Reinventing Literary History
Special Topics
Narcissism: Self, Science, and Morality
Shapes and Shadows of Identity
Mortals, Creatures, and Subjects
Revolutionary Generations: 1848 and 1968
Reinventing Literary History
http://www.barnard.edu/english/reinventingliteraryhistory/
A.Legacy of the Mediterranean II
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. Works include Milton, Paradise Lost; Voltaire, Candide; Puccini, La Boheme [excursion to the Metropolitan Opera]; William Wordsworth (selected poetry); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Darwin, Marx, and Freud (selected essays); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
FYSBC 1184
Lisa Hollibaugh, 1st year Dean
TR 1:10PM-2:25PM
FYSBC 1156
Pat Denison, English
TR 10:35AM-11:50AM
The courses offers a revisionist perspective by transcending the traditional and arbitrary distinction that seperates North and South American literatures. Emanating from what might be called the geographical site of modernity, American literature is characterized by unprecedented diversity and innovation. In addition to the classic American novels, short stories, and poetry, the following multicultural curriculum features genres ranging from slave narratives and manifestoes to gothicism and magic realism. A general lecture series dramatizes the historical vitality of American letter. Readings include Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; José Marti, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, and T. S. Eliot, selected poetry; Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro; William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, selected stories.
FYSB BC 1271
Herb Sloan, History
MW 2:40PM-3:55PM
The course examines constraints on canonicity, especially as they pertain to the portrayal of women in literature and culture. The curriculum explores a diverse range of intellectual and experiential possibilities for women, and it challenges traditional dichotomies-culture/nature, logos/pathos, mind/body--that cast gender as an essential attribute rather than a cultural construction. A general lecture series, shared with Legacy of the Mediterranean, provides a broad historical context. Readings include Milton, Paradise Lost; Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Cleves; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Emily Dickinson, selected poetry; Sigmund Freud, Dora; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Gertrude Stein, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights; Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star.
FYSB BC 1329
Kate Levin, English
TR 10:35AM-11:50AM
FYSB BC 1333
Laura Ciolkowski, English
TR 11:00AM-12:15PM
D. Global literature: New World Utopians and Rebels
When Venezuelan novelist and critic Arturo Uslar Pietri declared that “utopia is American,” he was speaking for the New World, north and south. In this course we will explore the writings of iconoclastic thinkers who found American space to be the inspiration for paper dreams of a new society. We will be especially interested in the rhetoric of revolution and the emphasis on the Western hemisphere as both the rupture and continuation of a European narrative. The field of study will range from the 17th to the 20th century, as authors include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Thomas Paine, Flora Tristán, Margaret Fuller, José Martí, and Che Guevara.
FYSBC 1285
Ronald Briggs, Spanish & Latin American Cultures
TR 1:10PM-2:25PM
Reacting to the Past
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 5th-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 16th-century China, with the Analects of Confucius as the main text; Game 3: A trial of Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson, set in 17th-century Massachusetts, with the Bible, Calvin's Institutes, and the original trial testimony as the main texts. Please visit http://www.barnard.edu/reacting for the most up-to-date information.
FYSB BC 1617
Rebecca Stanton, SlavicTR 4:10PM-5:25PM
FYSB BC1618
Dorothy Denburg, Dean of the CollegeMW 10:35AM-11:50AM
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).
FYSBC 1166
Mindy Aloff, Dance
TR 4:10PM-5:25PM
This course aims to develop an understanding of the terms modernism and modernity in philosophy, literature, theatre, cinema, and the fine arts, and to explore what is meant by postmodernity and postmodern culture. The seminar will begin with an analysis of the characteristics that came to define modernism in the arts. We will read classical and contemporary texts by Immanuel Kant, Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin and others that focus on the basis of the notion of modernity. We will also read the writings of cultural critics and artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Bertolt Brecht, Luce Irigaray and Ntozake Shange that address the different ways in which modernism and modernity construct notions of the self. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between modernity and modernism in the arts. We will visit the Museum of Modern Art to view art and analyze the various ways in which the Museum links modernism and modernity, and watch several films and discuss how their descriptions of modern life differ from painterly and written descriptions of the same.
FYSBC 1188
Alex Alberro, Art History
MW 10:35AM-11:50AM
A typical dictionary definition of the word chaos is "a state of utter confusion." However, the earliest examples of chaos depict it as emptiness, while modern mathematicians might define it as "a state of orderly disorder." We will study chaos as defined each of these ways, with applications in the social and physical sciences, literature, the arts and modern life. We will see these definitions and applications not as distinct, but as overlapping and intimately related. Readings will include John Milton's Paradise Lost, which we will compare and contrast with Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park; and Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia.
FYSBC 1256
Sharon Harrison, Economics
MW 10:35AM-11:50PM
Competing constructions of American identity in the United States date back to the early republic when, following a violent and successful quest for independence, a newly emerging America struggled with the question: What makes an American American? This seminar explores the way in which American performance texts reflect and project ever shifting notions self, “other,” and nation, which always occur at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Over the course of the semester we’ll examine how American identity has been staged in theatres, novels, political treatises and art as well as how those images have traveled through time, from the early republic to the present. We’ll examine texts treating Native American identity by Mary Rowlandson (1682) and John Augustus Stone (1829); texts treating women’s role in politics including political treatises and suffrage speeches as well as plays such as Spirit of 1776 (1868) and The Parrot Cage (1913); and texts treating African American identity by looking at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and texts responding to it including adaptations, vaudeville, Bill T. Jones 1990 dance performance “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Promised Land,” and Spike Lee’s 2000 film, Bamboozled.
FYSBC 1284
Pamela Cobrin, English
TR 2:40PM-3:55PM
What if humans were only cable of caring for their own interests? What kind of economic world could we expect to find? One in which the common good would be attained by market forces, or one in which many would be left behind? This course uses a diversity of sources to examine the interplay of culture, ethics and economics. The starting point is Adam Smith’s work. Economists and policy makers have focused on one side of Adam Smith’s work represented by self-regarding behavior and the supremacy of the invisible hand in market functioning. However, Adam Smith also pointed out that one of humans’ central emotion is “sympathy”, a natural tendency to care about the well-being of others. In light of the recent events as well as research this other side of Adam Smith’s work appears now more relevant. We analyze evidence of cooperative versus self-regarding behaviors and its relationship with the economy, human evolution and cultural values in a variety of settings. Readings include works from Adam Smith, Milton Freedman, Charles Dickens, David Rockefeller and Chris Gardner.
FYSBC 1286
Sonia Pereira, Economics
TR 4:10PM-5:25PM
Why do people go to war, and what affect does warfare have on those experiencing it? What roles do glory, honor, and duty play in warfare? Do gender roles shape people's perceptions of war? How do both civilians and soldiers cope when war tears their lives apart? This course examines some outstanding examples of both fiction and non-fiction writing about warfare across time and place, including works by Thucydides, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anthony Shadid, and less well-known women writers of World War I, alongside two notable movies.
FYSBC 1287
Kim Marten, Political Science
TR 2:40PM-3:55PM
In this seminar, we will examine a series of texts from the Western literary tradition--along with a few seminal works of classic and contemporary cinema--to consider how and why they thematize characters' quests for justice. From the ties of kinship to the bonds of citizenship, from the articulation to the deconstruction of transcendental moral codes, from the traumatic demands of law to the (often equally traumatic) exigencies of revenge, we will explore the many intricacies of "justice" as both an ubiquitous literary topos and an abiding ethical issue. Authors studied will include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, the Marquis de Sade, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.H. Auden and Martin Amis. Secondary readings will be drawn primarily from philosophical and psychoanalytic sources, such as G.W.F. Hegel, Heinz Kohut, and Jacques Lacan. Along with filmed adaptations of our primary literary works, we will view and discuss the movies Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" and Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down."
FYSBC 1455
Caroline Weber, French
MW 1:10PM-2:25PM
Narcissism: Self, Science, and Morality
When do people have what Jane Austen called “proper pride,” and when are they suffering from the difficult personality problems, the self-love gone wrong, that psychologists refer to as “narcissism”? What is the difference between healthy self-esteem and the kind of egoism and selfishness that people generally dislike and disapprove of? Is genuine altruism part of human nature? The narcissist appeared in ancient Greek mythology and political philosophy, and has since been depicted in poems, fiction, dramas, and operas, and in philosophical, scientific, psychoanalytic, and social scientific research. Narcissists are familiar targets of everyday moralizing, stock figures of misbehavior in sitcoms, archetypal bad choices for friend or spouse. In the abstract, they are disapproved of; in practice they are often admired, rising to the top of corporate and political hierarchies and winning love from the most desirable people around them. How? Why? What creates such people? Texts will include Ovid, “Echo and Narcissus”; Plato, The Republic; Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism”; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Otto Kernberg, “Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissism”; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism; and George Eliot, Middlemarch.
FYSBC 1459
Cheryl Mendelson, Philosophy
MW 11:00AM-12:15PM
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.
FYSBC 1546
Jonathan Rieder, Sociology
TR 10:35AM-11:55PM
Mortals, Creatures, and Subjects
This seminar examines concepts of the self in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy and literature. The Greeks saw human beings as mortals, in contrast to the gods. Christians in the Middle Ages regarded themselves as immortal creatures reflecting the image of God. Since the seventeenth century we have come to understand selves very differently, namely as subjects defined by self-reflection, self-determination, self-definition, inwardness, and irreducible psychological complexity. Authors include, Homer, Euripides, Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Freud.
FYSBC 1568
Taylor Carman, Philosophy
TR 9:10AM-10:35AM
Revolutionary Generations: 1848 and 1968
In this seminar we will discuss the history and meaning of revolution, and try to understand the importance of generations as a catalyst for historical change. 1848 was the "springtime of the peoples." Revolutions erupted demanding freedom, justice, the right to work, the equality of citizens, and liberation from oppression, led by a youthful generation known as "the 48ers." In 1968, throughout the continent of Europe and in the US, South America, and Japan, another wave of civil unrest was experienced, led by another youthful "springtime" movement. We will use readings from Mannheim, Sperber, and Goodwin on revolution, then focus on memoirs (from Flaubert's Sentimental Education to Luisa Passerini's Autobiography of a Generation); books on Garibaldi, Marx, Vaclav Havel and China's Cultural Revolution; and music and art (from
Verdi's operas to the musical Hair) from each of these revolutionary generations in our comparisons and investigations.
FYSBC 1585
Molly Tambor , History
MW 4:10PM-5:25PM