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Bard Literature Program
Main Image for Literature

Literature

Mary McCarthy and Ralph Ellison
Literature Menu
  • Curriculum + Course of Study
  • Community + Resources
    • Faculty
  • Mission + Aims
  • Equity + Justice Initiatives
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The Literature Program at Bard is free from the barriers that are often set up between critical and creative engagement, between different national literatures, or between the study of language and the study of the range of intellectual, historical, and imaginative dimensions to which literature's changing forms persistently refer. Literary studies are vitally engaged with interdisciplinary programs and concentrations such as Experimental Humanities; Human Rights; Mind, Brain and Behavior; Middle Eastern Studies; and the Africana, Asian, Classical, Environmental and Urban, Gender and Sexuality, Latin American and Iberian, Medieval, and Victorian Studies Programs. 
More about the Program

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 such as Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies, Experimental Humanities, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Latin American & 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 literature@bard.edu.

Literature Events

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  • 4/09
    Friday

    Friday, April 9, 2021

    The Buddha’s Shadow and God’s Flesh: Image and Anti-image in Huiyuan and Julian of Norwich

    Yun Ni, Assistant Professor of English Literature,
    Peking University

    Online Event 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    In this talk the speaker will compare how medieval Chinese Buddhism and medieval English Christian mysticism deal with the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. Specifically, the comparison centers on the ideology of visualization of the late fourth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–417) and the late fourteenth-century English Christian mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–1430). A thousand years apart, their articulations of the imagistic representation of the transcendent still reveal synchronic connections between Buddhist and Christian ideas about the absolute presence and necessary absence of the divine. Both religious thinkers use details related to the skin and to textiles when they address the representation of the “ineffable.” The ways they treat the boundaries between skin and textiles expose fundamental differences between the Trinity of the Christian God and the Buddha’s three bodies (the Trikāya), but the two religious writers reflect on a similar oscillation between the active generation and passive reception of mental images.

    Join Zoom Meeting:  https://bard.zoom.us/j/81330911036
    Meeting ID: 813 3091 1036

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    12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Online Event
  • 4/23
    Friday


    Image by Ralf Skirr
    Friday, April 23, 2021

    Learn to Love the Questions Themselves: Rilke on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

    Prof. Ulrich Baer in Conversation
    Online Event 10:30 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5
    Prof. Ulrich Baer of NYU will discuss via Zoom the works of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) with Prof. Peter Filkins and the students of LIT 2248 - Rilke in English. Following the threads of Loss, Grief, and Transformation that run throughout Rilke's poetry, fiction, and correspondence, Ulrich Baer will take up Rilke's thoughts on the role of "death in life" and how Rilke struggled to resolve its force and nemesis. Those attending from the broader Bard community will also be encouraged to participate in the conversation and pose questions of their own about Rilke's work, life, and thinking on grief and loss.

    Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography. His books include Remnants of Song: The Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan; Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma; The Rilke Alphabet; What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Equality and Truth in the University, and, as editor and translator, The Dark Interval: Rilke’s Letters on Loss, Grief and Transformation; Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters on Life, the German edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Prose. He hosts the ideas podcast, Think About It, and has published editions of numerous classic books with Warbler Press.

    10:30 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5 Online Event
  • 10/01
    Friday

    Friday, October 1, 2021 – Saturday, October 2, 2021

    Celebrating Celan at 100: Witnessing for the Witness

    Blithewood, Levy Institute In the one hundredth year after Paul Celan’s birth and the fiftieth year after his death — Bard College will host “Celebrating Celan at 100: Witnessing for the Witness,” a gathering of poets, scholars, writers, publishers, and translators to reflect on Celan’s work and his influence upon German and English poetry, including a performance of musical settings of Celan’s poetry and an exhibition of lithographs by his wife and collaborator Gisèle Lestrange.

    Organized by a trio of translators with long ties to Bard – Peter Filkins, Susan H. Gillespie, and Pierre Joris – in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Dutchess County, the conference will mark the publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan, the final volume of the complete bilingual edition of Celan’s poetry, translated by Joris. Christine Ivanovic will deliver the keynote address, and welcoming ceremonies will include Paul Celan’s son, Éric Celan, and his literary executor Bertrand Badiou. The conference will feature six panels to be presented by poets, writers, and scholars, a concert of musical settings of Celan’s poetry presented by the Bard College Music Conservatory, and a screening of Wolfsbohne – From Czernowitz to Mychailivka, a documentary by Thierry Valletoux (in French, German and English with English subtitles) that traces Celan’s life journey.

    The conference will take place at Blithewood on the Bard campus and is free and open to the public. Lunch and coffee will be provided on both days. To register for the conference, please fill out the linked Google form. Walk-ins will be welcome, but it is best to register ahead of time in order to reserve a seat and box lunch.
    Blithewood, Levy Institute
  • 10/01
    Friday

    Friday, October 1, 2021

    IWT Writer as Reader Workshops - Online

    Olin Humanities Building 9:00 am – 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    We are excited to announce that both the October 1 and November 5, 2021 Bard College IWT Writer as Reader Workshops will be held online.

    Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, to grasp the meaning in more complex texts, and to infer meaning from what they read. These workshops invite secondary and college teachers to consider “writing to read” as a central classroom practice, one that shows rather than tells students how writing clarifies the meaning of texts. Working with diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants discover what they bring to the text, what is apparent in the text, what is inferred, and what questions the text poses.

    Workshop offerings TBA

    9:00 am – 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Olin Humanities Building
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