are assigned specific roles that enable them to relive important intellectual debates in three separate historical moments. The class sessions are run by students and take the form of competitive "games." Students with similar roles will commonly work together to enact their dramatic scenarios. Students completing the fall seminar will automatically be entitled (but not required) to take a continuation seminar, designed on the same principles, in the spring semester. Each seminar will work with the following games: Game 1: A trial of Socrates, set in fifth-century Greece, with Plato's Republic as the main evidentiary text; Game 2: A succession dispute between the Wan-li Emperor and his Confucian bureaucrats, set in sixteenth-century China, with the Analects of Confucius as the main text; Game 3: A trial of Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson, set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, with the Bible, Calvin's Institutes, and the original trial testimony as the main texts. Please visit www.barnard.edu/reacting for the most up-to-date information.
FYSB BC 1602
Laurie Postlewate, French
MW 9:10-10:25
FYSB BC 1610
Pat Stokes, Psychology
TR 2:40-3:55
FYSB BC 1617
Rebecca Stanton, Slavic
MW 10:35-11:50
Special Topics
Transparency in writing is a creation. It conveys the sense that the writer is putting all of his or her cards on the table, that the voice is candid and reasonable, that the person writing is knowable in an essential respect. Although in recent decades such a prose style has not been especially cherished in literature, it has characterized works that endure and that survive translation. Great artists in whatever medium tend to write clearly, vividly, concisely, and memorably about such complicated subjects as aesthetics, technique, political identity, the workings of society, and the shadings of emotion that galvanize human action. This course will look at examples ranging across time, space, and literary medium: the essay, the lecture, the autobiography, the journal, the letter, and the short story. Readings in the past have included The Personal Essay (edited by Phillip Lopate), The Journals (Eugene Delacroix), Letters (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Home and Exile (Chinua Achebe), Private Domain (Paul Taylor), and One Writer's Beginnings (Eudora Welty).
FYSB BC1166
Mindy Aloff, Dance
TR 4:10-5:25
Many creative works conjure up imaginary realms lying beyond the reach of our world; think of fairy tales and of fantasy literature. But other works depict ordinary life itself as shot through with the extraordinary. How can the ordinary come to seem extraordinary? For some the question is rather: How could it ever have seemed merely ordinary? This seminar considers the theme of the estrangement of the ordinary: the rendering of the banal and everyday as unfamiliar and alienating--or, in some cases, enchanting. We focus on interpretations of the ordinary as uncanny, perverse, absurd, and sublime. Writings of René Descartes, E.T.A. Hoffman, Mary Shelley, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and/or others. Films may include Blade Runner, Vertigo, and La Jetée.
FYSB BC1180
Katalin Makkai, Philosophy
TR 2:40-3:55
In this course we will look at tales of spiritual metamorphoses in major works of fiction. We will read European classics, novels by contemporary Asian writers, and works of fantasy and science fiction. Writing assignments include both fiction and essay writing. Authors include Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, and Gao Xingjian.
FYSB BC1185
Wendi Adamek, Religion
MW 2:40-3:55
Ethnicity and Social Transformation
Novels, memoirs, films and fieldwork based on the American experience of immigration during the twentieth centure. Readings will include works by Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Christina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, Fae Ng, Gish Jen, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison.
FYSB BC1228
Peggy Ellsberg, English
MW 1:10-2:25
Classical economic theory developed in order to make sense of the experience of Great Britain, the most developed economy at the time. As economic development spread to the new world, so too did the economic ideas from the old world, but quite regularly these ideas seemed unsuitable. This class examines both the lives and the writings of a selection of authors, all of whom devoted their life work to developing a more suitable economics for their times. We will be interested in both how biography helps us to understand the work, and how the work helps us to understand the life. Authors include Wesley Clair Mitchell, Henry George, W. Arthur Lewis, and Jane Jacobs.
FYSB BC1283x
Perry Mehrling, Economics
MW 6:10-7:25
Families, Feminisms and States
Throughout history political and economic events reverberate in states' visions of household, family, and gender norms. Women's roles in families and society are particularly the focus of state policy and strategy. Social and political actors continually revise and redefine the norms and structures of marriage and family life, at times reinforcing and at other times resisting state ideology. This seminar examines how the construction of family--throughout human time and cross-culturally--normalizes gendered sets of behaviors that become encoded in nationalism, social practice and law. We will examine the shifting construction of family in a variety of cultural and historical settings as well as academic disciplines: fiction (Buschi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood); sociology and anthropology (Hilde L. Nelson, ed., Feminism and Families); and history (Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages). We will also examine recent American court cases that grapple with defining parenthood and appropriate family practices in light of new reproductive technologies, same-sex marriages, and immigrant cultures in America.
FYSB BC1436x
Maxine Weisgrau, Anthropology
MW 10:35-11:50
Consideration of mostly American texts that--and writers who--share a central engagement with the sea, seafaring and coastal life. Particular attention to the sea as workplace and as escape. Texts include Homer, The Odyssey; the Book of Jonah; St. Brendan, Navigations; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; Mather, "Surprising Sea Deliverances"; Franklin, "Maritime Observations"; Dana, Two Years Before the Mast; Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale; Thoreau, Cape Cod; Twain, Life on the Mississippi; Chopin, The Awakening; Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs; Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World; Beston, The Outermost House; Carson, Under the Sea Wind; Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"; Casey, Spartina.
FYSB BC1457
Robert McCaughey, History
MW 11:00-12:15
Technology and Society: Past/Future Visions
What is the impact of technology on society and culture? Throughout history the role of technology has been captured in many creative disciplines--writers, filmmakers, architects have offered utopian as well as dystopian visions. We will analyze technologies ranging from the printing press to the television to the internet. By examining works in different forms and genres, we will explore how technologies have shaped our lives, and in turn how the cultural imagination has influenced the development of new technologies at a given time. We will read short fiction by Ray Bradbury, J.G. Ballard, Philip Dick, Margaret Atwood, Don Delillo and others; watch film excerpts by Fritz Lang (Metropolis), Jean-Luc Goddard (Alphaville), and Wim Wenders (Until the End of the World); and review projects by architects Archigram, Kenzo Tange, Zaha Hadid, and others.
FYSB BC1458
Kadambari Baxi, Architecture
MW 2:40-3:55
An interdisciplinary examination of the intimate and fraught connections between animals and humans in literature, philosophy and culture. We will consider topics such as the historical constructions of species boundaries and of the multiple meanings and uses of animals in human life; the representations of animals as mirrors of human identity; varied emotions evoked by animals; and conceptualizations of animals as colonized "others." Recent developments such as evolving ethical notions and legal definitions of animal rights, the specter of cross-species pandemics, and the explosive growth of the pet industry as well as the staying power of industrial farming have rendered the space between human and animal existence narrower than ever. We will accordingly pay some critical attention to the dangers and opportunities this proximity between humans and other animals provides. Readings will include Aesop, Albee, Aristophanes, the Bible, Chaucer, Coetzee, Descartes, Flaubert, Haraway, Marie de France, Ovid, Pollan, Rilke, Voltaire, and Waugh.
FYSB BC1572
Timea Szell, English
TR 2:40-3:55