40. Country Music

Lyrics and themes of country music and the classic themes of American literature. The road as a genre, from the Oakridge Boys to Thomas Jefferson to Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac. Pioneer diaries, Mark Twain, and Frederick Douglass and their painful loneliness in the American journey. The "cheatin' song" tradition in country music and the literary theme of infidelity. Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and female tradition of counter-cheating songs. A folklorist's performance-oriented view of country music.

Participants: Richard Holland, Ellen Stekert, Cecelia Tichi.

41. The Subject of Race in Huckleberry Finn

Huckleberry Finn as a resource and a touchstone for thinking about race. What Mark Twain was trying to do in the novel, and the problems it poses for readers today. Portraits of African Americans in the novel. A contemporary interpretation of its controversial ending. Strategies for teaching Huckleberry Finn.

Participants: Thadious Davis, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, David E. E. Sloane.

42. Shakespeare in Performance: Othello and The Taming of the Shrew

How producers, directors, and actors have interpreted these plays over the years, especially with regard to the issues of race and gender. Franco Zeffirelli's movie version of The Taming of the Shrew. The early modern audience's reactions to The Taming of the Shrew and the history of the shrew figure in Shakespeare's day. The concept of race in the Renaissance as Shakespeare was writing Othello.

Participants: Lynda Boose, Hugh Richmond, Katherine Rowe.

43. Famous Beginnings

The importance of the opening lines of three famous novels: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and several translations of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Participants: John Burt Foster, Jr., Samuel Otter, Patricia Meyer Spacks.

44. Native American Stories, Then and Now

Storytelling and the oral tradition as a form of entertainment and as a method of keeping historical records, of building community, and of conveying information. Leslie Marmon Silko and the healing power of stories. How the writings of N. Scott Momaday preserve oral traditions. The invention of storyteller dolls and how they revolutionized Pueblo pottery in 1964.

Participants: Barbara Babcock, Arnold Krupat, Hertha D. Sweet Wong.

45. The Bible: Job and Stories Based on the Book of Job

The Old Testament story of Job. Interest of biblical traditions in the Renaissance. Shakespeare's King Lear as a Job story and John Milton's references to Job. Nineteenth-century praise of the Job story by Thomas Carlyle. American incarnations of the story in the work of Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. What lawyers can learn about justice and decision making from the Job story.

Participants: Robert Burt, Walter Reed, Hugh Witemeyer.

46. Sermon Traditions

Distinct traditions of sermons, from the poet John Donne's reputation as a charismatic preacher in the seventeenth century to Puritan sermons in America to the influence of African American sermons on literature.

Participants: Sargent Bush, Dolan Hubbard, Ramie Targoff.

47. Images of the American Self

The way the Puritans and other groups of Americans have invented themselves and the role American literature has played in shaping ideas of the American self; images of successful businessmen in the eighteenth century; the importance of gender in definitions of American selfhood and how women in the nineteenth century began to define themselves in their writing.

Participants: Nina Baym, David Leverenz, Michael Warner.

48. England and India: Literary Perspectives

Stories of England and India's shared past: English writing in the eighteenth century and the influence of trade and the East India Company; nineteenth-century writings about myths and realities of India in Wilkie Collins's crime novel The Moonstone and in Rudyard Kipling's works; the relation between England and India in The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy; the portrayal of relations between England and India in the work of V. S. Naipaul.

Participants: Fawzia Mustafa, Margery Sabin, Lavina Shankar.

49. Famous Endings

How the endings of Franz Kafka's The Trial, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot can transform readers and literary genres, how they leave the story open or tie it up, how they satisfy or haunt readers.

Participants: Thomas Bishop, Stanley Corngold, Farah Jasmine Griffin.

50. Controversial Diaries

Controversies concerning the diaries of the eighteenth-century writer James Boswell, who wrote them with an eye toward their future publication. The disjunction between the diaries of the twentieth-century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his ethnographic writings; how his diaries transformed ethnography. The editing of Anne Frank's diary by her and by her father.

Participants: Carol Gilligan, Marianna Torgovnick, Gordon Turnbull.

51. Jane Austen's Contemporary Appeal

What makes Austen's novels attractive to contemporary readers and moviegoers? The characters and the nostalgia for moral order they inspired in industrial mid-nineteenth-century society and today. The plots of Austen's novels and how they are treated in movies; the plot of courtship and the quest for a marriage partner. Clothing in Jane Austen's novels and costumes in film versions.

Participants: Stephanie Hull, Deborah Kaplan, James Thompson.

52. Uncle Tom's Cabin: Its Literary and Critical History

How Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel addresses race; the influence of Stowe on the literature and attitude toward slavery of her Russian contemporary Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev; the book's effect on public affairs in the United States when it was published; the problems it now poses for readers.

Participants: Michael Holquist, Robert S. Levine, Richard Yarborough.

53. Poetry in Performance

Poetry as a spoken art form. Ancient Greek traditions and the performance of Homer's poetry and oral epic. Slam poetry and its attraction for poets and new audiences. Robert Pinsky's campaign to revive interest in poetry through performance.

Participants: John Miles Foley, Robert Pinsky, Phil West.

54. Improving Your Writing

Advice to college students who want to be better writers. Problems that writers face and strategies that teachers have developed to help them. Free writing, the different kinds of writers and the ways that college writing centers can accommodate them, how reading can influence writers. Three writing students share their work.

Participants: David Bartholomae, Peter Elbow, Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton.

55. How Do You Read a Poem?

What poems by the nineteenth-century poet Christina Rossetti, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert mean to three scholars and their students.

Participants: Paul Alpers, Betty Sue Flowers, Richard Stamelman.

56. Literature of the Holocaust

The representation of the Holocaust in literature and survivors' journals and memoirs--such as Emanuel Ringelblum's Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto and Chaim A. Kaplan's Scroll of Agony--and in film, visual arts, and memorials. Recent works by second-generation writers of the Holocaust, including Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus; the urgency to document the experiences of the first generation. The reasons for writing about the Holocaust, from witnessing and remembering to the goal of understanding it in order to avoid repeating it.

Participants: Robert Skloot, James E. Young, Froma Zeitlin.

57. Choosing a New Language

The factors in choosing to learn a new language and in deciding which one to learn. Common myths about language learning. How national and international events can affect which languages people want to study--for example, the study of German in the United States during World War I and World War II. The importance of a supportive classroom environment in learning a language.

Participants: Peter Hohendahl, Elaine Horwitz, John Rassias.

58. Twentieth-Century War Stories

How twentieth-century war stories changed conceptions about war: women's writings about World War I, war stories in World War II films of Germany and the United States, women writing about war in the Middle East as emblematic of civilian experience of conflict.

Participants: Miriam Cooke, Margaret Higonnet, Eric Rentschler.

59. Issues in Contemporary Drama

Anna Deavere Smith's one-person documentary performances; Tom Stoppard's plays; recent plays about Oscar Wilde's writing, life, and trials--including Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency.

Participants: Lawrence Danson, Sandra Richards, Philip Smith.

60. Captivity Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The seventeenth-century Massachusetts colonist Mary Rowlandson, how she was abducted by Indians and wrote the first single-book account of the captivity experience that served as a model for the genre. Mary Jemison, captured as a child and raised by Indians, and her narrative of assimilation to Seneca culture and marriage to a member of the Delaware tribe. The nineteenth-century slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. Narratives associated with the Argentine frontier. John Ford's movie The Searchers and how abducted women become tainted by their coping strategies while held captive.

Participants: Frances Smith Foster, Annette Kolodny, Susana Rotker.

61. Literary Responses to the Civil War

Lydia Maria Child's abolitionist writing on the Civil War. Her letters in defense of John Brown's violent resistance against slavery and her Freedman's Book, a reader for ex-slaves aimed to teach literacy and foster racial pride. Walt Whitman's poetry on the human cost of the Civil War and how his personal experience led him to write to comfort the injured. The effect of photography on Whitman's poetry. Herman Melville's book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, and his sense that the war exhibited a failure of democracy.

Participants: Walter Bezanson, Stephen Cushman, Carolyn L. Karcher.

62. Stories about Words

Shakespeare's use of newly coined words and his invention of new words. How the meanings of the words blood, invention, language, resistance, and world have changed over time. Doublespeak, or language that only pretends to communicate, and its goal to deceive and shift responsibility.

Participants: Paula Blank, Roland Greene, William Lutz.

63. Literature and Science

Writers who explore scientific thinking. The changing relation of science, or natural philosophy, to literature in the seventeenth century in the work of William Harvey, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton. Nineteenth-century America and the emergence of the fields of medical studies and racial science in the writings of David Walker, influenced by the work of Thomas Jefferson. Contemporary science fiction about robots in the novels of Philip K. Dick and Richard Powers.

Participants: N. Katherine Hayles, Franny Nudelman, John Rogers.

64. Prisons

The representation of the prison experience in several works. Positive images of prison as mother, as refuge, as learning opportunity, as rebirth, as escape from chaos in Shakespeare's King Lear and in the works of the twentieth-century Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The writings of the South African political prisoner Ruth First. Prison as a place of transformation for Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son and for Jefferson in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson before Dying. The tradition of twentieth-century prison literature by African American writers, from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to Angela Davis's and Malcolm X's biographies to the oral poetry of rap artists.

Participants: Rudolph Byrd, Martha Duncan, Barbara Harlow.

65. Rereading and Discovery

Three scholars talk about the experience of seeing new meaning in a familiar literary work. The Royal Commentaries of Garcilaso de la Vega, a sixteenth-century history of Peru. References to housekeeping and the housekeeper in Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and women's lives in Victorian England and their management of middle-class resources to help men achieve status. A passage on death in Montaigne's essays.

Participants: Lawrence Kritzman, Elizabeth Langland, Doris Sommer.

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