Reinventing Literary History
A. Legacy of the Mediterranean I
B. Americas I
Special Topics
Ethnicity and Social Transformation
Revolutionary Movements: Visions and Experiences, Causes and Consequences
Families, Feminisms and States
Accent and Voice: Minority and Immigrant Women's Literature
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 1169
Cary Plotkin, English
TR 1:10-2:25
FYSB BC 1182
Ariella Lang, Italian
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 11:00-12:15
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
Imagining South Asia
This seminar considers the representation of South Asian cultures in art and literature over the past five hundred years. We will examine issues of colonialism and nationalism, gender identity, religious identity, and caste/class struggle in works by native authors, English colonial figures, and artists from diasporic communities beyond the subcontinent. How have historically marginalized figures responded to different forms of oppression, both by colonial forces and by governing structures and institutions? What is the relationship between imperial identity and national identity? Where does the "real" South Asia begin and end in relation to the imagined space, place, and tradition that has taken shape over the region's long and turbulent history? Authors considered will include Mahasweta Devi, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Rabindranath Tagore. Additionally, there will be two film screenings and a trip to the Dahesh Museum of Art.
FYSB BC1584
Manu Chander, English
MW 4:10-5:25
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 11:00-12:15
FYSB BC 1610
Pat Stokes, Psychology
TR 2:40-3:55
FYSB BC 1618
Flora Davidson, Political Science
MW 2:40-3:55
Special Topics
Encounter with the marvelous and the otherworldly as a call to adventure. The individual's quest for spiritual fulfillment, for recognition of and relationship to the agencies that shape human destiny. Transformations of romance and its reemergence in modern fantasy. Works to be chosen from the following: The odyssey, The Bacchae, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Hamlet. Romantic poetry and painting, Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Idylls of the King, Heart of Darkness, Nietzsche, Kafka, Jungian psychology, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Woman Warrior, Ursula Le Guin, Isabel Allende, Garcia Marquez, Edwin Danticat, Salman Rushdie.
FYSB BC 1137
John Pagano, English
MW 10:35-11:5o
What is Love? What are the philosophical and literary interpretations of the course and nature of love? This seminar will discuss various ideas and concepts of love that have developed throughout history from Confucius and Plato, to the idea of romantic love in the age of chivalry, and to the concepts of love in the modern world. The readings will consist only of works of literature. They include: Euripides, Medea; Sophocles, Anitgone; Plato, Symposium; excerpts from the Old and New Testament; Baccaccio, Decameron; Pushkin, Eugene Onegin; Turgenev, First Love; Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata; Checkhov, The Lady With the Pet Dog and others.
FYSB BC 1157
Mara Kashper, Slavic
MW 1:10-2:25
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
Governing authority can be defined as the relationship between ruler and ruled in which the framing of issues, the myths and narrative history of the state, and the reasoned elaboration of the government's decision are accepted by the citizens of subjects of the state. The crisis of authority occurs when this relationship is disrupted. In this semester we will examine such crises in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Western Europe, twentieth-century United Stated, and post-communist Eastern Europe, through the writings of such authors as Plato, Machiavelli, Milton, Mill, de Tocqueville, King, and Michnick
FYSB BC 1203
Richard Pious, Political Science
TR 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
Revolutionary Movements: Visions and Experiences, Causes and Consequences
Few historical events have shaped the modern world as profoundly as revolutionary movements. This seminar explores some of the most important revolutionary movements in modern history. We will look at how literary and artistic forms represent the revolutionary experience at the personal and philosophical level and examine how social analysis reveals the causes and consequences of the movements. Main texts: Gioconda Belli, The Country Under My Skin: A memoir of Love and War; Barrington Moore Jr.; Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making og the Modern World; Craig Calhoun, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991; Andre Malraus, Man's Fate (La Condition Humanie); and Margarethe von Trotta, director, Rosa Luxemburg.
FYSB BC 1279
Guobin Yang, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
TR 10:35-11:50
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
Accent and Voice: Minority and Immigrant Women's Literature
In this seminar we will explore ideal roles prescribed for women, and the relationship of those roles to issues of power, authority, class, race and ethnicity. Our investigation will include a cross-cultural selection of American minority and immigrant women's literature. Theoretical studies will help us to frame our questions and listen to women's voices as they speak through these texts. Readings will include Allende, My Invented Country; Alvarez, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Antin, The Promised Land; Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul (selections); Danticat, The Dew-Breaker; Gilligan, In a Different Voice (selections); Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Morrison, Beloved; Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (selections); Rosaldo and Lamphere, Women, Culture and Society (selections); Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
FYSB BC 1452
Celia Deutsch, Religion
TR 4:10-5:25
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
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