212. New Ideas on Language Teaching

Current methods of teaching foreign languages to college students. Using students' experiences to expand their role in the Spanish language classroom. Incorporating German culture into advanced German classes. How new Web technology provides materials for the study of less commonly taught languages.

Participants: Heidi Byrnes, Nina Garrett, Judith Liskin-Gasparro.

213. Madness and Insight

Wisdom or social critique from unexpected sources. An outcast wife whose suffering challenges Confucian tradition in Lu Xun's 1924 Chinese short story "New Year's Sacrifice." Whether a woman's insanity in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1899 "The Yellow Wall-Paper" criticizes patriarchy or reveals the author's fear of racial mixing. How André Breton's twentieth-century French novel Nadja reflects surrealists' rejection of social convention and their celebration of irrationality.

Participants: Ann Gaylin, Lydia Liu, Alys Weinbaum.

214. Power and Politics in Latin America

Responding to dictatorship in poetry, prose, and drama. Pablo Neruda's poem "La United Fruit Company," which mocks Central American dictators who grow rich at the expense of native Indians. "Note 20," the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman's account of his son's disappearance. How dictators maintain power in Mario Vargas Llosa's 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat, based on Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Brazilian theater groups, like the Teatro de Arena, that responded to military dictatorship by telling stories of resistance and encouraging audiences to think critically.

Participants: Severino Albuquerque, Leo Bernucci, Gwen Kirkpatrick.

215. Samuel Beckett

The twentieth-century Irish author's work and influence. Waiting for Godot, Beckett's French existentialist play, which reflects the legacy of World War II and shaped the stagecraft of future playwrights. How Beckett's work inspired the writer Raymond Federman by challenging nineteenth-century realism. Allusion and the relation between victims and the powerful in Beckett's trilogy of novels.

Participants: Enoch Brater, Tom Cousineau, Raymond Federman.

216. Rock and Roll

How the genre evolved from the 1950s to today. Rock and roll's roots, including the music of Elvis Presley. Social commentary in the blue-collar lyrics of Bruce Springsteen, Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill that celebrate strong women, and Bright Eyes' call to take political action. Why rock and roll lyrics are not poetry.

Participants: Stephen Burt, Joshua Clover, Ben Saunders.

217. The Afterlife of Don Quixote

Three nineteenth-century authors inspired by Miguel de Cervantes's 1605 work. The influence of sentimental literature and its tragic outcome in Gustave Flaubert's French novel Madame Bovary. How the failures of the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's quixotic Prince Myshkin from The Idiot and Stepan Verhovensky from The Devils critique liberal idealism. Don Quixote as a symbol of Spain in the writings of Miguel de Unamuno and the character's evolution from an emblem of the nation's warrior spirit to a social-worker figure to a mystic.

Participants: Javier Herrero, Judith Ryan, Lina Steiner.

218. Screwball Comedies

Classic and contemporary examples of the genre. Characteristics of 1930s and 1940s screwball comedies like It Happened One Night and The Philadelphia Story, including a Depression-era focus on class, an acknowledgment of rising divorce rates, and feisty heroines. Preston Sturges's 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, about a fictional director who disguises himself as a tramp to gather material for his movies. Updating the genre in Susan Seidelman's 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan.

Participants: Tom Conley, Lucy Fischer, David Shumway.

219. Sisters

Sisters as supporters and rivals. The four sisters of Louisa May Alcott's nineteenth-century American novel Little Women. How sibling rivalry in Cinderella and other fairy tales can help children understand their own emotions. "The Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite cautionary tale about two sisters who face temptation.

Participants: Nina Auerbach, Beverly Clark, Maria Tatar.

220. Taking Hip-Hop Seriously

Hip-hop's movement from the streets to the classroom. The South Bronx origins of the genre and key elements of hip-hop culture, including grafitti, break beats, break dancing, and MCs. Women artists who are challenging objectification and sexist images. Using the metaphor of minstrelsy to undermine racial stereotypes and to question the connection between racial identity and hip-hop.

Participants: Scott Heath, Eric Lott, Imani Perry.

221. Dante and His Afterlife

Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century Italian poem The Divine Comedy and its influence on later writers. The narrator's journey through the inferno and purgatory to paradise, including encounters with his beloved Beatrice and with the poet Vergil. How Dante's artist-hero inspired late-eighteenth-century Romantic poets. Matthew Pearl's mystery The Dante Club, about Dante translators who solve a Boston murder.

Participants: Benjamin Bennett, Matthew Pearl, Lino Pertile.

222. Fish in Literature

The traditional and symbolic pastime of fishing. Practical tips in Isaak Walton's seventeenth-century The Compleat Angler, which praises fishing as a communal activity and challenges Puritan prohibitions against group sports. How the detailed imagery of Elizabeth Bishop's 1940 poem "The Fish" convinces the reader to see what may not exist and demonstrates the power of imagination. A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean's 1976 novella, in which two Montana brothers bond through the art of fly-fishing.

Participants: Ann Colwell, Gregory Semenza, Kenneth Womack.

223. Voices from Prison

Literature about incarceration. Jack London's and Jimmy Santiago Baca's works about how the brutalization of prison makes prisoners more violent. The importance of art and our relation to others in the Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus, a collection of labor-camp letters. Fatna el Bouih's 2001 Arabic work Hadith al-atamah, which details her experience with other women prisoners in Morocco.

Participants: H. Bruce Franklin, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Susan Slyomovics.

224. Literary Roots of Opera

Operas inspired by literature. The romance between a gypsy and her jealous lover in Georges Bizet's late-nineteenth-century French opera Carmen, based on an 1845 short story by Prosper Mérimée. How Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin transforms Aleksandr Pushkin's Russian verse novel by offering multiple characters' perspectives, bringing to life dance scenes, and developing the inner world of the heroine. The comic seducer of Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff, drawn from several Shakespeare plays, including The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Participants: Leonard Barkan, Caryl Emerson, Nelly Furman.

225. Academic Novels

Fiction set in colleges and universities. David Lodge's satires Changing Places and Nice Work and how a post-World War II shift from pastoral to satiric academic novels reflected ambivalence about upward mobility. The humor of campus politics in Moo, Jane Smiley's 1992 novel about a fictional land-grant university. The Human Stain, Philip Roth's 2000 commentary on challenges to the university as a place to strive for human ideals.

Participants: Bernard Avishai, Bruce Robbins, Jane Smiley.

226. London in Literature

The changing city in the work of three authors. How Ben Jonson's The Alchemist reflects London's shift from a city of open spaces to a densely populated Renaissance metropolis. The eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson's changing perception of the city, from his depiction of corruption and callousness in the early poem "London" to his later appreciation for the city's diverse population. Bleak House, Charles Dickens's Victorian novel that documents urban poverty and encourages readers to create change.

Participants: Douglas Bruster, Nicholas Hudson, Sharon Marcus.

227. Pride and Prejudice

The continuing appeal of Jane Austen's 1813 novel and its heroine, Elizabeth Bennett. How Elizabeth must come to know herself in order to love another. Film and television versions of Pride and Prejudice. The economic stakes of the marriage market in Regency England.

Participants: Rachel Brownstein, Marcia McClintock Folsom, Susan Staves.

228. Literature on Foot

Writing inspired by walking. How William Wordsworth's long Miltonic poem The Prelude uses walking as a metaphor for the journey of composition. The mental freedom of solitary walks in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The difference between regular walking, repeated communal acts of procession, and irregular or inspirational walking in the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman.

Participants: James Chandler, Christie McDonald, James Simpson.

229. Topsy-Turvy

Inversions of class and gender roles inspired by pre-Lenten Renaissance carnivals. The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of the carnivalesque comedy of the marketplace in François Rabelais's sixteenth-century works Gargantua and Pantagruel. How everyday jests allowed English Renaissance women to mock and temporarily reverse roles with men. Eighteenth-century British public masquerades, in which classes mingled and reversed roles through costume.

Participants: Pamela Allen Brown, Terry Castle, Lawrence Kritzman.

230. Women Public Intellectuals

Three women of letters who confronted the issues of their time. The late-twentieth-century American author Susan Sontag, whose works On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others consider the impact of images of violence and suffering. How Simone de Beauvoir's ideas about the self and other developed, later shaping her book The Second Sex. The German philosopher Hannah Arendt's theories about plurality and the dangers of withdrawing from the world.

Participants: Susan Fraiman, Margaret Simons, Liliane Weissberg.

231. Libraries

The importance and allure of archives. Exploring a treasury of illustrated manuscripts in the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's 2001 My Name Is Red, set in late-sixteenth-century Istanbul. In an Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh's 1992 work about how an anthropologist uncovers the story of a medieval slave in Cairo's Jewish geniza, a repository for sacred documents. The difference between preserving and seeking knowledge in The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's 1980 murder mystery, which takes place in the library of a fourteenth-century abbey.

Participants: Norma Bouchard, Erdag Goknar, Amitava Kumar.

232. Epic War Heroes

Changing definitions of heroism in epic poetry. Vergil's Aeneid, which praises Aeneas as a leader of men rather than as a warrior and considers the relation between Roman heroism and revenge. The clash between force and wisdom in La chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), an eleventh-century Old French poem about Charlemagne and the Battle of Rencesvals. The medieval Spanish epic The Cid and how El Cid's humanity makes him a popular and powerful leader.

Participants: Howard Bloch, Louise Mirrer, David Quint.

233. American AIDS Drama

Three late-twentieth-century plays that confront the AIDS crisis. Larry Kramer's 1988 The Normal Heart, which documents the lack of attention initially given to the disease and the homophobia surrounding it. A sister coping with her brother's disease in Paula Vogel's 1992 The Baltimore Waltz. Angels, historical figures, and contemporary characters intermingling in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America.

Participants: Catherine Sheehy, Don Shewey, Robert Vorlicky.

234. Political Satire

Humor that comments on society. Jonathan Swift's early eighteenth-century English novel Gulliver's Travels, which critiques not only the politics of his day but human nature. How America (the Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, mocks government and the way we teach it. A nineteenth-century American who travels to medieval England in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which reflects Twain's Calvinistic skepticism about reforming a predestined world.

Participants: Robert Bednar, Lawrence I. Berkove, Jonathan Kramnick.

235. Victorian Word and Image

The visual arts' influence on writing in nineteenth-century England. How photography's popularity led to more detailed descriptions in novels like Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Mary Gaskell's Mary Barton. How the Pre-Raphaelite author Christina Rossetti combined image and word in her poetry, including "Goblin Market," "In an Artist's Studio," and If a Pig Wore a Wig. The increasingly important role of art critics, like John Ruskin, to painting's expanding audience.

Participants: Nancy Armstrong, Kate Flint, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra.

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