100-level

As you embark upon your life as college students and grow into your roles as citizens of the wider world, questions about your place in that world become more urgent. First-Year Seminar invites you to reflect on how writers and thinkers past and present have grappled with the question of how the self relates to other people and to the wider community. The year-long course is underpinned by two narratives of discovery and (self-)exploration: Homer’s ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey, and its latter-day adaptation, the Afro-Caribbean epic poem Omeros by Derek Walcott (1990). Along the way, we will read—slowly and carefully—a series of touchstone works that grapple with this central question of the self in the world from a wide range of perspectives: from the fragments of Sappho to the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and from Dante’s Inferno to Rabindranath Tagore’s classic Bengali novel, The Home and the World. The readings in these core works will be illuminated by companion texts from Genesis to Marx and Freud. Seminar-style discussion and writing-rich assignments will ask you to consider how ideas about “citizenship,” both broadly and narrowly defined, have emerged over the centuries as responses to the complex relations between the self and the wider world, providing you with a foundation for your work at the College and for life beyond Bard. In addition to your work in the classroom, the whole first-year class will also come together in regular forums, held on Monday afternoons, to engage creatively and critically with the ideas of the course.

100-level

The current moment presents a historical juncture in which assumptions about government and public life, in the United States and beyond, are being challenged in renewed and disconcerting ways. Economic and political stability, once regarded as the dividend of the ending of the Cold War, can no longer be taken for granted, even in the so-called mature liberal democracies of the North Atlantic region. Faith in democracy as a form of government, and in free speech, cosmopolitanism, and a separation of religion and politics as supporting pillars of such a government, are in decline. International challenges, associated with climate change and global public health, press a world system built upon independent nation-states. Against such a backdrop, students across the world are confronted with an urgent need to re-examine, articulate, and perhaps rejuvenate, what it means to live together in a shared society.

This incarnation of First-Year Seminar explores the challenges that arise from membership of a democratic community, the obligations and possibilities of citizenship, and the very notion of a collective society. Students read important works from across history—drawn from literature, philosophy, political theory, science, and the arts—that have shaped how people think about citizenship and civic membership across time and space. In the process, students develop the core skills needed to succeed at Bard, from engaging in active, critical reading and conversation to writing original, thought-provoking, and persuasive essays. The fall semester takes Plato’s Republic as an anchoring text to focus on the idea of the Republic as a commitment to organizing society and political life as a shared endeavor. The spring semester will build from the constitutional documents of the United States and elsewhere to address the obligations and possibilities that arise for individuals as a consequence of membership of such a community.

100-level, Common Course

The British Empire was underwritten by carbon. With the rise of steam technology, a dramatic shift in sources of energy—from natural flows (sun, wind, water) to fossil stocks (coal)—powered economic acceleration and imperial expansion from the nineteenth century forward. These sessions study the literature and culture of Britain’s carbon-driven empire through the lens of fuel. We will examine the coal imagination of the Victorian era (and beyond) in poems, prose, and paintings, to reflect on the social and ecological damage wrought by our reliance on fossil sunshine. We will read stories and journalism from elsewhere in the postimperial Anglophone world, including South Africa, Nigeria, and India, to see how carbon dependency has shaped literature, culture, and politics. And we will ponder tales of alternative fuels, to think about literature as itself a source of energy and change.

200-level, Literature

What does it mean to study literature today? How, precisely, do poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama differ from other forms of expression? How can we read those differences—the small, unexpected ways that works of literature can transform everyday life and everyday language—in connection with larger cultural, political, and aesthetic questions? And how can we use encounters with literary texts to reimagine or remodel our visions of self, community, and our mode of being in the world? Emphasizing the practice of close textual analysis and introducing students to foundational and emerging methods in literary studies, this course lays the groundwork for further investigations across a range of literary forms, national traditions, historical moments, and social identities.

200-level, Literature

When did humans leave nature behind? As the tragic realities of climate change, species extinction, and ecological crisis become daily more visible, humanity’s appreciable mark on the earth-system has prompted the suggestion that we now live in a geological epoch of our own making: the “Anthropocene.” In this course, we’ll turn back to a major inflection point in humanity’s relationship with the natural world, examining nineteenth-century ideas about—and representations of—nature and the environment that continue to inform our own. Across novels, poetry, scientific writing, art criticism, and social theory, we’ll look at different senses of “nature” as a source of aesthetic wonder and moral value, and as a zone of alterity and violence: “red in tooth and claw.” We’ll consider advances in, and literary responses to, sciences like geology, evolutionary biology, and climatology that remain vital for understanding humanity’s roles and effects in the natural world. We’ll read about how human activity was seen—in a steam-powered and coal-fired industrial age—as entangled with nature as an extractable resource and sink for waste products, both in Britain and across the territories of its empire. In writings about polluted landscapes and toxic workspaces, we’ll address the significant costs of Victorian industry to human health. And, throughout the course, we’ll contemplate alternative visions of human/nature interaction, from rural landscapes that nostalgically record vanishing ways of life to apocalyptic visions that look ahead to a world actually existing “after nature.”

200-level, Literature

Many in the 19th century came to understand that we live in a world ruled by chance rather than divine order. On railways and ships, in factories and mines, the speed of steam-driven capitalism made accidents more common and forced the law to rethink how to handle accidental injury and death. The rise of statistics revolutionized the study of society and revealed the uncanny predictability of apparently unruly phenomena—from births to deaths, marriages to murders. Chance made its way into the sciences, especially in the random variations underpinning the theory of evolution by natural selection. It inflected ideas about beauty and pattern in the arts, notably in the new (and chance-marked) art of photography. And it gave a renewed emphasis to questions of luck, risk, coincidence, and probability in literary narrative, where topics like gambling and financial speculation were rife. What Keats called the “magic hand of chance” everywhere raised and renegotiated fundamental questions about human life, action, and freedom—about how we think and act in conditions of uncertainty. As we read about how these topics were addressed in literature and culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries, we’ll also think about how they inflect our understanding of chance today.

200-level, Literature

This course aims to offer a broad survey of British literature and culture from the early 19th through the late 20th century, combining aspects of a canonical survey with thematically organized readings, contexts, and perspectives. Three interconnected themes will guide the trajectory of the course. First: the expansion, critique, and eventual dissolution of the British Empire and its institutions (foremost among them: slavery and the slave trade). We will trace literary responses to imperialism and colonialism, including examples from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as Ireland. We will reflect on the deleterious effects of empire on enslaved, colonized, and postcolonial subjects, paying attention to the politics of language and literary expression. Second, the widening of equality, represented in analogous struggles for freedom, rights, and recognition for slaves, women, and workers. Reading alongside the attendant social and political upheavals, from abolitionism to the suffrage movement to decolonization, we will consider how literature points to the relationship between progress and poverty, development and disaster, and marks the persistence of unjust arrangements along the lines of class, gender, and sexual orientation. Third: humanity’s changing relationship to the natural world, especially in the aftermath of the enclosure movement and industrial expansion. We will consider new attitudes to nature writing given a rapidly altering landscape, the tension between rural and urban experience, and the influence of evolutionary theory in ecological and social terms. Throughout, we will consider how literature interacted with these developments, looking at various literary movements and a range of evolutions in form, genre, and style. Readings will include poetry, short stories, novels, manifestos, and essays, as well as relevant historical and theoretical materials.

200-level, Literature, Experimental Humanities

What is the relationship of literary writing to scientific experiment? How do literary authors and movements characterize themselves (or become characterized) as experimental? This course surveys a range of texts from the 19th century to the present that engage with experiment in terms of content, form, or shape. We will read texts that represent scientific praxis alongside texts that deploy literary improvisation. We will consider what commonalities exist across experimental and avant-garde modes: the commitment to linguistic innovation and metatextual reflection; the prevalence of manifestos and movements; the lure of technology and intermediality. Throughout we will also consider experimentalism as both value and vice in critical method.

200-level, Literature

This course is designed as a broad introduction to literary writing in South Africa, across a range of genres and historical moments, with an emphasis on the 20th century. Alongside novels, short stories, plays, and poems, we will read excerpts from historical and travel writing, legal statutes, literary criticism, journalism, and nonfiction. The course starts by addressing historical and colonial accounts of South Africa, its landscapes, and the peoples who populate (or are held not to populate) them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We then turn to events leading from the Union of 1910 to Apartheid in 1948, examining accounts of life in increasingly segregated conditions, both rural and urban. We will evaluate different literary and critical approaches to the problem of writing under, within, for, and against an explicitly racist regime, and the different genres resulting from these approaches (polemic, manifesto, propaganda, theatrical collaboration). Later in the course, we consider literature produced during the regime’s more violent and isolated years in the 1970s and 1980s—its “interregnum” or “emergency” period—and consider further genres (protest poetry, witness literature, allegory). Finally, we turn to South Africa’s transition to democracy, negotiated from the late 1980s and brought to fruition in the 1994 elections. We read literature that retreats from the “spectacular” to the “ordinary” as it confronts the “New South Africa” and its enduring problems of racism, xenophobia, poverty, inequality, corruption, and disease. We reflect on the role of narrative in the official process of truth-telling, historical reconciliation, and amnesty, and on the broader role of literature in celebrating and critiquing a new society.

300-level, Literature

The coming-of-age novel, commonly known as the Bildungsroman (novel of education, formation, development), was a dominant genre of nineteenth-century literature. Tracing the lives of characters through familiar plots—growing up, leaving home, and making one’s way in the world—the Bildungsroman showcases the novel’s ability to express both individual hopes and social constraints, youthful ideals and mature realizations, “great expectations” and “lost illusions.” In this course, we will undertake an in-depth study of several classics of the genre by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, and Edith Wharton. Along the way we will touch on many of the topics and essential tensions of the Bildungsroman: love, desire, and courtship; the family and its substitutes; class, money, and social mobility; the shaping role of gender and the limited social choices afforded to women; and the vocation of art or writing as an alternative to more mainstream careers. We will read a selection of critical materials on the Bildungsroman, and on style and genre more broadly. We will also consider accounts of social and moral development as a way to think about the relationship between literature and historical change.

300-level, Literature

What is the role of literature in understanding, representing, and adapting to climate change? How has our urgent ecological crisis shaped the scales, genres, and plots of contemporary fiction? This course surveys the literary genre that has lately come to be characterized as climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Alongside the dystopian science fiction central to the genre, we will consider realist novels, nonfiction journalism, scientific writing, environmental memoir, poetry, and film from across the globe. We will examine how literature engages (or not) central concepts in earth-system science and scenarios of ecological calamity (hurricanes, megafires, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss); how it critiques (or not) environmental racism and injustice; and how it envisions possible futures for humanity in the Anthropocene. Reading critical materials from across the environmental humanities, we will also think about the challenges of narrative, representation, sympathy, and imagination as they apply to literature and climate policy. The course will emphasize methods of research, writing, and revision essential for Senior Projects in literature and other humanities fields.