Spring 2024
- Bard Annandale
This workshop presents the breadth of formal possibilities available to writers of prose. The course will consider how a sentence functions in a written work, our reading moving us beyond limiting categories (fiction; non-fiction) into spaces where, whatever the label, writing might achieve authority. Students will workshop—i.e., read and comment on—writing by Hilton Als, Aristotle, Roberto Bolaño, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Emily Dickinson, Gustave Flaubert, Jon Fosse, Mary Gaitskill, Louise Glück, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bohumil Hrabal, Edward P. Jones, Jamil Jan Kochai, Nam Le, Denise Levertov, Alfred Lobel, Janet Malcolm, Javier Marías, Shane McCrae, Leonard Michaels, Maggie Millner, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigrid Nunez, Marcel Proust, Christina Stead, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mark Twain, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William Butler Yeats. By workshopping established writers, students will learn to weigh what writing can do and to notice how it achieves its effects. In addition to daily writing, students will produce five pieces of prose to be workshopped during the term, pieces that will pursue the expressive varieties of form. As we cultivate a rigorous aesthetic practice, we will also be addressing the essential matter of fairness, exploring the ethical implications of our attempts at representation.
- Bard Annandale
Professors Derek Furr and Erica Kaufman
Ezra Pound’s imperative to “make it new” signifies the way modernist and postmodern poets tend to be characterized as opposed to, or at least skeptical of, formal practices that impose meter, rhyme, syllable count, and other constraints on expression. But even as poetry changed radically (and continues to change), certain forms persist and prove valuable, even to the most experimental of practitioners. In this course we will consider how some of the forms most associated with “tradition” evolved and remain vital to English-language poets now. Rather than survey many forms, we will work extensively with a small number, such as ghazal, tanka, and sonnet. Similarly, while we will examine many examples, we will also delve deep into the formal experiments of several poets—such as Terrance Hayes with the sonnet, Adrienne Rich with the ghazal, or Harryette Mullen with the tanka. As we study these individual forms, students will also conduct their own formal experiments, writing through the container of form in order to grapple with the contemporary.
- Bard Annandale
There is a certain perversity in knowing. The disciplinary apparatuses of the state have taken forms of which we are newly aware. They watch and document under the auspices of providing safety for citizens. We, in turn, provide almost everyone with excess access to what we do, who we believe ourselves to be, and what we think. Is counter documentation possible? What does it mean to attempt to speak against power? What narratives, forms, languages, gestures, and means toward performance can help us create future selves liberated from the overabundance of record? In this course, we will work toward uncovering the effects of surveillance and AI on writing and imagine strategies for refusing those effects. Together we will generate anti-dossiers that resist totality and information accumulation (secret or other).
- Bard Annandale
What gets forged in the poetic imagination through the forces and tensions produced by pressure? In this course, we’ll probe some of the ways that pressure and crisis—as it emerges in the political, the social, the economic, the ethical, the temporal, and the formal—impresses upon poetry and the imagination. How does pressure, elastically defined, act as a constraint, an engine, and also a mode of attention? And how does crisis and moments of sustained vulnerability find their way into poetic forms? As part of our collective lines of inquiry, we’ll analyze and think through a range of gestures, movements, and forms that emerge in the work of poets who composed under, or in response to duress, instability, and precarity. Readings will include selections from the work of Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich, Ilya Kaminsky, Jamaica Kincaid, Nazim Hikmet, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ricardo Maldonado, Myung Mi Kim, Danez Smith, Nicole Sealey, Chinese migrant worker poets, Claudia Rankine, Rachel Zucker, Sahar Muradi, Solmaz Sharif, and Brian Teare, among others. Students will write short critical responses provoked by the course readings, generate poems that respond to and arise out of felt pressures, and discuss one another’s writing in a seminar setting.
- Bard Annandale
Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Ultimately, he determined the question unanswerable: A bat’s experience of the world is so alien to our own that it is beyond the human understanding of subjective experience. That’s arguable. But it is true at least that a bat’s experience—or that of any other nonhuman consciousness—is not inaccessible to human imagination. In this course we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, approaching the subject of nonhuman consciousness through literature, philosophy, and science. We will read works that attempt to understand the experiences of apes, panthers, rats, ticks, elephants, octopuses, lobsters, cows, bats, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner, J.A. Baker, Eduardo Kohn, David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, Temple Grandin, Jane Goodall, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Susan Daitch, Giorgio Agamben, Bennett Sims, and E. O. Wilson, among others, in addition to a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and possibly other films. There will be several long writing assignments over the course of the semester, and a workshop component.
- Bard Annandale
On what grounds may someone responsibly declare that a work of literature is mediocre, mid, trash, or simply not worth one’s time? In what ways does it make sense to judge artwork by a generative AI differently than artwork we know to be by human beings? This course interrogates the ethics and practices of critical judgment by studying theoretical concepts like the sublime, the mediocre, the gimmick, and the hack. As we read influential theoretical texts by writers like Longinus, Fanon, Bourdieu, and Ngai, we will also tackle aesthetically challenging works that reflect upon artistic cultural production like William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, and Percival Everett’s Erasure. We will also consider an array of poetry, short fiction, and professional criticism of varying quality (we will, unfortunately, have to confront some supposedly bad art). Students will be challenged to compose responsible aesthetic criticism and also to develop a research project that critically engages an aesthetic problem of their choosing.
- Bard Annandale
Resisting totalitarian regimes takes not only courage, but imagination as well. This course explores the Eurasian nations’ responses to war, oppression, famine, epidemics, and exile through the oral tradition (epic narratives, fairy-tales, nursery rhymes, and popular jokes), along with the works of fantasy literature which often absorb, amalgamate, and recontextualize these genres. How can a pauper whose livelihood depends on nomad’s luck idolize and worship a horse? How can grandmother’s song save the world from destruction? Can two species form a union to give the future humanity its power and purpose? To people who need to find a refuge from danger and hardship, answers to these questions really matter. They lie in the ability of language to construct reality, as demonstrated by a variety of works, from the Kyrgyz epic poem Manas to Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novel Farewell, Gul’sary; from the fairy tales of the Bering Strait to Yuri Rytkheu’s rendering of the Chukchi foundational myth in “When the Whales Leave”; and from tales and lullabies that originated in Belarus, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, to Alindarka’s Children: Things Will be Bad by Alhierd Bacharevic – a recent fantasy of grief, frustration, horror, and all-conquering compassion. We will read these narratives as well as essays by Roman Jacobson, Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Vladimir Propp, Mieke Bal, and Cristina Bacchilega to contemplate the energy of defiance concealed in storytelling traditions across national borders and the millennia. We will also study heroic and trickster archetypes in modern renderings of classical mythology; analyze the politics of myth; and survey the mechanisms of domination and oppression that inspire such fantastical tropes as metamorphosis, magic helpers, and otherworldly journeys. Finally, in our attempt to understand what makes works of Eurasian folklore and fantasy so mesmerizing and full of hope we will endeavor to write both analytically and creatively on and around some of them, develop performative responses, and/or practice translation.
- Bard Annandale
n ancient Athens, citizens gathered each year to use the spectacle and storytelling of Greek tragedy to explore urgent contemporary questions. How do we make good moral decisions? How do we deal with the aftermath of war and displacement? Should we still put our faith in traditional institutions? Centuries later, artists still adapt classical tragedies in response to the issues of our own world. What makes Greek tragedy such a resonant medium today? How have artists from the contemporary USA, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa reimagined and reinvigorated it? In this course, we will read a series of ancient Greek tragedies in dialogue with modern adaptations by writers and producers such as Luis Alfaro, Yaël Farber, Sara Uribe Sánchez and Itab Azzam, and collectives including the Trojan Women Project, Aquila Theater, and Theater of War. In addition to their critical work, students will attend public performances of Greek tragedy and have the opportunity to create their own adaptation.
- Bard Annandale
Conocido como “el pulgarcito” del hemisferio (Gabriela Mistral), “la dulce cintura de América,” (Pablo Neruda) o como “el estrecho dudoso,” (Ernesto Cardenal) el istmo centroamericano y su literatura será el enfoque central de este curso. Leeremos una selección de autores de la región que escriben en el siglo XX y XXI para familiarizar a los estudiantes con textos que frecuentemente se quedan al margen del canon latinoamericano. Exploraremos consideraciones estéticas e ideológicas particulares a la zona y situaremos nuestras lecturas en el violento contexto histórico y político que, en sí, a menudo se convierte en un tema recurrente en la ficción centroamericana. Entre los autores que leeremos figuran Sergio Ramírez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gioconda Belli, Claribel Alegría y Ernesto Cardenal.
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“The Sweet Waist of the Americas:” Introduction to Central American Literature
Referred to as “the little thumb” of the hemisphere, “the sweet waist of America,” or as “the dubious strait,” the Central American isthmus and its literature will be the central focus of this course. We will read a selection of twentieth-century authors from the region in order to familiarize students with texts that are often marginalized from the Latin American canon. We will explore particular aesthetic and ideological concerns and situate our readings within the violent political and historical context that often becomes, in itself, a recurring theme in Central American fiction. Among the authors we will read are Miguel Angel Asturias, Gioconda Belli, Roque Dalton, Tatiana Lobo, and Sergio Ramírez. Conducted in Spanish.
- Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library
What are the limits of a poem? How can they be tested, mirrored, extended within the spatial dimensions of an image? In this class, we will look at different artists from North, Central, and South America to understand the ways text and image interact on the page and beyond, looking at the ways meaning can be made through cross-genre and cross-cultural dialogues, and radical methods of translation. By looking at the work Amanda Berenguer, Fernanda Laguna, Mónica de la Torre, Hannah Whitaker, Omar Schiliro, Renee Gladman, John Giorno, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Pedro Lemebel, Roberto Bolaño, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Lorna Simpson, David Wojnarowicz, Patty Chang, Leon Ferrari, Liliana Porter, Carlos Soto Román, and others, we will consider work that invoke image/text experimentation and are interwoven deeply with revolutionary politics, small press distribution, and resistance within and toward the mass media. We will also make image/text work of our own, which will culminate in a class-wide project.
- Bard Early College Hudson Valley
In this course, students will be encouraged to both hone their voice and dislodge from their voice. By identifying, dissecting, and re-imagining language, students will be asked to read short stories guided by the questions: Who is speaking, and why, ethically, does it matter? How do authors write passionately about subjects close to their hearts without climbing aboard a soapbox? How do readers understand a persona narrator and its function in a story? How does a “morally ugly” character get written? Is a “virtuous narrator” possible? Interesting? Truthful? Throughout the semester, students will unearth various narrative techniques in their readings and then write an original story in three varied forms, asking themselves with each new telling: How have the ethics of my story shifted? This class will include a micro-workshop with National Book Award Finalist author Aaliyah Bilal.
- Bard Early College in New Orleans
Professor Julia Carey Arendell
Though often considered experimental, hybrid narratives represent the questions our society is asking about boundaries, rules, and categories. Why do we assign the labels we do? The verb “to limn” stems from both the French “enluminer,” to enlighten, but also the Latin, līmen, which means “a threshold.” The act of crossing over demands a scrutiny of margins, ends and beginnings, purposeful movement, and possibly dissolution or revolution. Hybrid narratives provide a space and process of deep individuation, as one pauses to mark change, chaos, or blending. It is the individual watching, observing, and telling what is happening that holds a unique place in a landscape of meeting and departing, where margins are marked and crossed. These thresholds exist for realms, cultures, societies, as well as individuals who pass from one ritual to another, one existence to another.
We will study this process of creating and asking, while also building our own narratives. The class is itself a hybrid of traditional forms, part literature course, part creative writing workshop. We will question genres, and how they blend together as well as distill, while thinking about how we write and why. How does form speak to content?
Fall 2023
- Bard Annandale
The novels in this course each grapple with ethical issues through fictive means. In navigating them, we will try to assess the way in which literature can create, complicate, or resolve ethical dilemmas—or appear to eschew morality altogether. We will also attend to craft, investigating how these author’s concerns are furthered by formal considerations. Students will read approximately one novel per week, occasionally supplemented by theoretical texts. Analytical and creative writing will allow students to find their own fictive paths to a social, ethical, or political issue as they consider the liabilities of both didacticism and sensationalism, and explore the role of imagination in the expansiveness of fiction. The syllabus will likely include the following novels, among others: Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, Percival Everett’s The Trees, Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.
- Bard Annandale
We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies. This happens despite our knowing that characters remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. Characters are always mediated, but they can also show us how concepts like humanity and personhood depend on and contend with the media humans use to share ideas. In this course, we will study the history of characters in western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and the capabilities of different media technologies shape our encounters with them. We will also explore different ways of “reading” characters by thinking about how computer algorithms might understand something as supposedly complex as an individual’s personality. Primary texts will include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Parks’s The America Play, Cusk’s Outline, and short stories by Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, and others. We will also consider films, television shows, and video games. Students will have the opportunity to become characters in class debates, discuss fan fiction, and experiment with how to translate characters between media as we engage in analytical, theoretical, and creative work throughout the term.
- Bard Annandale
This course introduces students to theories and practices of translation. We will read from a range of theorists, to include Lydia Lu, Walter Benjamin, Walter Ong, Emily Apter, Michel Foucault, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Abdelfattah Kilito, Lawrence Venuti, and Gayatri Spivak; as well as the work of literary critics and intellectual historians as they deploy theories of translation in textual analysis. We will also study contemporary translation practices, from machine translation, to translation by correspondence, to the appearance of new translations of classic works such as the Arabian Nights.
- Bard Annandale
Poet-critic Lorenzo Thomas begins “How to See Through Poetry: Myth Perception and History” with the following question: “When is poetry or the word, itself, action?” Taking our cue from Thomas’s question, this course focuses on the reading and writing of poetry as an active, investigative process. Through delving into a myriad of modern and contemporary global writers (Leslie Scalapino, Eileen Myles, Myung Mi Kim, Harryette Mullen, Serhiy Zhadan, Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, CAConrad), and poetic genres (occasional, documentary, ecological, procedural poetries) we will examine how poetry acts. What does the form of poetry make possible in our own writing that other literary genres cannot? What kind of agency and knowledge-making does poetry enact and invite?
- Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library
- Bard Annandale
We are alive and writing during one of the most fragile times in most of our lifetimes—a time of plague and war, a time of elevated mass violence and white supremacist organizing, a time when most of us seek safety, not risk. Poetry, however, is a way toward thinking through what it means to be human in any context, whether we can recognize the world as ours or not. It has the capacity to shift our thinking—about sentence structures, about habitual patterns of thought, about what might be possible in the future. Poetry helps us recalibrate the already known so that we may re-see what appears ordinary or immutable. In this course you’ll generate new poems that push the boundaries of what you already know about what a poem might be. In creative practice, we’ll investigate this notion of risk. Readings will include work by Fred Moten, Fahima Ife, Cecilia Vicuña, Saidiya Hartman, Jane Wong, Jerome Ellis, among others.
- Bard Annandale
Over the course of this seminar, we will interrogate the function of perspective in establishing how a narrative, and the characters who inhabit it, not only see but also interpret the world, and how that perspective has been used to create distance, both real and imaginary, between an “us” and a foreign other. We will use our understanding of perspective to look critically at the world around us, and over the course of the semester will use a lab model to develop narratives that actively address and engage the world around us. We will focus on the ethics as well as the aesthetics of narration, paying close attention to the function of individual words and the narrative traditions that we are operating within and at times breaking from. The course will include a lab/workshop component where students will work on developing and researching topics to address in their writing. Selected readings will include, but are not limited to Susan Sontag, V.S. Naipaul, Roberto Bolano, Colson Whitehead, Katherine Boo, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, F.
- Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership in Harlem
Professor Christopher Rey Pérez
What memories, beliefs, lessons, promises, politics, worldviews, and more get passed down in the act of writing? How do writers create heritages, both formally and thematically, across histories, generations, and individuals? What are the decisive factors—and difficult responsibilities—that we must consider as writers when choosing the words and worlds we wish for others to inherit? This course begins with these questions in order to contemplate what we can inherit from/by writing. Throughout the semester, we will study diverse literary and artistic forms, such as letters, manifestos, children’s books, short stories, poems, essays, murals, and videoworks to think about the intergenerational relationships that authorship seeks to create or sometimes even disrupt or end. We will explore archives to draw upon material history, and we will also hone our use of literary devices and rhetorical modes to think about our audience and our message. Students can expect to utilize their creative and critical faculties in a generative setting, spurred by in-class writing and sharing. We’ll study Octavia Butler, Rio Cortez, Julia Alvarez, Firelei Báez, Sedat Pakay, Suzanne Kite, WAI Architecture Think Tank, Arturo Schomburg, Gloria Anzaldúa, Aykan Safoğlu, ENTRE film center, and more.
- Bard Annandale
When Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers arrived on the U.S. literary scene in 1974, it was both manifesto and provocation, inflaming still-ongoing debates over the borders, sensibilities, obligations, and political allegiances of the “Asian American writer.” Since the entrance of Aiiieeeee and the beginnings of the Asian American Movement in the late 1960s, Asian American poetry has expanded to cover vast political and aesthetic terrain, though knotted questions remain over what designating a work as “Asian American” allows us to see and understand. In this course, we’ll examine the aesthetic heterogeneity and capaciousness of this slippery category through the lens of contemporary AAPI and Asian diaspora poets who write in invigoratingly diverse modes, forms, styles, and visions. How do contemporary AAPI poets innovate poetically to address evolving concerns of the AAPI community? How do works by these poets deepen or destabilize our understanding of race and racialization? Course readings will include the poetry of Nellie Wong, Garrett Hongo, Theresa Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Rajiv Mohabir, Monica Youn, Vijay Seshadri, Li-Young Lee, Solmaz Sharif, John Yau, Sarah Howe, Sally Wen Mao, Monica Sok, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Craig Santos Perez, Timothy Yu, and more. The class will also feature writings by Anne Anlin Cheng, Viet Thanh Ngyuen, Hua Hsu, and Cathy Park Hong as critical frameworks for our conversations around race, form, and intersections between politics and aesthetics. In tandem with the course texts, students will write their own poetry, and engage in interdisciplinary modes of response.
Spring 2023
- Bard Annandale
This is a course on African American literature in the 21st century. In this class, we will explore what it means for an author in the contemporary era to render Blackness, Black folk, and Black experience in prose and poetry. How do Black writers contend with the present, bearing in mind the notion that, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past”? What does it mean to write in a moment—like many before it—when simply “existing while Black” carries with it a sense of sobering precarity? What is the significance of creating Black literature within a publishing industry that is itself an engine of racial inequality in terms of demographics and the literature itself? We will read broadly to find answers to these questions, and may encounter fiction, essays, poetry, plays, and the graphic novel along the way. Major authors may include but not be limited to: Hanif Abdurraquib, Brit Bennett, Mat Johnson, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, Brandon Taylor, Danez Smith, Jesmyn Ward, and Bryan Washington. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic difference are discussed at length in this course.
- Bard Annandale
Our current political reality demands that we return to the problematic and remarkable relationship between literature and politics. With renewed urgency and awareness of the role language plays in constructing and reshaping our reality, we will read across a broad range of texts, asking: how can resistance, protest, ideological critique, and indoctrination inhabit a piece of fiction? How can the imagination take part in the events of the day? What sort of creative response can be offered to the structures of power and justice? We will be investigating these and other urgent questions through a reading of various texts by the likes of P. B. Shelley, Jonathan Swift, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, Roberto Bolaño, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark; and we’ll be writing “political” stories and essays of our own.
- Bard Annandale
We are alive and writing during one of the most fragile times in most of our lifetimes—a time of plague and war, a time of elevated mass violence and white supremacist organizing, a time when most of us seek safety, not risk. Poetry, however, is a way toward thinking through what it means to be human in any context, whether we can recognize the world as ours or not. It has the capacity to shift our thinking—about sentence structures, about habitual patterns of thought, about what might be possible in the future. Poetry helps us recalibrate the already known so that we may re-see what appears ordinary or immutable. In this course you’ll generate new poems that push the boundaries of what you already know about what a poem might be. In creative practice, we’ll investigate this notion of risk. Readings will include work by Fred Moten, Fahima Ife, Cecilia Vicuña, Saidiya Hartman, Jane Wong, Jerome Ellis, among others.