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

Introduction to The Art of Literary Translation — LIT2259.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Marguerite Feitlowitz
Credits: 4
It may be that the closest, most interpretative and creative reading of a text involves translating from one language to another. Questions of place, culture, epoch, voice, gender, and rhythm take on new urgency, helping us deepen our skills and sensibilities in new ways. This course has a triple focus: you will compare and contrast multiple translations of a single work; read
CAPA Languages Literature

It's Alive!: 19th Century Genre Fiction — LIT2338.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Although frequently ignored or ridiculed by critics and academics, contemporary genre fiction can trace its roots back to some of the most well-known and studied writers from the 19th century. This course will focus its attention on these heady genre roots, working through the rom-coms of Jane Austen, the post-apocalyptic thrillers of Mary Shelley, tackling the rise of the
Literature

It's Gonna Be Epic — LIT4588.01

Fall 2024
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 4
Let's dive head-first into the Aegean Sea, swim around in the waters once swum by Achilles and Odysseus, root around in sacrifices and altars, the occasional slaughter of beloved Patroclus, the blood-thirsty murder of Hector and also a host of would-be-suitors of Penelope (I won't lie, that becomes a bloody bloody mess, that one) before swimming over to the Ionic and Tyrrhenian
Literature

It's Gonna Be Epic! — LIT2419.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Manuel Gonzales
Credits: 2
Starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving great work of literature, and then moving through both The Iliad and The Odyssey, hanging a left to catch up with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, before finally returning once again to modern times with Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red, we will explore the tradition of epic poetry in order to discover what makes
Literature

Italian Genius Through the Centuries — ITA2110.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Barbara Alfano
Credits: 4
This course will be taught in English. The course focuses on a few accomplishments of the Italian genius that have had a strong impact on the development of world civilization. Italy as a nation did not exist either when the city of Cremona produced the first violins, or when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. There was no Italy as such when Dante was imagining his
Languages Literature

Jane Austen — LIT4266.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote a five novels (not counting her unpublished fiction) that rate among the most powerful produced in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. These works still astonish readers with their sensitivity to hidden or nameless emotions, to the subtleties of conversation, and to the complexities of domestic life. The unfolding of many of these stories
Literature

Kafka — LIT2572.02

Spring 2025
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 2
When he died at age 40 in a sanitarium outside Vienna, Franz Kafka left the bulk of his literary effort in a drawer in the desk of his parent’s home in Prague. What he wanted was for his friend Max Brod to burn everything. In this class, we will read what was not burned, including the two major novels—The Trial, and The Castle, as well as his shorter masterpieces, The
Literature

Kafka and Beckett — LIT2273.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Annie Dewitt
Credits: 4
Often lauded as literary iconoclasts and Modernist visionaries, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett are known for "making things strange." This course will examine these writers' signal works alongside their shorter works and diaries. In approaching Kafka, we will explore several of his essays, including: "Letters to My Father," "The Blue Octavio Notebook," and
Literature

Kalón and Chaos: The Secret History and its References — LIT2423.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

"Live forever!" is the chosen mantra of the louche, monied and relentlessly insular group of Classics students at the center of Donna Tartt's now classic literary suspense novel The Secret History. Under the influence of their classics professor Julian Morrow--a "divine" with special status on the campus of Hampden College, a dark mirror-image of our own campus-

Literature

Kalón and Chaos: The Secret History and its References — LIT2423.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 2
"Live forever!" is the chosen mantra of the louche, monied and relentlessly insular group of Classics students at the center of Donna Tartt's now classic literary suspense novel The Secret History. Under the influence of their classics professor Julian Morrow--a "divine" with special status on the campus of Hampden College, a dark mirror-image of our own campus--they undertake
Literature

Keats and Stevens — LIT2299.02

Spring 2025
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

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 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

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

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