92. King Arthur

The figure of Arthur in legend and literature. The chivalric ideals of romance and adventure and the dream of a just and nonviolent society that Arthur and Camelot represent. Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Morte d'Arthur, the earliest full account in English of the various legends about Arthur and his knights. Malory's contributions to the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Alfred Lord Tennyson's nineteenth-century epic poem Idylls of the King. The movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail and how it comically addresses our attempts to grasp the past.

Participants: David D. Day, Alan Gaylord, Herbert Tucker.

93. Movie Versions of Hamlet

The film version of the play directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh (1996), which stages a full version of Shakespeare's text and its focus on the relationship between fathers and sons. Franco Zeffirelli's film, starring Mel Gibson (1990), as a remake of Laurence Olivier's 1948 version in its staging of an oedipal struggle. The 2000 postmodern version directed by Michael Almereyda with Ethan Hawke. A 1920 silent Swedish version made in Germany and a 1964 Russian version, with its Soviet moralism. Television productions, such as a 1984 Swedish version directed by Ragnar Lyth, which features a punk Hamlet.

Participants: Diana Henderson, Barbara Hodgdon, Kenneth Rothwell.

94. Recent Nobel Prize Winners

The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, the Portuguese writer José Saramago, the West Indian writer Derek Walcott.

Participants: Robert D. Hamner, Luiza Moreira, Edward W. Said.

95. On the Road, the American Road

How film and fiction convey the experience of America through car trips. The beat-generation writer Jack Kerouac and On the Road's postwar celebratory travel. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; the European corruption of American innocence; and travel as fear, amusement, opportunity for escape, and paranoid dream. The movie Thelma and Louise as a feminist buddy film in which the heroines discover things about themselves, each other, and the United States and in which the road represents freedom. Images of the West in Thelma and Louise and the elegiac nature of this and other road-trip films.

Participants: Leo Braudy, Ann Charters, Michael Wood.

96. Psalms

Origins of the Psalms in Hebrew scripture, Mary Sidney's translations of the Psalms in the Renaissance, and interpretations of the Psalms from the point of view of a contemporary poet--how they depict a man's world, powerfully represent human emotion, and influence writers.

Participants: Margaret Hannay, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Alicia Ostriker.

97. Orphans

Orphans in eighteenth-century gothic novels, in nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, and in the work of Nathanael West.

Participants: George Levine, Gary Scharnhorst, Judith Wilt.

98. Confronting a Foreign Culture

Learning a foreign language and experiencing the culture of a foreign country through study-abroad programs. Studying Russian in Russia, German in Germany, and Spanish in Mexico.

Participants: Dan Davidson, Margaret Dunaway, Gerd Gemünden.

99. Life Writing and Persons with Disabilities

How early autobiographies discuss persons with disabilities and how the Persons with Disabilities Act changed life writing. Nancy Mairs's "On Being a Cripple." Michael Bérubé's Life As We Know It, about his son who was born with Down Syndrome and about the social assumptions about disabilities. Jorge Luis Borges's blindness and his writing.

Participants: Carlos Alonso, Michael Bérubé, Nancy Mairs.

100. Cuban Writing, on the Island and in Exile

Cuban literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the effect of the 1959 revolution on Cuban literature, the Cuban diaspora. Nineteenth-century Cuban writing: Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiography of a Slave; José Martí's writing. The twentieth-century novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers. Zoé Valdés's La nada cotidiana (I Gave You All I Had) and female disillusion with Castro's rise to power. Cuban American writers.

Participants: Isabel Alvarez-Borland, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat.

101. Postapartheid South African Literature

Voices of apartheid and resistance: Achmat Dangor's Kafka's Curse, South African and South African Indian writers, the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee on South African literature, Lucky Mazibuko's column in the Sowetan, Rob Nixon's memoir Dreambirds.

Participants: Vilashini Cooppan, Rob Nixon, Mark Sanders.

102. Heritage Languages

Teaching Spanish to college students in the United States whose families speak Spanish; the increase in heritage languages taught after the cold war; the study and teaching of Yiddish and of Occitan (also known as Provençal, a language spoken in medieval France).

Participants: Anita Norich, William Paden, Guadalupe Valdés.

103. Anglophone Canadian Writers

How literary production between 1964 and 1972 helped establish a Canadian literature. Margaret Laurence's novel The Stone Angel as a signal of a new beginning for Canadian literature. Margaret Atwood's distinct sense of place in Lady Oracle. Michael Ondaatje's writing; his use of collage, multiple viewpoints, and the past; his novel Anil's Ghost. The mythic character of Robertson Davies's novel Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford Trilogy.

Participants: Donna Bennett, Russell Brown, Donna Heiland.

104. Computers in the Classroom

How computers have changed the way we communicate and learn. From word processing to e-mail to the World Wide Web, the new opportunities that technology presents. The use of computers in teaching composition and literature. How interactive video projects can help students learn foreign languages.

Participants: Gail Hawisher, Douglas Morgenstern, John Unsworth.

105. Love Poetry, Volume 2

Urdu love poetry and the ghazal. Gay love poetry in the American literary tradition; how Walt Whitman influenced gay love poetry and its incorporation of many different traditions, geographies, and gender identities. Provençal courtly love songs of the medieval French troubadours and their invention of vernacular poetry.

Participants: Lee Edelman, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Stephen Nichols.

106. Famous Endings

The effectiveness and importance of the endings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée.

Participants: Richard Millington, Gerald Prince, Donald Rackin.

107. Language and Literature in Quebec

The influence of the 1960 Quiet Revolution, feminism, and the rise of the nationalist movement in the 1970s on Quebecois francophone theater, film, and fiction. Louky Bersianik's Picnic on the Acropolis, a feminist version of Plato's Symposium, and her L'Euguélionne, a feminist rendition of the Bible. The writings of Denise Boucher. Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn and Mauve Desert and her experimentation with life writing, innovative uses of language, and commentary on the social and political forces that affect women's lives.

Participants: Barbara Havercroft, Leanore Lieblein, Jane Moss.

108. Anthologies

Anthologies from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. The role anthologies play in introducing literature to a wider audience. Sixteenth-century English anthologies and commonplace books. Anthologies of world literature and of African American literature.

Participants: David Damrosch, Henry Louis Gates, Karen Newman.

109. Women's Life Writing

Eighteenth-century women's autobiographies, from spiritual autobiographies to scandalous memoirs; African American women's autobiographies, from Harriet Jacobs's to Maya Angelou's; and twentieth-century women's autobiographies, including Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past."

Participants: Felicity Nussbaum, Joanne Braxton, Susan Stanford Friedman.

110. Regional Literature in the United States, Volume 1: New England

T. Walter Herbert describes regional literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter; the poetry of Robert Frost; the rise of industry and the employment of women in nineteenth-century New England, the Lowell mill girls, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner.

Participants: Millicent Bell, Amy Lang, Matthew Parfitt, T. Walter Herbert.

111. Rereading, Volume 2

Teachers talk about the changes in their understanding of particular literary works, from the poem "Myth" by Muriel Rukeyser to the Journals of Anaïs Nin to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Participants: Catharine R. Stimpson, Robert Scholes, Helene Meyers.

112. Regional Literature in the United States, Volume 2: The Midwest

T. Walter Herbert describes regional literature. Sinclair Lewis's novels Main Street, about a country undergoing construction, and Babbitt, about the growing urbanization of the Midwest. The writings of Carl Sandburg, which aim to redefine America as the Midwest. The Plains Indian tradition. How the Oklahoma Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, in her book Mean Spirit, borrows a story from the Osage tribe.

Participants: Mark Van Wienen, Betty Louise Bell, Sally Parry, T. Walter Herbert.

113. Reading Groups

Reading circles and literary societies as institutions that allowed women to enter national civic and political debates in the nineteenth century. African American men's and women's reading groups from the early nineteenth century on and their broad definition of literature to include items from newspapers and government documents. How to organize a reading group today.

Participants: Mary Kelley, Carol Fonken, Elizabeth McHenry.

114. Regional Literature in the United States, Volume 3: The South

T. Walter Herbert describes regional literature. Explosion of interest in southern literature after the Civil War and the literature's national-unity function. Writers' portrayal of diverse southern culture. George Washington Cable's use of the regional form to discuss national issues and tensions between Anglo-Americans and French-speaking Creoles, the horror and effects of slavery, and the legacy of mixed racial heritage on Louisianians. Zora Neale Hurston and the South as a cultural legacy and her interest in folklore and folk practices. Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and its challenges to earlier definitions of the South.

Participants: Gavin Jones, Ann Goodwyn Jones, Cheryl Wall, T. Walter Herbert.

115. Coming of Age Stories

J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and its view that mid-twentieth-century American society was stuck in adolescence. Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, set in World War II-era New Mexico, as a social and spiritual growth story that focuses on the development of manhood. Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina and its departure from a silence of innocence in traditional coming-of-age stories to a deliberately chosen silence that protects elders.

Participants: Renée Curry, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Joyce A. Rowe.

116. Regional Literature in the United States, Volume 4: The Pacific Coast

T. Walter Herbert describes regional literature. Jack London and the reinvention of California fiction, his attention to the working class, issues of race, and nonwhite characters from the Pacific Rim. Frank Norris and the writings of naturalists. The promise and the brutality of the western frontier at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the idea of an America that is open to possibilities; the beats in San Francisco. The writing of Karen Tei Yamashita, the connections between Asia and America, and the extension of the concept of manifest destiny that went beyond the West Coast and into the Pacific Rim. Gary Pak's nonromantic vision of Hawai'i and his concept of community.

Participants: Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Michael Skau, David Palumbo-Liu, T. Walter Herbert.

117. The Ballad Opera

Origins of the ballad opera in eighteenth-century England as a reaction against the spectacle and conventions of traditional Italian operas. Ballad opera's capacity for parody, social satire, and political protest. Ballad operas from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: John Gay's Beggar's Opera; Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas; and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.

Participants: Carolyn S. Williams, Cynthia Wall, Elin Diamond.

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