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.
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
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
- 4/09Friday12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Online EventFriday, 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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Meeting ID: 813 3091 1036
- 4/23Friday
- 10/01FridayBlithewood, Levy InstituteFriday, 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. - 10/01Friday