1. Literature and Humor

Humor from a variety of perspectives. Classical and medieval traditions of comedy--including Plautus's plays, early modern feasts of fools, and Erasmus's In Praise of Folly--that influence the twentieth century. Soviet and Russian traditions of joke telling, Mark Twain, and the musical theater of Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Participants: Svetlana Boym, Natalie Zemon Davis, James Tatum.

2. Literature Matters: What We Read and Write in Times of Calm and in Times of Crisis

How literature helps shape people's lives and values and how people read and write to endure and understand extreme situations. The Bible and hymnals in pre-Revolutionary War American households. The role of the reader during community events and the growing emphasis on book ownership during the war. The focus of postwar novels on the responsibility of freedom in a new republic and the importance of education for democracy. Charlotte Temple by Mrs. Rowson, Henry David Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience and Walden Pond, the appeal of nature writers. Nazi concentration camps and the effect of Molière's play The Misanthrope that one survivor, Charlotte Delbo, describes in her memoirs.

Participants: Lawrence Buell, Cathy N. Davidson, Stephen Greenblatt, Marianne Hirsch.

3. Freshman Writing

An almost universal requirement for undergraduates: What do colleges and universities expect the course to accomplish? The history of writing and rhetoric, from Aristotle to Erasmus to the present-day college composition classroom. Writing anxiety and how to help students find their voices as writers. Some common misconceptions about writing; the difference between summary and analysis. Teaching techniques that have students work collaboratively. Students at the College of Staten Island share their experiences in a writing class.

Participants: Gregory Colomb, Ellen Goldner, Andrea A. Lunsford.

4. Censorship

A historical perspective on censorship and its social and physical consequences. The importance of free expression in democracies. Gustave Flaubert's trial for Madame Bovary in Paris in the 1850s. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. Censorship in the former Soviet Union. Complaints against books in libraries of the United States.

Participants: Marianna Tax Choldin, Jonathan Culler, Judith Krug, Donald Shojai.

5. Favorite Passages

Several scholars read passages that they love and that they like to teach, and then they speak briefly about why the passages move them. A description of Odysseus's reunion with Penelope from Homer's Greek epic poem The Odyssey, a passage from Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient about reading books aloud, and how he writes each passage in a different style, a passage from the Aeolus episode in James Joyce's Ulysses in which Joyce employs the technique of doubling, a passage from the nineteenth-century playwright Georg Büchner's Lenz about the eighteenth-century Latvian poet and playwright Jakob Lenz.

Participants: Robert Fagles, Linda Hutcheon, Lawrence S. Rainey, C. Lynne Tatlock.

6. Preservation of the Book and Public Libraries

The importance of access to books for the public and for teachers, students, and scholars. The role of libraries in a democracy. Attempts to preserve books and newspapers. Public libraries as one of the few noncommercial places remaining in contemporary American society. The education public libraries can provide. Ray Bradbury on writing Fahrenheit 451 in a public library.

Participants: Ray Bradbury, J. Hillis Miller, Ruth Perry.

7. Shakespeare Then and Now

On the ways that Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet have been imagined and interpreted in performance, from the reasons for their tragedy to their portrayals of parents and children. The development of the theater in Elizabethan England and the building of the Globe Theatre. The theatricality of daily life and self-presentation in the Renaissance that gave rise to the theaters. The nineteenth-century Romantic interpretation of Hamlet as meditative and introspective, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, and the influence of historical versions of the play on audiences and actors today. Two different film versions of Romeo and Juliet: Baz Luhrmann's (1996) and Franco Zeffirelli's (1968).

Participants: Michael Goldman, Jean Howard, Susanne Wofford.

8. Personal Writing

Examples of autobiographies and other forms of personal writing: Thomas Jefferson, whose life story included the original draft of the Declaration of Independence; Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography; Susan Rubin Suleiman on her Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and why she chose the diary form to record her return to her Hungarian homeland; Alice Kaplan on her French Lessons: A Memoir and on recapturing memories. The value of personal writing in the classroom. The intertwining of autobiographies and social context.

Participants: Alice Kaplan, James Olney, Susan Rubin Suleiman.

9. The Bible as Literature: Translations and Interpretations

Issues scholars must consider when they translate, study, or teach the Bible. The issues one scholar faced in translating the Old Testament; the variety of ancient languages. How interpretations of the Bible changed during the Renaissance. The development of the concept of the Bible as literature. The difference in the literary, historical, and theological views of the Gospels.

Participants: Robert Alter, Steven Knapp, Debora Shuger.

10. Advocacy in the Classroom

The teacher as advocate and the nature of academic freedom. The responsibilities of an advocate. A definition of academic freedom that gives teachers latitude in deciding how material is taught but that emphasizes the responsibilities teachers have toward students. How teachers can introduce views without requiring students to adhere to them. One teacher on why the inclusion of a feminist perspective on literature--or a perspective that men and women are equal and should be considered equally--matters. The challenges of teaching controversial subject matter, and one teacher's experience teaching a Middle Eastern history course.

Participants: Carolyn Heilbrun, Michael Olivas, John Voll.

11. The American Dream

The pre-Revolutionary roots of the dream and the focus on opportunities to an individual and aspirations of an ideal Puritan community by English settlers. Literature of the Virginia Company and its hope for prosperity versus the New England colonies and their focus on conscience; John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity." Nineteenth-century perspectives on the dream in the writings of Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who emphasized the need for self-reliance and the likelihood that hard work and desire will not fulfill the dream. Fiction that depicts themes of immigration and migration as part of the American Dream--Abraham Cahan's "Yekl," Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Participants: Martha Banta, T. Walter Herbert, Janice Knight.

12. The Humor of Outsiders

How humor often relies on a rift between insiders and outsiders, whether in literary humor, popular humor, or folk humor. The stereotypical outsider figure who is the butt of the joke. How the object of a joke can use the stereotype to transform it: women as the butt of jokes versus feminist humor, where women find a comic voice; how African American humor allowed slaves to preserve a part of their heritage. The use of technology in circulating jokes.

Participants: Regina Barreca, Alan Dundes, John Lowe.

1998 Program Topics >