Reinventing Literary History
A. Legacy of the Mediterranean I
B. Americas I
Special Topics
Ethnicity and Social Transformation
Families, Feminisms and States
Shapes and Shadows of Identity
Fire and Ice: Exploring Energy and Climate
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 masterpiece, though, may challenge the very culture it helps constitute. Through close readings of individual texts, each class will explore how the works sometimes reinforce certain assumptions about Western culture and sometimes confront them, through their depictions of the relationship between individuals and their societies, between characters and their environments, between characters of different genders, and between intellectual and spiritual conceptions of truth. Texts include Euripides, The Bacchae; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Homer, Odyssey; Vergil, Aeneid; Dante, Inferno; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe; Shakespeare [work to be determined]; Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Cleves; Cervantes, Don Quixote.
FYSB BC 1156
Stefan Pedatella, English
MW 4:10-5:25
FYSB BC 1169
Cary Plotkin, English
TR 1:10-2:25
FYSB BC 1182
Ariella Lang, Italian
TR 4:10-5:25
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:Popul Vuh; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet, and Phillis Wheatley, selected poetry; Madre María de San José, Vida; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; Toussaint L'Ouverture, selected letters; Leonora Sansay, Secret History; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; William Apess, A Sonof the Forest; Esteban Echeverría, "The Slaughterhouse"; Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno."
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, and therefore explores 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, As You Like It; Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; and Lady Hyegyong, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong.
FYSB BC 1164
Georgette Fleischer, English
TR 2:40-3:55
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 1601
Mark Carnes, History
MW 11:00-12:15
FYSB BC 1610
Patricia Stokes, Psychology
TR 2:40-3:55
FYSB BC 1617
Rebecca Stanton, Slavic
MW 2:40-3:55
FYSB BC 1618
Dorothy Denburg, Dean of the College
TR 4:10-5:25
FYSB BC 1619
Judith Shapiro
MW 4:10-5:25
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
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 seminar we will examine such crises in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Western Europe, twentieth-century United States, and post-communist Eastern Europe, through the writings of such authors as Plato, Machiavelli, Milton, Mill, de Tocqueville, King, and Michnik.
FYSB BC 1203
Richard Pious, Political Science
MW 1:10-2:25
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
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
Shapes and Shadows of Identity
A look at the elusive meaning of "black," "white," and other group identities in the United States and the forms--novel, literary essay, stand-up comedy, ethnography, performance, film, television, magazines, radio, memoir, sermon--through which such identities are depicted. Readings will include: Johnny Otis; Upside you Head; Upsky; Bomb the Suburbs; Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues; Mary Waters, Black Identities; James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother; Ann Douglas, Mongrel Manhattan; selected sermons and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.
FYSB BC 1546
Jonathan Rieder, Sociology
TR 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 4:10-5:25
Fire and Ice: Exploring Energy and Climate
Using books, articles, and essays from the 19th century to today, we will explore relationships among the history, economics, and biogeochemistry of energy and climate change. We will discuss how we have reached our current global climate over both human and geologic timescales, and we will examine what lies before us in the twenty-first century and beyond. What are the economic, social, scientific, and technological challenges? What are the implications of inaction? Readings will include works by Svante Arrhenius, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Friedman, David Goodstein, Charles Lyell, John McPhee, Donella Meadows, and Noel Perrin.
FYSB BC 1582
John Magyar, Chemistry
MW 10:35-11:50