14. The Millennium Approaches

How other historical periods have reacted to the turning of a century: the meaning of New Year's celebrations, the end of the seventeenth century in France and the first division of history into hundred-year periods, the end of the eighteenth century in England and early work of novelist Jane Austen, the end of the nineteenth century in Vienna.

Participants: Joan De Jean, Claudia L. Johnson, Carl Schorske.

15. Who Done It? Detective Fiction in the British and American Tradition

The history of murder mysteries and crime novels and the development of modern police forces. American hard-boiled detective fiction from writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, characterized by loner first-person narrators, edgy and urban slang, and crime-filled neighborhoods. How Chandler's use of similes mirrors the puzzle of the plots. The background of the Depression and the mingling of social classes during the genre's golden age. The British polite tradition in the work of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, its genteel amateur detectives and peaceful upper-class English settings. Women mystery writers and the growing use of women private investigators in the late twentieth century. The novels of Marcia Muller, Barbara Neely, and J. M. Redman and their critique of the loner ethic developed by male writers.

Participants: Max Byrd, Susan Leonardi, Dennis Porter.

16. The Myth of the West

The establishment of the genre of the Western--with its vacant landscape and solitary hero--in early Western novels such as Owen Wister's The Virginian and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, as well as in James Fenimore Cooper, in musicals such as Oklahoma!, and in film. The spiritual side of the myth and the adoption of the myth by the German writer Karl May.

Participants: Meredith McClain, Lee Mitchell, Jane Tompkins.

17. Teaching Then and Now

Two generations of college teachers of writing and literature discuss how the classroom has changed. A father and daughter talk about changes in students' attitudes toward writing, language, and literature. A mother and two daughters--all teachers--discuss the differences in their careers and in their students.

Participants: Alison Booth, Wayne Booth, Jean Ferguson Carr, Margaret Ferguson, Mary Anne Ferguson.

18. Rereading

Seeing new meaning in a familiar literary work; reading as a relation between text and reader; how the historical, social, or emotional context can affect how a reader understands a work of literature. Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays, Dante's Divine Comedy.

Participants: Evan Carton, Rachel Jacoff, Sylvia Molloy.

19. Looking It Up

The creation of important reference works in the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and his decision to include some slang words. Diderot's Encyclopédie, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment that aimed to inform and whose organization discouraged censorship. The use of illustrations in dictionaries. The compiling of dictionaries today; how decisions to add new words are made.

Participants: David Barnhart, Gwin T. Kolb, Philip Stewart.

20. Love Poetry

The earliest love poetry written by women: the first written poetic text, by the Sumerian writer Inanna; the ancient Greek poet Sappho; women poets of ancient China and Arabic-speaking lands; and the Song of Songs. The poetry of Aliki Barnstone. Shakespeare's Sonnets and the popularity of the sonnet form in the sixteenth century, influenced by Petrarch's fourteenth-century sonnets. The Sonnets' expression of consummated love, a range of emotions, and of both homosexual and heterosexual love.

Participants: Aliki Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Carol Thomas Neely.

21. Revision as Discovery

How Henry James and Virginia Woolf rewrote their work in various drafts. The role of revision in the writing classroom. The poet Grace Paley discusses her writing process.

Participants: Victor Luftig, Grace Paley, Alex Zwerdling.

22. Hard Times

The literary portrayal of financial stress and of people, families, and entire societies who survive troubled times. Money and its problems in Charles Dickens; his satiric treatment of abuse and indifference and the harsh conditions brought on by industrialization. His depiction of material prosperity as spiritual poverty. Émile Zola and hard times as a permanent condition of life. Naturalism and Zola's physical description of misery. William Faulkner and the American South. Hard times as regional and national in Faulkner; his depiction of a post-Civil War South, of the South during the Great Depression, and of the South as a place that makes art from hard times.

Participants: Richard Dunn, Naomi Schor, Warwick Wadlington.

23. Radio: Imaginary Visions

History of radio and its enduring uses and appeal. The role of listeners' individual visual imagination in radio broadcasts. The importance of radio in Germany from World War II on, its uses for art and for disseminating both Nazi propaganda and outside information. Radio drama, including Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.

Participants: Everett Frost, Elissa Guralnick, Thomas Whitaker.

24. Food Glorious Food

How three writers use food and food-related events in their work. Food as survival and as ritual in Robinson Crusoe. Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century novel Tom Jones. Dinner parties and luncheons in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own. Emily Post's American etiquette book of the 1920s and the social significance of how one eats.

Participants: Elizabeth Abel, Paul Hunter, Paul Schmidt.

25. New York City Writers

The ways in which writers have depicted New York City. Walt Whitman's use of everyday aspects of city life to bring democracy into his poetry. Edith Wharton's depiction of the cloistered upper classes in old New York and her satire of the limitations of New York society. African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance; Harlem as a city within a city in the early twentieth century. The poetry of Langston Hughes and the feeling of jazz.

Participants: Amy Kaplan, David Reynolds, Jerry Ward.

26. Parody

What parody is and how it works through imitation to pay homage to and mock an original. What it tells us about the thing being parodied. Verse parody as a popular form in the nineteenth century. Parody in Vladimir Nabokov's work. X. J. Kennedy shares some of his parodies.

Participants: Vladimir Alexandrov, Donald Gray, X. J. Kennedy.

27. Learning a New Language

The difficulties of learning a new language. Different approaches to learning a new language and culture. Language learning as an artistic experience. Language learning in a class on Spanish cinema. Carmen Tesser describes her experience of learning English.

Participants: David T. Gies, Claire Kramsch, Carmen Tesser.

28. Mystery Plots around the World

How mystery plots, from the Oedipus story to those of Sherlock Holmes, feature detectives using clues to reconstruct a story from the past. The detective and criminal as alter egos. How Sigmund Freud was influenced by the clue hunting in mystery plots. Suspended answers in Chinese mysteries. The writings of Jorge Luis Borges as mysteries.

Participants: Yomi Braester, Peter Brooks, John Irwin.

29. Science Fiction

The visions of science fiction writers and what these visions say about our hopes and fears about science. Why we read science fiction novels differently from other novels--less as detectives and more as travelers. Aliens and first encounters in sci-fi literature. The genre of hard science fiction, with its focus on the theoretical possibilities of science.

Participants: Tom Moylan, Mark Rose, David Samuelson.

30. Writing Home: Immigrant Experiences

The experiences of immigrants who settled in various parts of the United States. Mexican Americans in the Southwest after the War of 1812 as portrayed in Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez. The band Los Tigres del Norte's music. Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street and the immigrant experience in Chicago. Asian American literature written by people who settled in the West. The Japanese American writer Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables and the Korean American writer Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. Italian American literature written by people who settled in the Midwest: Rosa Cavalleri's Rosa and Pascal D'Angelo's Son of Italy.

Participants: King-Kok Cheung, Fred Gardaphe, Ramón Saldívar.

31. Literary Translations

The challenges that specific passages posed for translators and the choices made by translators. How translations add to the meaning of the original work and make available to readers a wide array of texts. Translating the writings of Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Paul Celan, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Participants: John Felstiner, Gregory Rabassa, Marilyn Gaddis Rose.

32. Travel Literature

Real and fictional journeys to foreign lands. Travel writing as a genre that tries to make the strange familiar. Gulliver's Travels as a satire that attempts to make the familiar strange. Women explorers, from the fourteenth-century pilgrim Margery Kempe to women on the American frontier, from Isabelle Eberhardt, who traveled through North Africa dressed as a holy man, to Alexandra David-Neel, who visited Tibet at a time when it was forbidden to foreigners. A seventeenth-century manuscript of a 1,200-page letter from Peru written by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and its attempt to write a history of ancient Peru, its version of the Spanish conquest of Peru.

Participants: Rolena Adorno, Michael Seidel, Sidonie Smith.

33. Being Poor

Three novels that portray people who do not have money or power: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Ann Petry's The Street, and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth.

Participants: Blanche Gelfant, Florence Howe, Nellie McKay.

34. Grieving

Whether writing about grieving helps and whether reading about how other people have dealt with bereavement provides solace. Traditional forms of writing about grief, like the pastoral elegy, as well as contemporary forms of writing about loss, like the memoir. Nancy K. Miller's Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death. How Deborah E. McDowell's academic study of grief led her to write a more personal story, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin.

Participants: Louis Martz, Deborah McDowell, Nancy K. Miller.

35. Afterlife of Great Books

The relation between Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, between Shakespeare's The Tempest and Marina Warner's Indigo, and between Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee's Foe.

Participants: Sandra M. Gilbert, David Marshall, Marina Warner.

36. Invented Societies

Utopias and other invented societies in literature and their relation to real social change. Writing about utopias during the conquest of America. Sir Thomas More's Utopia. The concept of dystopia. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward as a response to the inequities that arose from industrialization. The Czech playwright Karel Capek's RUR and its focus on the transformative capacity of knowledge and technology.

Participants: Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, Kenneth Roemer, Peter Steiner.

37. Money and Literature

How works of literature reflect the uses and misuses of money. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' interests in money of all kinds--inheritance, investments, exchanges, gambling, and speculation. How small sums of money figure prominently in Henry Fielding's Adventures of Joseph Andrews. The eighteenth-century phenomenon of consumerism and the pleasures of shopping in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The interest in how one got one's money in the early nineteenth century and Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son.

Participants: Margaret Doody, Deidre Lynch, Alexander Welsh.

38. Elizabeth I and Victoria

The influence that each ruler had on the politics, mores, and literature of her time. Elizabeth's reign in a realm of male power. How Edmund Spenser's epic poem Faerie Queen uses allegory to depict Elizabeth and England. Portrayals of Elizabeth from William Shakespeare and Mary Sidney to the poet Anne Bradstreet. Biographies of Elizabeth, including the first biography by William Camden. Victoria's ability to be invisible in plain view and influence on the scholarship of her time. Representations of Victoria from Gilbert and Sullivan to Lewis Carroll to broadsides.

Participants: Katharine Maus, Adrienne Munich, Maureen Quilligan.

39. Walt Disney: Modern Mythmaker

Walt Disney's creation of modern myths and his contribution to popular culture. Pinocchio, originally a nineteenth-century Italian character created by Carlo Collodi, and how Disney tailored it for twentieth-century audiences. How in other characters Disney created, rather than reworked, a myth: Dumbo as a pre-World War II film about labor issues and race relations geared for adults. Disney's presence on television in the 1950s and how he used it to market his theme park Disneyland. The Davy Crockett phenomenon and the effect of the cold war and the American strategy of containment on Disney's portrayal of family, gender roles, and freedom.

Participants: Thomas Inge, Alan Nadel, Russell Reising.

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