– Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”

It has been said that if you want to learn about a society, you should take a look at the people whom that society puts in jail. This course takes for its premise the idea that we can likewise learn a great deal about a culture by studying the literature that it blacklists, bans, and censors.

Throughout history, societies have repressed those books and authors they have found to be overly inflammatory, sacrilegious, or otherwise objectionable. Artists tend to push social and political norms; societies tend to push back. This course seeks a historical understanding of this tension and the cultural anxieties, desires, and prejudices it reveals. By studying the repressed books of Woolf, Nabokov, Rushdie, and others, we gain a transnational view of the issues that have most engaged and vexed governments and lay-readers alike.

Possible texts/authors include: Kiss of the Spider Woman, Fahrenheit 451, Nabokov, Rushdie, Brecht, Ginsburg, Woolf, Flaubert, Solzhenitsyn, Lorca, Kundera, Milton, Mill, Plato, de Sade, Twain. The course supplements the literature with transcripts and analyses of relevant court cases, as well as with films, free speech law, and other essays.

LITERATURE OF OBSESSION
The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

We hated each other. We hated each other so much that other feelings didn’t get enough light. It disfigured me.
—This Boy’s Life

What is it to be obsessed? The lover who cannot forget, the amateur detective who will not rest until he has uncovered the truth, the victim who insists on revenge, the brother who adores his sister so much he would rather see her dead than married to a man she does not love – how do you get there from here?

The man or woman who refuses to compromise (in art, on principle, in love) is both admired and reviled by society. What could be more beautiful than the Bible’s promise that love is stronger than death, what more revolting than the middle-aged man who resurrects his dead lover by pursuing a young girl who resembles her? Are there “good” obsessions and “bad” ones? Who is to be commended, the person whose balanced – timid? – emotions are always appropriately moderated or the one willing to let his passions run wild?

In this class we read works that focus on individuals whose inability to forget, to give up, or to move on gives rise to the question: Are these people madmen or heroes (or both)? We begin with Lolita , to be followed by To the Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury. Time permitting, we also read one or two additional titles and peruse the occasional short story, essay, and numerous poems. Students are expected to write weekly essays of approximately one to two pages.

THE LITERATURE OF UGLINESS
Ugly is indeed an ugly word. It means more than just unsightly, frowzy, a little the worse for wear; it evokes deformity, perversion and the intrinsic vileness that is as repellent as it is fascinating. The appeal of circus freaks, of Hannibal Lecter, of Friday the 13 th Parts 1-17, can be even more powerful than the allure of beauty.

The Literature of Ugliness (otherwise known as “uglilit”) explores the obsession with beauty and ugliness, physical as well as moral, that has existed in human nature since the beginning of time. The Greeks had Medusa, the Bible has its lepers, Shakespeare has Richard, Iago and Caliban. The Victorians loved their madwomen and opium-eaters as much as the modernists do their Holdens and Humberts.

Throughout the year, we try to see why. We read a Shakespeare play – either King Lear or The Tempest – and Dante’s Inferno. We go on to explore Charlotte Bronte’s haunting Jane Eyre and Nabokov’s eerily seductive Lolita. If there’s time, we look at a few naughty stories by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and possibly Dostoevsky. As we read each work, we explore the relationship between surface and substance, appearance and reality. Does a crippled body contain a crippled soul or a pure one? Does a pretty face reflect inner beauty, or does it belie the moral turpitude within? In the end, we evaluate the terms themselves and try to decide what “beauty” and “ugliness” really mean.

NARRATIVE & MEMORY: PROUST, WOOLF, FAULKNER
With occasional forays into the works of other authors, this course explores in particular the ways in which Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner use memory to propel their narratives. We look at both the uses and influences of memory in their texts, and the ways in which memory is uncovered through their narrative devices. We pay close attention to the varying conditions and differing contexts within which these authors’ characters remember. How do various historical ruptures (World War I in Woolf, the fall of the Old South in Faulkner) affect memory? While we dip into other texts as they brush up against our primary sources, we focus largely on Swann’s Way (the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past), To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. We are also likely to read Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and some short stories of Faulkner, and to take frequent breaks from prose to examine related issues in poetry.

Along with our focused reading, students are expected to complete frequent writing assignments, both expository and creative. Some of the issues of memory and narrative that come up in our discussions are explored through writing exercises, and we occasionally imitate, in our own writing, what these authors do. A group exploration of memory in the form of a collaborative creative writing project is likely. An essay on each book is required, and a final project on some aspect of memory in writing completes the year.

RUSSIAN LITERATURE
You too are an exile, I thought. You mourn for the broad open steppes where you have room to spread your icy wings. Here you feel stifled and constricted, like an eagle that cries and beats against the bars of an iron cage.

—Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

Since the late 18 th century when Russian authors began to be translated into French, German and English, Russian literature has moved and intrigued Westerners with its depth and subtlety. This course considers a number of the major figures in Russian literature – beginning in the first part of the 19 th century with Russia ’s foremost lyric and narrative poet, Alexander Pushkin, and concluding in the second half of the 20 th century with the multi-layered work of Vladimir Nabokov. The reading list also includes works by Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is indeed a weighty and wide-ranging enterprise that raises questions of the individual’s place in society and the world, the nature of truth and reality, the meaning of faith in God, and the role of the past in the present – to name a few.

TWENTIETH CENTURY WORLD LITERATURE: BEYOND KAFKA

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
– James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus)

In the twentieth century great movements and forces placed an enormous strain on cultures and the individuals within them. World and regional wars (and shifting national boundaries), fascism and communism and capitalism (and shifting national boundaries), colonialism and post-colonialism, secularization and globalization and the rise of mass media have shaken the world – mightily.

Questions abound. What is truth? What is history? Who controls it? How do people survive war? What should societies be? Can discrete cultures survive? Should they? Are gender roles important? Is art important? Are our lives meaningful? As humans, what are our vulnerabilities? Our powers? What is the significance of the individual? What are the obligations of the elite? Is God dead? Is religion obsolete, or more powerful than ever?

Writers have explored these questions with tragedy and wit, with experimentation and realism (and surrealism and magical realism). This course investigates the literary response to a tumultuous century. Beginning with the stories of Franz Kafka, who dreamed up a literature that sustained and inspired writers worldwide, we work to understand Modernism. Then, through reading works of the last one hundred years, we explore the themes that preoccupied the twentieth century.

Possible readings: Kafka, “Metamorphosis” and other stories; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Ionesco, Rhinoceros; Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Sartre, No Exit; Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Appelfeld, Beyond Despair; Ozick, The Shawl; Kashua, Dancing Arabs; Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; Yoshimoto, Kitchen; Kenzaburo, stories and essays; Achebe, Things Fall Apart; García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Mphahale, Mrs. Plum.

WHEN EMPIRES FALL
When an empire falls, how do writers remember its rise and respond to its passing? Do its embers generate a new culture, or does its memory create fatal longing and haunted dreams? In this course we track empires as they flare, or follow their traces as they dim and expire. We ask what power politics or treasure hunt or cultural imperative initially builds empire. Does the dominator repress, exploit, and spit out? Enlighten and lift up?

Including a brief, essential trip to the Roman Empire , we visit several addresses in the Western world. Reading E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, we watch the British fatefully pretend to understand those they dominate. In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black we see Julien Sorel’s consuming regret for the lost Napoleonic Empire. In the shadow of the Third Reich we travel through the haunted passages of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. We may read King Lear and watch the mad old king divide his psychic empire as he tries to conquer time. We ask if an American Empire exists and look for its champions and critics.

While most of our texts are Western, we read non-Western writers as time permits. We also visit visual artists who applaud or revile the empire through painting and sculpture and architecture, through photography and film.

Other possible writers include: Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Tim O’Brien, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, V.S.Naipaul, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nakokov, Yukio Mishima, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marguerite Duras, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Virginia Woolf, Claude Levi-Strauss.

WRITING
This course is intended to provide self-motivated writers with optimal creating conditions: ample time set aside for writing, ready access to readers’ responses, biweekly assignments, disparate readings in literature, and – last but hardly least – deadlines. Three twenty-five -page portfolios of each writer’s best poetry and fiction must be punctually submitted over the course of the year. Students write whether or not they are inspired; students write beyond what they know how to write.

Readings , to which we respond in creative and expository fashion, may feature works by T.S. Eliot, Chinua Achebe, William Shakespeare, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Italo Calvino , Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Franz Kafka, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, and a slew of contemporary poets and writers. We discuss matters of voice, of form, of style, of diplomacy, of politics, of heresy and belief as they inform our approaches to language. A term paper permits an extremely close reading of a largely self-selected author’s work. Students may also attend occasional NYC readings by contemporary writers. In the spring the class becomes part-workshop, with participants reading and commenting, in writing and subsequently in classroom discussions, on one another’s poems or narratives. We conclude a year of intensive writing with a public student performance and a brief overview of some contemporary literary magazines, where so many writers first find their way.