Reading Literature: How to Do Things with Words How does language make and unmake the world around us? Is literature capable of intervening in the social and historical conditions of its own making? How does literary criticism participate in cultural transformation? To get a grasp on these questions, we will read widely in literature that explores the relationships between language, power, and social life, as well as criticism and theory that examines the interactions between aesthetics and politics. Our inquiry will survey the practical and theoretical foundations of literary study, as well as current debates about methodology in the field. Readings might include: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and poetry by Phillis Wheatley Peters, John Keats, Dionne Brand, Solmaz Sharif, and M. NourbeSe Philip

The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Ethics and Empire Coetzee, whose novels engage questions of institutional racism, state-sponsored violence, patriarchal privilege, environmental degradation, animal rights, and how to ethically approach cultural Others, manages to speak of specific historical circumstances—such as South Africa’s apartheid regime—while simultaneously addressing universal dilemmas of our contemporary human condition.  Having received both the Booker (twice) and Nobel Prizes for literature, Coetzee is recognized as the living heir of both Kafka and Beckett, and as a writer whose searing prose and formal experimentation both extend and transform the novel’s traditional role as our culture’s most skeptical self-inquisitor.  Depicting every act of writing as either a confrontation or an evasion, Coetzee both reveres and rebukes the literary traditions he warily embraces.  We will read his strongest and most globally recognized works, from Waiting for the Barbarians through Disgrace.

Poems, Poets, Poetry Emily Dickinson declared, “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”  In this introductory class we will encounter hair-raising poems from a wide variety of genres and historical eras in order to examine their structural forms, linguistic audacities, ideological captivities, and personal revelations.  We will also read various poets’ meditations on their own craft, from which we will draw our own conclusions about what poems do, should, or might accomplish in the world.  Our goal will always be to render poetry accessible, relevant, and enjoyable—to become confident readers of, and informed writers about, the diverse poetic utterance.

Introduction to Contemporary Literary Theory In this course we will introduce several major schools of contemporary literary theory. By reading theoretical texts in close conjunction with works of literature, we will illuminate the ways in which these theoretical stances can produce multiple interpretations of a given literary work. The approaches covered may include New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Marxism and Cultural Criticism, Race Theory and Multicultural Criticism, Feminism, Post-Colonial Criticism, Queer Studies, Eco-Criticism, Post-Structuralism, and others. These theories will be applied to various works of fiction, poetry, and drama. The goal will be to make students critically aware of the fundamental literary, cultural, political, and moral assumptions underlying every act of interpretation they perform.

Nineteenth Century British Literature (II) The 19th century is the era of “peak novel,” for never before or since has the genre exhibited such confidence in its ability to tell the truth about both the teeming world and the private life.  But far from merely reflecting social reality, the novelists and poets of the period played an active part in constructing their readers' ideas about gender and sexuality, imperialism and colonialism, class, religion, and technology, insisting that literature be relevant and revelatory in a time of swift and sometimes frightening cultural and intellectual innovation.  Works to be covered will include novels by Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy, and the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti.

The Romantic Revolution he generation of British poets and novelists known collectively as the Romantics decisively rebelled against earlier conceptions of what literature could speak about, how it could best describe a rapidly changing world, and who was fit to be its reader.  Arguably the first environmentalists, the Romantics also initiated our modern discussions of gender, class, race, and nationalism.  To encounter the Romantics is to witness intellectual courage taking up arms against habit, prejudice, and tyranny.  We will trace their genius and daring (and follow their personal attachments for, and rivalries with, each other) through the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the novels of Mary Shelley and Emily Brönte.

Towards a Poetics of Community Why read literature? One answer: such reading is not individual but communal. It links readers to each other in aesthetic experience, in ethical and hermeneutic debate, and in appreciation for writers and fellow readers. As we read literary texts from different times, cultures, and genres, we will examine how they anticipate, create, or recreate readerly communities, and how these communities in turn help shape the texts as they are experienced. We will also strive to form our own readerly community—one that is as inclusive and as intellectually generous as possible. We will begin with close analysis of poetry in various forms from various historical periods. We will then read dramas by such playwrights as William Shakespeare, Margaret Edson, and/or Lolita Chakrabarti, as well as two works from among such prose writers as Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Marilynne Robinson, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Walter Moseley, and Jean Rhys.

The Body in Question What does literature have to say about the fact that we are “embodied” beings?—that our consciousness interacts with the world through an envelope of flesh that both weighs us down with its mundane requirements and propels us forward with its remarkable abilities and insistent desires?  We know that the world at large cares deeply about our bodies, for it continually categorizes us along the lines of race, gender, age, and “normality,” but who gets (or should get) the last word about what our skin and bones declare about us?  In this class we will investigate what novelists, playwrights, and poets have to say about our ability to either make peace with our flesh or to transcend it, and whether such outcomes can best be accomplished through religion, imagination, drugs, sexuality, or political action.  The works we address will include Shelley’s Frankenstein, Morrison’s Sula, Beckett’s Happy Days, Silko’s Ceremony, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and others.

Cates Baldridge

Reviews and ratings for Cates Baldridge at Middlebury College.Cates Baldridge teaches Reading Literature, Novels by J.M. Coetzee, Poems, Poets, Poetry and more.  Explore top rated instructors and find the best for you.Is Cates Baldridge good ? Find out on MiddCourses.

Feel like the prof is one of those you either love or hate. Fine enough guy, but a bit unapproachable. Funny moments in lecture, though. Totally unprompted. Sneakily can be one of those classes that you think little of but bites back in the end since the workload seems so tiny. Don't get hit with the hammer!

Baldridge is obviously passionate about the material, but I struggled to engage with it on a substantive level. I think that the structure is arguably not structured enough, and only having three essays was not too fun in terms of grading structure. He's a fickle grader.

Baldridge is very enthusiastic with his lectures, I learned a lot. However, it seemed like the material included a lot of memorization of terms, and the final exam was basically defining a bunch of these terms. Lots of reading and ~3 essays. 