Deerfield's Complete Course Catalog

The soul-searching Hamlet turns to actors, whose “purpose of playing…was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” Today, we still look to those “walking shadows” who “strut and fret their hour upon the stage” to find some sense of our own natures in the theater’s unforgiving mirror. Using Shakespeare’s dark comedies Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice, his late romance The Tempest, and his tragedies Macbeth and Hamlet, students examine and reflect on the plays’ defining moments from theatrical and literary perspectives. They attempt to view and explore the plays as actors, critics, and audience members through seminar discussions, essays, staging exercises and improvisations.

The ground-breaking “dystopian” novels of the 20th Century, such as Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, have produced an extraordinary and growing body of literature that imagines future worlds shaped by current trends, for better and worse. What kind of societies will cyberspace, genetic engineering, emerging technologies , climate change, terrorism, population growth and resource wars produce? What will be the fate of the institutions and ideals that presently define us? What will happen to our fundamental notions of liberty, the individual, and human relationships? Will human beings flourish or fail? This course will examine these questions through several of the finest recent literary dystopias and will approach the reading in a primarily seminar-style, discussion format. Writing assignments will be predominantly creative responses to the reading, with an occasional foray into relevant essays, short stories and films. Possible texts include Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood; The Road, by Cormac McCarthy; The Dazzle of Day, by Molly Gloss; Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson; Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban.

The decade of the 1950s was full of contrasts: Ike presided in the White House but James Dean ruled the Hollywood screen; some people lived sedately in the suburbia of Beaver Cleaver while others struggled for an equal place to sit at a lunch counter. Parents brought stability to the evening meal, but Elvis played the pied piper to teenage-America and rebels battled mass conformity. Beyond these conflicting images, the fact of 50 years of two world wars and a world-wide depression had many hungry for change. Technology advertised a solution to every problem, but fears of the atom bomb, the Cold War, and the threat of communism cast a long shadow over the decade. While pop culture let the good times roll, writers (and artists, musicians, and film directors) showed us another side. Reading James Baldwin, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Sylvia Plath, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and Richard Yates gives us a fifty/fifty chance of getting at the heart of the Fifties. This two-term course comes with the option of a spring term elective devoted to “The Stage and Screen of the 1950s.”

Using William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and The New Yorker as keystone texts, students in this writing intensive course will practice the art of writing non-fiction prose in a variety of forms. In addition to contributing regularly to a course blog and writing numerous short and medium length pieces (reflections, humor, editorials, profiles, memoir, etc.), students will read and dissect excerpts and full texts from authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Jon Krakauer, Elizabeth Kolbert, and David Halberstam. Over the course of the fall and winter terms students will plan, research, write, and edit one longer “capstone” piece of writing that captures their interest with an eye toward sending it to an appropriate publication for consideration, before turning their attention to the Meditation after the Long Winter Weekend.

Paris, Harlem, Greenwich Village: Why were these places such powerful magnets for a generation of writers, artists, and musicians? Students will discover how a diverse range of Americans at home and abroad responded to the cultural climate of the 1920s, a decade characterized by enormous artistic upheaval in the midst of a balloon of economic prosperity. Special attention will be paid to the space Paris, Harlem, and Greenwich Village occupied in the cultural imagination of the 1920s. Students will not only study literature but also how jazz has shaped modernism in American poetry and fiction. Among the writers students will encounter will be James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Claude McKay, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Toomer. Writing assignments will include personal and analytical essays, as well as creative pieces inspired by modernist models.

“The past is never dead,” says a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun; “it’s not even past.” Faulkner’s famous paradox calls attention to an area of enormous fascination on the part of modern writers, whose efforts over the past century to represent the many shapes the past assumes is the subject of this course. In some cases, the past is deliberately called back in forms of self-understanding, moral reflection, confession or exculpation, or witnessing. In other instances, the past lingers or returns unbidden as a haunting, a dream, an outburst of hysterical anguish, or even pathological violence. And, sometimes, a useable past must be constructed before a new present might flourish. We will examine a number of works whose explorations and formal enactments of the presence of the past count as among the greatest achievements of modern art. Texts to be enjoyed may include works by Truman Capote, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tim O’ Brien, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf. With the poetry and prose of modern writers in English as its basis, this class will also feature a dozen two- or three-class-long lectures by Deerfield faculty from disciplines outside the English Department. Intended to enrich students’ understanding of the literature under discussion, to broaden their thinking about the central topic of the course, and to suggest directions for additional study, these lectures will examine modern memory in relation to the following areas of study: relativity and quantum theory (Mr. Bakker); urban spaces (Mr. Barnes); archaeology and myth (Dr. Burke); physiology of memory and pathology (Dr. Cullinane); nostalgia and Spanish poetry (Dr. Curtis); geology (Mr. Harcourt); the primitive in modern art (Ms. Hemphill); the tango in Latin America (Dr. Invernizzi); the Holocaust and collective memory (Ms. Melvoin); monuments and memorial architecture (Mr. Moorhead); musical memory (Dr. Warsaw).

This advanced workshop is for accomplished writers who want to develop their craft by experimenting in a variety of genres: poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, personal vignettes, and meditations. In class, students discuss the work of published authors, practice different techniques, critique their peers’ work, and develop rewriting skills. Texts include The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Finbar’s Hotel, What If?, and The Things They Carried.

This course seeks to explore the concept of sanity and those to whom the label “crazy” has often been attached. Through close-readings of texts that vary across genre and historical lines, we will confront a series of complex and often overlapping questions: What are the telltale signs of insanity, and who defines the criteria for determining it? What sorts of power relations are implicit in such decisions? Is it possible to be “crazy” at one moment, but wholly sane in the next? What happens when one willfully inhabits the label? Are there any scenarios within which insanity might actually be a desirable condition? In articulating responses to these and other questions, students will develop improved reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. Texts will include fiction, poetry, prose, film, and readings in psychological theory.

In this course our concern will be the literature of postcolonialism (all that’s written after the colonizing force has gone home). In his poem “Conqueror,” W.S. Merwin frames many of our questions, albeit without that mark of punctuation: “when they start to use your language/ do they say what you say/ who are they in your words/ …do you know who is praying/ for you not to be there.” In addition to taking up the questions we hear Merwin asking—What does it feel like to be the conquered? the one in power? How do you know the answers to those two questions? What happens when the conquerors finally go away? Can they ever leave?—we’ll also frame our own questions and engage critical theorists to give us a new language to contain new ideas. Our path through the crowded landscape of writers concerned with postcolonialist questions will be necessarily circuitous (geographically, temporally)—and varied when it comes to genre: we’ll read essays, novels, poems, plays, and we’ll take in a few films that amplify the postcolonial issues we’re exploring. In the Fall term we’ll focus on literature of post-Independence India, writers from home and abroad (which is which?). In the Winter term we’ll cast a wider net to include writers from other former British colonies: the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria. We’ll turn also to Americans’ literary presence in a postcolonial world. Our writing will span the spectrum: journal work, personal narrative, critical essay, poetry.

What child has not fantasized about life in the big city? Even those of us who have “grown up” in the city might find ourselves leaving the city and coming back or drawn to new cities across the globe. City lights have been beckoning men and women for generations. Freed from the land and seeking opportunity, more than 50 percent of the world’s population now live in cities, and there is no end to urbanization in sight. An article published recently in The European boldly claimed, “Cities are Making Us More Human.” Generations of writers would have disagreed and with French theorist Jean Baudrillard depicted cities as “distinguished by the catastrophic fantasies they give rise to and which, in turn, are vital to their essential charm.” In this seminar, we will study the rise of the city as geographical location and as cultural production, the enchanting subject and setting of literary, artistic, and critical creations across the globe. We will travel to Shakespeare’s Venice, crossroads of east and west, in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, seeking through close reading and critical writing the thematic patterns that will continue to guide this course of study: country and city, reality and fantasy, male andfemale, self and other, local and exotic, insider and outsider, and how imagining the city has continued to define and complicate these dualities. Our subsequent sequencing of texts and visual arts selections will build upon this “opening” and take us perhaps to the London of Blake and Eliot with stops in the Paris of Balzac and Baudelaire and the St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky before students will be invited to research a “foreign” cityscape of their choosing: Tokyo, Beijing, Abu Dhabi, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Cairo. With this exercise, we will also consider the fate of the city and debate the ethical and environmental choices now facing the global community. What does it mean to be “more human”? Culminating in the senior meditation, personal narrative compositions will grow from imitation and analysis of several models, including excerpts from two famous meditations on the city,Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem (San Francisco) and Alfred Kazin’s memoir A Walker in the City (Brooklyn).