143. Lost Homelands

What's lost and gained in twentieth- and twenty-first-century experiences of emigration and immigration. Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and the main character's ambivalence about her colonial Antigua homeland. Edmundo Paz-Soldán's La materia del deseo (The Matter of Desire), the story of a Bolivian immigrant who finds he can never return to the homeland of his memories. A short story by Alberto Fuguet. Two stories by writers whose indigenous cultures were displaced by immigrants: the Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, which conveys the sense of loss experienced by the Laguna Pueblo Indians; and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, the coming-of-age story of a Chicano boy dealing with his Catholic, Native American, and Mexican roots

Participants: Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Neal Tolchin, Melissa Zeiger.

144. Fathers

Representations of fathers and their children in literature. Franz Kafka's early-twentieth-century German stories "The Judgment"; Metamorphosis; and "Letter to My Father," written as a way to escape his father's authority. Missing or failed fathers and the antebellum South's broken legacy in William Faulkner's novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! A white plantation owner's betrayal of his mixed-race daughter in Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Participants: Peter Demetz, Philip Weinstein, Patricia Yaeger.

145. Trauma, Memory, and Healing in Latin American Literature

Violent repression and murder by military juntas and governments in Latin American countries and how writers document and come to terms with such traumas in fiction, drama, and poetry. The importance of memory in the process of healing. Elena Poniatowska's 1971 Massacre in Mexico, a collection of interviews, newspaper quotes, and poems about the 1968 student movement; the Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, a performance group and political collective started in 1971, and its 2000 adaptation of Antigone to show that survival sometimes entails witnessing and not resisting injustices; and the Dirty War in Argentina's influence on Alicia Borinsky's All Night Movie, set in postdictatorship Argentina.

Participants: Danny Anderson, Alicia Borinsky, Diana Taylor.

146. Puerto Rican Literature on the Island and in the United States

National and cultural identity in Puerto Rican literature since Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, conflicts between traditional Hispanic and Afro-Antillian culture, the increasing influence of the United States on island culture. Writers who leave Puerto Rico and impart outside perspectives on island life. The work of Antonio S. Pedreira. José Luis González's story "Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country." Mayra Santos-Febres's 2002 novel Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (Any Wednesday I'm Yours). The founding of the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1974. Tato Laviera's poem "My Graduation Speech" and Victor Hernández Cruz's "An Essay on William Carlos Williams." The life and work of the mid-twentieth-century poet Julia de Burgos.

Participants: Licia Fiol-Matta, Guillermo Irizarry, Lázaro Lima.

147. The Irish Theater

William Butler Yeats and the founding of the Abbey Theatre at the end of the nineteenth century. How questions about language, politics, and an Irish national identity distinct from that of England were at the heart of twentieth-century Irish drama. The use of Irish myths and history in Irish plays. Yeats's plays Cathleen ni Hoolihan, On Baile's Strand, and The Death of Cuchulain as support for Irish nationalism. Ireland's remote Aran Islands as inspiration for John Millington Synge's 1904 tragedy Riders to the Sea and the controversy provoked by his Playboy of the Western World. Brian Friel's Field Day Company in Northern Ireland and how his 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa offers music and dance as alternatives to the failures of language.

Participants: Stanton Garner, Jr., Kathleen Hohenleitner, Patrick McCarthy.

148. Writers in Exile in the United States

The willing and forced exile of writers unable to work freely or to publish in their homelands. Artistic freedom and the challenges of exile, such as poverty, feelings of being a stranger, and longing for one's native country to experience similar freedom. Two works by the Cuban writer and former prisoner Reinaldo Arenas, exiled from Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel Exodus: The Color of Summer (1991) and Before Night Falls (1992), a posthumously published memoir that mixes personal and Cuban revolutionary history. The flight from Hitler's Germany by the German scholar Erich Auerbach and the Viennese scholar Leo Spitzer and their contributions to the field of comparative literature, notably Auerbach's Mimesis. The Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Cancer Ward, exiled from the Soviet Union for writing on the prison system and labor camps.

Participants: Emily Apter, José Quiroga, Paul N. Siegel.

149. Melodrama

The emergence of domestic melodrama in nineteenth-century English theater, its focus on the moral status of the heroine, and the popularity of the novel turned play East Lynne. Melodrama as a cinematic genre. Women's films of the 1940s and domestic paranoia. How Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far from Heaven, a remake of Douglas Sirk's 1955 All That Heaven Allows, uses music, light, and setting to convey emotion. The faulting of melodramas for their superficial plots, overacting, predictable endings, and sentimental music versus the accessibility of the genre's conventions and story lines. How the popular appeal of melodramas on stage, screen, and TV--especially in soap operas--gives voice to marginalized groups and especially to women.

Participants: Mary Ann Doane, Elaine Hadley, Martha P. Nochimson.

150. Best Sellers

How best-selling novels not only make money but also capture their historical moment and tell us something about our society. Book clubs from Oprah's Book Club to the Book-of-the-Month Club. Some best sellers considered: Bernhard Schlink's 1995 German novel The Reader and reading, silence, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone detective series, appealing for its strong heroine, variations in the style of individual books, and the pleasure of figuring out a challenging mystery.

Participants: Ernestine Schlant Bradley, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Janice Radway.

151. Great French Films

The brilliant study of a single emotion in classic French films of the 1930s, including Jean Renoir's 1939 The Rules of the Game, which uses multiple perspectives to examine life in France at the end of the Third Republic. New wave filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s and their preference for genre mixing and a personal approach to cinematic production, in works like Jules and Jim and 400 Blows, by François Truffaut. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film Amélie as a movie about life in Paris and as an homage to earlier popular French films.

Participants: Dudley Andrew, Mary Jean Green, Lynn Higgins.

152. Booker Prize Winners

Established in 1968, the Man Booker Prize for fiction names the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland. How Kazuo Ishiguro considers himself an international or homeless writer and how his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day mocks nostalgia for a mythic England. The 1990 novel Possession, by A. S. Byatt, as a love story and a detective novel that uses literary allusion to assert the importance of knowing one's intellectual heritage. The True History of the Kelly Gang, by the two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, about an Australian hero and bandit, as well as class and religious struggle in the bush.

Participants: Simon During, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Brian Shaffer.

153. Caribbean Literature in English

Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans who increasingly write poetry, drama, fiction, and journalism in English, incorporating a mix of languages and broaching issues of race, class, colonialism, homeland, gender, and the relation of literature to oral traditions. The Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's use of colloquial and elevated language in his poem "The Schooner Flight." The balance between assimilation and resistance in the Barbadian American writer Paule Marshall's novels Brown Girl, Brownstones and Praisesong for the Widow. The storytelling tradition and women "kitchen poets" in the short story "Women like Us" from Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat's book Krik? Krak! and the work of the novelist Jacques Stéphan Alexis.

Participants: Paul Breslin, Edwidge Danticat, Cherene Sherrard.

154. The Battle of the Books

The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in seventeenth-century France, including debates about the novel, the emergence of women readers, and the relation between present and past. Germany's Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in the eighteenth century and how it challenged the boundaries of social class and the limitations of dramatic conventions. Debates about college curricula, from Harvard's free-elective system of the late nineteenth century to Stanford's shift from its Western Culture program in the 1980s.

Participants: Bliss Carnochan, Susanne Kord, Lewis Seifert.

155. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol

The Victorian holiday story of Ebenezer Scrooge. A Christmas Carol's message that social transformation starts with individual change. Autobiographical aspects of the story. The influence of Dickens's novel on stage, film, and society--especially its celebration of the holiday.

Participants: Karen Chase, John Jordan, Gerhard Joseph.

156. Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Three late-twentieth-century postcolonial works. India's development as a nation as reflected in the life of one man in Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. The Great Indian Novel, by Shashi Tharoor; the stories India tells about itself; and Indian pluralism. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, as a novel about place. How novels about India as a nation have excluded stories of women and Indians of lower castes.

Participants: Suvir Kaul, Josna Rege, Shashi Tharoor.

157. Murder at Home: Domestic Tragedy on the Renaissance Stage

The change in the tragic hero from a noble to an ordinary man on the sixteenth-century London stage. Arden of Feversham and the emergence of domestic tragedy, as well as its relation to the Protestant Reformation's focus on the family and the household. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood, and the disparity between real crimes and their representation in Renaissance literature--especially in ballads, drama, and pamphlets--as well as the early modern audience's fascination with stories of untrustworthy intimates. Othello and William Shakespeare's modifications to the genre to include not only the conventions of a troubled marriage, a wife's adultery, and spousal murder but also the politics of race.

Participants: Viviana Comensoli, Frances Dolan, Lena Cowen Orlin.

158. Hideous Progeny: Stories about Cloning

The fear and fascination of artificially created beings. Early accounts of artificial reproduction--from the classical concept of art to the biblical concept of creation to the Hebrew story of a golem. Paracelsus's theories of reproduction in the Renaissance, Charles Bonnet's eighteenth-century Philosophical Palingenesis. Bram Stoker's Dracula and the reproduction of vampires. How literature and popular movies have influenced our ideas about cloning; the horror genre's portrayal of clones as automatons lacking a soul. How identical twins and the movie Blade Runner challenge this portrayal.

Participants: Stephen Arata, Mary Baine Campbell, Jay Clayton.

159. Literary Feasts

Feasts that are central or pivotal events in literature: a well-crafted meal as a work of art and as a way to unite community in Isak Dinesen's 1953 Norwegian work Babette's Feast. The language of food in Laura Esquivel's 1989 novel Like Water for Chocolate, a serialized love story and cookbook set during the Mexican Revolution. An all-male gathering at which philosophy and conversation is as important as food in Ben Jonson's seventeenth-century English poem "Inviting a Friend to Supper."

Participants: Sarah Webster Goodwin, Gail Kern Paster, Kari Salkjelsvik.

160. Trauma, Memory, and Healing in European Literature and Film

Attempts by writers, artists, and filmmakers to come to terms with large-scale conflicts and war in twentieth-century Europe and the unprecedented civilian devastation and displacement. How some East German films--Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are among Us, Kurt Maetzig's Marriage in the Shadows--show sympathy both for those complicit in fascist atrocities and for those who were victims of them. The Spanish Civil War in George Orwell's 1938 Homage to Catalonia, the work of the imprisoned resistance member Jorge Semprún, and Javier Cercas's 2001 Soldiers of Salamis. How the French author Marguerite Duras's stories of personal trauma, including Hiroshima Mon Amour, address larger political traumas and suggest the healing power of forgetting.

Participants: Judith Greenberg, Randolph D. Pope, Katie Trumpener.

161. Brazilian Film

Brazilian cinema from the Vera Cruz Studio films of the 1940s and 1950s to authentic portrait films attempted in the late 1950s to the later realist films that sought to explore Brazil's national identity and react against Hollywood influences. The harsh realities of Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shanty towns) in Carlos Diegues's 1998 Orfeu and how the film is a response to Marcel Camus's romanticized French film Black Orpheus. Depictions of the unrealistic expectations and misadventures of a naive heroine in Suzana Amaral's 1986 movie The Hour of the Star, based on Clarice Lispector's short novel. Pilgrimage, faith in flawed human beings, and redemption through relationships in Walter Salles's 1998 Central Station.

Participants: Mark Lokensgard, Marta Peixoto, Charles A. Perrone.

162. Pinocchio

The classic story of a puppet who becomes a boy, Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi in the late nineteenth century, and how it reflects the political and social situation in Tuscany and the birth of Italy as a modern nation. The puppet motif's focus on freedom and individualism on the one hand and conformity and citizenry on the other, the story's attitude toward education. What makes the novel a children's classic and what makes it appealing for print, film, cartoon, and musical versions. How twentieth-century American versions often flatten its complexities. Readings from a recent translation of Pinocchio that blends the fantastic and realistic elements of the story.

Participants: Nancy Canepa, Thomas J. Morrissey, Rebecca West.

163. Contemporary Language Poetry

Experimental poetry that defies lyric conventions. The origins of a genre that resists representation to draw attention to how poetry is formed. A poem from Charles Bernstein's Let's Just Say. Literary innovations of early language poetry in the 1970s. How to enjoy works that are hard to understand. Bob Perelman's "Here 2" and the importance of focusing on the present, and Diane Ward's work "Cracks." Language poetry as a critique of language itself.

Participants: Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman.

164. Cookbooks as Literature

Cookbooks as more than a source of recipes. The nineteenth-century Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management and the role of women in Victorian England. African American cookbooks as historical records and as responses to the social movements of their time, how they helped shape African American social identity. Contemporary cookbooks as literature, leisure-time reading, lifestyle manuals, sources for class aspiration, and travel narratives.

Participants: James Buzard, Sukey Howard, Doris Smith Witt.

165. Writers Abroad

Writers who choose to live as expatriates to join foreign causes, for a retreat, and to gain new experiences and perspectives on their native lands. The twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop's collection Questions of Travel and the new perspective that Brazil offered on her childhood in Nova Scotia. How living in Paris influenced the avant-garde work of Gertrude Stein. Lord Byron's travels to continental Europe as inspiration for the quintessential Romantic hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; the international interest in his work.

Participants: Charles Berger, Charles Robinson, Susan Winnett.

166. Parables

The archetypal parables of the Bible, from the chiefly moral import of the Old Testament to the increasingly theological focus of the New Testament. The persuasive power and potential for multiple interpretations of biblical parables, including the story of Bathsheba and the Good Samaritan narrative. Parables that remain a mystery or paradox. Franz Kafka's paradoxical 1914 "Before the Law." How modern parables illustrate irresolvable inner conflicts. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges's two parables "Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" and "Borges and I" and his attraction to the genre for its oral nature, brevity, lessons, and its demand for active interpretation by the reader.

Participants: Pablo Brescia, Leslie Brisman, Walter Sokel.

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