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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
See Literature 3021 for a full course description.
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4.00 Credits
What could be more "natural" than love? Wehave all lived it, chased its pleasures, been driven by its mandates, and suffered from its pain. In this course, students trace the literary construction of love and fidelity and the elaborations of betrayal. Readings include works by Molière, Casanova, Tirso de Molina, Choderlos de Laclos, Mozart/Da Ponte, Byron, and Shaw.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights In troubled times, poets tend to explore the political implications of their forms. Such preoccupations have resulted in poetic movements of various sorts. Many poets today think of themselves as responsible to an enlarged vision of the human community and to the natural environment. This course looks at examples of poetry and related writing with sociopolitical implications from around the world and from several historical contexts. Writers studied include Whitman, GarcÃa Lorca, Akhmatova, Pound, Tom Raworth, Juliana Spahr, Abba Kovner, and others. In this practice-based seminar, students experiment with poetic forms, write essays, and research areas of contemporary social concern. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
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4.00 Credits
Since "poesis"-the root of "poetics"-simeans "making," the heart of poetic process andstructure is composition. The same can be said of the structure of music. This course operates as both seminar and laboratory, with particular attention to cross-pollinating traditions of experimentation in poetry, music, philosophy, and science. Authors studied include Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, John Dewey, John Cage, Neils Bohr, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, Jackson Mac Low, Jonathan Skinner, and Caroline Bergvall. The presence of the John Cage Trust at Bard provides the opportunity for students to examine Cage's varied and original approaches to composition. Prerequisites: at least one advanced course in poetry and/or music and one theory course in any area (or an independent interest in theory).
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4.00 Credits
In this seminar, students read, write, and translate a variety of texts. The class draws on the language proficiencies of the students and invited consultants. Authors include Sappho, Catullus, Chaucer, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, VÃcente HuidobroVelimir Khlebnikov, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Federico GarcÃa Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Kurt Schwitters,Wittgenstein, Lorine Niedecker, Anne Tardos, and Jackson Mac Low. Along with weekly writing assign- ments, students are encouraged to experiment with bi- and polylingual writing.
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4.00 Credits
French Studies It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in 20th-century French thought, especially as it is understood and interpreted by Alexandre Kojève in the "anthropological" commentary he elaboratedbetween 1933 and 1939 (subsequently published as the Introduction to the Reading ofHegel). Kojève'sinsistence on the master/slave dialectic and emphasis on excess, risk, violence, and death had a profound influence on an entire generation of thinkers. Students read from theoretical essays, manifestos, and works of fiction by Bataille, Blanchot, Breton, Caillois, Klossowski, Leiris, Paulhan, Ponge, Queneau, and Sartre. All works are read in translation.
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4.00 Credits
This course begins with the study of 1768, the year that Captain Cook set sail for Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. The course ends with the study of 1833, the year Britain moved to ban colonial slavery. Between these two dates, a major conceptual shift occurred in how Britons looked at themselves and the world. Students examine the complex relationship between the traditions of literary travel, political journalism, and imperial exploration during the era that saw the rise of Britain as the world's preeminent imperial power. Texts include radical poet Helen Maria Williams's eyewitness account of the French Revolution, Lord Byron's Don Juan, Wordsworth's Prelude, Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights Each text in this course grapples with ethical issues through fictive means. In navigating the texts, students assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas-or eschew morality altogether. The course also attends to craft, investigating how authors' concerns may be furthered by formal considerations. Works studied include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Edie Meidav's Crawl Space, Martin Amis' s Time'Arrow, J. G. Ballard's Crash, Elfriede Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Russell Banks's Continental Drift, Norman Rush's Mating, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, and Michael Tournier's The Ogre, among others. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
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4.00 Credits
This seminar examines the concept of ideology in its relation to literature, art, and the task of their critique. What is ideology? How can one distinguish between ideological and nonideological forms of consciousness? What makes a work of literature or art ideological? How can a work of art or literature resist or critique ideology? In attempting to answer these questions, students follow a central strand in German aesthetic thought that runs from Hegel to Habermas, and engage with recent non-Marxist thought about social norms and communicative action. Core readings include Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein. Prerequisite: limited to third- and fourth-year students.
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4.00 Credits
Human Rights, Medieval Studies Anyone who has encountered references to Afghanistan's Taliban as "medieval" knows thathe Middle Ages represent a time of religious fanaticism, intellectual obscurantism, and rampant violence. Is it fair to assume that medieval society had no notion of human rights? To what extent did medieval concepts such as the just war, feudalism, and chivalry provide protections similar to those enjoyed today? Can understanding the medieval past help modern societies to understand foreign cultures? In pursuing answers to these questions, students read literary, historical, and theological medieval texts, as well as modern theoretical texts. Topics considered include crusades, anti-Semitism, trials by ordeal, heresy, and witchcraft. The works of Augustine and Aquinas, troubadour poets and Christine de Pisan, King Arthur and Vlad the Impaler are juxtaposed.
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