Literature

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Keats and Stevens — LIT2299.02

Spring 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
This introductory seminar will consider and juxtapose the 19th century British Romantic poet John Keats and the 20th century American modernist poet Wallace Stevens, both of whom were rigorous craftsmen, provocative thinkers, and aesthetic theorists who argued fervently for the supremacy of the imagination, the interconnectedness of truth and beauty, and the importance of
Literature

Keeping Close: Journals Notebooks — LIT2531.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
In his essay "The Uses of Literature," Italo Calvino asserts that in order to write, the writer must first invent the "I" who is writing. The "I" who writes in a notebook, journal, or diary may or may not be an invention. We often think of notebooks as presenting a more candid and honest voice, simply due to the intimacy and purposes of a journal. Who exactly is the writer of a
Literature

Kipling — LIT2192.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was the most popular poet and fiction writer of the late Victorian era. He is nowadays, in many circles, the most reviled, perceived as embodying the very spirit of British imperialism. In this class we will explore Kipling's poetry, short stories, and a couple of longer books (probably 'Kim') in some depth, attempting to draw our own conclusions
Literature

Late Twentieth Century British Fiction — LIT2195.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Annabel Davis-Goff
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
1960 to 2000. We will read English and Irish novels which reflect the literature and culture of final forty years of the Twentieth Century. Reading will include Anita Brookner, John Banville, Penelope Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro. Students will write two essays.
Literature

Latinx Avant-Garde — LIT4125.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Credits: 4
“Rather than sit at our drafting table as aesthetic innovators, we Latin@ poets are expected to normalize our histories and tell the ancestral tales of our colorful otherness” write Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez in their introduction to the anthology Angels of the Americlypse. How do expectations of the Latinx experience as filled with colorful papel picado, calaveras,
Literature

Leaves of Grass — LIT2578.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 2

This 2-credit course is an introduction to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which inaugurated a distinctly American free verse by breaking with European formal traditions of poetry. We will read the entire original 1855 version (a self-published volume with only twelve poems) as well as selections from some of the subsequent editions that Whitman published

Literature

Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — LIT2418.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) was a novel of bold ambitions. The book is about betrayal as a bid for freedom that is fraught with consequences. Anna Karenina tells the story of the title character’s infidelity in a soulless marriage, while also portraying the ways in which all people struggle to transcend the roles that are socially assigned to them. What
Literature

Letters to a Young Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke — LIT4528.01

Fall 2020
Instructor: MWunderlich@bennington.edu
Credits: 4
From 1903 to 1908, the German-language poet Rainer Marie Rilke wrote ten letters to a young military cadet who wanted to become a poet. These letters have become some of the most widely-read and quoted letters on the art of writing poetry the world has ever known. In the spirit of these inspiring and philosophical letters, and in an exercise of analog exchange, this course will
Literature

Life into Art: A Reading and Writing Seminar — LIT4258.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Credits: 4
We will read fiction and nonfiction by three writers: Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery OConnor. Through this lens, students will experiment with their own forays into story and memoir, with an eye towards exploring the ways in which life may shape story. Readings include Welty's One Writer's Beginnings and The Optimist's Daughter; Woolf's A Writer's Diary and To the
Literature

Literary Bennington — LIT2390.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 2
We all know the literary generation that Bennington produced in the 1980s and early 90s: Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem and Kiran Desai. But how seriously have we read their work? And what about the illustrious faculty who prepared the literary ground for those who came after: Bernard Malamud, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman (and his wife the novelist
Literature

Literary Bennington — LIT2390.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 2
We all know the literary generation that Bennington produced in the 1980s and early 90s: Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Kiran Desai. But how seriously have we read their work? And what about the illustrious faculty who prepared the literary ground for those who came after: Bernard Malamud, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Edgar Hyman (and his wife the novelist
Literature

Literature and History of the Holocaust — LIT2582.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

The Holocaust is one of the most ethically challenging, traumatic, and consequential occurrences in modern history. This seminar aims to give students a granular understanding of the mass oppression, enslavement, and genocide that occurred in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, in order to then consider how it has been represented in poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction both by

Literature History

Literature of the AIDS Pandemic — LIT2513.02

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 2
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the AIDS epidemic was regarded as a global catastrophe with no hope of remedy. For many, the disease was an uncomfortable subject, one that some at first refused to address by name and others chose to ignore entirely, an illness intertwined in the collective imagination with mainstream culture’s perceptions of, and fears of, gay culture. In this
Literature

Literature of the Holocaust — LIT2526.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
Philosopher Theodor Adorno famously claimed that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno didn’t write this statement to silence poets. Specifically referencing the poet Paul Celan, he meant that poetry after the Holocaust would need to be radically different to account for these historic atrocities. We will begin by reading Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Castle,
Literature

Literature of the Renaissance — LIT2265.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Credits: 4
The literature of the European Renaissance did much to help shape the modern mind and the modern world. In this class we will begin in Italy with Petrarch and Boccaccio, then go on to works by Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Erasmus, Wyatt, Sir Thomas More, Cervantes, Rabelais, Vasari, and Montaigne, discussing them in the context of their time and in terms of
Literature

Literature of the Spanish Civil War — LIT2396.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Sarah Harris
Credits: 4
"Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple." (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia) Technically a Civil War, the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) was also an intensely international conflict in a number of ways: though no other nations officially entered the war, German forces used it to rehearse the blitzkrieg tactics they would employ in World War II;
Society Culture and Thought Literature

Literature of World War I — LIT2345.01

Fall 2015
Instructor: Brooke Allen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
The First World War, 1914-18, was a cataclysm that left ten million dead and created the modern world. It was also a period of tremendous artistic innovation and activity. In this class we will read the work of writers who fought the war, on both sides: soldier-poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden; novelists like Henri Barbusse, Ernest
Literature

Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America — LIT2420.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: M/Tu 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 4

In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous period. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, poet Jones Very

Literature

Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America — LIT2420.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of the Transcendentalist movement through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous time in America's intellectual life. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson,
Literature

Living in Translation: A Student-Run Literary and Cultural Publication — LIT2347.02

Fall 2019
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 2
This course, while rooted in Literature, is part of the Lexicons of Migration cluster. Taking as a point of departure Isabelle de Courtivron's touchstone Bilingual Lives: Writers and Identity, students will update, complicate, and enrich the binary orientation of this collection, originally published in 2003. We will delve into the personal, familial, communal, and political
CAPA Literature

Living to Learn, Learning to Live: Readings in Contemporary South American Fiction — LIT2255.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
Contemporary South American fiction is rife with urgency, politics, and history, as well as narrative mischief, layering and literary gamesmanship. In this course we will read a selection of novels and stories from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and El Salvador from such authors as Cesar Aira,  Roberto Bolano, Alicia Borinsky, Sergio Chefec, Claudia Hernandez,
Literature Languages

Lowell, Plath, and After — LIT2575.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: MO,TH 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 4

This seminar will study the mid-20th century revolution in poetic style and content known as "confessional poetry," a school of poetry that gave voice to the private and personal, highlighting extreme autobiographical experience, as well as subjects that were previously seen as improper or taboo, including mental health, sexuality, suicidal ideation, trauma, menstruation,

Literature

Lyric Theory — LIT4616.01

Spring 2026
Instructor: Franny Choi
Days & Time: TU 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 2

What is the lyric? How did lyric poetry emerge as a genre, and how have reading practices evolved alongside it? This is a 2-credit survey class exploring theoretical engagements with the modern idea of the lyric, including readings in genre theory, new criticism, structuralism,  post-structuralism, and beyond. Drawing primarily from <

Literature