189. Literature of the Spanish Civil War

Writers who challenge traditional perspectives on the war. Women's lives during the war in María Teresa León's short story "Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas" ("Light for the Peaches and the Girls"). The Spanish civil war's legacy of violence in Camilo José Cela's 1942 novel The Family of Pascual Duarte and how Juan Goytisolo's 1966 novel, Marks of Identity, questions Spain's official version of the war. A twenty-first-century journalist researching the fascist leader Rafael Sánchez Mazas in Javier Cercas's novel Soldiers of Salamis.

Participants: Vance Holloway, Tabea Alexa Linhard, Gonzalo Navajas.

190. Christian, Jew, Muslim: Coexistence in Medieval Spain

The convivencia, or coexistence, among three religious groups of the Iberian peninsula. How two twelfth-century accounts, Cantar de mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid) and Historia Roderici, depicted the Christian general Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, or El Cid, who led armies of Muslims and Christians. Conversos--Jews who converted to Christianity--and the effect of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews in Fernando de Rojas's prose dialogue Celestina. Al Andalus's (Islamic Spain's) rich culture, including the poems of the thirteenth-century Sufi writers Abu Hassan al-Shustari and Ibn al-Arabi.

Participants: Lourdes Alvarez, Matthew Bailey, Michael Gerli.

191. What Writers Read

Works that inspire three contemporary authors. How Miguel de Cervantes's early-seventeenth-century Spanish work Don Quixote de la Mancha satirizes novels of chilvalry and offers consolation to readers confronting a complex world. Lessons of individuality and self-determination in John Stuart Mill's 1859 philosophical treatise On Liberty and in Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day. Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino's collection of essays about the transformative power of writing.

Participants: Anthony Appiah, Ariel Dorfman, Rikki Ducornet.

192. Literature and Film of the Armenian Diaspora

The history and writing of the Armenian diaspora. Memory and intergenerational relationships in twentieth-century Armenian American fiction, including Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Discovers His Armenian Past. How young Armenian Americans try to recover their grandparents' unspoken stories of the 1915 genocide in Nancy Kricorian's novels Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire. Parallels between Greek and Armenian immigrant experience in Elia Kazan's 1963 movie America, America.

Participants: Nancy Kricorian, Khachig Tololyan, Karen Van Dyck.

193. Listening to Literature

The auditory experience of literature. Oral tradition in the Acoma Pueblo community. "To Plant Again" and "To Exculpate Sorrow," two poems by Simon Ortiz, a member of the Acoma Pueblo community. How literature on the radio evolved from poetry readings to 1930s radio dramas to contemporary experimental montages of voices. Pleasures of physical books versus the convenience of books on tape, including how reading a printed book stimulates the imagination.

Participants: Rand Richards Cooper, Simon Ortiz, Martin Spinelli.

194. Walt Whitman and Democracy

Whitman's egalitarian point of view and its legacy. How the violence of the Civil War affected Whitman's vision of democracy, shifting from the optimistic inclusiveness of Song of Myself to the more sober Democratic Vistas and "Reconciliation." Eroticism and the human inspiration for poetry in Leaves of Grass. Whitman's influence on contemporary film, including Richard Kwietniowski's 1997 movie Love and Death on Long Island.

Participants: Ed Folsom, Mark Maslan, Kenneth Price.

195. Nathan the Wise

Religious tolerance in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 drama. The play's parable of the ring and its message about the coexistence of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in twelfth-century Jerusalem. How the play responded to the status of Jews in Lessing's eighteenth-century Germany. Paul D'Andrea's twenty-first-century American adaptation.

Participants: Paul D'Andrea, Meredith Lee, Gerhard Weiss.

196. Novels about Growing Up

The bildungsroman genre in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. An English precursor to the bildungsroman, Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe. Character development and the theme of changing one's mind in Jane Austen's 1813 Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte Brontë's Victorian novel Jane Eyre, which helped establish the concept of female adolescence and made a case for women leading active lives. How Hans Castorp's mental dissolution challenges the traditional bildungsroman's story of growth and socialization in the German author Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, written after World War I.

Participants: Susan David Bernstein, Michael McKeon, James Rolleston.

197. City of Ladies

Christine de Pisan's 1405 defense of women's character. How the Book of the City of Ladies responds to criticism of women and offers models of female accomplishment and virtue. The medieval French work's influence on powerful women in later eras, including Elizabeth I of England. The misattribution of City of Ladies to male authors in early editions.

Participants: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Mary Beth Rose, Jennifer Summit.

198. Sartre

The twentieth-century French existentialist as a public intellectual, creative writer, and man. Sartre's underground journalism during World War II and his idea of political commitment or engagement. The 1938 existentialist novel Nausea and Sartre's first play, No Exit. Sartre's creative and conflicted relationship with the author Simone de Beauvoir.

Participants: Ronald Aronson, Denis Hollier, Hazel Rowley.

199. Activist Writers in an Age of Reform

Nineteenth-century works that responded to social change. How the urban poverty of the English Industrial Revolution inspired Charles Dickens's novels Oliver Twist and Bleak House, which criticize mismanagement of institutions intended to aid the poor. Critiquing the values of Spain's growing middle class in Benito Pérez Galdós's novels, including the 1897 Misericordia (Compassion). Zaynab Fawwāz's writings in support of the education and independence of Arab women and her 1893 biographical dictionary of famous women.

Participants: Marilyn Booth, Christopher Herbert, John Kronik.

200. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Three medieval pilgrims' tales from Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century Middle English work. Rulership and making prudent choices in the Knight's Tale. The fantastical Squire's Tale's lessons about how to tell a story. Interpreting the views of the teller and the author in the anti-Semitic Prioress's Tale.

Participants: Robert Hanning, Seth Lerer, Sylvia Tomasch.

201. The Gilded Age

What lies beneath the surface of American wealth at the turn of the twentieth century. Henry James's travelogue The American Scene, which suggests that history is erased in the era's architecture and in the assimilation of immigrants. Exploring the treatment of women as consumer objects in Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth. Cuban-born José Martí's cronicas, or chronicles, about life in New York and the disparity between rich and poor during the period.

Participants: Sara Blair, Laura Lomas, Elaine Showalter.

202. Science Fiction by Women

Late-twentieth-century Anglophone novels about gender in imaginary worlds. Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, set on Gethen, a planet where people change sex throughout their lives. Repression of women on Caba, the fictitious planet in Joanna Russ's The Two of Them, published in 1978. How women are stripped of their identity in the Republic of Gilead, the dystopia of Margaret Atwood's 1985 The Handmaid's Tale.

Participants: Lois Feuer, Carl Freedman, Ellen Peel.

203. New American Literatures

How the American literature canon has expanded to include more works by writers of color. Diversifying the contents of anthologies, like the Heath Anthology of American Literature, and what makes Countee Cullen's "Incident" a powerful poem. Competing poems about Puerto Rican female identity: Sandra María Esteves's "A la mujer borinqueña" and Luz María Umpierre's "In Response." Prejudice against Asian Americans in Hisaye Yamamoto's 1950 short story "Wilshire Bus," and the Vietnamese American writer Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt, which raises questions about why some are excluded from history.

Participants: David Eng, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Paul Lauter.

204. English Romanticism and Science

The influence of scientific developments on late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British poetry. William Wordsworth's lyric poem "Tintern Abbey" and how photosynthesis and other new theories about the earth shaped the poem's view of the relation between human beings and nature. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," in which geological discoveries about the age and dynamism of glaciers inspire the poet to compare the imagination to a glacier. The connection between brain and body, opium use as a stimulant to inspiration, and the image of the mind in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

Participants: Marilyn Gaull, Alan Richardson, Eric Wilson.

205. Novels about Empire

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction about colonialism. How imperialism destroys empire builders as well as imperial subjects in Joseph Conrad's 1902 Heart of Darkness, set in the Belgian Congo. E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, a critique of the limitations of liberalism, which suggests that friendship cannot exist without independence and equality. The Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, about a Trinidadian of Indian descent and whether former colonies are doomed to mimic their colonizers rather than develop a dominant culture of their own. Wu Zhuoliu's The Orphan of Asia and the colonial experience of being neither Japanese nor Chinese during Japan's occupation of Taiwan.

Participants: Homi Bhabha, Leo Ching, Michael Hardt.

206. Proust

The French author Marcel Proust's multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu), written in the early twentieth century. How the novel captures ordinary experiences, such as the limits on knowing another person. Its reflections on becoming a writer, art's capacity to allow us to see through the eyes of others and to see ourselves, and the relation between Proust and his narrator. The theme of reading and interpreting one's beloved, as well as the representation of sexual orientation in both biological and biblical terms.

Participants: Malcolm Bowie, Elyane Dezon-Jones, Jarrod Hayes.

207. Al Pacino's Shakespeare

The American actor's longtime commitment to Shakespearean theater. Portraying Shylock through movement and speech in Michael Radford's film version of The Merchant of Venice. Pacino's staging of the history play Richard III. What Shakespeare means to Shakespeareans and to people on the street in the documentary Looking for Richard. How Pacino adopts an underdog persona to try to expand Shakespeare's audience in the United States.

Participants: Denise Albanese, Richard Burt, Sam Crowl.

208. Stories within Stories

Three works in different genres that include at least one tale within the tale. How The Murder of Gonzago ("The Mousetrap"), the play within the play in Shakespeare's Hamlet, comments on the relationship between Gertrude and the late king. A projectionist who fantasizes of entering the movie he's showing in Buster Keaton's 1928 silent film comedy Sherlock Junior. The fictional newsreel of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, which parodies 1930s journalism and contrasts how news and cinema tell stories. Exploring nonlinear time through a labyrinth of stories within the story "The Garden of Forking Paths" by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Participants: Gene Bell-Villada, Joseph A. Porter, Garrett Stewart.

209. Women Warriors

Challenges faced by real and fictional military women and the battle styles of female warriors. Joan of Arc's leadership of French troops in support of Charles VII during the Hundred Years' War and the relation between masculine dress and her virginal warrior persona. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston's retelling of the Chinese folk legend of Fa Mu Lan, who becomes a general after taking her father's place in the imperial army. The physical and political hurdles faced by a woman training to become a Navy SEAL in Ridley Scott's 1997 film, GI Jane.

Participants: Susan Crane, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Yvonne Tasker.

210. A Soldier's War

Stories of battle from on the ground. Stephen Crane's 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which presents sensory details of the horrors of the American Civil War. The weight of war--and its aftermath--on foot soldiers in Tim O'Brien's collection of nonchronological short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. Two short stories about the Iran-Iraq war and how the effects of war go beyond the battlefield.

Participants: Muhsin al- Musawi, Benjamin Fisher, Stacey Peebles.

211. The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film about a key battle in Algeria's war of independence against France. The movie's documentary-like cinematic techniques and point of view on Algerian independence. Political and military events that led up to the Battle of Algiers from the perspective of an Algerian who lived through the war. Why the film's French release was delayed and protested.

Participants: Réda Bensmaïa, Ranjana Khanna, Ann Smock.

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