Literature Courses

Explore our full curriculum

Spring 2024

20th Century Afrocaribbean Writers
Anaïs Duplan
Anne Carson
Sandra Simonds
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing – Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing — Prose
Libby Flores
Crocheting the Classics: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South
Jenny Boully
Experimental Fiction by Women
Bruna Dantas Lobato
Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Sandra Simonds
Hearing Voices: a Master Class in Literary Journalism
Jia Tolentino
Introduction to Dramaturgy
Maya Cantu
Keeping Close: Journals & Notebooks
Jenny Boully
Poetry and Technology
Franny Choi
Race, Robots, and Asian American Literature
Franny Choi
Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Dreamwork
Jenny Boully
Reading and Writing Poetry: Games and Experiments
Franny Choi
Reading and Writing the Short Story: The Body
Bruna Dantas Lobato
Reading and Writing: the First Novel
Benjamin Anastas
Shakespeare: The Tragedies
Michael Dumanis
The Female Grotesque
Camille Guthrie
The Flower Songs of the Hungry Coyote: Pre-Columbian Indigenous Poetry
Anaïs Duplan
The Immigrant Novel
Bruna Dantas Lobato
The Literature of Black Insurgency
Anaïs Duplan
The Mystery that Keeps Us Humble: St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton
Benjamin Anastas
The Prose Poem
Michael Dumanis

Fall 2023

Advanced Dramaturgy
Maya Cantu
Black Mountain/Beat Poetry
Sandra Simonds
Chosen Family Style: Queer Asian Pacific American Literature
Franny Choi
Ecopoetics: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire
Sandra Simonds
Ethical Translation: Eye on Race, Gender, and Queerness
Mariam Rahmani
Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Jenny Boully
Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Nicolette Polek
Horror Writing and the (Postcolonial) Afterlife
Anaïs Duplan
Literature of the Holocaust
Sandra Simonds
Poetry & Performance
Franny Choi
Reading & Writing: Spectacular Failure
Manuel Gonzales
Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Ambience, Architecture, & Environment
Anaïs Duplan
Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak
Michael Dumanis
Richard Wright and James Baldwin
Benjamin Anastas
Senior Projects in Literature
Benjamin Anastas
The Camp Aesthetic
Maya Cantu
The Flower Songs of the Hungry Coyote: Pre-Columbian Indigenous Poetry
Anaïs Duplan
The Inexorable(Middle)March of Time
Manuel Gonzales
The New York School of Poetry
Michael Dumanis
The Real Housewives of Lit
Manuel Gonzales
The “I” of the Beholder
Franny Choi
Victorian Ephemerality: Poetry, Photography, & Paper
Jenny Boully

Spring 2023

A Collective Portrait of America: Literary Memoir Since the Civil War
Rachel Lyon
Bad Romance: Shakespeare’s Poetry
Camille Guthrie
Crafting a Book Review
Sandra Simonds
Crocheting the Classics: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford
Jenny Boully
Dostoevsky’s Major Novels
Alexandar Mihailovic
Dybbuks, Golems, Tradition & Resistance: Isaaac Basheveis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Essays of Walter Benjamin
Anne Thompson
Fantasy Literature: 4000 Years of Written Wonders
Maria Dahvana Headley
Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Jenny Boully
International Modernist Poetics
Sandra Simonds
Introduction to Dramaturgy
Maya Cantu
Perfect Vacuums: Critical Studies of Nonexistent Texts
Manuel Gonzales
Race, Robots, and Asian/American Literature
Franny Choi
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Benjamin Anastas
Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Mourning and Grief
Jenny Boully
Reading and Writing Poetry: Conjuring El Duende
Anaïs Duplan
Reading and Writing Short Stories: Narrative Shape-Shifting
Rachel Lyon
Reality and Dreams: Robert Musil and the Vienna Secession
Benjamin Anastas
Social Semiotics of Contemporary Literature
Anaïs Duplan
Technologies of Heartbreak
Manuel Gonzales
The Art of Literary Translation: Your Histories, Texts, and Authorial Selves
Marguerite Feitlowitz
The Slow Burn
Manuel Gonzales
Writing a Life
Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Fall 2022

Advanced Dramaturgy
Maya Cantu
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing – Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing – Prose
Manuel Gonzales
Confessional Poetry
Sandra Simonds
Contemporary Ukrainian Literature
Alexandar Mihailovic
Early American Confessions
Benjamin Anastas
Genres and Forms of Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Going Backstage: Musicals, Plays, and Novels about Theater
Maya Cantu
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
Alexandar Mihailovic
Literature of the AIDS Pandemic
Michael Dumanis
Mother Figure and Motherly Figures in Italian Literature and Culture – Taught in English
Barbara Alfano
Racialized Chronologies: Alternative Temporal Structures in Contemporary Poetry
Anaïs Duplan
Reading & Writing Multilingual Texts: When One Language Isn’t Enough
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Reading and Writing Poetry: The Speculative Lyric
Franny Choi
Reading and Writing: Autofiction
Benjamin Anastas
Romance Literature of the Middle Ages
Sandra Simonds
Screenwriting: The Story Studio
Manuel Gonzales
Senior Projects in Literature
Manuel Gonzales
The Ghosts of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the Brontës
Sandra Simonds
The Right to Opacity: Reading Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant
Anaïs Duplan
Words Without Borders: Translation in Times of Crisis
Marguerite Feitlowitz

Spring 2022

Advanced Screenwriting
Manuel Gonzales
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing – Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing–Prose
Benjamin Anastas
Black Queer Writing and Theoretical Approaches
Phillip B. Williams
Chance Encounters
Mary Ruefle
Dickensian Binge
Manuel Gonzales
Immortality
Manuel Gonzales
Nonsense, Surrealism, and The Absurd
Michael Dumanis
Out of Dark Noise: The History of Black Documentary Poetics
Anaïs Duplan
Persona Poetry: An Overview
Phillip B. Williams
Prima dell’_Amica geniale_: Elena Ferrante’s Short Novels
Barbara Alfano
Reading and Writing Fiction: Space and Place
Paul La Farge
Reading and Writing Poetry: Poet’s Proof—Existential, Ephemeral, Ethereal, Empirical, and Other Evidences
Jenny Boully
Reading and Writing: Literary Journalism
Benjamin Anastas
ReVisions Rebellions, Revolution: Latin American Women Writers
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Shakespeare: The History Plays
Maya Cantu
Sound and Cadence for the Contemporary Ear/Era
Anaïs Duplan
Speculative Fiction
Paul La Farge
The Art of Literary Translation
Marguerite Feitlowitz
The Prose Poem
Phillip B. Williams
The Russian Modernist Poets
Michael Dumanis
The Whiteness of the Whale: Moby-Dick and Melville’s America
Benjamin Anastas
Tom Stoppard
Maya Cantu
When Books Become Films
Rachel Lyon
“Beastly and Beautiful”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
Jenny Boully

Fall 2021

Black Nature Writing
Phillip B. Williams
Conceptualizing the Environment
Paul La Farge
Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Jenny Boully
Genesis
Carol Pal
Historical Fictions/Fictional Histories
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Kalón and Chaos: The Secret History and its References
Benjamin Anastas
Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America
Benjamin Anastas
Living to Learn, Learning to Live: Readings in Contemporary South American Fiction
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Muriel Spark and the Vanishing Novel
Benjamin Anastas
On Sustaining a Practice of Documentation
Anaïs Duplan
Reading and Writing Fiction: Lies, Spies & Private Eyes
Manuel Gonzales
Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail
Michael Dumanis
Relation, Reflection, Refraction: Contemporary South American Fiction
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Screenwriting: The Story Studio
Manuel Gonzales
Senior Projects in Literature
Jenny Boully
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Paul La Farge
The Problem of Sylvia Plath
Mark Wunderlich
The Romantic Poets
Michael Dumanis
Toni Morrison and Afro-Diasporic (Re)Mything
Phillip B. Williams

Spring 2021

Advanced Screenwriting
Manuel Gonzales
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing-Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Bennington Review: A Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing–Prose
Benjamin Anastas
Black Playwrights of the Civil Rights Era
Maya Cantu
Genres and Forms of Poetry
Michael Dumanis
Henrik Ibsen
Maya Cantu
How to Read a Translation
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Imaginary Worlds
Abe Koogler
It’s Gonna Be Epic!
Manuel Gonzales
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Benjamin Anastas
Reading and Writing Poetry: Refusals and Mythic Transformations
Jenny Boully
Reading and Writing: Looking Beyond the Self
Paul La Farge
Reading Poetry: A Basic Course
Michael Dumanis
Scenes
Abe Koogler
Seminar on Virginia Woolf
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Shakespeare: The Comedies
Manuel Gonzales
Starring the Translator!
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Sun Ra: Space is the Place
Michael Wimberly
The Art of Literary Criticism
Benjamin Anastas
The Bible as a Key to Environmental Thought
Michael M. Cohen
The Jewish Annotated Gospels
Michael M. Cohen
Truth and Consequences: The Uses (and Misuses) of Literary Persona
Paul La Farge
Victorian Children’s Literature: Girls in the Underworld
Jenny Boully

Fall 2020

Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Jenny Boully
Horror Fiction and Film
Paul La Farge
If I Loved you Less, I Might be able to Talk about it More: Jane Austen’s Heroines
Manuel Gonzales
Introduction to Dramaturgy
Maya Cantu
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
Alexandar Mihailovic
Letters to a Young Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke
Mark Wunderlich
Literature of the AIDS Pandemic
Michael Dumanis
Playwriting – Storytelling Across Media
Megan Tabaque
Re-Creating the Classics
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Childhood and Its Aftermaths
Jenny Boully
Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak
Michael Dumanis
Reading and Writing: Autofiction
Benjamin Anastas
Screenwriting: The Story Studio
Manuel Gonzales
Senior Projects in Literature
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Shipwrecked
Akiko Busch
The Art of Spectacle
Megan Tabaque
The Jazz Age Revisited
Benjamin Anastas
Tristram Shandy and the Pointless Novel
Paul La Farge