Writer/translator examines the classics alongside their "radical retellings"

What's it like to study at Bennington? Peek into Re-Creating the Classics—a literature course for the book-hungry, the idea-hungry, the rigorously curious.

Course description for
Re-Creating the Classics
Marguerite Feitlowitz
"Why read the classics?" Italo Calvino famously asked. What does it mean to be "contemporary"? Why is it that our meditations on, and debates with, these landmark works never seem to be "settled"? Why is it that some of our most deeply experimental, politically combative, and visionary writers continually find inspiration in canonical works? In our exploration of these questions we will read a series of classic works with their radical re-creations: Sophocles' Antigone/Griselda Gambaro's Antigona Furiosa: The Travels of Marco Polo/Calvino's Invisible Cities; The Tempest/Auden's The Sea and the Mirror; Robinson Crusoe/Coetzee's Foe; Jane Eyre/Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. We will also consider the ways in which fresh waves of scholarship and new translations may effectively re-create works we thought we "knew."

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"I'm interested in work that has engendered other provocative, searching works of art," says Marguerite Feitlowitz, the writer and Bennington literature faculty member who teaches Re-Creating the Classics. "I'm not interested in flimsy sequels, anything parasitic, or the further adventures of so-and-so. I'm not even interested in transposing heroes into heroines or heroines into heroes. In this class we're searching for something much deeper, where the very form is interrogated."

"We get angry with the classics, we talk back to them, but we don't want to be without them. What is that tension?"

Feitlowitz says she has been "an inveterate reader of the classics" for her whole life, and she found herself wondering "why that is, and why is it that classics have so often spawned radical retellings....We get angry with the classics, we talk back to them, but we don't want to be without them. What is that tension?" Sophocles' 2400-year-old Antigone is a prime example, she says. "It's one of the works that seems to crop up when there are situations of repression. For example, under the Nazi occupation of France, think of Jean Anouilh's important version of that play. During the 1960s and 70s, and into the 80s, when many Latin American nations were under military dictatorships, there were over 60 adaptations of Antigone."

Like most literature classes at Bennington, Re-Creating the Classics is a discussion-based seminar, in which the teacher leads a small group of students in a round-table conversation. Feitlowitz writes in her syllabus: "You will each make presentations to the class based on our readings and on issues that derive from, or are provoked by, our texts. We will challenge, provoke, and support one another in animated discussion, as well as in moments of doubt and quiet contemplation." With a statement like that presiding over the intimacy of the seminar format, there is no hiding. All students--first-years and seniors, those concentrating in literature and those who aren't--are expected to join in.

"To be a good writer, you need to be a reader....Seeing and hearing what other people think helps me figure out what I want to write about."

Says Danny Brylow '10: "We had a really intense debate going on about Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea--what a particular character's motivations were, what his actions were, how they were related. Some people viewed what he'd done as unforgivable; other people said it was not quite justified, but understandable. So we were getting into a heated discussion about that, which is exciting." For Brylow, a first-year student, debating literature alongside other students who are so engaged in the reading--many of them upperclassmen--has challenged him to deepen his thinking. "The older students have such a clear way of articulating what they're trying to say. I think that level of insight is a product of very close reading....I've started to search for meaning in things that I wouldn't have ever thought to look for six months ago."

"To be a good writer, you need to be a reader," says Michael Nordine '10, another first-year student. "You need to absorb as much as you can and see what's in there. Seeing and hearing what other people think helps me figure out what I want to write about." Close reading is accompanied by thoughtful writing--and a lot of it. Over the course of the term, students write weekly response papers, along with two critical essays and a final project. In addition to an entire class session in which students can volunteer to have their papers workshopped, they also team up in writing partnerships.

"Marguerite is really good at letting us go out on a limb, go in our own direction..."

Students say that kind of simultaneous interaction with the texts and with each other enriches their understanding of what they're reading. Because Feitlowitz encourages them to examine the aspects of the works that most fascinate them, they have the chance to delve into particular topics and seek out advice from each other on how best to research and defend their arguments. They talk with fascination about their classmates' papers and projects: the student who graphed out the structure of Invisible Cities as a tessellation; the student who examined Travels with a specific interest in birds (Marco Polo recorded meticulous details about the birds he encountered in his travels); the student who analyzed the structures of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in comparison with the structure of a sonata.

Though the investigations are varied, they are anything but fanciful, and Sofia Alvarez '07 appreciates Feitlowitz's approach: "Marguerite is really good at letting us go out on a limb, go in our own direction, discover what we want about the book--and then pulling us back into the grounding of the historical basis of the book and the author's intention."

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