Literature

Course System Home All Areas of Study Literature

Select Filters and then click Apply to load new results

Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Out of Dark Noise: The History of Black Documentary Poetics — LIT4357.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
“Dark noise,” as Black video artist Lawrence Andrews calls it, is an alternate truth-building system. The idea of dark noise indicates a sort of failed consensual reality, or in Audre Lorde’s terminology, a “chaos of knowledge.” Dark noise is the area outside of the state-sanctioned truth that the justice system, for instance, relies upon. As such, we will use the phrase “dark

Pakistani Fiction — LIT4269.01

Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
The literature of the Indian subcontinent has a rich and ancient history. The violent partition of India in 1947 and the birth of the new nation of Pakistan saw a new national consciousness and literature emerge. In this class we will read the work of a variety of Pakistani writers. Authors considered will probably include, but might not be limited to, Jamil Ahmad, Fatima

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing — LIT2110.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing — LIT2110.01

Instructor: wayne hoffmann-ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction to Writing Essays — LIT2393.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Pathways: An Introduction To Writing Essays — LIT2393.01

Instructor: Wayne Hoffmann-Ogier
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Beginning writers will explore the steps of the writing process as a path for discovery and communication. Weekly papers explore several modes of writing, including description, nonfiction narrative, and both analytical and argumentative essays. The course primarily emphasizes the art of essay construction by focusing on rhetorical patterns, by introducing research techniques,

Perfect Vacuums: Critical Studies of Nonexistent Texts — LIT4177.01

Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
In this class, using Stanislaw Lem's 1971 book, A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books as a jumping off point, we will discuss the influence and power of nonexistent texts in literature and pop-culture, and we will turn our critical eye to our own invented and imagined nonexistent texts, bounding across space, time, and genre as we do, with the goal of

Persona Poetry: An Overview — LIT2517.01

Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 2
The mask, or persona, is a common construction in creative, focusing on building a personality in a work by manipulation of rhetorical strategies, sound, and perspective. Writers such as William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Ai, Kevin Young, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and many others have relied on their ability to create convincing characters in order to satirize, criticize,

Plains Songs: Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alice Munro — LIT2550.01

Instructor: Doug Bauer
Credits: 4
The fictions of Cather, Porter and Munro form a sequential chronology of influence and inheritance that spans the 20th century. Drawing deeply from their origins in Nebraska, Texas, and Ontario respectively, each of these writers explores the place from which she came and the various places her characters are subsequently drawn to – in some cases familiarly rural, in others

Plays From Plays From Plays — DRA2155.01; first seven weeks

Instructor: Kathleen Dimmick
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
Where do plays come from? In this course we’ll look at the bloodline of plays: origination myths, tales, folklore, and, of course, other plays. We’ll read and discuss plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Buchner, Zola and their followers – Racine, Alfred Jarry, Sarah Kane, Neal Bell, Elizabeth Egloff, and others.

Playwriting - Storytelling Across Media — DRA2184.01

Instructor: Michael Giannitti
Credits: 4
What makes Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag a singularly perfect work of art that we can’t stop watching? How exactly does Beyonce’s cinematic album Lemonade capture and sustain our emotional attention, outside of her inherent god-like energy? How can I write a play that “feels” like that? In this introductory course, we will take a “study what you love” approach to playwriting.

Poetry Performance — LIT2533.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
Though poetry was an oral art form before it was anything else, its contemporary relationship to performance is varied and complex. What does it mean to write a poem that comes alive in the air? What happens to poems when they become embodied? And how have questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality historically shaped (and been shaped by) the work at the intersection of

Poetry and Technology — LIT4393.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 2
Since Open AI’s release of ChatGPT, many have wondered—even panicked—about how this new technology would impact literature, including the field of poetry. But literature has always been shaped by the technology of its time. In this 2-credit class, we will look beyond the common assumption of poems as ideally “timeless” to examine how poetry has developed alongside (not against)

Poetry of Perpetual War — LIT2258.01

Instructor: Stefania Heim
Credits: 4
We will begin our study of War Poetry not on the beach before Troy or in the trenches of the first World War, but in our present moment, when, as legal scholar Mary Dudziak argues, wartime is no longer “an exception to normal peacetime,” but “the only kind of time we have.” What are War Poems when war is everywhere and always? Who does and does not get to write them? What kind

Practicum: National Undergrad Literary Anthology — LIT4360.01

Instructor: rebecca godwin
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
This two-credit course involves reading, selecting, and editing material for plain china, an on-line literary anthology highlighting the work of undergraduate students from across the country. The work will result in a monthly on-line publication of 2014 writing and art. We're looking for readers/editors in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; interest in art selection and computer

Practicum: National Undergrad Literary Anthology — LIT4360.01

Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
This two-credit course will focus on reading, selecting, and editing material for plain china, an on-line literary anthology featuring the work of undergraduate students across the country. The work will result in monthly on-line publication. We're looking for reader/editors in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; interest in art direction and computer knowledge welcome. This

Prima dell'_Amica geniale_: Elena Ferrante's Short Novels — ITA4613.01

Instructor: Barbara Alfano
Credits: 4
Elena Ferrante's novels are all written in the first-person. The narrator of her stories and their fictitious author weave a fabric in which they purposely overlap, suggest non-existent biographical references, lie to tell some truth, and ultimately consign to the reader a particular authorial profile as much as unforgettable female protagonists. This course explores the

Projects in Translation — LIT4606.01

Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This intensive advanced translation workshop focuses on student work. Meant for those who have taken Ethical Translation and learned the nuts and bolts of translation there – or otherwise have translation and/or extensive foreign language experience – here we dig into your longer translation projects. The aim of the course is to leave with a polished

Puppet Full of Worms — LIT2577.01

Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Days & Time: TU 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

In this course we are tackling the Shakespeare history plays, examining the imperialistic and violent movements of Henrys and Richards, et al, exploring betrayals, battles, the War of the Roses, British history -- as understood in our contemporary time and compared to how it was understood by Shakespeare, who cut his teeth on the histories, spreading both English lore and

Queer American Poetry: Stonewall to Present — LIT2297.01

Instructor: Phillip Williams
Credits: 4
Often, same-sex desire exists as the sole portrayal and determining factor of whether or not a text dwells in queerness. But the idea of queer has never been solely about same-sex desire or even sexual desire at all. Contrary to expectation, poets for years have written about revolutionary ways to exist in a society that has made the self-proclaimed orthodoxy of gender

Queer Asian Pacific American Literature — LIT2529.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem to be be in constant flux. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from Chinese American lesbian poets of the 1980s to

Queer Asian Pacific American Literature — LIT2529.01) (cancelled 4/23/2024

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem constantly to be shifting. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from the work of early Chinese American lesbian poets

Race in Publishing — LIT2574.01

Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: FR 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

That writers of color earn less than their white peers in advances and fees is anecdotally well known. But we lack exhaustive data. Gearing up for such data collection the next few years in a faculty-driven project at Bennington, this course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in

Race in Publishing — LIT4599.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
That writers of color earn less than their white peers in advances and fees is anecdotally well known. But we lack exhaustive data. Gearing up for such data collection the next few years in a faculty-driven project at Bennington, this course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in publishing. Major

Race, Robots, and Asian American Literature — LIT2603.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
From Blade Runner to Ex Machina, visions of robotic futures are populated with Asian bodies, settings, and cultural forms. How is it that robots became so closely linked to the racialization of Asian/American people? What might we learn about the latter by examining how the former shows up in our cultural imagination? And how have Asian diasporic writers handled these