Literature

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Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
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Race, Robots, and Asian/American Literature — LIT2603.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
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
Literature

Racine — LIT4157.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Dan Hofstadter
Credits: 4
During the seventeenth century France rose to unparalleled heights of literary creativity. We explore the historical context of this development, devoting some attention to classical models, particularly Euripedes' play Andromache. Jean Racine, who was at times in conflict with the royal court, offered his tragedies Andromaque, Phedre, Berenice, Iphigenie, and others, which we
Literature

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man — LIT2277.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Before Donald Glover donned prosthetic whiteface for the “Teddy Perkins” episode of Atlanta, before Get Out flipped the contemporary horror movie on white audiences, Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man turned the bildungsroman, a realist staple since the 18th century, into a wild phantasmagoria about structural racism in the U.S. and the experience of Black Americans. “All
Literature

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man — LIT2277.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 2
“All novels are about certain minorities,” Ralph Ellison insisted in a 1955 interview with The Paris Review. “The individual is a minority," he went on. "The universal in the novel–and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?–is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.” If this assertion is still to be believed, then the the
Literature

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — LIT2277.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
"All novels are about certain minorities," Ralph Ellison insisted in a 1955 interview with The Paris Review. "The individual is a minority. The universal in the novel--and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?--is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance." If this is true, then the enduring power of Ellison's Invisible Man
Literature

Re-Creating the Classics — LIT2318.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: mfeitlowitz@bennington.edu
Credits: 4
A contemporary drama critic recently wrote: “Whenever you return to something—to a play, a song, a scene—you bring your past with you. And not just what you’vebeen through and figured out, but what your culture has been through and figured out too, and what you are both still going through.” How is it that a work written hundreds or thousands of years ago can resonate so
Literature

Re-Creating the Classics — LIT2318.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
"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
Literature

Re-Creating the Classics — LIT2318.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
"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
Literature

Reading Writing Fiction: ESLit — LIT4594.01) (day/time updated as of 5/10/2024

Fall 2024
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Credits: 4
Reversing the typical shame around so-called "ESL" speakers, this course explores the rich history of modern and contemporary Anglophone literature written by authors who learned English as a second language or within a bi/multilingual context. This rigorous reading list is then used as a springboard for cultivating diverse voices and stories in the classroom. The course’s
Literature

Reading Writing Fiction: Plot and Suspense — LIT4144.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
What is plot? What are stakes and how are they raised and can a story or a novel still compel a reader with small or smaller stakes? What is dramatic tension and what are the other ways a writer can build tension into a short story or a chapter? What, in other words, keeps a reader turning pages through a story or a novel and what happens when these same tools are applied to
Literature

Reading Writing Poetry: Revision as Play — LIT4593.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
The point of revision, we’re told, is to make our writing better. No wonder (framed this way) the idea of revision can often provoke annoyance, boredom, or even fear. But what if the revision process was closer to John Cage’s “chance operations,” a completely spontaneous and open-ended experience of creativity? Or, what if, through revision, we could explore yet-undiscovered
Literature

Reading Writing: Spectacular Failure — LIT4383.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
I often suggest to students in a writer's workshop that they should, when submitting work for class, aim for spectacular failure, figure out the breaking point of their own abilities and charge headlong past them, because there is no better place to test one's limits than in a workshop full of peers working at the same goal. In this generative writing workshop, I'm putting my
Literature

Reading Writing: Spectacular Failure — LIT4383.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
I often suggest to students in a writer’s workshop that they should, when submitting work for class, aim for spectacular failure, figure out the breaking point of their own abilities and charge headlong past them, because there is no better place to test one’s limits than in a workshop full of peers working at the same goal. In this generative writing workshop, I’m putting my
Literature

Reading & Writing Fiction: Exquisite Pressure — LIT4613.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

In her essay, Violence, director Anne Bogart writes, "Richard Foreman, perhaps the most intellectual of American directors, said that, for him, creation is one hundred percent intuitive. I have learned that he is right. This is not to say that one must not think analytically, theoretically, practically and critically. There is a time and a place for this kind of left-brain

Literature

Reading & Writing Fiction: Writing the Body — LIT4604.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This Reading & Writing Fiction course focuses on the novel, and in particular on reading and writing the body, with an emphasis on femininity. We will look at both the construction of and conspicuous erasure of the femme/feminine body. We will treat gender as a construct, discussing gender normativity, ciswomanhood, transness, and other related subjects and

Black Studies Literature

Reading & Writing Poetry: Audacity, Excess, Extravagance — LIT4611.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

William Wordsworth said that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Allen Ginsberg said: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!”  This is a poetry workshop about subverting

Literature

Reading & Writing Poetry: Experiments in Multimedia — LIT4615.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: An Duplan
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project,

Literature

Reading and Writing Dirty Realism — LIT4136.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Annie DeWitt
Credits: 4
In his review of Amy Hempel's story collection The Dog of The Marriage, New York Times book critic D.T. Max aptly wrote, "It's said that the music you hear when you are first sexually active is the music you keep wanting to hear your whole life." Often nicknamed, the "dirty realists," writers such as Hempel, have long had to defend the inherent breadth of their "miniaturist"
Literature

Reading and Writing Fiction Nonfiction: The Emergence of Prose — LIT4333.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
The purpose of this workshop is to focus in on what brings us to writing. Beyond familiar objectives such as “I want to write a novel” or “I’m a poet working on poems” or “I want to write about the time this happened to me or to my family or in my country,” we will go further in to ask how do we want to feel while we’re writing? What do we want to experience at the
Literature

Reading and Writing Fiction: Lies, Spies Private Eyes — LIT4537.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
By digging into the works of contemporary crime and thriller novelists, we will explore notions of narrative tension, good mystery versus bad mystery, red herrings, unreliable narrators, complex plots, anti-heroes, slick villains, the falsely accused and the downtrodden, not to mention the dark alleyways and the hidden compartments of fiction. How do these authors manipulate
Literature

Reading and Writing Fiction: Space and Place — LIT4508.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Paul La Farge
Credits: 4
Some writers invent houses; some invent cites; others invent worlds. What do these different kinds of space express? In this class, we’ll think about the way fiction writers make use of real and imagined geographies, and how the representation of space constructs a social order: upstairs vs. downstairs, wilderness vs. civilization, oriented vs. disoriented. How, in narrative
Literature

Reading and Writing Human Frailty — LIT4343.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Elisa Albert
Credits: 4
Via a survey of mostly contemporary short fiction and close examination of our own efforts, we'll discuss voice, structure, plot, pacing, and most especially language.  We'll question our own unique narrative priorities and trouble the waters with regard to the ethical duties of storytelling.  We’ll interrogate how we as readers are forced to confront discomfort,
Literature

Reading and Writing Literary Journalism — LIT4141.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
With the practice of journalism undergoing its most profound changes since the invention of the television, this course will steep students in the traditions of criticism, literary non-fiction, reporting and cultural journalism that thrived during the golden age of print and have persisted in the Internet era. We’ll work our way through literary criticism from Robert Boswell to
Literature