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 1960’s, 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.