66. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock

Why Hitchcock's films captivate us. Rear Window and spectatorship; North by Northwest as a film about film, its relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet; Spellbound, Vertigo, and psychoanalysis.

Participants: Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Freedman, Brigitte Peucker.

67. Latino Writings in the United States

Nineteenth-century novels that deal with the injustices faced by the Chicano community in Baja, Puerto Rican American writing from the island and the mainland, Cuban American literature and Flora González's memoir A House on Shifting Sands.

Participants: Frances Aparicio, Flora González, Rolando Romero.

68. The Reader in the Poem

The role of the reader; how poets address readers; and how readers suspend disbelief in reading poems by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, and an eleventh-century Andalusian poet.

Participants: Jane Hedley, Jahan Ramazani, Jeffrey Robinson.

69. American Indian and Alaska-Native Tribal Traditions

The effects of tribal traditions on the teaching and scholarship of Native Americans. M. Scott Momaday and the development of American Indian and Alaska-native literature both in English and in tribal languages. Teachers and writers discuss the influence of tribal traditions on their work.

Participants: Jeane Breinig, Robert Warrior, Ofelia Zepeda.

70. Fateful Births

How in literature the birth of a child, development of an idea, or moment of personal revelation conveys ominous prophecy and portends consequences of events and choices. Three works that have at their heart a fateful birth: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a fictional autobiography concerned with where life begins and ends; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein as an allegory of giving birth to a novel; and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, about a woman's growing self-awareness--or rebirth.

Participants: David Marshall, Mary E. Papke, Susan Wolfson.

71. Contemporary Detectives

Three contemporary mystery writers and their detectives: Lucha Corpi's Chicana feminist detective, who solves a crime against a background of the Chicana civil rights movement; Valerie Wilson Wesley's female private investigator, based on a traditional tough-guy model; Tony Hillerman's Navajo detectives Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, who take an intuition- and nature-based approach to detective work.

Participants: Donna Bickford, John Gruesser, Diane Stevenson.

72. Mothers

Nurturing, domineering, suffering, self-sacrificing--literary portrayals of mothers and their children from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Fantasies about maternal origin in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear. Seventeenth-century medical theories and the invigoration of a concept of motherhood that focused on the intimacy of mother-child relationships in the works of Mme de Sévigné and Mme de La Fayette. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the great all-American character of Mama Lena, and the revolutionary potential of strong black mothers.

Participants: Janet Adelman, Trudier Harris, Domna Stanton.

73. The Gothic

Fright as entertainment; the political vision of the gothic genre. Origins of the English gothic novel in the eighteenth century and its connections to Romantic ideas about the Middle Ages. Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown. A cultural historian's perspective on Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn.

Participants: Teresa Goddu, Maggie Kilgour, Carol Smith Rosenberg.

74. The Big Bad Wolf: Scary Characters in Children's Literature

Scary characters in children's literature, from the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood to the witch in Hansel and Gretel to the dementors in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Virginia Lee Burton's Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and technology in children's literature. The shift from using negative to using positive characters and situations to teach children lessons.

Participants: Ruth Bottigheimer, Alan Rauch, Glenn Edward Sadler.

75. Film Couples

The silent movies of D. W. Griffith and the effect of sound and music on the depiction of romantic union--Maurice Chevalier, Nelson Eddy, and Jeanette MacDonald. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the role of dance. From a traditional notion of heterosexual couples in Westerns, with their focus on inheriting patrimony and on child rearing, to a notion of couples as companions in marriage. How changing ideas about masculinity shaped relationships between men and women: Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront. The social--rather than romantic or sexual--chemistry of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, with undertones of a burgeoning feminist and gay rights movement.

Participants: Charles Affron, Virginia Wright Wexman, Jennifer Wicke.

76. Medieval Women

Opportunities for, accomplishments of, and challenges faced by women in the Middle Ages. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Wife of Bath--her career, financial status, and five marriages. The economic, social, and spiritual reasons women chose to enter or were sent to convents; the advantages of convent life. The twelfth-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen and her poetry; music; and visionary, theological, scientific, and dramatic writings. The types of healing practiced by women healers in medieval Spain and their training and education. Virgin miracles, or songs to the Virgin, and what they teach us about healing in medieval Iberia.

Participants: Marie Boroff, C. Jean Dangler, Barbara Newman.

77. Life at Court

Marriage politics at the imperial court in Japan as portrayed in Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji; Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, a how-to manual for courtiers in Renaissance Italy; and Louis XIII's Versailles as the model of courtliness and its influence on French literature.

Participants: Faith Beasley, Edward Kamens, Deanna Shemek.

78. Children's Literature That Appeals to Adults

The perennial interest of many children's books for adults and the writing of books for a dual adult and child audience in recent years. Whether adults and children appreciate the same or different qualities in such books. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, and Michel Tournier's Friday and Robinson: Life on Esperanza Island.

Participants: Sandra Beckett, James Kincaid, Uli Knoepflmacher.

79. Star-Crossed Lovers

Famous lovers in literature. The interest in love in twelfth-century Europe, the first written versions of Tristan and Isolde's story, and the rebirth of their story in Richard Wagner's nineteenth-century opera. Versions of the Troilus and Criseyde story and the backdrop of the Trojan War. Chaucer's focus on the psychological complexity and the power of love versus Shakespeare's depiction of a world of treachery and violence. Lancelot and Guinevere's love triangle with King Arthur.

Participants: David Hult, Clare Kinney, Lee Patterson.

80. Controversial Writers

Writers who generate controversy for political, sexual, religious, and literary reasons. James Joyce's Ulysses and its bold use of a Jewish protagonist to emphasize the anti-Semitism of Sinn Fein politics. The poet Ezra Pound, who was controversial for his anti-Semitism and his advocacy of fascist politics. The Egyptian doctor and feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, author of The Circling Song, accused of writing critically of her native land to appeal to a Western audience.

Participants: Christine Froula, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Jean-Michel Rabaté.

81. Literary Villains

Lovelace in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and his rakish desire to possess the heroine. Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and the character Clyde Griffiths, moved by social and economic forces to commit murder. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Papa Karamazov as a corrupted man.

Participants: Jill Campbell, Susan K. Harris, John Kenneth MacKay.

82. Classic Detectives

Edgar Allan Poe, creator of the detective-hero C. Auguste Dupin. The blurring of fiction and reality in early detective novels. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and how true-to-life he seems to readers. Doyle's focus on the process of knowledge. Sherlock's continual questioning of Watson's--and thus of readers'--observations. Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Simenon's plots as explorations of French life and people.

Participants: Laura Braunstein, William Stowe, David Van Leer.

83. Great Historical Novels

Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and how it created a national myth for England and invented a popular conception of the Middle Ages. Stendhal's The Red and the Black and how it acts as a contemporary chronicle for the future. How E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime uses fiction to fill in and reenvision the limited scope of official history.

Participants: Ian Duncan, Charles Harris, Juliet Flower MacCannell.

84. Literature of the Sea

How the nothingness reflected by the sea leads Ishmael to atheism and Ahab to murder in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. How the sea offers a tragic self-knowledge to sailors in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The sea as a setting that provides the opportunity for conflict in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.

Participants: John Bryant, Susan Gannon, James Phelan.

85. Literary Paris

What Paris means to writers. The attraction of Paris for the French writers Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. The American-born writer Edith Wharton, who wrote about New York society but lived mainly as an expatriate in Paris. African American writers who went to France during the cold war.

Participants: Shari Benstock, Mae Henderson, Sandy Petrey.

86. Cross-Dressing in Performance

Noh theater--its fluidity of gender and persona, all-male dance troops, and exploration of psychology over outward representation. How Noh differs from Kabuki. Cross-dressing in Shakespeare's plays, in which men played all the roles, and how women's roles were written to be played by men. Disguise as a plot device in the plays. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theater's use of female actors and the motif of a woman in search of a man who has dishonored her so she can restore her honor by marrying him. Humor and temporary social disorder in the dramas.

Participants: Emilie Louise Bergmann, Susan Blakeley Klein, Stephen Orgel.

87. New Views of Hemingway

Hemingway the artist, the Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, and Hemingway's early stories.

Participants: Jackson Bryer, Judith Fetterley, James Nagel.

88. Editions

The impossibility of producing a final or definitive edition of Shakespeare; the Pelican edition of Shakespeare; why new generations produce new editions. The new edition of the eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Mme de Graffigny's letters. The three versions of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein and how editors use them to produce a single edition. Percy Bysshe Shelley's revisions to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's first manuscript.

Participants: Jonathan Crewe, Anne K. Mellor, English Showalter.

89. Trials in Literature

Good versus evil, justice, power, and corruption in the work of three writers. Trials in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Albert Camus's The Stranger, and the work of Bertolt Brecht.

Participants: Merton Sealts, Guy Stern, Mary Ann Witt.

90. Books as Artifacts

History of bookmaking in the West: how the European Renaissance imagination linked storytelling with technologies of cloth making; the emergence of the printed book in the fifteenth century with the Gutenberg Bible; the first printer, William Caxton, who was first a textile maker. The book as a physical object from a librarian's point of view and the role of preservation and of organization in research libraries. The benefits for some resources, such as the Rossetti Archive, of being available on the World Wide Web.

Participants: Jerome McGann, Karin A. Trainer, Linda Woodbridge.

91. The Blues as Literature

The influence of blues lyrics on artists in other genres. How blues lyrics operate autobiographically to convey the hardships of African Americans in the South. The vernacular songs of Charley Patton and the literary work of the novelist Richard Wright and the poet Etheridge Knight. Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and how the blues nurtured a sense of community in industrialized urban areas through performance. The blues as poetry in the songs of Robert Johnson. The 1920s music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith as a source for understanding the histories of black working-class women.

Participants: Houston Baker, Robert Cantwell, Angela Y. Davis.

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