Literature

Mary McCarthy and Ralph Ellison

Toni Morrison, “Literature and Public Life"

“Literature allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons. And in doing so, is far more necessary than it has ever been. As art it deals with the human consequences of the other disciplines: history, law, science, economics, labor studies, medicine. As narrative its form is the principal method by which knowledge is appropriated and translated.”

About the Program

Curriculum and Course of Study

The Literature Program at Bard challenges the national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries that have too often dictated the terms by which we understand the meaning and value of the written word. Our curriculum emphasizes cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity, and is vitally engaged with interdisciplinary programs and concentrations such as Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, Experimental Humanities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Curriculum and Course of Study
Community and Resources

The Bard Literature Program has a long-standing commitment to fostering the work of writers and thinkers who challenge political authority, diversify literary canons, and expand the parameters of public discourse. As poets, critics, novelists, scholars, translators, teachers, editors, journalists, and political activists, our faculty, students, and alumni/ae are uniquely positioned to interrogate inherited forms of knowledge and to chart out innovative models of imaginatively and socially engaged responsibility.

Community and Resources
Our Mission and Aims

Literary study wakes us up to the historical weight of our individual and collective voices and expands the analytic and expressive tools we use to engage other beings. Thinking critically, both individually and collectively, speaking up with compassion and conviction, and writing with clarity and purpose are the cornerstones of what we teach and practice as a faculty. These skills are essential to the study of literature, to active citizenship, and ultimately, to having a voice in the world.
Mission and Aims
Equity and Justice Initiatives

To study literature is to insist on the value of our differences, and to learn to encounter difference in expansive ways. Yet when it comes to social inequalities and educational access in this country, the humanities have a long and complicated history. In order to address these systemic injustices, the Bard Literature Program is committed to frank self-scrutiny, to transparency, and to ensuring genuine equity for all members of our community.
Equity and Justice Initiatives

Additional Contact

To find out more about the Bard Literature Program, our upcoming events, and current initiatives, please contact us at [email protected].

Literature Events

View all News + Events

2/03
Friday

Credit: China Jorrin
Friday, February 3, 2023
New Kinds of Attention
An Introduction to Writing-Based Teaching
Online Event 10:00 am – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In 2021, we launched an online workshop series to give teachers a new opportunity to experience IWT’s writing-based teaching practices. This series continues in 2023, allowing teachers to join us for an immersive, online introduction to IWT writing practices. Intended for those who might not be able to attend IWT’s one-day workshops at Bard, these workshops provide a taste of our popular July Weeklong Workshops on the Annandale campus. Check the website for an up-to-date list of offerings!

Workshops include:
• Introduction to Writing and Thinking (February 3)
• Introduction to Writing to Learn (February 3)
• Introduction to Thinking Historically through Writing (March 3)
• Introduction to Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines (March 3)
• A selection of online Writer as Reader workshops (TBA)

Participants are welcome to register for one or both dates. Visit iwt.bard.edu for details.

10:00 am – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Online Event

2/13
Monday

Monday, February 13, 2023
Kilometer 101: Reading and Conversation with the Author Maxim Osipov
Campus Center, Weis Cinema; Other 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other “undesirables” could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to observe a Russia that, in Maxim Osipov’s words, “changes a lot [in the course of a decade], but in two centuries—not at all.” The stories and essays in this volume—a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors—tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with Osipov’s trademark blend of daring and subtlety. Deceit, political pressure, ethnic discrimination, the urge to emigrate, and the fear of abandoning one’s home, as well as myriad generational debts and conflicts, are as complexly woven through these pieces as they are through the lives of Osipov’s fellow Russians and through our own. What binds the prose in this volume is not only a set of concerns, however, but also Osipov’s penetrating insights and fearless realism. “Dreams fall away, one after another,” he writes in the opening essay, “some because they come true, but most because they prove pointless.” Yet, as he reminds us in the final essay, when viewed from ground level, “life tends not towards depletion, towards zero, but, on the contrary, towards repletion, fullness.”

Maxim Osipov is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published six collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov’s writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Kilometer 101 is his most recent book. Osipov lived in Tarusa up until February 2022, when he moved to Germany.

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Campus Center, Weis Cinema; Other

3/03
Friday

Credit: China Jorrin
Friday, March 3, 2023
New Kinds of Attention
An Introduction to Writing-Based Teaching
Online Event 10:00 am – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In 2021, we launched an online workshop series to give teachers a new opportunity to experience IWT’s writing-based teaching practices. This series continues in 2023, allowing teachers to join us for an immersive, online introduction to IWT writing practices. Intended for those who might not be able to attend IWT’s one-day workshops at Bard, these workshops provide a taste of our popular July Weeklong Workshops on the Annandale campus. Check the website for an up-to-date list of offerings!

Workshops include:
• Introduction to Writing and Thinking (February 3)
• Introduction to Writing to Learn (February 3)
• Introduction to Thinking Historically through Writing (March 3)
• Introduction to Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines (March 3)
• A selection of online Writer as Reader workshops (TBA)

Participants are welcome to register for one or both dates. Visit iwt.bard.edu for details.

10:00 am – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Online Event