Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

The Literature of Matriarchy — LIT2346.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Elisa Albert
Credits: 4
As 21st century feminism awakens to human rights issues within childbearing and child-rearing, Mary Wollstonecraft’s early feminist writing can serve as an illuminating jumping-off point. From the dawn of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, this seminar will help guide us toward an understanding of the essential historical movement toward a politically, spiritually, and
Literature

The Lives of Wives — LIT4600.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Zoe Tuck
Credits: 4
This literature survey is designed to engage with the figure of the wife. We’ll read 20th century writing by authors whose fame was at the time eclipsed by their husbands and partners. We will approach them as writers, thinkers, and activists in their own right, before turning to where their creative and intellectual work meets their conscription in a system of gendered labor.
Literature

The Long Poem — LIT4607.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: TH 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

This course will track the development of the long poem and extended poetic sequence as a poetic form in 20th and 21st century poetry. While the long poem does not have a narrow, succinct definition and can refer to many types (and lengths) of writing from sonnet cycle to verse novel, long poems are often associated with the ambition to write an iconic, all-encompassing, be

Literature

The Making of a Poem — LIT4117.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
How are poems made? What do we mean when we say something is 'lyrical' or 'poetic?' How do poets reward readers for the gift of their attention? In this course we will read the work of the poets who will come to campus as part of Poetry at Bennington and look at the strategies they use to shape poems that are distinctive, satisfying and rigorous. We will also examine their
Literature

The Mystery that Keeps Us Humble: St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton — LIT2539.01) (day/time updated as of 10/17/2023

Spring 2024
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
"Late have I loved you," St. Augustine wrote in one of the many direct appeals to God in his Confessions. "O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you." With these lines, the confessional impulse in the early Christian tradition makes the jump into spiritual autobiography, and a new genre of literature is born. In this class, we'll pair the discussion of faith and
Literature

The New York School of Poetry — LIT2198.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will serve as an immersion in the work of several major American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, noted for their humor, irreverence, disjunctive experimentation, charm, and wildness, and collectively known as the New York School. We will begin by focusing on the original generation of New York School poets: John Ashbery, Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and
Literature

The New York School of Poetry — LIT2198.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course will serve as an immersion in the work of several major American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, noted for their humor, irreverence, disjunctive experimentation, charm, and wildness, and collectively known as the New York School. We will begin by focusing on the original generation of New York School poets: John Ashbery, Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and
Literature

The New York School of Poetry — LIT2198.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will serve as an immersion in the work of the New York School of poetry: successive generations of imaginative American poets noted for their humor, irreverence, disjunctive experimentation, charm, and wildness. Significant attention will be paid to the effect of close friendship and community, homosexuality, painting and other visual arts, and New York City urban
Literature

The New York School of Poetry — LIT2198.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This course will serve as an immersion in the work of several major American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, noted for their humor, irreverence, disjunctive experimentation, charm, and wildness, and collectively known as the New York School. We will begin by focusing on the original generation of New York School poets: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and
Literature

The Nouveau Roman — LIT4181.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Annie Dewitt
Credits: 4
This course will examine the emergence of the "new" avant-garde French novel which came to prominence in the 1950's. We will investigate how these novels questioned the role of literary realism and narrative authority, often subverting traditional elements of fiction including: plot, character, and the all-knowing intelligence of the omniscient narrator. We will also consider
Literature

The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro — LIT4291.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Stuart Nadler
Credits: 4
In the inscription for Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee announced it had chosen to give him the award because his novels had “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In this class, we will read nearly all of these novels, beginning with Ishiguro’s first, A Pale View of These Hills, and including An Artist of
Literature

The Ocean, The Creek, The Lake: Writing Water — LIT2405.02

Spring 2020
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 2
As water—through floods and droughts alike—continues to reshape the geography of the world around us, this course will look at waterscapes as written by women: Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge. Science, poetry, and ideas of conservation converge here. As a marine biologist, Carson wrote with
Environment Literature

The Poetics of Love — LIT2534.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Days & Time: MO,TH 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 4

Magic. Jealousy. Why. Tenderness. Scenes. Waiting. Anxiety. Body. Night.
Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by the poet Richard Howard (1978), is a unique dictionary which defines the language, tropes, and patterns of the actual and fictional experience of love. Using Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther as a primary

Literature

The Poetics of Love — LIT4268.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Camille Guthrie
Credits: 4
Magic. Jealousy. Why. Tenderness. Scenes. Night. Waiting. Anxiety. Body. Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1978) examines the structure and language of the fictional and lived experience of love. In his analysis of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Barthes observes the received ideas about love in order to demystify them and discover what remains radiant. With Barthes’s
Literature

The Poetics of Protest — LIT2541.01) (cancelled 4/23/2024

Fall 2024
Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 2
What makes a poem political? Why do some poems, chants, and slogans circulate in political contexts, while others don’t? In this course, we will read poems from the 20th and 21st Century that have gone under the banner of “protest poetry” and examine the tools of craft that socially-engaged poets have utilized to further their work. Beginning with poets writing under Soviet
CAPA Literature

The Poetics of Protest — LIT4612.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

Since the killing of poet Refaat Alareer by Israeli forces in December of 2023, his now-famous poem “If I Must Die” has been read aloud at rallies and teach-ins, shared widely on social media, and written on countless picket signs. What makes a bit of language sticky and alive enough to mobilize people to take political action? What role has poetry played in

Literature

The Problem of Sylvia Plath — LIT2122.02

Fall 2021
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 2
Sylvia Plath is one of the most widely-read and influential poets of the 20th century, yet her work has been read through the lens of her biography in ways that have serious consequences of interpretation. Knowing what we do about the life of this important artist, how can we read the poems and prose in ways that counter the received narratives of tragedy and self-destruction?
Literature

The Prose Poem — LIT4280.01) (day/time updated as of 10/9/2023

Spring 2024
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
Is a poem still a poem when it replaces line and stanza with sentence and paragraph? If so, what components are essential to a poem? What is the distinction between a prose poem and a flash fiction? In this course, we will read a wide range of paragraphs and book-length collections of paragraphs as we familiarize ourselves with the history and range of the prose poem. We will
Literature

The Prose Poem — LIT4280.02

Spring 2022
Instructor: Phillip B. Williams
Credits: 2
The prose poem challenges the very notion of genre—but what are the implications of this challenge and how does it reframe the perceived disciplinary limits of literature itself? Students will learn the history of the prose poem beginning in 19th-century France through its contemporary usage. Reading a book a week, there will be discussion about form and function, the nuance of
Literature

The Prose Poem — LIT4280.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Phillip Williams
Credits: 2
The prose poem challenges the very notion of genre—but what are the implications of this challenge and how does it reframe the perceived disciplinary limits of literature itself? Students will learn the history of the prose poem beginning in 19th-century France through its contemporary usage. Reading a book a week, there will be discussion about form and function, the nuance of
Literature

The Prose Poem — LIT4280.02

Fall 2016
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
The prose poem challenges the very notion of genre—but what are the implications of this challenge and how does it reframe the perceived disciplinary limits of literature itself? Students will learn the history of the prose poem beginning in 19th-century France through its contemporary usage. Reading a book a week, there will be discussion about form and function, the nuance of
Literature

The Real Housewives of Lit — LIT2528.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Beginning with Medea and Lysistrata, we will look at various women, 'housewives' you might say (though I wouldn't, not to their faces) through literature, possibly moving into Taming of the Shrew and MacBeth, skipping ever so lightly into the 19th century to pop in on Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, before moving firmly into the modern literature of the early- and mid- and
Literature

The River in Literature — LIT2507.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 4
The river may be the geographic feature of the earth that speaks to us most deeply.  It divides and it connects; it is what takes us to things and away from things.  And it comes naturally to us to find some metaphor for human experience in the strength or flow or velocity of a river, to find the familiar in the sight of two rivers peaceably merging, or to imagine a
Literature

The River, The Forest, The Glacier: Classics of American Environmental Literature — LIT4139.02

Fall 2019
Instructor: Akiko Busch
Credits: 2
How to take measure of place is a question that has long resonated in the American imagination, and this course considers both the geography and the voices that provide the foundation for current environmental writing. The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons by John Wesley Powell, The Maine Woods by H. D. Thoreau, and Travels in Alaska by John Muir offer occasion
Environment Literature