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RENAISSANCE
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM
19th CENTURY
20th CENTURY
AMERICAN
THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS
THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS
 course descriptions  MEDIEVAL ENGL G6043y Chaucer and the Problem of Angry Speech (Paul Strohm)
Wed 11-12:50. Seminar. Ten years ago a consensus seemed to be
emerging in which (abetted by books by Strohm and Wallace) Chaucer's
Canterbury pilgrimage was viewed as socially integrative, as a literary
modeling of dispute-resolution within a communal frame. Recent and
contrary opinion, however, emphasizes the persistence of aggressivity
within any social formation, and also interests itself in discourse-conflicts,
back-biting, scolding, and angry speech as inescapable conditions
of social interaction. Taking as its primary texts Chaucer's House
of Fame and Canterbury Tales, this seminar will probe the problem
and status of combativeness in spoken and narrative exchange. Some
issues to be considered will include: literary rivalries (HF and
pilgrim tellers), gossip and loose talk (Wife of Bath, Canon's Yeoman),
verbal incitement, poetical insurrection (the Miller's interruption
has been called 'the Peasants' Revolt in rhyme'), conciliation (Host/Pardoner,
Manciple/Cook). Supplementary readings will include Laclos and Mouffe
on aggressivity; C. Lindahl and E. Craun on angry speech; S. Phillips
on gossip; M. Turner on the impossibility of late-medieval community.
Phillips and Turner will be invited as visiting speakers, in relation
to the course. Short papers, as incentives to discussion, and a
final seminar paper in 'article' form. Application
required. Deadline: students should apply between late
November and mid-January, no later than January
8. Instructions. RENAISSANCE CLEN W4122y Wit and Humor in the Renaissance (Anne Prescott)
Mon & Wed 4:10-5:25. Lecture. What did Renaissance writers
find funny? What was their theory of the risible? How does laughter
help the body and cure neurosis? Should Christians write satire?
Focusing on prose satire, we will read classical works by Petronius
and Lucian and then Renaissance texts by such writers as Aretino,
Alberti, Rabelais, Labe, More, Nashe, Hall, Harington, and Donne.
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM ENGL W4703y Restoration and 18th-century Drama (Jenny Davidson)
Mon & Wed 9:10-10:25. Lecture. A survey of the English theater
from 1660-1800, with attention to a wide range of social, historical
and formal questions; we will consider performance history and theories
of acting as well as topics including gender, class, empire, power,
satire. Students with a practical interest in theater are encouraged
to enroll. 19th CENTURY ENGL W4404y Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray) Mon & Wed 1:10-2:25.
Lecture. This course examines the works of the major English
poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to
Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation,
the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti,
Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy. 20th CENTURY CLEN W4785y Global English Literature (David Damrosch) Tues
& Thurs 2:40-3:55. Lecture. A survey of the explosion of
English literatures around the globe in the course of the twentieth
century. Issues to be discussed will include exile and migration,
dialect and creolization, postcoloniality and the politics of literary
form, in Kipling, Eliot, Wodehouse, Barnes, Rhys, Desani, Rushdie,
Walcott, Coetzee, Gordimer, Tutuola, Kelman, Brooke-Rose, Jamyang
Norbu, and Shahid Ali. AMERICAN ENGL W4593y The American Novel 1789-1865 (Ezra Tawil) Tues &
Thurs 10:35-11:50. Lecture. History and theory of the novel
form in America, from its emergence after the Revolution, through
its dominance at mid-century, up to the emergence of the African
American novel in the years leading up to the Civil War. Readings
will likely include: Rowson, Foster, C.B. Brown, Cooper, Sedgwick,
Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville. THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS CLEN W4560y Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Bruce Robbins)
Tues & Thurs 4:10-5:25. Lecture. What are the intellectual
antecedents of contemporary critical, cultural, and social theory?
Where do the vocabularies and problematics that occupy us most urgently
today, or that we occupy--history, the subject, the other, the aesthetic,
culture, society, discourse, and so on--come from, and how does
this history illuminate their current challenges and relations?
Beginning with Judith Butler's argument about the French appropriations
of Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic and its place in her later theorizing
of gender and the body, this course will look back at certain thinkers
of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche,
Durkheim, Weber) who offer indispensable continuities with and counterpoints
to it. Though some knowledge of recent feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist
theory would be helpful, only minimal acquaintance will be presumed;
selected 20th-century readings that illustrate lines of connection
will be provided. OF RELATED INTEREST AMST G4120y Comics Marching into the Canon (Art Spiegelman) R 6:10-8. There has been a very recent sea-change in how comics are perceived in America, from the "crime against American children" decried by educators at the beginning of the 20th century through the comic book burnings and Senate Hearings of the early 1950s to the current celebration of the form as museum art, as the new Literature, as the site of academic inquiry (like, say, this seminar). It's a Faustian Deal, dragging comics out of their gutter and into the salon. Using the Masters of American Comics shows as a point of departure and as a point for contention, this course will study the 15 cartoonists exhibited in their historical context, as well as analyzing the work of other artists in their extended circles. (Despite the sociological and historical "through-line" of this seminar, primary focus will be placed on the aesthetic and formal achievements of these artists.) Application procedure: E-mail Angela Darling (amd44@columbia.edu) with the subject line "Comics Seminar" by Friday, November 10, and include your name, year of study, school, major / department, relevant course background, and reasons for wanting to take the course. Note to English Dept Graduate Students: this class can count toward your required coursework and will fulfill the 20th-century distribution requirement.JAZZ W4900y Topics in Jazz Studies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Brent Edwards) TR 9:10-10:25. Limited enrollment lecture (25 undergraduates, 10 graduate students). This course will focus on the ways that jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures, from the blues poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary fiction. We will consider in detail the ways that writers have discovered or intuited formal models and political implications in black music. Rather than simply assume that influence only travels in one direction, we will also take up some literary efforts (including autobiography, poetry, historiography, and criticism) by musicians themselves. What are the links between musical form and literary innovation? How can terms of musical analysis (improvisation, rhythm, syncopation, harmony) be applied to the medium of writing? How does music suggest modes of social interaction or political potential to be articulated in language? How does one evaluate the performance of a poem (in an oral recitation or musical setting) in relation to its text? Materials may include writings and recordings by Jacques Attali, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Kurt Schwitters, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Ella Fitzgerald, William Melvin Kelley, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Gayl Jones, Michael Ondaatje, Joseph Jarman, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen, among others.
MEDIEVAL
RENAISSANCE
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM
19th CENTURY
20th CENTURY
AMERICAN
THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS
course descriptions M.A. COURSES ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar (section 1) Introduction to Scholarly Writing (Amanda Claybaugh) Thurs 4:10-6. Through a careful reading of the most important scholarly work of recent years, we will explore a range of argumentative modes and evidentiary practices; through workshops of student writing, we will experiment with rhetoric, voice, and style. A recurrent topic will be the new attention to print culture and the ways in which it has reconceived of writing, publishing and reading. Other topics to include close and distant reading; empirical literary studies; the politics of identity; translation and colonial encounter; the fate of high theory and the persistance of historicism. Authors to include Amanda Anderson, Ian Baucom, Diana Fuss, Isabel Hofmeyr, Walter Benn Michaels, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and Leah Price.ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar (section 2) From Writer to Reader: 1500-1800 (David Kastan) Thurs 4:10-6. This course studies the ways in which written texts were produced, circulated, and read. We will focus on various aspects of book production, consumption, and reception: from the ambitions and intentions of authors, to the physical practices of manuscript production and print, to the trade in books, to the desire for authentic texts, copyright laws, and censorship, to the paratextual materials of early books, to the surviving evidence of reading practices, all with aim to think about how the material aspects of the books that were available to be read in this period shaped the ways in which those books were understood and valued. ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar (section 3) Narratives of Slavery (Saidiya Hartman) Thurs 2:10-4. By reading eighteenth and nineteenth-century narratives of slavery and theories of social death, disposable life, primitive accumulation, and the commodity, the course will explore the relation between modes of power and narrative representation, the entanglements of freedom and captivity in the liberal imagination, and the generic conventions of the slave narrative. The central questions to be examined are: How do the rhetorical strategies, modes of emplotment and argumentation, and forms of self-fashioning employed in autobiographical narratives illuminate the constituent elements of slavery? Is the tension between the law of the dead (slave law produces dead subjects), and the fiction of personhood the structuring antagonism of the slave narrative as genre? How does the crisis of witnessing in slave narratives articulate the limits of justice and the impossibility of legal redress? What are the ethical and political consequences of narrating slavery? For example, why is romance the most popular mode of representing slavery? What assumptions regarding decline, progress, and emancipation subtend the historiography of slavery? To what extent does the slave exercise a claim on the present and how might we produce an analytics of power that does not rely on empirical models that attempt to quantify violence, liberal models that normalize violence in the language of property, or impose historicist boundaries between "modern" and "pre-modern" forms of power? ENGL G5005x Masters Colloquium will take place on alternate Thursdays from 1-2. MEDIEVAL ENGL W4011x Chaucer (Paul Strohm) Mon & Wed 10:35-11:50.
Lecture. This course will consider Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as
a 'moment' and arena of narrative experimentation. Extended poetic
works in English were a novelty at the time that Chaucer wrote,
so his project was already infused with an element of risk. Furthering
his experimental motive was his decision to tackle a variety of
genres and styles, many for the first time in English. In this course,
we will read most of his Tales, attending to their narrative and
generic variety, with admiration for his accomplishments, with alertness
to his emergent tendencies, and with candor about his false starts
and dead ends. Lectures will occasionally be supported by brief,
supplemental handouts on matters of narrative theory. RENAISSANCE ENGL W4712x Shakespeare Lecture: Shakespearean Economies (Mario
DiGangi) Tues & Thurs 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course will
examine the representation of economics in the drama of Shakespeare,
and a few of his contemporaries, from 1590-1610, when London theater
was flourishing as a business and England was beginning to emerge
as an international economic power. Economics will be broadly defined
to encompass the financial, social, and sexual dynamics of the household,
the city, and the international market. We will explore the dramatic
representation of property (including stage properties and the notion
of the self as property), money, capitalism, mercantilism, class
conflict, nationalism, credit, debt, urban space, and questions
of worth, value, and ownership. Shakespeare plays might include
2 Henry VI (1591), The Taming of the Shrew (1592), The Comedy of
Errors (1592-94), The Merchant of Venice (1596-97), Troilus and
Cressida (1602), Measure for Measure (1603), King Lear (1604-5),
and Timon of Athens (1607-8). Non-Shakespearean plays might include
Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1589), Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday
(1599), Heywood's Edward IV (1599) and The Fair Maid of the West
(1600-1604), and Jonson's The Alchemist (1610). Requirements
for graduate students: a short paper (7 pp) and a longer paper
(12 pp). 18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM ENGL W4801x History of the Novel I (Jenny Davidson) Mon & Wed 1:10-2:25. Lecture. When people talk about the "rise" of the novel, where do they imagine it rose from and to? We will read some of eighteenth-century Britain's major canonical fictions alongside short critical selections (Watt, Barthes, Foucault) that give a vocabulary for talking about the techniques of realism; other topics for discussion include identity, sex, families, politics (in short, all the good stuff). [Readings are likely to include Defoe, Moll Flanders; Richardson, Pamela and subsequent contributions to the controversy its publication initiated by Eliza Haywood, Carlo Goldoni and others; Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; Burney, Evelina; and Austen, Persuasion (if time permits).] Requirements: six 2-page writing assignments (a cross between a reading journal entry and a mini-essay, with one or two options for creative assignments); submission of all of these assignments in a portfolio at the end of the semester, plus one 5-to-7 page essay (either an expansion of a journal entry or a new topic); and a final exam.ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry (Erik Gray) Mon & Wed 11-12:15. Lecture. An introduction to the works of the great poets of the Romantic period (1789-1824), especially William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. In addition to closely considering their poems, we will also read prose works that complement and illuminate the poetry, including essays by Wordsworth, Shelley, and William Hazlitt, and letters by Keats. Syllabus. ENGL W4301x The Age of Johnson, 1740-1800 (James Basker) Tues & Thurs 9:10-10:25. Lecture. The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their contemporaries in historic context; rise of the novel (Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne); poets from Pope to Blake and Wordsworth; women writers from Carter and Collier to Wollstonecraft; working class writers; topics include slavery and abolition in literature, the democratization of culture, and the transition to romanticism. ENGL G6321x Women, Politics, the Novel in the 1790s (Jenny Davidson) Mon 6:10-8. Seminar. In the wake of the French Revolution, writers of both sexes and all political complexions turned to the novel to work out arguments about political and domestic virtue, female education and the rights and obligations of women, metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries, the benefits and costs of strong government (both national and parental), the powers and limits of reason and sentiment. We will read a sequence of novels in their historical and cultural contexts; we will also consider questions of genre and canonicity, asking why so few of these novels are taken into account by important histories of the novel (Watt, McKeon, Armstrong) and how these books can clarify and complicate our own understanding of the relationships between fiction and politics. Novels are likely to include Inchbald, A Simple Story; Godwin, Caleb Williams and Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication; Wollstonecraft, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman; Burney, Camilla; Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney; Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers; Opie, Adeline Mowbray; Edgeworth, Belinda; Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Scott, Heart of Midlothian; Ferrier, Marriage; Shelley, Frankenstein. Criticism by M. Butler, G. Kelly, C. Johnson, I. Duncan, R. Crawford, K. Trumpener, I. Ferris, A. Welsh, J. Wilt and others. 19th CENTURY CLEN W4822x The 19th-century European Novel (Nicholas Dames)
Mon & Wed 10:35-11:50. Lecture. The European novel in the
era of its cultural dominance. Key concerns: the modern metropolis
(London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois narrative
(the parvenu, the adulterer, the adolescent, the consumer) and bourgeois
consciousness (nostalgia, ressentiment, sentimentalism, ennui);
subjectivity and its relation to class tactics, labor, money, and
social upheaval; the impact of journalism, science, economics. Works
by Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert,
Turgenev, Zola. Tentative syllabus,
with course overview and requirements. 20th CENTURY CLEN W4550x Narrative and Human Rights (Joseph Slaughter) Tues
& Thurs 6:10-7:25. Lecture (no auditors).. The convergences
and interdependencies of the thematics, philosophies, politics,
practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights.
In particular, the ways in which human rights discourse and literature's
generic technologies of representation construct visions of the
human being and/in society and facilitate (or not) the imagination
of an international order based on human dignity, equality, and
rights. We will read both classic literary texts and contemporary
writing (literary and non-literary) to think about the relationship
between story forms and human rights problematics and practices-e.g.,
sentimentality and humanitarianism; drama and truth commissions;
testimonio and group rights; the Bildungsroman and individual human
rights claims; chivalric romance and human rights advocacy; lyrical
memoir and torture. Syllabus. AMERICAN ENGL W4604x American Modernism (Rachel Adams) Mon & Wed
1:10-2:25. Lecture. This course surveys cultural responses to
the historical, technological, intellectual, and political conditions
of modernity in the U.S. Spanning the period from the turn of the
century to the onset of WWII, we consider the relationship between
key events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, WWI, the Jazz age, the
Great Depression); intellectual and scientific developments (the
theory of relativity, the popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis,
the anthropological concept of culture, the spread of consumer culture,
Fordism, the automobile, the birth of cinema, the skyscraper); and
cultural production. Assigned readings will include novels, short
stories, and contemporary essays. Visual culture--paintings, illustrations,
photography, and film--will also play an important role in our investigation
of the period. Past syllabus
(which will be somewhat revised). THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS ENGL W4725x Shakespeare: Whose Contemporary? (Helen Barr) Tues & Thurs 10:35-11:50. Lecture. 'He was not of an age, but for all time'. Was Ben Jonson right? This lecture course will examine responses ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries to a deliberately eclectic corpus of Shakespeare's plays. Why do certain plays appear to appeal to given cultural 'moments'? How far was Shakespeare's playwriting in keeping with practice in his own time? Shakespeare's drama will be placed alongside playtexts written by his contemporaries, 18th-century re-writings, critical reception (including performance diaries), modern stage history, and adaptations for film and television. There will be time for class discussion of issues raised in the lectures.Graduate students will be required to submit 3 ten-page papers during the course of the semester. The text for this class will be The Arden Complete Shakespeare which can be ordered through Amazon and is also available electronically. The supporting materials will be made available either at the lecture, or in the case, of visual performance or electronically archived materials, beforehand. Tentative syllabus. CPLS G4900x Introduction to Comparative Literature (David Damrosch and Sheldon Pollock) Wed 2:10-4. Lecture. Introduces beginning graduate students to comparative literature by (1) examining the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline and (2) introducing interdisciplinary method in literary study and sociology. CLEN W4996x Derrida (Gayatri Spivak) Mon & Wed 4:10-5:25. Lecture. Restricted to graduate students and undergraduate seniors. A consideration of the work of Jacques Derrida. Combination of summary and close reading. Consideration of problems in translation. Some reference to critical material. Graduate students: final paper (c. 15 pp). CLEN G4995x Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) Tues 11-12:50. Lecture. An intensive reading of selections from the late Lacan: Seminars XIV The Logic of the Phantasm; XVII Psychoanalysis upside down; XX Encore; XXIII The Sinthome and selected works by Molière, Laclos, Camus, Duras, James, D.H. Lawrence, and others. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan's thought to literature and culture, and his redefinition of sexuation, feminine sexuality, jouissance, love, and the symptom. Graduate student requirements: Seven 1-page responses on discussion board (4 before the middle of the term) and a 15 page final paper. CLEN G6632x [Studies in Film and Theory] Ugly Feeling: Bodies, Pain, Cinema (Maura Spiegel) Thurs 6:10-8. Seminar. This is a course about film and film theory, recent work in bio-medical culture-and their intersections. Films by Almadovar, Egoyan, Frears, Haynes, Kubrick and Leigh and others. Readings in film theory will track thinking about the gaze, identification and viewer experience-after Mulvey and Lacan. Issues in bio-medicine will include biology as ideology; changing sex; extraordinary bodies; medical advances vs. social realities, and "the plot of suffering." Readings in Foucault, Haraway, Latour, Morris, Sontag, among others. Syllabus. CLEN G6905x Plagiarism and Postcolonialism (Joseph Slaughter) Wed 2:10-4. This course examines practices of literary plagiarism, piracy, kidnapping, reproduction, falsification and other disparaged textual activities to consider their implication in the power/knowledge complex of (neo)imperial international relations under current capitalist copyright and intellectual property regimes that constitute the so-called "World Republic of Letters." In its attention to translinguistic and transnational examples of "copy writing," this course goes beyond the "Empire Writes Back" version of intertextuality that has characterized so many studies of the postcolonial novel, in which "non-Western" literature is read simply as a derivative response to the European canon. We will study cases that involve "trafficking" in texts across linguistic and national boundaries to analyze historical, cultural, socio-economic, political and theoretical notions of authorship, originality, and (trans-)textuality as they intersect with colonialism and postcolonialism and as they are being negotiated in legal and literary conventions in the contemporary era of cultural-economic globalization.Course Requirements: two short instigation papers (2 pages); research presentation; final seminar paper. Syllabus. MEDIEVAL ENGL G6091y (Seminar in Anglo-Saxon) The Witness and the Text. Subjectivity in Anglo-Saxon England (Patricia Dailey) W 1:10-4. Seminar. This course will explore the figure of the witness in Anglo-Saxon England and the early Middle Ages in literary, historical, and religious contexts. We will be looking at the implications of eyewitnessing in the construction of history and experiences of time, the role of the eyewitness and vision in the construction of authority, inscription as a form of testimony, Christian and non-Christian modes of bearing witness to the word, the question of the human and the voice in its Anglo-Saxon context. We will be looking at the relevance of testimony to poetry and its relation to contemporary thought. Readings include The Fates of the Apostles, Daniel, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, selections from Bede, Biblical texts, travel narratives (The Voyage of Othere) and pseudo travels such as The Wonders of the East as well as Old English Riddles. Theoretical texts include Agamben, Derrida, Lyotard, Felman, Blanchot and medieval theories of optics. Application procedures.CLEN G6035y Women in Medieval Life and Literature (Joan Ferrante & Robert Hanning) M 4:10-6. Seminar. In the course we will look at the roles of women in selected literary texts and at the work of women writers (Hrotsvit, Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schoenau, Clemence of Barking, the trobairitz, Marie de France, Christine de Pisan, Margery Kempe); we will also have available the letters of historic women (rulers, regents, consorts, colleagues, friends, family) on the web in Latin and in translation, as a background to help understand the literary works and the roles of women in the middle ages. RENAISSANCE ENGL W4101y Sixteenth-century Lyric (Molly Murray) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. This course will survey the development of major lyric forms in English from 1500 to 1603, with attention to cultural context. Poets will include Skelton, Gascoigne, Wyatt, Raleigh, Greville, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser. ENGL W4702y Tudor-Stuart Drama (Mario DiGangi) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Today considered the preeminent dramatist of Renaissance England, Shakespeare was in his own time one among many talented and admired playwrights working within a vibrant professional theater. In this course we will read the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries through a focus on sexuality. "Sexuality" will be broadly construed to encompass the following issues: ideologies of romantic love and sexual morality; discourses of erotic desire; concepts of masculinity and femininity; same-sex relationships; marriage and the family; virginity and chastity; rape and sexual violence; the imbrication of the sexual and the social. We will also examine feminist, historicist, and lesbian/gay critical accounts of gender and sexuality in early modern England. Plays might include: Lyly, Gallathea; Marlowe, Edward II; Anon., Arden of Faversham; Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness; Dekker and Middleton, The Roaring Girl; Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster; Jonson, Volpone, Epicoene; Middleton, Women Beware Women, The Changeling; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. While helpful, a Shakespeare course is not required. CLEN G6128y Erasmus and Humanism (Kathy Eden) R 4:10-6. Seminar. ENGL G6200y English Reformation Literature (Alan Stewart) T 2:10-4. Seminar. "English Reformation Literature" could equally be titled "Reforming English Literature". This course examines the processes by which writers, translators, editors and printers came to terms with the new demands of a post-Reformation England in the sixteenth century. We will read texts written as part of self-conscious pro-Reformation campaigns by authors such as John Bale, Robert Crowley and John Foxe; controversies between William Tyndale, Thomas More and Simon Fish; Protestant recastings and appropriations of earlier English writers, notably Chaucer and Langland; English Reformation redactions of Erasmus of Rotterdam; and trace the canonical path leading to major works by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. 18th CENTURY CLEN G6490y Comparative Romantic Texts: Memory and Forgetting
(Ross Hamilton) T 6:10-8. Seminar. This course explores romantic
notions of self-definition within a larger historical narrative
of mind and memory. We will focus on the impact of changing visual
technologies (perspective, the development of optical systems, explorations
of the psychology of vision and neuroscience, and the evolving computer
culture) on conceptual frameworks operating within literature and
the visual arts to define the social context of the individual.
Extended case studies used to structure this examination include
discussion of Renaissance memory rooms and Raphael's program for
the Stanze della Segnatura, Locke's theory of association and Tristram
Shandy, Rousseau's aleatory walks, the development of "spots
of time" in Wordsworth's poetry, an historical evolution of
public and private funerary memorials, debates about trauma theory
and recovered memory, twentieth-century neurological investigations,
cinematic manipulation of space and time in Vertov, Eisenstein,
Renais,and Brackhage. [Film screenings outside of class time.] 19th CENTURY ENGL W4405y Victorian Literature: Major Victorian Poets and Critics (John Rosenberg) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. Close readings of the major works of the more important poets, social and aesthetic critics, prophets and autobiographers of the period. Our focus will be upon the particularities of language in the works before us, but we will also examine historical contexts and recent criticism. Authors: Carlyle, Mill, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold and Pater; Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins.CLEN W4822y The Novel in Europe: Studies in the Nineteenth-century European Novel (Monica Cohen) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. By using a selection of nineteenth-century texts as case studies, this course will explore the aesthetic conventions of high European realism as they take shape in the novel. We will begin with Lukács'statement that the novel "is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God" and go on to examine the relationship between form and culture, story and historicity. We will focus on questions of class, national consciousness, religion, gender and education. Readings include Hugo (Notre Dame de Paris), Balzac (Père Goriot), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Austen (Persuasion), Dickens (Our Mutual Friend), Eliot (Middlemarch), Mann (Buddenbrooks), Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) and James (The Ambassadors). Supplementary material will include works by Lukács, Watt, Bakhtin and other narratological theorists. ENGL G6402y (Nineteenth-century Texts) Domestic Affections and Anxieties in 19th-century Britain (Eileen Gillooly) M 11-12:50. Seminar. "The duties of a parent are so various and extensive," warns the anonymous author of The New Female Instructor (1835), "that the welfare and happiness of a nation depend in a great measure upon the proper and just performance of them" (108-09). This course will focus on the ways in which domestic affections and anxieties bore upon the sensibility and production of many nineteenth-century parents, including Darwin, Dickens, Oliphant, Gaskell, Thackeray, Mary Howitt, Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, Hemans, William and Catherine Gladstone. We will consider the structure of middle-class parental feeling and its development: How did child-rearing become a source of morally anxious, self-conscious reflection? How did changing cultural notions about authority, subjectivity, and affection inform the evolution of the parental role from disciplinarian to nurturer? Drawing upon a range of literary and cultural sources—fiction, poetry, autobiography, advice literature, diaries and letters, parliamentary and philosophical debates, and scientific narratives—we will investigate the ways in which the discourse, psychology, and even gender of middle-class parental feeling changed in Britain in the nineteenth century. CLEN G6420y (Nineteenth-century Selected Texts) Transnationalizing 19th-century Literature (Bruce Robbins) W 11-12:50. Seminar. How planetary is the 19th century literary canon? To what extent does it make sense as interpreted within the traditions and boundaries of the nation to which it is assigned? And if-as might be expected- it exceeds national interpretation, what pressure does it put on the (already strained) protocols of "post-colonial" criticism? This seminar will reflect on these questions, making reference to certain critical moments that are themselves already canonical, like Edward Said's reading of Austen's Mansfield Park and Gayatri Spivak's reading of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, while also extending them to other texts, some at the heart of the canon (like Middlemarch) and some that have not yet been taken into the same discussion, like Flaubert's "A Simple Heart," Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and Rizal's Noli Me Tangere. Contextual readings will emphasize the varying modes of interconnection between the European and non-European worlds, including free-trade liberalism, with its financial and commodity flows, alongside the more blatant facts of colonialism. 20th CENTURY ENTA W4723y Modern Drama I (Matthew Buckley) TR 4:10-5:25.
Lecture. This course will survey the development of modern drama
from the 1830's to the early 20th century. We will explore how melodrama
and dramatic realism arise in response to the acceleration of lived
experience, the instability of social formations, and the anxious
negotiation of identity in the modern world. We will also examine
changes in the social and political role of the theatre during this
period, from the revolutionary dissolution of traditional theatre
institutions and the rise of spectacular stages to the early formation
of the avant-garde and modern political performance. ENGL G6851y Twentieth-century English Literature: Modernism and the Imperial Imagination (Sarah Cole) W 2:10-4. Seminar. What was the relationship between British modernist literature and the British Empire? Modernism has been construed in nearly oppositional terms- as deeply collusive with imperial thinking, or, alternatively, as viscerally hostile to empire. In this course, we will attempt to theorize this relationship in our own terms, reading a variety of writers and texts from the first half of the twentieth century. The bulk of our readings will be English, but we will also read material from Ireland, India and Africa. CLEN G6920y (Perspectives on the Modern) Contested Memory and the Holocaust (Marianne Hirsch) T 4:10-6. Seminar. Much of the theoretical literature on cultural, collective and social memory turns to the Holocaust as a touchstone or limit case. In conversation with key texts in memory studies (Halbwachs, Hartman, LaCapra, Nora, Agamben, Caruth, Felman, Laub, Bennett, van Alphen, Sturken, Huyssen, Assmann) we will explore several sites of debate about Holocaust memory and representation. Topics may include: trials (Eichmann and Barbie); truth and authenticity (Wilkomirski's Fragments); memorialization (the Berlin "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"); photography and evidence (the Wehrmacht exhibit; Lanzmann versus Godard); laughter and play (Mirroring Evil, Life is Beautiful); who "owns" the Holocaust? (Plath); gender and memory; the politics and limits of empathy; "postmemory" and the second generation; the uses of memory in contemporary Israel; postcolonial memories of the Holocaust. Seminar participants will be invited to bring examples of contested memory from other cultural contexts and events to the discussion in the latter part of the course. Application procedures. AMERICAN ENGL G4603y The American Novel 1850-1950 (Jonathan Arac) W 6:10-8. Lecture. Intensive reading in outstanding works of American prose fiction, from the 1850s into the 1950s, by Melville, Twain, Howells, Dreiser, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Roth, Faulkner, Penn Warren, and Ellison. Writing assignments will be frequent but brief. Syllabus. ENGL G6613y American Studies: The Concept of a National Literature, 1771-1850 (Ezra Tawil) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This course explores the emergence of the idea of a "national literature" in America, from its first stirrings after the Revolution, through the burgeoning cultural nationalism of the 1820s, and culminating in the full blown literary nationalism of Young America in the 1840s and the solidification of a national literature in the 1850s. We will read a range of literary texts from these periods (likely to include Freneau, Foster, Brown, Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Stowe). We will also look at how contemporary European thinkers (Kant, de Staël) provided the groundwork for the cultural project of a literary nationalism by theorizing national character and its relationship to aesthetic production. ENGL G6608y (Topics in American Literature) Literature of War
and Reconstruction (Amanda Claybaugh) M 4:10-6. Seminar. The
legacy of the Civil War and the consequences of Reconstruction were
the most important issues of the postbellum era, and this seminar
will focus on the literary responses to each. Topics to include:
the trauma of witnessing the war and the trauma of missing it; radical
abolitionism and the promise of miscegenation; the great American
novel, dialect fiction, and the plantation romance; the Old South
and the New South; carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan; Plessy v.
Ferguson and the Haymarket Affair; and the meaning of New Orleans.
Authors to include Lydia Maria Child, John De Forest, George Washington
Cable, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mary Chesnut, William Dean
Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Frances W. Harper, Stephen Crane,
Sutton Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt. Syllabus. THEORY CLEN W4902y Introduction to Literary Theory (Anthony Alessandrini). MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. A selective introduction, focusing in particular on the relationship between literature and theory, aimed at graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who have little or no prior acquaintance or experience with literary theory. Readings will range from Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle, through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Woolf, to Adorno, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, and Spivak.CLEN G6532y Issues in Literary Theory: Feminist Psychoanalysis
(Gayatri Spivak) M 2:10-4. Seminar. Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein,
Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Juliet
Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Sarah Kofman. Cannot do more in 14 weeks.
Close reading. People with real language proficiency will be given
preference. Underlying question: what is psychoanalysis? 13-page
paper. No incompletes. Admission by interview only; interviews will
take place Monday, December 19. Further
details. OF RELATED INTEREST JAZZ G6200y Seminar in Jazz Studies: Jazz and Film (John Szwed) R 4:10-6. Seminar. Limited to 16 students. An examination of the use, representation and influence of jazz on film, including shorts, cartoons, soundies, documentaries, and features by Malle, Scorsese, Minnelli, Altman, Lee, Kar-wei, and others. Application procedure. FALL 2005 M.A. COURSES ENGL G5001x Masters Seminarsection 1: The Critic in Culture. David Damrosch (Monday 4:10-6). This seminar gives an introduction to the scholarly study of literature. It will offer readings in a range of contemporary theories and methods of literary study, looking closely at critics and theorists as writers: how do they approach and analyze their objects of study? How do they position themselves in relation to their material and to their readers? What are the relations between specifically literary studies and more general cultural criticism? Syllabus. section 2: Text, Image, Film, Performance, Event. Julie Peters (Monday 2:10-4). This seminar investigates how we interpret: texts, images, films, performances, and events. Drama will stand at the center of the course, as both normative and bastard literary genre, against which such categories as "literature," "performance," "ritual," "film" (etc.) may be measured. A series of dramatic and quasi-dramatic texts and films will serve as the background for readings in classical aesthetics (discussions of aesthetic medium, narrative genre, character, reception, and the ethical function of art) and in contemporary theory (the meaning of the avant-garde, the nature of material culture, the performance of sexuality, globalism and medium, etc). Students will present papers at a "mini-conference" at the end of the semester. Primarily geared toward MA students, but open to post-MA students by permission of the instructor. ENGL G5005x Masters Colloquium will take place on alternate Mondays from 12:30-2. MEDIEVAL CLEN G4093x Introduction to Old Norse (Richard Sacks) F 1:30-4. Lecture. An introduction to Old Norse language and literature, with the primary focus on learning to read Old Norse literature in the original. A few texts from a range of literary genres will also be read in translation. Some previous exposure to Old English or another Germanic language is useful though not required. Syllabus.CLEN G6045x Medieval Romance (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50. Seminar. From its appearance in the later twelfth century through the end of the Middle Ages, romance was the dominant long narrative genre in western vernaculars. As such, it was an important imaginative space for developing and reconsidering ideologies of identity, justice, conquest, sexuality, faith, history, and more. This course will only begin to introduce the genre's capacious reach. We will place English romances in their Anglo-Norman and continental French context, and we will focus on just a few of their many preoccupations. First unit: courtship, homoeroticism, gender definition; second unit: chivalric identity, honor, performance of identity; third unit: nation, race, and faith. Romances likely to be on the syllabus: Eneas, Tristan, Erec and Enide, Knight of the Cart, Romance of the Rose, Romance of Horn, King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blancheflor, Squire's Tale, Morte Darthur. Course requirements: two 10-12 page papers involving primary and secondary research; class discussions; one or two presentations in class. RENAISSANCE CLEN W4122x The Renaissance in Europe: Figuring the Erotic (Anne Prescott) MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture. How did Renaissance writers imagine Eros? What obstacles does he meet? How does he relate to other kinds of love? To loss and to wit? Readings include Plato, Ovid, and Petrarch for background, then Stampa, Ariosto, Rabelais, Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Rabelais, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne. ENGL W4211x Milton (David Kastan) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Milton's writing has usually been more admired than enjoyed, recognized as towering monuments to "dead ideas," but Tom Paulin has recently called Milton "the greatest English poet and the most dedicated servant of English liberty." Through a study of the major poetry and prose of John Milton, focusing especially on Paradise Lost, the course considers Milton in terms of the literary and historical forces that affected his work and continue to affect his reputation. ENGL G6135x Tudor Drama: Dramatizing the Body Politic (Jean Howard & Paul Strohm) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course will consider the rich dramatic tradition of the eight or nine decades predating the opening of the commercial theaters in London in the 1570s. Its particular focus will be on the ways in which this theater represents the social polity or 'body politic,' and on the generic forms and representational strategies it employed. This course will consistently refuse subdivision of its materials into periodic categories of 'medieval' and 'renaissance.' Although viewing its texts historically, it will view their temporalities as inherently mixed, consisting of residual and emergent, as well as period-specific, materials. It will begin with a deliberate chronological interruption, starting 'in the middle' with Skelton's early Tudor Magnyfycence. It will then work backward (to medieval mysteries and moralities) and forward (concluding with two Shakespeare histories and the anonymous Elizabethan Jack Straw). Further details and schedule of classes. ENGL G6201x Seventeenth-century Texts: John Donne (Molly Murray) W 6:10-8. Seminar. Perhaps no figure in the early modern literary canon has inspired such wide-ranging critical responses as John Donne from adulation to disgust to (current) near-neglect. This seminar will consider the volatile critical fortunes of Donne and the group of lyric poets sometimes designated “metaphysical.” Our main concern, however, will be with problems of identity and identification in Donne’s writing itself; through careful readings of the poetry and a significant portion of the prose (sermons, essays, letters), we will explore the ways in which Donne both encourages and defies our attempts to fix his devotional, political, erotic, and aesthetic coordinates. [Students are encouraged to buy any scholarly edition of the poems with unmodernized spelling—the Everyman edited by Patrides has good notes—and read as much as possible over the summer.] 18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM The following seminar is offered at NYU and open to Columbia students through the Graduate Consortium. To register, students should see Craig Knobles in 301 Philosophy Hall.G41.3951 Genres of Enlightenment (Clifford Siskin & Mary Poovey) T 4:55-6:55. As literary historians, we can answer the infamous question "What Was Enlightenment?" in a material as well as philosophical way. If, after all, the trace that Enlightenment has left is the knowledge it produced, then how was it produced? With what tools? Using which procedures? With Britain as our focus, we will argue that the primary technology of Enlightenment was writing; the tools were the forms that writing assumed in the 18th century; the procedures were the characteristic ways those forms mixed. We'll range across the literary genres, tracing the interrelations of the lyric and experiment, facts and fictions, the novel and information, bank notes and travel narratives, biography and the encyclopedia. 19th CENTURY ENGL G6401x Nineteenth-century Texts: Oscar Wilde (Sharon Marcus) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Readings in Oscar Wilde's poetry, plays, fiction, prose, and autobiographical texts. We will focus on current critical debates about Wilde's provocative role in the history of sexuality and his interrogation of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.CLEN G6565x Occultism, Postcoloniality, Modernism (Gauri Viswanathan) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This course probes the shaping of the modern subject through such "occult" devices as mesmerism, ventriloquism, hypnotism, telepathy, disembodiment, telekinesis, and clairvoyance. We will examine the ways that occultism constituted a crucial enactment of modernity's contradictions and provided postcoloniality with the tools for critical definitions of selfhood and society. Several questions raised by the course are: How does one account for occultism's persistence in modernity? Is occultism a form of residual irrationalism, a mode of thought superseded by Enlightenment rationality? Or is it a constitutive element of modernity itself, reflecting its contradictions and ambiguities? What is the relationship between occultism and detection, anthropology, philology, science, Darwinian evolution, psychoanalysis, capitalism, and technology? How does occultism become a tool for both relating to the past and imagining future worlds, especially for the decolonizing imagination? In what ways, if at all, does occultism signal the emergence of a postcolonial moment in literature? Readings include Freud, Adorno, Weber, Benjamin, Blavatsky, Besant, Owen, Latour, Luckhurst, Connor, among others. Note: exceptionally qualified undergraduates may be admitted to the seminar; those interested should email Prof. Viswanathan by August 15, explaining their interest in—and qualifications for—the course. 20th CENTURY ENGL G6505x Modern Texts (Edward Mendelson) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, W. H. AudenCLEN G6820x The African Novel (Joseph Slaughter) W 6:10-8. Seminar. What happens to the nationalism and individualism of the novel in the African context? This course provides a formalist, socio-historical, and theoretical overview of the "rise of the African novel." We will consider the generic development in relation to colonialism, post-colonialism and recent theories of the globalization of literary forms and as a distinctly "African" phenomenon. AMERICAN ENGL W4503x Race, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Poetic Form (Michael Golston) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets to include Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Stein, H. D., Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, Zukofsky-read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.ENGL W4670x American Film Genres (Maura Spiegel) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Some critics contend that all Hollywood film is either melodrama or morality play, no matter what its claims to the contrary; others see it as purely wish-fulfillment fantasy. This course will examine a range of genres in Hollywood film, while also scrutinizing and questioning the formation and usefulness of genre distinctions. Our orientation will be formal as well as social and historical, as we explore codes and conventions of generic illusion and verisimilitude, the rise and fall of genres (the Western, the "weepie"), increasing self-reflexiveness (in noir, musicals, romantic | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||