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Spring 2009, Fall 2008, Spring 2007, Fall 2006, Spring 2006, Fall 2005, Spring 2005, Fall 2004, Spring 2004, Fall 2003, Spring 2003, Fall 2002, Spring 2002, Fall 2001, Spring 2001, Fall 2000, Spring 2000, Fall 1999, Spring 1999, Fall 1998

SPRING 2009

MEDIEVAL

ENGL G6002y  Troilus, Gawain and the Court Culture (Paul Strohm) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. Questions to be investigated in this seminar include: the extent to which Chaucer and the Gawain poet may be considered ‘court’ poets; current theories and our own new inferences about the audiences of these poems; the requirements of conduct in a ‘courtly’ milieu; the ‘scopic’ court and paranoia; ideas of gender, station, and duty as ‘court-produced.’  We will do some reading on the Ricardian court (with at least brief looks at Chaucer’s ‘Complaint unto Pity’ and House of Fame), as well court culture more generally, but these two fabulous poems will be, and provide, our main material.  Please contact the instructor, by email [ps2143] prior to enrollment, with a short description of your relevant academic experience and reason for wishing to enroll in the course.

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EARLY MODERN

ENGL W4211y  Milton   (Julie Crawford)  MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. This course will look at the major works of John Milton in the context of 17th-century English religious, political and social events. In addition to reading Milton’s poems, major prose (including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth), and the full texts of Paradise Lost and Sampson Agonistes (the course text will be Orgel and Goldberg, eds. John Milton), we will look at the authors and radicals whose activities and writings helped to provide the contexts for Milton’s own: poets and polemicists, sectarians and prophets, revolutionaries and regicides, Diggers and Levelers. Requirements for this course include two short primary research papers (3 pp.) and an exam. Graduate students will also be required to write a seminar paper.

CLEN W4122y  Renaissance in Europe II: Figuring Eros (Anne Prescott) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. This course studies a few Renaissance writers who exploit, express, or explore how Eros relates to language in a variety of human situations and dilemmas. Eros himself is a complex and contradictory god and Renaissance writers tend to be complex and contradictory when allowing him to influence what they think and say. Eros, moreover, is not really (in spite of what some say) the enemy of other gods or God, so we will also consider how a couple of writers have treated his relation to the religious imagination. Eros even, from time to time, if not often, supports what some politicians now call “family values,” so we will also take a look at how he might energize hopes to marry and procreate. I am fairly mellow about methodologies and theories, so feel free to apply or experiment with approaches that intrigue you. I have no books on reserve but will make suggestions as we go along. Authors studies to include Ovid, Petrarch, Rabelais, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Nash, among others. Tentative syllabus.

CLEN G6128y  The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Kathy Eden) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Taking as its point of departure the recovery by Renaissance humanists of key ancient texts, including letter collections, rhetorical manuals and school exercises, this seminar will explore early modern reading and writing practices for a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy. Writers featured will range from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian to Petrarch, Erasmus and Montaigne.

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18th - 19TH CENTURY

ENGL W4302y  Satire (Jenny Davidson) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. The 18th century is the last time when most of Britain's major writers chose to work in the genre of satire. In this course, we will read both verse and prose satires, paying special attention to the relationship between politics and language and to the role of gender. Is satire more conducive to conservative or progressive political impulses? How does satire as a genre allow poets to challenge the authority of their precursors? Readings include Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, satires on women and responses by women writers ("lady's dressing room" poems), 18th-century adaptations of Horace and Juvenal, romantic-period satire (Byron, Shelley, Austen); the course will end with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and 1984. Syllabus.

ENGL  W4802y The History of the Novel II (Sharon Marcus) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Why do we take novels seriously?  Realism.  Realist novels are self-contained fictional universes that also represent an external world of historical events and social forces.  Accordingly, this course will approach the realist novel with a dual focus on literary form and social history.  Topics to be covered include: the Gothic, sensation fiction, and melodrama; character system, plot structure, and narrative technique; the novel’s relationship to other forms, such as newspapers, diaries, and the theater; the invention of childhood; marriage, kinship, and friendship; work, vocation, and social institutions; city and country; religion, nation, and empire.  Readings: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda; and Bram Stoker, Dracula.  Two short papers and a final exam.

ENGL W4404y  Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray)
MW 4:10-5:25.  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.

ENGL W4603y  The American Novel 1865-1914 (Amanda Claybaugh) MW 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Focuses on the three literary modes that flourished in the postbellum era: realism, naturalism, and "local color" fiction.  Considers the following topics: rising and falling, choice and chance, consciousness and embodiment, as well as the aftermath of Civil War and Recon-struction. Authors to include: John W. De Forest, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton.

ENGL G6326y The Oriental Tale  (Nicole Horejsi)  R 11-12:50.  Seminar. At the beginning of the 18th century, the French translator and Orientalist Antoine Galland brought the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to Europe. Soon translated into English, the Nights continued to enthrall audiences throughout the century, competing even with the epics of Homer and Vergil: indeed, Horace Walpole exhorted a female correspondent, “read Sindbad the Sailor’s voyages, and you will be sick of Aeneas’s.”  This seminar will examine the powerful vogue for Oriental tales in 18th-century British literature, beginning with the Arabian Nights and tracing its influence especially through drama (Dryden, Manley, Inchbald) and the developing novel (Haywood, Johnson, Sheridan, Beckford), on to the birth of “Romantic” Orientalism marked by the publication of Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir.  What does the Orient—or rather Orients—come to symbolize and evoke for writers and audiences in the long 18th century?  How might we begin to explain its popularity and appeal?  Questions of gender and alterity will also take center-stage as we consider how British writers used the Orient to engage with various cultural “others” in the popular imagination.

ENGL G6871y Scholarly Editing: Texts, Contexts, and Paratexts of David Copperfield (Eileen Gillooly) R 4:10-6.  Seminar. This course is conceived as part literary criticism, part literary history, part editorial practicum.  Although we will focus closely on mid-nineteenth-century England, the editorial skills that we'll develop will be of use to students working in other centuries.  We will begin by constructing a working literary-intellectual-cultural history of England (focusing on London) in the years 1847-1850 in order to contextualize our production of a scholarly edition of David Copperfield (for Norton), complete with bibliographies, scholarly apparatus, and ancillary materials.  We'll read Dickens biographies, his letters and journalism, contemporary newspapers (e.g., The Times, The Morning Chronicle), journals (e.g., the Illustrated London News, Household Words), contemporary histories (e.g., Macauley), Hansard's, and other things we know to have been part of Dickens's own memorable reading in those years, as well as the full range of essays on and reviews of David Copperfield since its publication.

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20th CENTURY

ENGL W4503y  Race, Gender, and Poetic Form (Michael Golston) TR 2:40-3:55. 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.

ENTA W4724y Modern Drama II: O’Neill, Williams, Miller (Zander Brietzke) MW  1:10-2:25. Lecture.  The inclusive dates for the three American masters of modern drama range from 1888 to 2005. Despite that span, all three produced their best plays on stage in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1945-1956): The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible. We will read these mature dramas as well as other works from the respective playwrights in order to trace the arc of their careers, paying particular attention to Williams’s social lament, O’Neill’s individualism and Miller’s moral vision. Frequent short essay assignments and one significant paper required.

CLEN W4935y Transnational Modernisms (Victoria Rosner) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. This course surveys emerging approaches to thinking about the transnationalism of modernist literature.  Looking beyond a national-literature approach to modernism, we will explore transnational affiliations and imaginations in modernist literature, consider modernism's relation to imperialism and the project of decolonization, and think broadly about modernism's politics and political agency.  We will discuss works by writers whose modernist practices originate outside of the United States and western Europe as well as writers more traditionally associated with Anglo-American modernism.  Ours will be a "long modernism," expanding well past the traditional boundary of WWII; the implications and logic of this choice will be a matter for our discussion and debate.  We will consider a range of topics and issues, including the autonomy of the intellectual, resistance to war and fascism, the internationalism of the avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, and the home in the world.  Writers discussed will include Aimé Césaire, Tsetse Dangarembga,  T. S. Eliot, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Langston Hughes, Doris Lessing, Wyndham Lewis, V. S. Naipaul, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Rabindranath Tagore, and Virginia Woolf.  Requirements for undergraduates: midterm exam, two papers, and a presentation.  Requirements for graduate students to be discussed in class. Syllabus.

CLEN W4640y   Caribbean Literature: Revolution in/on the Caribbean (Frances Negron-Muntaner) TR 2:40-3:55.  Lecture. Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major social and revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize through analysis and language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers and musicians such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Cliff, V.S. Naipaul, Bob Marley, Carlos Varela, and Calle 13, among others. Reading list.

ENTA G4600y Theatre and Theory: Theatre of the Body (John Robinson-Appels) R 6:10-8.  Lecture. Theatre of the body and its expression framed by 20th century language philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty). Gesture in Artaud and Grotowski, feminist playwrights Stein, De Beauvoir, Cixous, and Churchill, gay playwrights (and AIDS plays) of the last few decades, as well as Pinter, Boal, Soyinka, Baldwin, tanz-theater, movement theatre, abstract dance. Reading list.

CLEN W4930y Transpacific Approaches American Literature (Wen Jin) MW 4:10-5:25.  Lecture. Toward the end of the 19th-century, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, who became known as the opener of Korea in 1882, enthusiastically declared that the Pacific was the “ocean bride of America.”  His was not alone in harboring this sentiment.  This course is designed to explore the role of the Asia Pacific in the American literary and cultural imagination.     We will seek to generate new readings of some important texts in American literature since the mid-nineteenth century by placing them in the context of U.S. entanglements with the markets, peoples, and cultures lying across the Pacific.  We will also consider how transpacific approaches to American literature contribute to theories of translation and circulation, the capitalist world-system, and minority cultural production.  More importantly, by focusing on social, political, and cultural networks that link the U.S. with Asia, this course offers a preliminary survey of the emerging filed of Transpacific American Studies, which complements and complicates what has been conventionally known as Transatlanticism.  Literary readings include Herman Melville, Jack London, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Alex Kuo, Amitav Ghosh; theoretical readings include Said, Lye, Dirlik, Derrida, Benjamin, Arrighi, Liu, Wallerstein, Frank, etc. Syllabus.

ENGL G6851y  Virginia Woolf  (Edward Mendelson) Mon 11-12:50.  Seminar. COURSE CANCELED.

CLEN G6300y Black Radicalism and the Archive (Brent Edwards) Wed 2:10-4.  Seminar. This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of radical knowledge production among African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read key works of African, Caribbean, and African American cultural and political movements, with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and the ways that the exigencies of anticolonialism, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism have provoked methodological innovation in interdisciplinary work.
      We will focus especially on the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive; to this end, we will not only read current scholarship on the issue, but also take advantage of recent acquisitions of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, including the papers of C.L.R. James, Hubert Harrison, and Amiri Baraka. Participants will be expected to pursue original archival research in their work for the seminar.
      Readings may include work W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and Sylvia Wynter; and secondary scholarship by Cedric Robinson, David Scott, Robert Hill, Nikhil Pal Singh, Stuart Hall, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, and Joy James.

ENGL G6623y  20th-century Epic Poems: Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson  (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8. Seminar. Four major 20th century poetic productions with epic pretensions: The Cantos of Ezra Pound; Louis Zukofsky’s “A”; William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. This is a reading intensive course, designed to give students the opportunity to gain a broad familiarity with these texts. We will read each poem in its entirety; students will maintain an ongoing reading journal. 

ENGL G6502y Contemporary Black Writers: The Poetics of Dispossession (Saidiya Hartman) W 11-12:50.  This course examines the relation between dispossession and literary form by focusing on the novels and non-fiction of contemporary black writers.   In exploring the varieties of dispossession, which include enslavement, colonialism, abjection and exile, the class will attend to issues of injury and identity, violence and narrative fragmentation, silence and the historical archive, and trauma and repetition.

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THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W4917y  Writing on Disability (Christopher Baswell) MW 2:40-3:55.   Lecture. Writings about disability and eccentric bodies, from Oedipus of the swollen foot to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Texts will cover a range of periods, including medieval narratives of miraculous cure, the hunchback king in Shakespeare's Richard III, and a powerfully immobile and sexually magnetic woman in Trollope's Barchester Towers.  While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety, students will be encouraged (and required) to seek out texts that address other issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental disability.  Critical readings will be drawn from the emerging field of Disability Studies.  Issues to be addressed will include the great historical shift from notions of the "ideal" or heroic, to the "normal" body; the social construction of disability; the cripple as icon or agent; disabled identity and the return of the memoire.  Two short papers and a take-home final.  Syllabus.

ENGL G4905y Text and Culture: The History of the Book (Gerald Cloud) R 2:10-4. Seminar. This course studies the History of the Book, in its historical & cultural context, from the period when codex manuscripts gave way to the printed book, up to the industrial book of the 19th century.  We will look particularly at how the material aspects of books, their production, and their distribution changed over time and how those changes influenced the development of intellectual culture.  The course will be held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s seminar room, and draw heavily on the department’s rich collections of manuscripts, printed books, and printing realia. Our approach to the topic will introduce students to the history of the book through material examples of codex manuscripts, printed books, the materials of the press and letterpress printing, bibliographical methods, and recent scholarship. We will focus on how to recognize, describe, and analyze various aspects of book production, how books were read (signs of use, ownership, etc.), and circulated. Our examination of the physical book will prepare students to evaluate how the material and paratextual aspect of books contributed to their meaning, the formation of cultural and intellectual practices, and the way in which books were understood and valued. Syllabus.

CLEN G4995y  Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) T 2:10-4. Lecture/discussion. This semester we will study selections from the late Lacan: Seminar XX Encore (On feminine sexuality) and beyond to Seminars XXI The non-dupes err/The names of the father (Les non-dupes errent/Le nom-du-père), XX R.S.I. and XXIII Sinthome together with essays by Jacques-Alain Miller and Badiou and modern and postmodern novels and short stories. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan’s thought to literature and culture, and to questions of neuroscience, capitalism, democracy, and happiness.

CLEN G6910y  Theater and Philosophy (Martin Puchner) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course focuses on philosophical reflections on the theater, as well as dramatic dialogues, the theater of ideas, and theatricality in philosophical works. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Shaw, Burke, Stoppard, Murdoch, Badiou.

CLEN G6550y Theory, Religion, Culture (Gauri Viswanathan) W 4:10-6. Seminar.  This seminar takes a close look at the religious turn in critical theory. Despite what the secularization thesis says, religion has not declined in contemporary life and continues to exert influence, at times leading to situations of conflict but at other times refocusing attention on the terms by which identity and selfhood are imagined. How does one reconcile religious sensibility with the demands of multiculturalism and pluralism? How does religion constitute subjects and conceptualize their relation to and responsibilities in the world?  These are pressing questions in the work of theorists from Derrida and Levinas to Caputo and Vattimo, who have taken up the challenge of understanding the place of religion in a world that presumably renders it irrelevant. This course will explore various theoretical approaches to religion in modernity and include readings on topics such as: religious subjectivity and the politics of belief; the place of imagination in the evolution of religions; theories of secularism; religion, postcolonialism, and postmodernism; world religions, heterodoxy, and alternative spiritual movements. Readings will include works by Weber, Derrida, C. Taylor, M. Taylor, Levinas, Caputo, Vattimo, Asad, Viswanathan, among others.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

JAZZ W4900y Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Brent Edwards) TR 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. 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. Requirements: a 5-7 pg. midterm paper and a 9-12 pg. final paper. Syllabus.

WMST G4000y Genealogies of Feminism: Politics in the Wake of the Human (Saidiya Hartman and Neferti Tadiar) T 11-12:50. This seminar is directed toward students with previous work in feminist scholarship. 3pts. This course examines the formation of the human in the discourses of modernity.  The discourse of man, according to Aimé Césaire, has generated a great heap of corpses and established a hierarchy of life in which the well-being of Man is based on the sacrifice of his subordinates and the creation of disposable persons.   By looking at political and juridical conceptions of the human in documents like the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Dred Scott vs. Sandford, the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and The Congress of Racial Equality’s We Charge Genocide, we will trace the discourse of the human from the Age of Revolution to anti-colonial movements to feminist struggles to establish women’s rights as human rights in international law.  The course will also examine contemporary theories of the human and the post-human, conceptions of life and sociality beyond the discourse of man, as well as the practices of freedom intent upon re-describing the human and engendering new terms of order.  Lastly, we will consider the ways in which anti-racist, anti-colonial, and feminist movements have tried to unsettle the discourse of Man while remaining yoked by it. 
        The course reading will focus on issues of slavery, coloniality, and disposable life in interrogating the question of the human and attending to the excluded figures and forms of abject existence considered external to or outside of the embrace of Man. 
        Required Texts: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Veena Das, Life and Words, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human, George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother, Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human?, Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, Achille Mbembe, The Postcolony, Fred Moten, In the Break, Yambo Ologuem, Bound to Violence, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
        In addition to these books we will read essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Sellers, Bruno Latour, Joy James, Sharon Holland, Michel Foucault, Samera Esmeir, Colin Joan Dayan, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Judith Butler, Alan Badiou, and Theodor Adorno. This graduate seminar fulfills one of the requirements of the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies.

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FALL 2008

MASTERS SEMINARS

ENGL G5001x MASTERS SEMINAR. 
Registration for this  course is handled separately in the summer.
This course (required for all first-year graduate students in the English Department) introduces students to scholarly methodologies in the study of literature and culture. The Masters Seminar operates in tandem with the Masters Colloquium [ENGL G5005], and requires short writing assignments over the course of the semester and extensive in-class participation.

Section 1:   Amanda Claybaugh Wed  2:10-4
Section 2: Joseph Slaughter Wed  6:10-8
Section 3: Gauri Viswanathan Wed  4:10-6

ENGL G5005x Masters Colloquium will take place on alternate Wednesdays from 1-2.

MEDIEVAL

CLEN G4015x Textual Analysis: Paleography (Consuelo Dutschke) M 6:10-8. Seminar. This one-term graduate course will survey the history of the manuscript book from the Carolingians to the early years of printing (9th -15th century). Students will study the questions that have driven the field of paleography since its inception, and the canonical history of the main scripts used in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. We will consider the manuscript book as a physical artifact, in a codicological approach; and we will look at the production of books in their social and political settings. Students will develop practical skills in reading and transcription, and will begin to recognize the features that allow localization and dating of manuscripts. We will use original materials from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library whenever possible. Students will be expected to have a basic knowledge of Latin.

CLEN W4021x   Medieval Cosmopolitanisms (Shayne Legassie) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Complete syllabus.As contemporary critics have observed, the concept of "cosmopolitanism" is a promising paradox because it invites individuals and groups to reconsider their obligations to a local community (polis) in light of their role as sojourners in a larger world (cosmos). This course examines the challenges of cosmopolitanism in the European Middle Ages, a time period that is normally excluded from such considerations because of its presumed insularity. Looking to literary genres such as romance, travel narrative, mystical visions, and the frame tale collection, we will examine a range of medieval engagements with the foreign and consider the extent to which those engagements enriched, desta-bilized, and displaced the conventional ways in which individuals and groups thought about their relationships to the world. We will also consider how our own engagement with medieval cosmopolitanisms challenges the methods we use to study the cultural production of the European Middle Ages. Readings will be in English translation, although students are strongly encouraged to conduct research in at least one other language.
        This course is designed with the intention of inviting both specialists in medieval European studies as well as non-medievalists who might be interested in the development of travel writing and the cultural history of travel; theories of gender, race, and sexuality; and the history of Europe's contact and exchanges with the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The course will be divided into three units, each of which addresses an emergent area of inquiry in medieval studies:

Chivalric Cosmopolitanisms
In this unit, we will think about how different literary genres (romance, crusade account, and travel narrative) represent chivalric travel, hospitality, cultural exchange, and conquest. Among the works we   may read are: Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval; Jean de Joinville, Life of Saint Louis; Anonymous, The Book of John Mandeville; travel narratives by Pero Tafur and Arnold von Harff; Joanot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc; accounts of the conquest of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

Tuscan Cosmopolitanisms
This unit will ask what new perspectives we might gain by re-thinking canonical works of "Italian" literature as products of Tuscany's unique, productive, and deeply conflicted involvement in global commerce. In     particular, we will examine a tension between the vision of a world brought closer together by financial and mercantile activity and the idea of a cosmos governed by a Christian deity. Works may include: Dante, The Divine Comedy; Boccaccio, Decameron; pilgrimage accounts by John of Marignoli, Leonardo Frescobaldi, and Simone Sigoli; the devotional writings of Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Bernardino of Siena.

Mediterranean Cosmopolitanisms
   The final segment of the course will turn its attention to literary production written in Hebrew and Arabic.   Potential readings: travel narratives by Benjamin of Tudela and Ibn Battuta; The Arabian Nights; The   Conference of the Birds.

Email [sal52@columbia.edu] a brief, one-paragraph statement of  interest in the course. A working knowledge of at  least one language other than English is preferred,  but this is not a requirement.

 CLEN G6031x   Medieval Court Performance and Performance Theory (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50. Seminar. This course examines performance situations that are not staged, at least not in the conventional sense: tournaments, festivals, banquet entertainments, and secular and religious rituals. Such performances were ubiquitous in late medieval England, and they are frequently depicted in chronicles, poetry, and manuscript illuminations. Each week of the course gathers sources around one kind of performance, and considers how it shaped and expressed medieval identities. Dramatic works (mummings, religious plays) are set in this wider context of social performances. Primary sources will include romances, hunting manuals, scripts, saints’ lives, rolls of heraldry, and Joan of Arc’s testimony to the Inquisition. Secondary readings on self-performance and on performance types such as ritual, festival, and spectacle will include essays by Talal Asad, Judith Butler, John J. MacAloon, Joseph Roach, and Stanley Tambiah. Apply by e-mail [sc2298@columbia.edu] anytime during pre-registration.

ENGL G6631x   Codex and Criticism: The Medieval Culture of the Book (Christopher Baswell) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. Our encounter with the modern print text is a relatively impoverished event, compared to the multi-layered sensory experience of the medieval book.  Medieval manuscripts display individualized hands, rubrication and marginalia, decoration and illustration.  They negotiate between sight and sound; as Chaucer tells his listeners, paradoxically, if they don’t want to hear the Miller’s Tale they can turn the page.  Manuscripts even smell and feel distinctive, depending on the source and preparation of their parchment, or the material of their bindings.  
      In this seminar, we will attempt to re-conceive and re-embed the “texts” of the Middle Ages, most of them editorially created in the 19th and 20th centuries, within their original sites in the physical culture of the past: that is, in manuscripts and early printed editions, and in the settings of cultural creation and consumption those codices intimately reflect.  Studying individual manuscripts in New York collections (especially Columbia University), in facsimile, and on-line, our investigations will move in two main directions.
      First, we will learn about some of the major arenas of book production across the high and later Middle Ages—the kind of manuscripts through which most people, most often, encountered the written word.  These will include books of private devotion (and often public ostentation) such as Psalters and Books of Hours; classroom anthologies and related collections; annals and chronicles; herbals and bestiaries; romances and lives of saints.  Most of these use the two dominant languages of high medieval textual culture in England: Latin and French.  Among them will be the “Aberdeen Bestiary” (http://www.clues.abdn.ac.uk:8080/besttest/firstpag.html) and the Anglo-Norman History of St. Edward the King (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/MSS/Ee.3.59/).  All these materials will be available in translation.
      Second, those dominant modes of book culture will provide contexts for investigating manuscripts of what has become the canon of Middle English.  For instance, we will study one or more Langland manuscripts, in part via the Electronic Archive of Piers Plowman, guided by recent work of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and others.  We will look at the great Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer (in facsimile and selective folios on line), yet look too at Chaucer manuscripts that lay different, more modest claims on his text.  Depending on the enrollment and interests of the seminar, we can explore the Middle English Brut Chronicle and Middle English translations by John Trevise (with important examples at Columbia); dramas whose manuscripts are available on-line (such as Digby 133, “The Digby Plays”), Middle English religious texts, or romances such as Bodleian Douce d.6 (Tristan romances in Anglo-Norman).  For many of these, see http://image.ox.ac.uk/.

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EARLY MODERN

CLEN W4121x The Renaissance in Europe I  (Kathy Eden)  MW 4:10- 5:25.  Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.

ENGL G6711x Shakespearean Masculinities (Mario DiGangi) Wed 11-12:50. Seminar. Masculinity, long a topic of interest for psychoanalytic and new historicist Shakespeare critics, has become central to recent work by feminist materialists, queer theorists, and social historians.  Using insights from various critical approaches, we will explore questions such as the following: through what representational strategies (sartorial, gestural, vocal, rhetorical, erotic) is manhood staged in early modern theater and culture?  How is masculine identity inflected by distinctions of social status, age, sexuality, nationhood, or race?  How might an analysis of the multiple forms of masculinity unsettle the notion of a monolithic patriarchal culture?  What role might the study of masculinity play in recent debates between historicist and “continuist” Renaissance critics?  We will examine both canonical and less familiar texts from throughout Shakespeare’s career, probably including The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet, Venus and Adonis, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.  We will use The Norton Shakespeare, as well as the following secondary texts: Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women; and Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare. Requirements include class presentations and a research paper.

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18th - 19TH CENTURY

ENGL W4801x History of the Novel I (Nicole Horejsi) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Clara Reeve argued, in her literary-critical dialogue, The Progress of Romance (1785), that the “English” novel had a diverse and polyglot history, one that extended not only to the romances of ancient Greece, but to Africa and further East.  This class will explore one general strand of this ancient lineage, the “romance,” a “feminine” genre much maligned by 18th-century writers anxious to legitimate their own authorship, even as the terms “novel,” “romance,” and “history” overlapped and remained ill-defined in the first part of the 18th century. As we explore the novel’s debt to romance, including the immense popularity of the Gothic leading into the 19th century, we will consider contemporary criticism by such authors as Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Clara Reeve, as well as modern theories of the novel by scholars such as Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, and Margaret Doody.  We will also consider, in works like The Female Quixote and Northanger Abbey, the complex, often ambivalent satirical backlash against romance, the seeming conflict between romance and realism, and the cultural factors that shaped the novel in its various incarnations, from Behn to Austen. Syllabus.

ENGL G4305x Swift and Burke (Jenny Davidson) M 11-12:50. Seminar. Major works of two of 18th-century Britain’s greatest prose writers, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke. We will consider questions concerning satire, the relationship between politics and literature, Irish politics in an age of overseas colonialism and a number of related topics, and will do some background reading in the history of the period, but our overwhelming concern will be to come up with an effective set of tactics for reading non-fiction prose.  How do we talk as effectively about sentences, paragraphs and the movements of prose as we have learned to do about poems, plays and novels?  Brief readings from some other major prose stylists of the period to supplement (Mandeville, Hume and Hazlitt are likely to make brief appearances).  This course is intended for undergraduates and graduate students; it will probably be capped at 35, but everyone who is interested is likely to be able to enroll.  There will be one weekly meeting for everyone, a lecture-seminar hybrid, and a second hour of discussion for undergraduates.

ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 2:40-3:55.
 Lecture.  An introduction to the works of the great poets of the Romantic period (1789-1824), especially Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron Shelley, and 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.
 
CLEN  W4822x The 19th-century European Novel (Nicholas Dames) MW 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, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

ENGL W4405x Literature of the Fin-de-Siecle (Victoria Rosner) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. This course will survey the tumultuous scene of England--chiefly London--in the 1890s, focusing on the most significant cultural, political, and social debates of the period.  We will be concerned in particular with the fin-de-siècle rhetorics of degeneration and the concomitant fascination with sensation and sensory experience. Topics to include: sexology and the criminalization of sex; monstrosity, racial science, and physiogamy; feminism and the New Woman; urban poverty, crime, and policing; spiritualism and psychic research; new technologies of visuality and communication; and the new imperialism.  We will also study the significant aesthetic movements of the period, including Decadence, Aestheticism, and Pre-Raphaelitism.  Writers will include: Grant Allen, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, Max Nordau, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats.

ENGL G6380x  Great Poems of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Erik Gray) F 11-12:50.  Seminar. This course examines seven poems that are “great” both in quality and in length.  All were enormously influential and are indispensable to a full understanding of 18th- and 19th-century British literature, but unfortunately they are rarely assigned in their entirety.  The poems include James Thomson, The Seasons; William Cowper, The Task; William Wordsworth, The Excursion; Lord Byron, Don Juan; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King; and Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book.  We will consider each work individually and also discuss the nature and importance of the “long poem” as a genre. Please email [eg2155@columbia.edu], stating your status (department, PhD/MAO, year), field of specialty, and interest.  

ENGL G6631x Literary Realism and Naturalism (Amanda Claybaugh) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. In the first half of this course, we will study the defining works of realism and naturalism: Madame Bovary, Adam Bede, The Rise of Silas Lapham; Germinal, New Grub Street, Sister Carrie. Then, we will survey the critical writings about both modes, beginning with mid-nineteenth-century manifestos and reviews, extending through the landmark works of twentieth-century scholarship, such as Eric Auerbach and Ian Watt, and concluding with the scholarship of our own day. In the final third of the course, students will pursue their own research projects, which will be work-shopped in class.

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20th CENTURY

ENGL W4501x Modernism and Cultural Change (Sarah Cole) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course begins with the premise that British literature of the first half of the 20th century was shaped by profound concerns about the present. If modernism is often understood as a unified and coherent aesthetic movement, championing its own modernity, we will pay attention to its spirit of ambivalence, contradiction, and deep conflict, especially with respect to such vexed topics as gender and sexuality, empire and nationalism, war and revolution, production and consumption, and political power. Our particular angle for addressing these large issues will be the representation of past, present, and future in a range of literary works. Authors include Wells, Conrad, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Achebe, and Orwell. Syllabus.

ENGL W4628x U.S. Latino Literature (Frances Negrón-Muntaner) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. U.S. Latino literature from mid-20th century to the present, with historical, literary, and theoretical context for this produc-tion, examined in a wide range of genres: poetry, memoir, essays, fiction, with special emphasis on works by Cubans, Dominicans, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Authors studied will include Richard Rodríguez, Esmeralda Santiago, Rudolfo Anaya, Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Piri Thomas.

ENGL W4632x Introduction to Asian American Literature and Culture (Wen Jin) MW 5:40-6:55. Lecture. We will examine important prose narratives, poetry, and plays written by Asians in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with a focus on two questions in particular: 1) How do these works figure the relationship among U.S. racial formation, transpacific migration, and U.S.-Asian relations? 2) How do they contribute to and complicate familiar literary genres and modes of writing (historical fiction, the short story, speculative fiction, modernist and experimental poetry, etc.)? Possible texts: Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables, Theresa Hak Kyun Cha’s Dictee, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Monique Truong’s Book of Salt, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, Alex Kuo’s Panda Diaries, selected poetry by John Yao, Jose Garcia Ville, Prageeta Sharma, and Lawson Inada, and plays by Ping Chong.

ENTA W4731x American Drama I (Katherine Biers) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. Survey of American drama from 1900-1960s. We will ask what makes American drama “American” and how American dramatists responded to European influences. We will also examine American drama’s relationship to key cultural events and transformations of the 20th century, such as the rise of mass culture; mechanization and alienation; labor unrest; race and racism; and Cold War paranoia. How has American identity been constructed and contested on stage? What are the broader social and political contexts of dramatic performance in the 20th century? How does drama relate to other media, such as film? Plays by Eugene O’Neill, Sophie Treadwell, Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Edward Albee.

CLEN W4540x Postcolonial African Literature and Theory (Joseph Slaughter) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. A survey of postcolonial African literature and theory. Likely authors include: Abani, Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Armah, Dangarembga, Eric, Farah, Gurnah, Ngugi, Sembène, Soyinka, and Tutuola. The literary readings will be supplemented with critical and theoretical essays meant to introduce students to the major issues and problematics of postcolonial studies within a Sub-Saharan African context (from colonial contact to contemporary globalization). We will also examine primary historical, sociological, and cultural documents from the imperial and postcolonial “archives.”

CLEN G6920x Modernism and Interiority (Victoria Rosner) W 4:10-6. Seminar. "Look within," urged Virginia Woolf in her essay, "Modern Fiction." Interiority, understood as an exclusive focus on the textures and processes of mental life, is famously the preoccupation of modernist writers. This course will explore the broad significance of interiority for modernism. The interior is a key site of modernist energies in forms that extend well beyond the representation of consciousness to encompass areas such as the reorganization of domestic life; revised definitions of personal privacy and the public sphere; and newly spatialized assessments of the sexualized and gendered body. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will look at how interiority is imagined and articulated in the modern novel, including but not limited to the influence of nonliterary constructions of interiority (from architecture, painting, industrial design, and psychology, among others) on literature. Figures to be discussed will include: Le Corbusier, Ford Madox Ford, Christine Frederick, Sigmund Freud, E.W. Godwin, Radclyffe Hall, Henry James, Georg Simmel, and Virginia Woolf. Email [vpr4@columbia.edu] giving year of study and a short paragraph expressing interest in the course.

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THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W4901x History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern English. There are two required books, both paperbacks: (1) Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin), and (2) Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker (Harper Perennial). There will be about half a dozen written assignments: hands-on research efforts, written up meticulously.

CLEN W4560x Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Ross Hamilton) MW 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.

ENGL W4917x  Writing on Disability (Christopher Baswell) MW 2:40-3:55.   Lecture. CANCELLED. BUT NOTE: This class WILL be offered in Spring 2009.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

CPLS G4900x Introduction to Comparative Literature and Society (Brent Edwards) W 2:10-4. Seminar. An introduction to changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, giving special attention to the stakes of interdisciplinary method in comparative scholarship. We will investigate the debates around comparativism in a number of fields, and our discussions will focus on rubrics of inquiry that combine strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from multiple disciplinary formations: e.g. postcolonial studies, cultural studies, media studies, urban studies, globalization studies, feminism, translation studies. There will be regular faculty visitors drawn from a variety of departments in the humanities and social sciences at Columbia. Enrollment is limited and the seminar is designed for grad students working toward a degree in Comparative Literature and Society. Students are expected to have a preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Readings may include some of the following: fiction by Tayeb Salih, W.G. Sebald, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid; critical scholarship by Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Auerbach, Benjamin, Fanon, C.L.R. James, Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss, Clifford, Appadurai, Apter, Buck-Morss, Moretti, Damrosch, Harvey, Jameson, Said, Rancière, Kittler, Butler, Trouillot, and Spivak.

JAZZ W4900x  South African Jazz: Identity & Authenticity (Gwen Ansell) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Limited to 30 students. This class will explore the history of jazz in South Africa, one of the few countries outside the US where music bearing that genre label has been a genuinely popular music. The class will use the case study of South Africa to explore various ways in which jazz identity and authenticity have been defined and, in particular, notions of ‘African-ness’ and ‘American-ness’ in the music. It will also engage with skills relevant to writers about jazz in both academic and media contexts: Assignments and presentations may encompass the traditional analytical paper based on readings, more personal work recounting personal/community responses to the music, and researched feature-type writing exploring oral history aspects of documenting jazz.

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SPRING 2007

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.

CLEN G6031y Gender before 1500 (Patricia Dailey) Tues 4:10-6:30. Seminar. Please note: this course will be co-taught by Professor Patricia Dailey (Columbia) and Professor Stacy Klein (Rutgers) and will shift weekly between Columbia and Rutgers).
          This course will explore issues and questions generated by two developments in medieval studies: the increasingly central position of gender as a topic for critical analysis, and the use of contemporary theory as a means to explore the past. We will be concerned to trace out how medievalists have both used and (implicitly or explicitly) produced theories that touch on gender, to examine fundamental changes in public attitudes toward gender from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries, and to develop a variety of working models for theorizing gender in medieval texts.
          We will focus many of our primary readings on hagiography and romance-the two most popular genres of medieval writing. Both genres foreground gender, gendered bodies, sexuality, marriage, and family within highly formulaic and yet historically particularized narrative structures, offering a way to mediate between theoretical issues and the claims of a particular historical period. A brief tour of Old English heroic poetry will offer additional perspectives on gender, as well as primary materials for theorizing gender. Throughout the course, we will read theoretical texts and examine analyses of gender from a variety of disciplines. Texts may include: AElfric's Life of Euprhosyne and Life of Eugenia, the Life of Mary of Egypt, Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae, the Roman de Silence, Beowulf, Judith, Elene, Wulf and Eadwacer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthurian Romances, the Old English Life of St. Margaret and the Story of Apollonius of Tyre, texts on rhetoric (Philip of Harveng, Alberic of Monte Cassino) and medicine, and texts by early women mystics.

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.

CLEN G6125y European Renaissance Texts: Prose, Print and Politics in 16th-century Europe (Alan Stewart) Mon 2:10-4. Seminar. This course examines some of the most innovative and influential prose works of sixteenth-century Europe. Encompassing travel writing, political treatises and essays alongside romances and picaresque novels, it will explore the mutual impact of apparently "non-literary" and "literary" works; the interplay between manuscript and print cultures; the attempted appropriation of particular genres for religious and political agendas; strategies for reading prose; and prose's possibilities for women. Texts will include: More's Utopia; Machiavelli's The Prince; Castiglione's Book of the Courtier; Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel; Gascoigne's "The Adventures of Master F.J."; Sidney's Arcadia; Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller; and Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha. Non-English texts will be read in English translation.

ENGL G6115y The Literature and Culture of Reformation England, from More to Milton (David Kastan) Thurs 11-12:50. Seminar. A study of the various ways in which the charged religious landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England exerted itself and was mediated by the rich literary production of the age. We will consider topics and genres such as biblical translation, autobiography and martyrology, sermons, and devotional literature; and we will read, among others, More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Surrey, Foxe, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Milton.

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.

CLEN G4321y Reformation to Romanticism: Literary and Scientific Revolutions (Ross Hamilton) Wed 6:10-8. Lecture/discussion. This course will attempt a synthetic literary analysis of the "long Reformation" through an examination of the shift from natural philosophy to the rise of modern science. Recent exciting work in the history of science will provide the basis for an exploration of literary analogues. Our work deliberately avoids the division of knowledge into literary periods. Accordingly, the reading list includes literary texts written between 1600 and 1820, (selections from Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Cavendish, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley); scientific works (selections from Galen, Paracelsus, Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Newton) and essays by contemporary historians (Kuhn, Feingold, Jones, Miller and others). Please reread Hamlet for the first class, and look at Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory.

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.

ENGL W4802y History of the Novel II (Sharon Marcus) Mon & Wed 2:40-3:55. Lecture. In 1881, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that marriage was the only "proper ending for a novel." This course explores that rule and its exceptions by reading novels in which marriage is both a social institution and narrative structure. We will explore how the ideological and the formal converge in the Victorian novel's courtship plot and in novels that revise and resist that plot. Works to include: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë, Shirley; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.

ENGL G6404y The Victorian Novel and the Victorian Book (Nicholas Dames) Wed 11-12:50. Seminar. This seminar is intended as an introduction to advanced study in the Victorian novel, but with a central premise: that "the novel" can no longer be understood as a transparently literary category, but rather as a something like a communicative medium, dependent on a series of developments in the material, financial, and legal technologies of publication. More specifically: that the Victorian novel can best be understood as a form involved in complex negotiations with and meditations upon its own material container, the "book." Our survey will involve close attention to the full range of nineteenth-century publication forms for fiction-serial numbers; magazine and newspaper sketches; anthologies; three-deckers; cheap reprint editions; deluxe collected editions-and will consider how to make critical and theoretical use of bibliographical facts such as typeface design, illustrations, copyright, format and price. We will also consider the Victorian novel's constant figurations of textual materiality and reading practices. Authors studied will include Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Collins, Eliot, Trollope, Gissing; we will also read recent work by scholars in the field ranging from Richard Altick to Laurel Brake, Jerome McGann, Clare Pettitt, Leah Price, Jonathan Rose, John Sutherland, Alison Winter. Application required. Deadline: December 11. Instructions.

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.

ENTA W4724y Modern Drama II (Martin Puchner) Mon & Wed 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course explores European and U.S. drama from the early twentieth century to the sixties, including the avant-garde theaters of futurism, the political theaters of Brecht and Odets, and classics of modern tragedy such as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Attention is also paid to the relation between the theater and the other arts, including architecture, cinema, and music.

ENGL G6740y Early 20th-century British Drama (Edward Mendelson) Mon 11-12:50. Seminar. Modernist drama and dramatic theory: Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Beckett (and perhaps Virginia Woolf's "Freshwater"), possibly with side-glances at Strindberg, Pirandello, Cocteau, Brecht, and others.

CLEN G6550y Cultural Studies: Trauma, Memory, and Performance (Marianne Hirsch & Diana Taylor) Tues 4:10-6. Seminar. This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance through two major 20th century events, the Holocaust and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ and the theoretical questions they raise. Do they each have their own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a translocal, cosmopolitan lens? Topics include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; the construction of archives of testimony; testimony, its use in literature, museums, and pedagogy, its the dramatizations by others, its archivization; the social role of sites of memory (Auschwitz, Club Atlético, etc.); theaters of justice such as trials, tribunals and truth commissions; performances of protest and resistance.
        This course draws from classic and recent readings at the juncture of trauma, memory, and performance studies. To build on the paradigms suggested by the Holocaust and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ students will be encouraged to extend the topics explored in class to other sites—slavery, the Gulag, Hiroshima, 9/11, TRC, Tlatelolco, etc.
        Please note that this is a consortium course which will alternate meetings at Columbia and NYU. Students need to figure travel time into their plans. We plan to meet on Tuesdays from 4:15-6:30. During the semester, several evening talks and seminars will be organized in conjunction with the course, both at Columbia and NYU.

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.

ENGL W4632y Asian American Literature and Culture (Wen Jin) TR 9:10-10:25. Lecture. This course offers an overview of "Asian American literature" while interrogating the political and formal underpinnings of this very category. We will examine important prose narratives, poetry, and plays written by Asians in America from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with a focus on two questions in particular: 1) How do these texts figure the relationship among U.S. racial formation, transpacific migration, and U.S.-Asian relations? 2) How do they complement and complicate familiar genres and styles (autobiography, the short story, social realism, magical realism, modernist and experimental poetry, etc.)? The course begins by examining how early Chinese immigrant writings provided alternative representations of the American West and moves at the end to contemporary Asian American imaginings of national and global democracy.

ENGL G6408y Pragmatism: Emerson to Rorty (Ross Posnock) Wed 4:10-6. Seminar. The one native American philosophy has been a crucial presence in American literature as well, for Emerson, arguably, is the first pragmatist. We will evaluate this argument and will read work by his admirers William James and John Dewey and by the contemporary pragmatist Richard Rorty. The literary pragmatism that we will discuss includes works by Henry James, W.E.B Du Bois and Ralph Ellison.

ENGL G6610y Cold War Culture and Film Noir (Ann Douglas) Tues 6:10-8. Seminar. Interdisciplinary study of U.S. noir culture of the postwar decade. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War (notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Hiss, Chambers), the blacklist, examples of science fiction (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), film noir (Double Indemnity, The Sweet Smell of Success, The Killers, In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat), the roman noir (Jim Thompson), as well as background readings in history and film theory. Syllabus available at Courseworks.

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.

ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern.

CLEN G6537y Topics in Theory: Feminism & Queer Theory (Sharon Marcus) Thurs 4:10-6. Seminar. Our focus will be on gender and sexuality as mutually defining concepts. We will begin with foundational texts (de Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler), then read recent work that addresses religion, globalization, transsexuality, and kinship. We will pay special attention to the effects that interdisciplinary syntheses and disciplinary divisions have on the articulation and deployment of feminist and queer theories.

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.

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FALL 2006

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.
          Chaucer's works will, of course, be read in his Middle English (not nearly so difficult as sometimes rumored). A weekly small-group section will allow class members to raise reading issues, challenge lectures, and (since it's hard to appreciate the writing without 'hearing' it as you read) will also include practical tips on reading Middle English aloud. Written work will include a brief, weekly, in-class exercise in translation and commentary (a total of ten of these, with your best eight marks to be tallied), a short midterm paper (5 pp) and a longer final paper (8-10 pp).
           Graduate students enrolling in this course will complete the requirements for other members, and will write a somewhat more developed (10-12 pp) final paper. Professor Strohm will also run a discussion section for graduates, which any interested undergraduate students are also, optionally but cordially, invited to attend.
          The text for this class will be the Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson. It is unfortunately expensive, and available only in hardbound in the U.S., but used copies should be available. Alternatively, a 50 per cent savings can be achieved by ordering the British paperback edition, airmail and at least a week in advance of our first meeting, from Amazon.Co.Uk.

ENGL W4091x An Introduction to Old English: Language and Literature (Patricia Dailey) Mon & Wed 5:40-6:55. Lecture. This class is an introduction to the language and literature of England from around the 8th to the 11th centuries. Because this is predominantly a language class, we will spend much of our class time studying grammar as we learn to translate literary and non-literary texts. While this course provides a general historical framework for the period as it introduces you to the culture of Anglo-Saxon England, it will also take a close look at how each text defines the human, the monstrous, and the notion of "home," as well as the role language itself plays in defining (or blurring) the boundaries between them. We will look at how each work contextualizes (or recontextualizes) relationships between the human and the divine, the natural and the super-natural, the individual and society. We will use Hasenfratz and Jambeck's Reading Old English as our language textbook, and supplementing it with Mitchell and Robinson's An Introduction to Old English. Students will be expected to do assignments for each meeting. The course will involve a mid-term and possibly a final exam or a short paper.

CLEN G6028x Medieval Animals (Susan Crane) Thurs 2:10-4. Seminar. The intellectual and political turbulence around the animal question in our own time provides new vantage points from which to consider how animals figure in medieval writing. This course organizes medieval readings around theoretical readings stemming from three major arenas of contemporary thought on animals. First, in philosophical critiques, the inadequacy of defining humanness as difference from animality is argued in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Adam’s naming of the animals, and in wider critiques of the compulsion to differentiate when conceiving human-animal relations. Second, environmental studies urge the pervasive importance of animals (their labor, skills, skins, and protein) in a wide range of technologies such as warmaking, bookmaking, hunting, and fashion. Third, the utilitarian tradition informing Singer’s activist writing as well as Cavell’s on the novels of Coetzee considers animals and ethics: do humans have ethical duties to other animals, or is the conjunction unthinkable? Medieval theologians align themselves with the latter position, while medieval vernacular writing sometimes anticipates utilitarianism in its awareness of animal suffering and its location of animals inside the ethical circle. Medieval texts may include a Bestiary, the lays and beast fables of Marie de France, Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and romances of the Knight of the Lion and Knight of the Swan. Critical writing on animals by Augustine, Aquinas, Berger, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Eco, Singer, and others will prepare us to think about how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. Syllabus.

ENGL G6002x Piers Plowman and the Piers Plowman Tradition (Helen Barr) Tues 2:10-4. Seminar. Piers Plowman was one of the most popular poems of the Middle Ages, outranked in surviving copies only by the works of Chaucer. Piers Plowman was immersed in contemporary issues such as civil dissent, revolt, heresy and the relationships between individuals, communities and powerful institutions. The poem participates in struggles of its cultural moment and was also appropriated by various parties to articulate their own positions and agendas. The seminars will focus closely on the texts of Piers alongside other contemporary cultural materials in order to bring out the complexity, subtleties, and occasionally, dead ends reached in this poem as its author(s) wrestled with the times. Later seminars will turn to the shorter poems written in the wake of Piers. This so-called 'tradition' constitutes a rich reading response to Piers as each poet, in turn, saw in their poetic predecessor material to fuel their own causes.
          Texts for this course: The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B Text, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (Everyman: London, 1995) [make sure that you have a version in Middle English and not a translation]; The Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Helen Barr (Everyman: London, 1993); materials from other texts of the poem will be supplied. Starting in week 2 of the course, the seminars will begin with short presentations condensed from written position papers (circa 3pp). Participants will be expected to produce these bi-weekly. There will be a final seminar paper of circa 20pp.

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).

ENGL W4211x Milton (Thomas Festa) Tues & Thurs 1:10-2:25. Lecture. A revolutionary poet and an outspoken radical, Milton immersed himself in the leading controversies of his day, such as the freedom of the press, the right to kill an unjust ruler, and the liberty to divorce. Since his own time, Milton's writing has encouraged questions about what it means to be radical, an investigation notoriously associated with the figure of Satan in Paradise Lost. Through a close study of the major poetry and prose, this course will consider Milton in terms of the literary and historical constructions of such concepts as "liberty" and "evil" that affected his writing and continue to affect his reputation.

ENGL G6711x Feminist Shakespeares (Jean Howard) Wed 11-12:50. Seminar. Intended as a polemical investigation of critical practices, this course asks what it means to read Shakespeare in relationship to feminist thought. We will slice and dice this issue in a number of ways. Was there something akin to an early modern feminism in view of which a writer like Shakespeare worked? Were there changes in the early modern social landscape which affected his fictions in ways that are of interest to 21st-century feminists, especially feminist historicist critics? What is gained and/or lost in reading Shakespeare's texts in relationship to current feminist theory? Are there particular ways in which feminist reading practices inflect formalist inquiries concerning genre, language, and dramatic convention? We will not be asking: was Shakespeare a feminist?
          The course will focus on the following texts: "The Rape of Lucrece," "Venus and Adonis," "The Sonnets," I Henry VI, Henry IV, I, Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. In concert with these texts we will also explore particularly provocative examples of current feminist Shakespeare criticism, early modern writings by and about women, and a handful of classic texts of contemporary feminist theory.
          Participants will have freedom to pursue a range of research projects within the broad catchment of the course's concerns, but each participant should expect to do one oral presentation on a primary text, a review of a significant and relevant instance of feminist criticism or theory, and a substantial seminar paper that explicitly engages with the overarching critical issues posed by the course and with one or more Shakespeare texts.

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.

ENGL G4403x 19th-century Autobiography (John Rosenberg) Wed 9-10:50 [limit: 20]. Lecture /discussion. Versions of the self from Wordsworth to Woolf. Themes: the problematics of autobiographical truth; cultural roots of the self; "I" as metaphor; crisis, conversion and unconversion; Biblical typology and autobiographical narrative; gender, subjugation, and identity; novelized autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Writers: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Tennyson, Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Nightingale, Newman, Ruskin, Darwin, Hopkins, Gosse, and Woolf. Requirements: an oral presentation; short critical essay; seminar paper of approximately 15 pages.

ENGL G6405x Victorian London: Myth, Metamorphosis, Modernity (William Sharpe) Tues 2:10-4. Seminar. Strategies of representing the Victorian city, particularly in regard to the ways in which urban experience provokes formal innovations, deformations, illegibility, proto-modernism, and even criminality and court cases. Special emphasis on the nighttime as a site of exploration and transgression for both individuals and artworks. Texts and images by Dickens, Engels, Poe, Mayhew, Gaskell, Barrett Browning, Doré, Whistler, Ruskin, Stevenson, Wilde, Doyle, and others. The focus will be London, but there will be reference to 19th-century New York and Paris, and contemporary issues in painting, architecture, and urban planning. Students will be expected to participate in the shaping and conduct of the seminar. NB: Participants should come to the first class meeting having read the following two short stories: Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and Hawthorne's "Wakefield" (any edition is fine; also, both are posted at Courseworks).

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.

ENGL W4502x British Literature 1950 to the Present (Maura Spiegel) Mon & Wed 6:10-7:25. Lecture. English fiction (and film), with attention to narrative drift, history, temporality, memory and current travails of representation; voice and the status of subjecthood; the colonial legacy, globalized and "post-national" identities. Writers include Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Kelman, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipual, John Osborne, W.G. Sebald. Films by Carol Reed, Michael Apted, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Frears.

ENTA G6707x Machine Art (Martin Puchner) Tues 4:10-6. Seminar. Modernism's fascination with machines, puppets, and robots as they affect different art forms, including cinema (Chaplin, Lang) and music (Antheil), as well as literature. Attention to drama and theater, in particular to changing conceptions of character and representation on the modernist stage. The ultimate aim of the course is to understand the aesthetic and formal consequences of industrialization and modernization. Readings by F.W. Taylor, Pound, O'Neill, Treadwell, Rice, Cocteau, Beckett, Stein, Shaw, Bergson, Marinetti and others.

CLEN G6566x Transnational Culture (Bruce Robbins) Thurs 11-12:50. Seminar. A critical survey of cultural theories and literary texts that assert, test, qualify, or respond to the double proposition that 1) in an era of so-called "globalization," culture has now expanded beyond the scale of the nation-state, and 2) it can no longer be made proper sense of within a critical vocabulary that assumes the centrality of the nation. Reference will be made to the disciplinary areas of human rights, humanitarian intervention, aerial bombing, finance, and commodity narratives. Authors to be discussed include George Orwell, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hannah Arendt, Jamaica Kincaid, Luc Boltanski, Arjun Appadurai, Susan Sontag, and Michael Ondaatje.

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).

ENGL W4612x Jazz & American Culture (Robert O'Meally) Tues & Thurs 2:40-3:55. Lecture. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of jazz's influence on the visual arts, dance, literature, film; introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies. Requirements for graduate students: students have the choice of writing a 20-25 pp research paper or developing two detailed syllabi for new courses within the field of Jazz Studies.

ENTA W4731x American Drama (Zander Brietzke) Tues & Thurs 1:10-2:25.
Lecture. Why bother to see stage drama if an adaptation is available in a much more accessible format? This course tries to answer that question by showing through numerous examples that plays and films do different things and create different experiences and that those differences that the stage offers are worth seeing. If the theater is to continue to survive as a viable art form, it must do so on formal grounds and intrinsic qualities apart from any cultural/social status. We'll compare the mediatized event to the implied theatrical performance of a dramatic text in order to see what's different, what's in, what's out, what's the same. The plays to be discussed at length range from the beginnings of the American theater and the one-act sea plays of Eugene O'Neill, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the end of the last century. In between, a representative list includes plays by Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, David Mamet, Margaret Edson. Students will be responsible for seeing one film outside of class each week as well as reading the dramatic text upon which the film is based. In addition, we'll read essays by directors, theorists, critics, and writers that correspond to the relevant issues of a particular play/film.

ENGL G6602x American Renaissance: Literature & Theory (Ezra Tawil) Thurs 6:10-8. Seminar. We will do two things at once: first, read a set of literary texts inside--and a few outside-the category "American Renaissance" or "Classic American Literature." At the same time, however, we will read and analyze some of the masterworks of 20th-century literary criticism that have produced, defended, and contested this tradition. What authors, texts, or even parts of texts tend to be valorized or emphasized, or devalued and forgotten, in order to maintain a literary tradition such as this one? What happens when we focus on the narrative elements of criticism? When and with what effects are literary histories themselves structured and emplotted like the literary texts they privilege or devalue as American Literature? And is there any sense in which the works of literature in question perform a labor we might call "critical"-in thinking, for example, about their own value as fulfilling the call for a national aesthetic? The course will alternate week by week between a work of literature and a work of criticism. Readings will likely include literary works by Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stowe, and critical works by D.H. Lawrence, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, William Spengemann, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, Toni Morrison, Eric Sundquist.

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.

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SPRING 2006

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.

CLEN W4740y The Third-World Bildungsroman (Joseph Slaughter) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. This course studies the contemporary international bildungsroman, the story of an individual's "coming of age," in the context of twentieth century political, cultural, and social developments of (post)colonialism, imperialism, human rights discourse, and globalization. We will consider how these "Third World" novels subscribe to, resist, and/or renegotiate the traditional novelistic conceptions of human development through creative engagement with the genre's conventions.

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.

ENGL G6631y American Literary and Cultural History: Mellon Colloquium on the History of Higher Education in the United States (Andrew Delbanco and Casey Blake) M 6:10-8. Open to graduate students in English and History beyond the first year of study. Themes include the history of public and private institutions, democratic educational ideals, curricular debates past and present, access to higher education (quotas, financial aid, affirmative action), university governance, and the rise of science and technology in the modern research university. This course is designed to prepare students for academic citizenship as faculty members in colleges and universities. We shall meet on Monday evenings from 6:10-8 pm to discuss readings, and, several times during the semester, discussion on special topics will be led by visiting faculty over dinner. Interested students should see Professor Delbanco or Professor Blake during the fall term. Further details.

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.

ENTA G6725y Drama and Dramatic Theory: The Theater of Ideas (Martin Puchner) W 6:10-8. Seminar. This course examines the relation between theater and philosophy. What happens when ideas and arguments are brought into the theater, shaping characters, action, and setting? And conversely, how does the theater affect philosophy? Plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Sartre, Frayn, Stoppard, and Murdoch; theatrical theory by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Burke, and Deleuze.

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.

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FALL 2005

M.A. COURSES

ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar

section 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. Auden

CLEN 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 comedy), genre and acting style, genre-bending and postmodernity, mis en scène. Why are certain genres linked to political parties, as are specific styles of heroism? Genres will include: the Western, War Movie, Romantic Comedy, Horror, Action, Gangster, Melodrama, Social Conscience, Musicals and "Women's films." Weekly screenings will be held MW 8-10 pm.

ENGL G6601x Nineteenth-century American Texts: Contesting Emerson (Ross Posnock) W 4:10-6. Seminar. We will construct and examine the philosophical, aesthetic, political and cultural conversation that animates the 19th-century literary response to Emerson in texts by Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. This conversation will engage such matters as the intellectual in the public sphere, the heritage of antinomianism, the response to slavery, the emergence of American cosmopolitanism, the paradoxes of individualism, the literary representation of what Emerson calls the soul's becoming.

THEORY

CLEN G4563x Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) M 4:10-6. Lecture. Lacan's Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation with Hamlet, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis with Antigone; Seminar VIII: Transference with Plato's Symposium, Seminar X: Anxiety and Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality with selected novels. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan's thought to literature and culture and on his shift from desire and language to jouissance, love, and poetry.

SPECIAL TOPICS

CLEN G4011x Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle) T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.

CLEN W4521x The World of Banned Books (Jonathan Abel) TR 9:10-10:25.
Prodding the underbelly of the corpus of world literature, this course examines the politics of banned literature in various guises across several centuries and continents. Texts have been classified as taboo, seized, and burned and their producers fined, jailed, tortured, and killed throughout history and under a multitude of political regimes. Incorporating in our discussion a diverse range of systems of censorship in Europe, the US, Japan, and China, we will uncover differences amongst these modes of repression while uncovering sometimes surprising connections between church and monarchy, fascism and democracy. Syllabus and requirements.

ENGL G8490x Advanced Research Seminar (James Shaprio) M 6-7:30. Limited to those in English and Comparative Literature completing their degrees and preparing for the MLA job search.

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SPRING 2005

MEDIEVAL

ENGL W4092y Beowulf (Richard Sacks) TR 11-12:50. A close reading of the poem in Old English, as well as an examination of various issues and approaches-both accepted and controversial, ranging from the poem's linguistic and manuscript problems to its cultural and narrative strategies-critical to interpreting the text. Some previous exposure to Old English is preferred but not required since 30-60 minutes of regularly scheduled class time during most weeks will be dedicated to providing ongoing exposure to and review of Old English grammar. Syllabus.

CLEN G6023y Provencal Lyric (Joan Ferrante) M 2:10-4. An introduction to the language and the major early poets of the courtly love tradition.

ENGL G6002y Middle English Texts: Host Bodies (Patricia Dailey). R 4:10-6. This course will focus on embodiment, language, and hospitality in works by women mystics: Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Angela di Foligno, and Beatrice of Nazareth. We will then move backwards, so to speak, to similar themes in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

RENAISSANCE

ENGL G6101y Spenser (Anne Prescott) W 4:10-6. We will examine Spenser's Shephearde's Calendar, Faerie Queene, selections from Complaints, Amoretti and Epithalamion, Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and Colin Clouts Come Home Again, and passages from Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. Classroom discussion will focus on the primary texts and on the religious and political issues, generic play, and cultural dynamics they inscribe. Students are, though, encouraged to investigate current criticism on whatever aspect of Spenser's work interests them. (We will use T.P. Roche's or A.C. Hamilton's Faerie Queene and W. Oram's edition of the shorter poems.)

ENGL G6712y Shakespeare Seminar (David Kastan) R 2:10-4. Shakespeare: Writer, Playwright, Author. A study of what the surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays represent in terms of his literary and theatrical aspirations and possibilities.

18th CENTURY

ENGL W4801y History of the English Novel I: The Rise of the Novel (Clifford Siskin) T 4:10-6 (with 40-minute discussion immediately following). In 1803, Samuel Miller warned that any "young person" who became "devoted" to novels "is in a fair way to dissipate his mind, to degrade his taste, and to bring on himself intellectual and moral ruin." This course will test that hypothesis by examining the 18th-century "rise" of the novel.

CLEN G6400y Comparative Romantic Texts: Memory and Forgetting (Ross Hamilton) T 6:10-8. 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

CLEN W4822y The 19th-century European Novel (Nicholas Dames) MW 4:10-5:25. 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, Balzac, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

ENGL G6401y Victorian Studies Today (Nicholas Dames) W 11-12:50. An intensive survey of current work being done under the rubric "Victorian studies," with attention to the different methodologies now in play, and how those methodologies construct their object of study (the "Victorian") in markedly different ways. We will be reading primary texts from across generic boundaries (including, but not limited to, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Gissing, Arnold, Ruskin, Tennyson, the Brownings, Vernon Lee) alongside key recent works from a variety of important approaches. Among the topics to be considered: Victorian print and media culture; histories of technology; mappings of nineteenth-century intellectual, scientific, and theoretical fields; empire and domesticity; Victorian sexualities; reconstructions of the Victorian senses; studies of the Victorian economy. How these different fields define the literary, and how they each attempt connections to contemporary phenomena, will be our leading lines of inquiry.

20th CENTURY

ENGL W4501y 20th-century British Literature (Sarah Cole) TR 2:40-3:55. This course begins with the premise that British literature of the first half of the twentieth century tended to be shaped by profound anxieties about the present. If modernism is often presented as a unified and coherent aesthetic movement, championing its own modernity, we will pay attention to its spirit of ambivalence, contradiction, and conflict, especially with respect to such vexed topics as gender and sexuality, empire and nationalism, production and consumption.
        Our particular angle for addressing these large issues will be the representation of past, present, and future in a range of literary works. Authors include Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Chinua Achebe.
        Graduate students also will be expected to meet regular for discussion.

CLEN W4200y Caribbean Diaspora Literature (Frances Negron-Muntaner) MW 1:10-2:25. Caribbean literature is largely studied by language of authorship, leading to categories such as Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean literature. Yet there is a growing Caribbean literature in English by authors whose ancestral tongue is French or Spanish. We will examine texts written by writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Dominica, and Jamaica and investigate the impact of migration and transculturation on the texts, the articulation of new cultural subjects, and in some cases, the fostering of dialogue that has been largely suppressed in the writers' home countries. Authors may include: Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, V.S. Naipaul, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, Oscar Hijuelos.

ENGL G6851y Literature, Culture, and War in the Twentieth Century (Sarah Cole) M 2:10-4. This is a seminar about war and culture, with a focus on twentieth-century England and America. Our primary concern is to consider how literary forms have developed to make sense of the twentieth century’s mass wars, how wars are remembered and forgotten, and how war has been adapted to the dominant aesthetic and cultural movements of the century. The bulk of our readings will center on the First World War, primarily from the British perspective, and on the Vietnam War, primarily from the American perspective, but we will also read material from the Second World War and from more recent conflicts such as the first Persian Gulf War. Issues of national identity, memory, gender, irony, and protest will be at the forefront of our inquiry. We will read both combatant and civilian writers, and our readings will be drawn from a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, film, cultural studies, and theory. In addition to an in-class presentation, students will be expected to write a 12-15 page paper, due on the last day of classes.

CLEN G6565y Occultism, Postcoloniality, Modernism (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. This course probes the shaping of the modern subject through such "occult" devices as mesmerism, ventriloquism, hypnotism, disembodiment, telepathy, spirit photography. 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, in what Fanon called a "zone of occult instability." Some of the questions the course hopes to raise 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? To what extent can occultism be understood as a product of clashing world views? 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? As these questions suggest, the course takes as its point of departure the modern Weberian notion of disenchantment and the split between the magical and the mundane that it prefigured. Occultism reemerged in the 19th century not in continuation with an earlier tradition of esotericism but in a variety of discrete forms that collectively posed a challenge to the disenchanted world view of science. Yet, in reinterpreting contemporary society and culture, occultism also adopted the techniques and aims of science, fashioning a new composite of matter and spirit, seen and unseen, empiricism and mysticism. Notions of invisibility, disembodied experience, and a hidden, inner self combined to create modern understandings of subjectivity. At the same time the blurred lines between seen and unseen allowed for new negotiations of colonial power: mesmerism is only one instance of lines that were crossed, creating new intimacies, racial fears, and sexual attractions. Primary readings include Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race, Zanoni; Rider Haggard, She; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone; Arthur Conan Doyle, Sign of Four; Richard Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Practical Occultism, selected essays; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Invisible Man; George du Maurier, Trilby; Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa.

CLEN G6920y Theory & Practice of Black Internationalism (Brent Edwards). T 11-12:50. This course is constructed around the proposition that since the mid-nineteenth century, a literature of black internationalism has arisen concurrently with efforts to practice black internationalism through political movements (Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism, Back-to-Africa, etc.). Black internationalism here refers not simply to a history of migration of peoples of African descent, but more specifically to a theory and metaphorology of the interconnection and political collaboration of black peoples across national and linguistic borders. We will consider a range of work in a variety of modes, including fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Particular texts may include: Martin Delany, Blake (1861-1862); Frances E. W. Harper, Of One Blood (1902-1903); W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928); Claude McKay, Banjo (1929); George Schuyler, Black Empire (1937-1938); Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo (1956); Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama (1961); C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963); Richard Wright, Black Power (1954); Maryse Conde, Heremakhonon (1976). We will also attend to some of the recent historiographic work theorizing a genealogy of black internationalist politics by scholars including Cedric Robinson, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Mahmood Mamdani, Manthia Diawara, Edouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter.

AMERICAN

ENGL W4593y The American Novel 1789-1865 (Ezra Tawil) TR 10:35-11:50. A history 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, Webb.

ENGL G6623y Modern American Poetry: Radical Poetries of the American 20th Century (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8. A range of poets from 1914 to the present, focusing on writing that is formally innovative or otherwise unconventional, and prose works in which the poets reflect on practice (poetics). Poets include Stein, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Zukofsky, Hughes, Olson, Ashbery, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Harreyette Mullen, Myung Mi Kim.

ENGL G6633y Issues in African American Literature, Criticism & Theory (Farah Griffin) T 4:10-6. This course will consider works of fiction, history and criticism in an effort to re-conceptualize notions of “The Black South” as a cultural landscape that includes sections of the U.S. South, the Caribbean and Central America. In so doing we will attempt to forge a dialogue between three separate but related critical discourses: Literatures of the Americas, the Black Diaspora and the Atlantic Rim. Our readings focus on significant historical, literal and mythic landscapes including but not limited to Haiti and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Works include: literature, scholarship and film by Paule Marshall, Nikki Finney, Edwidge Danticat, Gloria Naylor, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Dayan, C.L.R. James, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Maya Deren, Julie Dash.

ENTA G6707y 20th-century Dramatic Texts: American Spectacle (Matt Smith) W 2:10-4. This seminar will study the influence of mass media on American art since roughly 1965. We will range across disciplines to identify common patterns in contemporary American culture. Sources will include visual art (Warhol), novel (Pynchon, DeLillo), drama (Shepard, Kushner, Parks, Smith), film (Altman, Scott, Luhrmann), architecture (Graves, Johnson, Gehry), and urban design (the new Las Vegas, the new Times Square). We will also read theorists such as Jameson, Harvey, Huyssen, and Haraway.

THEORY

CLEN W4995y Special Topics: Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) R 6:10-8. An intensive reading of selections from Lacan’s Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation with Hamlet, of Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis with Antigone and Kant’s Ethics; of Seminar VIII: Transference with Plato’s Symposium, and of Seminar X: Anxiety and Seminar 20: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality with selected novels. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan's thought to literature and culture and on his shift from desire and language to jouissance, love, and poetry as well as on the significance of his inclusion of the symptom in his knot of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real.

CLEN G6120y Ancient Literary Theory (Kathy Eden) F 11-12:50. Major works of rhetorical and poetic theory from the Greek and Roman traditions, including those of Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Longinus, Tacitus, Quintilian, Seneca and Plutarch.

ENGL G6532y Issues in Lit Theory: Pattern Recognition: Rethinking Literary History Since Foucault (Clifford Siskin) M 4:10-6. How "close" can our "readings" of texts and authors and cultures get before we risk losing focus, before this valuable form of attention—like so many behaviors today—reaches its historical limit case? One recent, acclaimed book on Austen, for example, gets so close that it reads her—explicitly—for what is not there. "Pattern Recognition" offers an alternative mode of attention—one that recognizes that there is more than one way to reap the benefits of "closeness": in reconstruing the object of knowledge, we can also rework how to gain proximity to it. Need we, for example, continue to gaze into individual objects for deep meanings, or are there now opportunities, enhanced by new technologies, for turning to larger groupings and other configurations? Can "zooming out," as a number of critics have put it, yield knowledge and pleasure that are as new and rewarding to us as Wordsworth's plan to "look steadily" inward was over 200 years ago?
       "Pattern Recognition," then, refers, first, to our effort to identify an emerging pattern of knowledge production in our field. What do apparently disparate efforts in literary history and theory, the novel, media, print culture, book history, science studies, the new economic criticism, queer theory, and global and cultural studies have in common? Second, we will try on "Pattern Recognition" as a label for what we find: is the new pattern in our field "pattern recognition" itself-both the procedures we already share and those that we may want to borrow and adapt? Here, we will sample other disciplines, where the strategies of pattern recognition have emerged as key modes of producing knowledge in sociology and economics, cybernetics and communication, evolutionary dynamics and artificial intelligence. Writers addressed will likely include Foucault and Strydom, Plant and Borges, Williams and Radcliffe, Kelly and Eno, Habermas and Price, Moretti and McLuhan. As a start, give yourselves a present over the holidays: read William Gibson's most recent novel, Pattern Recognition.

SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern.

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FALL 2004

MEDIEVAL

ENGL W4091x Anglo-Saxon (David Yerkes) T 6:10-8. 4 pts. The goal is to learn to read Anglo-Saxon verse and prose with the help of a glossary and grammar. Instructor permission required.

CLEN G6028x Studies in Medieval Lit: Serio ludere: Comedy, Culture, and Society in the poetry of Ovid, Chaucer, and Ariosto (Robert Hanning) W 11-12:50. An examination of how three great comic poets use the techniques and traditions of comedy-parody, satire, wordplay, representations of outrageous language and behavior-to engage the social and cultural aspirations or anxieties of their respective civilizations. Reading knowledge of Latin, Italian, or medieval English is helpful but not required. This is a graduate seminar, but applications from well-prepared undergraduates will be considered. Extensive class discussions of primary texts will be the norm (supported by secondary readings); enjoyment and understanding the twin goals. Syllabus.

CLEN G6031x Medieval Court Performance and Performance Theory (Susan Crane) W 2:10-4. Readings will include some dramatic texts (such as cycle plays) but will focus on texts concerning performance situations that are not staged (at least not in the conventional sense), such as tournaments, festivals, secular and religious rituals, and banquet entertainments. Such performances were ubiquitous in late medieval England, and participating in them gets frequent representation in chronicles, poetry, and manuscript illumination. Each week of the course gathers sources around one kind of performance, and considers how it shaped and expressed medieval identities. Secondary readings from performance, practice, and ritual theory. Syllabus.

RENAISSANCE

ENGL W4711x Shakespeare (David Kastan) MW 11-12:15. A study of Shakespeare, focusing on representative comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. The course is designed to explore the relationship of the imaginative achievement of the plays to the theatrical, literary, social, and intellectual world in which they were produced.

CLEN G6128x Comparative Renaissance Texts: Renaissance Letters (Alan Stewart) M 2:10-4. The letter is the early modern period's most prominent textual form, its primary non-verbal mode of communication. This course will examine both model, real and wilfully fictional letters in a range of settings, from the sixteenth-century classroom to diplomatic embassies to war campaigns to the early epistolary novel. Topics will include the rhetorical traditions of letter-writing (ars dictaminis, Erasmus, Vives, Justus Lipsius), the material conditions of letter-writing, diplomatic letters, news letters, women's letters, secretarial culture, and letters in fiction. Examples will be taken from Latin, English, French and Italian sources, but we will study them in English; we will also examine archival manuscript letters.

WMST G8010x European Merchants and International Trade, 1300-1700: Practice and Representation (Jean Howard and Martha Howell) W 2:10-4. This graduate seminar will examine how international trade was practiced and represented by northern Europeans in the late medieval and early modern periods. We will examine such things as the changing financial practices that underwrote long-distance trade; the role of fairs, factories, and urban entrepots in its development; the relationship of international merchants to traditional guild culture and the development of joint stock companies; the usefulness of world system theory in understanding the structure of international trade during this period; the changing way in which international trade was textualized in drama, travel narratives, voyage literature, and prescriptive tracts. We will look first at some of the historiography on international trade 1300 to 1700 including Braudel, Wallerstein, and Brenner. We will then juxtapose selections from Mandeville with selections from Hakluyt and look at some instances of early mercantilist discourse; we will conclude by reading a selection of plays in which long-distance trade is represented, either directly or indirectly, such as The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Three Ladies of London, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, If You Know Not Me, Christian Turned Turk, The Island Princess, and The Widow Ranter. [Team-Taught at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender by Martha Howell, History, and Jean Howard, English] Syllabus

18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM

ENGL W4703x Restoration & 18th-century Drama (Jenny Davidson) MW 11-12:15. 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. Syllabus.

ENGL G6629x The Idea of Culture (Jenny Davidson) W 4:10-6. Raymond Williams called it "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language," and the term culture appears in a bewildering range of contemporary contexts (cultural studies, the culture wars, culture versus nature, the cultured classes, etc.). This class will examine the idea of culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain through the lens of more recent writing about the meanings of culture. One intellectual context for our investigation is the history of cultural studies in the academy; another, the new dominance in the United States of an evolutionary psychology (indebted to sociobiology) that invokes a biological human nature to account for and vindicate human difference, particularly between the sexes. Syllabus.

19th CENTURY

ENGL W4404x Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 1:10-2:25. 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. Syllabus posted at Couseworks.

ENGL W4390x Dickens and the Nineteenth Century (Maura Spiegel). MW 6:10-7:25. This course will trace the arc of Dickens' career, his evolution as a narrative strategist and social visionary, with attention to such nineteenth-century preoccupations as urban life, crime, detection, bureaucracy, reform, poverty, disease, self-help, sentimentality, and the problem of virtue. This is a lecture / discussion class with limited enrollment-20 senior undergraduate students and 10 graduate students. Syllabus posted at Couseworks.

ENGL G6933x 19th-Century Autobiography (John Rosenberg) W 9-10:50. Versions of the self from Wordsworth to Woolf. Themes include the problematics of autobiographical truth; cultural roots of the self; "I" as metaphor; crisis, conversion and unconversion; Biblical typology and autobiographical narrative; gender, subjugation, and identity; novelized autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Writers: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Carlyle, Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Nightingale, Newman, Ruskin, Darwin, Pater, Hopkins, Gosse, and Woolf.

20th CENTURY

ENTA W4724x Modern Drama (Matthew Smith) TR 1:10-2:25. A survey of modern drama from roughly 1870 to 1960, with particular attention to the foundations of modern theatre in the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw. Other playwrights may include Wilde, Synge, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, O'Neill, Williams, and Miller. We will also discuss the development of modern techniques of acting, directing, theatre architecture, and scene design.

ENGL G6550x Modern Poetry: Auden (Edward Mendelson) W 11-12:50. All Auden all the time. Poems, prose, drama. Intellectual, political, biographical, critcial, historical, and moral issues. Possibly some use of unpublished material. Prerequisites: Courtesy and intelligence. Requirements: Active participation in the seminar. At the end of the term, a paper that is substantial, readable, and, at least in intention, publishable.

CLEN G6707x Drama, Film, and the Law (Julie Peters) M 2:10-4. Investigates both representations of the law in drama and film and legal events as cultural performances, exploring law's historical preoccupation with its own performance status, and theatre and film's historical preoccupation with the law. We will examine the historical connections between law and theatre (from the ancient and medieval schools of rhetoric to Court TV), a number of trials (the Loudun witch trials, the Oscar Wilde libel and obscenity trials, the Nuremberg trials, recent child abuse cases), and dramatic representations of such substantive issues in the law as murder and culpability, freedom of speech, the nature of punishment, justice after atrocity. The course also serves as a vehicle for interrogating "law and literature," "cultural studies," and "performance studies" as sub-disciplines, addressing the conceptual problems involved in writing about quasi-literary texts and about performances that straddle the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. Texts include: plays (Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Susan Glaspell's Trifles, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden); films (Orson Welles' The Trial, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, Errol Morris' Thin Blue Line), historical, journalistic, and legal texts, and secondary studies of law and performance (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and others). Syllabus.

AMERICAN

ENGL W4612x Jazz and American Culture (Robert O'Meally) TR 10:35-11:50. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of jazz's influence on the visual arts, dance, literature, film; introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

ENGL G6608x Texts & Interpretations (Andrew Delbanco) T 2:10-4. Major works of American literature from the 17th through the 19th centuries (by such authors as Winthrop, Emerson, Melville, Stowe, DuBois, Dresier, and Henry James) will be read along with influential secondary interpretations by critics including Moses Coit Tyler, V.L. Parrington, Perry Miller, and F.O. Matthiessen, as well as by contemporary critics (e,g, Sacvan Bercovitch, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, Lawrence Buell) who write from such perspectives as the new historicism, gender studies, reader-response theory, ethnic studies, ecocriticism, etc. The aim of the course is to set classic works composed through the 19th century in the context of 20th-century interpretations that emerged as American literature established itself as an academic subject.

THEORY

CLEN W4560x Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Bruce Robbins) TR 4:10-5:25. 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. Syllabus.

ENTA G6725x Drama and Dramatic Theory: Theories of Tragedy (Matthew Smith) R 4:10-6. Modern theories of tragedy, accompanied by dramatic texts. Theoretical readings from Aristotle, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Brecht, Miller, Boal. Dramatists may include Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, O'Neill, Soyinka, Smith, and Parks.

SPECIAL TOPICS

CLEN G4011x Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle) T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.

ENGL G6431x Anti-Vivisection, Feminism, and the Critique of Progress (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. Why was the movement against vivisection of animals so heavily dominated by women? And what connections exist between antivivisection and the many conflicting causes that comprise the late nineteenth-century women's and working class movements? This course examines how the protection of animal rights introduced new dichotomies into which women's struggles could be inserted. Scientific and medical advances highlighted these dichotomies for women far more sharply than any other comparable developments. The discourse of progress that cited the improved mortality rates of women blocked criticism of either science or the men who practiced it. But the vivisection of animals for experimental purposes cracked open the supposedly noble intentions of science and exposed the raw suffering that was inflicted in the name of knowledge: improvement at a price, in other words. Modern science, which made animals expendable in the search for cures for modern diseases, created new hierarchies of ontology that subordinated animal suffering to worldly ends. The ontological divisions between the materialism of science and the sanctity of biological life (human and animal) created a new ethical awareness about the nature of pain. But mainstream religion had little to offer by way of developing this awareness into action. Ideas of suffering as Christian atonement were too severely undermined by science to be effective in a battle that depended for its success on recognition of the visceral quality of pain. The intellectual biographies of some of the nineteenth century's greatest female reformers reveal their confrontation with the limitations of the religion in which they were born and their search for ways of making social activism responsive to the physical reality of pain. Their writings are paralleled by the novels of major figures like H.G. Wells and Wilkie Collins exploring the nexus between violence against animals and the abuse of women and workers. The course will probe the uses of antivivisection in advancing the causes of women and the English working classes, as well as the extent to which animal advocacy was served by these connections and by the translation of animals into fiction and fable. Primary works include Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau; Blavatsky, Have Animals Souls?; selected writings of Darwin, Huxley, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, and Elizabeth Blackwell; J.M. Coetzee, Lives of Animals. Secondary works include Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic; Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate; Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900; Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog. Application instructions.

OF RELATED INTEREST

CLLT W4300x The Classical Tradition (Kathy Eden) TR 4:10-5:25. An introduction to the humanistic arts of Greek and Roman antiquity, including poetry, history and philosophy, complemented by some ancient rhetorical and poetic theory that addresses both the commonalities among these arts and their differences. (Syllabus posted on Courseworks.)

M.A. COURSES

ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar
section 1: The Critic in Culture. David Damrosch (Monday 4:10-6)
section 2: Digital Retroaction: Print Culture in a Digital Age. Clifford Siskin (Tuesday 4:10-6)

ENGL G5005x Masters Colloquium will take place on alternate Mondays from 12:30-2 in the Ward Dennis Room, 510 Lewisohn. Schedule.

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SPRING 2004

MEDIEVAL

ENGL W4011y Chaucer: Time and Narrative in the Canterbury Tales (Paul Strohm) MW 11-12:15. This course will be organized around two intimately-related subjects: Chaucer's ideas about time and his experiments with narrative form. Resources for discussions of time will include Augustine, Le Goff, Auerbach, and Ernst Bloch; for narrative, Ricouer and Barthes; for their interpenetration, Bakhtin and Baudrillard. Substance for many of our discussions will be generated by the irreconcilability of two Chaucerian impulses: on the one hand, an attraction to the possibilities of linear narrative (entry, in Bakhtin's terms, into the 'productive horizontal'); on the other hand, a deep conviction that time is not really linear at all, but cyclical, simultaneous, and 'vertical.'

CLEN G6021y Medieval Allegory (Joan Ferrante) T 4:10-6. Major medieval allegories from Prudentius to the Roman de la Rose and traditions of allegorical interpretation in classical and biblical exegesis.

ENGL G6002y Medieval Texts: Textuality and Treason in the 14th and 15th Centuries (Paul Strohm) W 2:10-4. We will spend our first nine or ten weeks looking together at some key texts: short selections from Usk and Chaucer in the 14th century, and then longer pieces by Pecock (probably the Donet), Fortescue (the 'Declaration' and the Governance of England) and Malory (probably Tristram). 'Background' readings will explore the worldly vicissitudes of these writers; textual analyses will touch on such matters as the 'doubleness,' the 'wounded' text, and loyalty as an unattainable ideal. We will pose the question of what, aside from overt treatment of treason-topics, constitutes a 'treasonous' text? The eleventh to the thirteenth weeks of the semester will be devoted to conferences about seminar paper subjects and short presentations by members of the seminar, outlining their proposed 'line of attack' on their (as yet incomplete) seminar paper topics. Professor Strohm will lecture or provide other intellectual stimulus during the fourteenth and fifteenth weeks, when people are bringing their seminar papers to completion.

RENAISSANCE

CLEN W4122y Renaissance in Europe: Wit and Humor in the Renaissance (Anne Prescott) TR 4:10-5:25. Varieties of Renaissance humor from courtly wit to lowdown scatology: satire, jokes, parody, paradoxes, wordplay, and theories of the risible. Works by Poggio, Castiglione, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Laurent Joubert, Louise Labé, Donne, Nashe, Philip Sidney, John Harington, and Jonson as well as jestbooks and a surprisingly funny French-English dictionary.

ENGL G6128y The Renaissance Marvellous (Julie Crawford) W 11-12:50. This seminar will look at the role of the wonderful and marvelous in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture. In addition to examining theories of wonder and the history of marvels, the course will focus on a number of specific topics: religious signs and visions; witchcraft and the occult; travel and colonial writings; science and natural history; and physiognomy, race, and sexual difference. In addition to a wide range of lesser known and non-fiction primary texts, we will read Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, Bacon's New Atlantis, Harriot's Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, James VI/I's Daemonologie, selected poetry, and selections from Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Secondary critics will include Caroline Walker Bynum, Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Keith Thomas, Michel de Certeau, Homi Bhabha, and Natalie Zemon Davis. The assignments for this class include a presentation and a final seminar paper.

ENGL G6712y Shakespeare seminar (James Shapiro) M 9-10:50. This seminar focuses on a year in the life of Shakespeare. Readings will include the plays he wrote or began writing in 1599 (Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet) as well as The Passionate Pilgrim (a poetry collection attributed to Shakespeare). We'll also be reading a broad range of literary, social and economic texts published in this year. In addition, the seminar will locate Shakespeare's life and work within the theatrical and political events of 1599--including the building of the Globe Theatre, the Bishops' Ban, Essex 's Irish campaign, and the establishment of the East India Company.

18th CENTURY

ENGL W4801y History of the English Novel I: The Rise of the Novel (Clifford Siskin) MW 11-12:15. In 1803, Samuel Miller warned that any "young person" who became "devoted" to novels "is in a fair way to dissipate his mind, to degrade his taste, and to bring on himself intellectual and moral ruin." This course will test that hypothesis by examining the 18th-century "rise" of the novel.

ENGL G6301y The Social Lives of Texts (Clifford Siskin) M 2:10-4. As print saturated British society during the long 18th century, the social lives of texts became newly complicated. Only some, for example, joined the newly exclusive category of "Literature." We will examine those changes as matters not just of meaning but of behavior-of how texts worked in the world.

19th CENTURY

ENGL G4404y Major Victorian Poets (John Rosenberg) W 9-12. Close readings of the major poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, D. G. and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins, with stress placed on continuities in English poetry from Wordsworth through T. S. Eliot.

CLEN G6300y Literature & Politics: 1857 in England and France (Sharon Marcus) T 4:10-6. This course will examine a key year in the literary and political history of England and France.  1857 was most famously the year of a major uprising against British rule in India, as well as the year that British feminists brought issues of matrimonial property and divorce to the forefront of Parliamentary debate. In France, 1857 was the year of two major literary trials that brought both a poet and a novelist into conflict with the repressive Second Empire regime. In English literary history, 1857 was remarkably productive: an astonishing number of the century's major authors, all at different points in their artistic careers, produced significant work in 1857. Among the most important novels published that year were Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers. But it was also the year George Eliot published her first work of fiction; Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a novel in verse; Elizabeth Gaskell ventured into biography; Thomas Hughes reinvented the school story; and Mary Seacole appropriated the travel narrative.
          Over the course of the semester, we will focus on the critical questions raised by the microhistorical construction of an object of knowledge. How can we synthesize close and contextual reading; synchronic news and diachronic history; global and local systems? What can intensive focus on one important year teach us about the structure of a literary field and about the relationship between literature and politics? How does a comparative framework complicate such inquiries?
         Readings will include primary documents concerning the Indian Mutiny and divorce reform; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays; Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; and Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal.
         Knowledge of French is not required; bilingual editions of French works will be used.

20th CENTURY

ENGL W4501y 20th-century British Literature: Embattled Modernism (Sarah Cole) TR 2:40-3:55. This course begins with the premise that British literature of the first half of the twentieth century tended to be shaped by several organizing conflicts. If modernism is at times presented as a unified and coherent aesthetic movement, we will pay attention to its spirit of ambivalence and contradiction, and to the way particular historical and cultural problems deeply divided the literary scene, both within individual works and more broadly in the intellectual culture.
          The course is organized around three large topics: the relation to history and the past; gender and sexuality; empire and nationalism. For each of these broad topics, we will read a variety of texts (fiction, drama, and poetry) spanning the period from the 1890s to the 1940s. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Likely authors include: Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Jean Rhys.
         Though the course follows a lecture format, a degree of class participation is required. Written work consists of several short papers and a final exam. For graduate students, an extra one-hour discussion session per week is required.

ENGL W4503y 20th-century British and American Literature: Race, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Poetic Form (Michael Golston) MW 1:10-2:25. This class examines intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. We read a selection of British and American poets from 1860 to 1960 against an archive of contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics. Poets include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Mina Loy, W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes, Basel Bunting, and Louis Zukofsky.

CLEN W4200y Caribbean Diaspora Literature (Frances Negrón-Muntaner) MW 1:10-2:25. Caribbean literature is largely studied by language of authorship, leading to categories such as Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean literature. Yet there is a growing Caribbean literature in English by authors whose ancestral tongue is French or Spanish. In this course, we will examine texts written by writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Dominica, and Jamaica and investigate the impact of migration and transculturation on the texts, the articulation of new cultural subjects, and in some cases, the fostering of dialogue that has been largely suppressed in the writers’ home countries. Possible authors include: Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, V.S. Naipaul, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, Oscar Hijuelos.

CLEN G6565y Postcolonial Literature (Susan Andrade) W 2:10-4. This course stages a week by week dialogue between novelistic practice and critical theory. We will read some major modern theorists of the novel (Lukacs, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Barthes, Woolf, Jameson) and juxtapose them to those who have worked particularly on the relation between narrative and colonialism (Appiah, Sangari, Said, Spivak, Ahmad, Sommer). Theorists of decolonization and political culture, such as Cabral, Fanon, and Chatterjee, also form part of the conversation. We will pay special attention to the received understanding of modes of narration (realism / modernism / postmodernism) focusing on how individual novels exemplify or challenge such understanding. We also take up the question of the politics of form (such as that of the special purchase claimed for magical realism) as well as that of the location of artistic production. Novelists will be drawn from works by: Woolf, Balzac, Dangarembga, Ba, Sembene, Rushdie, Conrad, Fuentes, Djebar, Naipaul, Danticat, Mistry, Farah, Coetzee, Okri and Conde.

ENGL G6511y Joyce and Company (David Damrosch) F 2:10-4. A reading of Joyce's major fiction in comparative context, looking at important precursors, contemporaries, and successors. The plan is to read Dubliners together with Chekhov, Premchand, and Lispector; Portrait together with Proust and Kelman, Ulysses together with Barnes and Asturias; and selected chapters of the Wake together with Stein, Desani, and Brooke-Rose. Critical/theoretical readings will help situate the works in both narratological and cultural-political terms.

ENTA G6707y Theater and Machine Art (Martin Puchner) R 2:10-4. From Shaw's Pygmalion to the Bread and Puppet Theater, the modern theater has continually been rebuilding the dramatic character as puppet, marionette, statue, decoration, or automaton. Actor training, choreography, but also dramatic texts and other forms of textual representation revolve around the enigma of the depersonalized machine on stage. What are the consequences of this machine modernism for the aesthetics and ethics of the theater? What are its philosophical underpinnings? How does it affect the practice of the theater? Readings in Shaw, Craig, Jarry, Maeterlinck, Taylorism, Meyerhold, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Bauhaus, Pound, Marinetti, Beckett. Supplementary readings by Winnicott, Lacan, Benjamin, and Kleist.

AMERICAN

ENGL G4603y American Novel 1850-1950 (Jonathan Arac) W 6:10-8. Intensive reading in outstanding works of American prose fiction, from the 1850s into the 1950s, by authors such as Melville, Twain, Howells, James, Wharton, Cather, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Roth, Steinbeck, Wright, and Ellison. Writing assignments will be frequent but brief.

ENGL W4670y Film Studies: Film Noir, Noir Nation (Ann Douglas) W 6:10-8. Class limited to 30. This course will study Hollywood (and French) noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s in the context of “noir culture” more broadly speaking, looking at the noir cinematic phenomenon as a marker of the founding enterprises of the modern capitalist West, from 19th-century imperialism in the third world onto the labor-management struggles of the 20th century. Attention will be paid to the multiple “auteurs” of the movies studied.

ENGL G6630y A Literary History of "Race" in America, 1600-1850 (Ezra Tawil) T 6:10-8. This seminar explores a series of significant moments in the political, cultural, and literary history of the concept of "race" starting in the colonial period and leading up to its dominance at the middle of the nineteenth century. We will begin by looking at sources from Colonial America regarding the relationships among the "Englishman," the "African," and the "Indian" in order to question whether American writing figured difference in specifically racial terms from the beginning. We will then follow the transformations of conceptions of difference through close readings of political, scientific, and literary texts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

ENGL G6633y African American Lit: Baldwin & his Contemporaries (Marcellus Blount) R 11-12:50. Four of Baldwin's novels-Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Just Above My Head-in relationship to Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Randall Kenan, as well as some recent literary and queer theory.

ENGL G6631y American Literary and Cultural History: Mellon Colloquium on the History of Higher Education in the United States (Andrew Delbanco and Casey Blake) M 6:10-8. Open to graduate students in English and History beyond the first year of study. Themes include the history of public and private institutions, democratic educational ideals, curricular debates past and present, access to higher education (quotas, financial aid, affirmative action), university governance, and the rise of science and technology in the modern research university. This course is designed to prepare students for academic citizenship as faculty members in colleges and universities. We shall meet on Monday evenings from 6:10-8:00 to discuss readings, and, several times during the semester, discussion on special topics will be led by visiting faculty over dinner. Interested students should see Professor Delbanco or Professor Blake during the fall term.

THEORY

CLEN G4563y Psychoanalysis & Literature: Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) R 6:10-8. An intensive reading of Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality and selections from other Seminars together with texts by Lispector, Duras, Lawrence, Camus, Goethe and others. Emphasis on Lacan's redefinitions of feminine sexuality in relation to issues of pleasure, love, desire, drive, death, transference, jouissance, and the unconscious.

CLEN W4560y Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Bruce Robbins) TR 11-12:15. 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 lin es of connection will be provided.

CLEN G6531y Marx (Gayatri Spivak) W 9-10:50. Selections from the 1844 manuscripts, the Grundrisse, Capital 1,2,3. The Eighteenth Brumaire and the Critique of the Gotha Program will be read in full. The general approach, relationship between problems in translation and problems in political philosophy. Instructor interview in August. Good knowledge of German required.

SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern.

ENGL G6914y Teaching Writing: Theory and Practice II (Joseph Bizup, Lexi Rudnitsky, Nicole Wallack) M 4:10-6. Prerequisite: G6913 or permission of the director of the Undergraduate Writing Program. All instructors new to the UWP must take this 1-credit, ungraded course during the fall of their first year of teaching. The course is intended to guide instructors through their first semester and emphasizes the practical application of the knowledge and expertise developed in G6913. Successful completion of the course is required for continuation as a UWP instructor.

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FALL 2003
ENGL G5001x MASTERS SEMINARS Tuesday 2:10-4

1. Theory and Performance (Martin Puchner). Important movements within 20th-century theory and philosophy (psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, marxism, speech act theory, performance studies) through their relation to theatricality and performance. What does it mean that theory turns to the theater for some of its central concepts and models? What is the significance of drama, theatricality, performance and performativity for theory and philosophy? Readings include Burke, Deleuze, Foucault, Nietzsche, Brecht, Marx, Austin, Pavis, Turner, Schechner, Freud, Kristeva.

2. Applications of Theory to Medieval and Early Modern Texts (Paul Strohm). This seminar will tackle a series of weekly units, touching upon circumstances of premodern textuality and assessing the pertinence of current theoretical approaches. Weekly discussion will focus on such topics as: oral/written; script/print; vernacularity; authorship; intentionality; literacy and reading public; audience; genre; discourse; nation; pre- and post-colonial; the 'affiliated' text; performance/practice theory. Supplementary readings will include the likes of: Auerbach, Clanchy, E. Bloch, Jauss, Barthes, Macherey, de Certeau, Bourdieu.

ENGL G5006x Introduction to the Discipline (David Damrosch) M 4:10 -6. Open to all graduate students; required for M.A. students. An introduction to graduate study in the context of the intellectual and institutional history of literary studies (English, American, and Comparative). We will look primarily at literary studies in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, with attention as well to British and Continental trends and contemporary global developments. The course will focus on case studies, with clusters of readings that illustrate different aspects of major issues and varying approaches to literary studies. Students will do a series of exercises designed to deepen their familiarity with the issues raised and to give them focused training in graduate-level research (creating annotated bibliographies, using electronic databases, assessing the changing shape of a given period or field). Recognizing that some students will have (or develop) an actual research interest in disciplinary issues, while for others a general introduction to the history and shape of their discipline will suffice, students will have the option of writing a research paper and receiving full seminar credit for the course, or simply doing the several shorter assignments and having the course count toward the number of lecture courses needed for the M.A. MEDIEVAL

CLEN G6031xChivalry: Fact, Ideology, Fiction (Robert Hanning) R 11-12:50. An exploration, through texts and documents, of the impact of mounted shock combat, and of those who engaged in it, on the practice of war and other forms of violence; on social constructions (and nostalgic ideals) of nobility and gentility; on evolving ideologies of conduct, service, and gender relations; and on fictions of love, prowess, and strife (between nations or religions). While the primary focus of the seminar will be France and England, eleventh through fourteenth centuries, its legacy to early modern Europe, as a system of behavior and object of nostalgia or parody, will also come under scrutiny. Texts studied will include chronicles, chansons de geste, verse romances and prose romance cycles, chivalric biographies and treatises, and records of ceremonies and spectacles based on chivalric theory or practice.

CLEN G6028xMedieval Animals (Susan Crane) W 11-12:50. Medieval writers often turn to animals when commenting on human culture. Beast fables provide strategies for analysis and critique of human society; stories of metamorphosis explore humanity's kinship and difference from animals; and bestiaries present the natural world as a moral instruction book. Besides this emphasis on the human, medieval writing expresses ideas about animal nature--animals' capacities for reason, emotion, sin, and learning--that contrast intriguingly with our contemporary ideas. The goals of the course are to refine our understanding of what medieval animal literature says about human culture, and what it says about the difference between humans and animals, but also what it says about the identity and mentality of animals themselves. The reading list sets a range of English, French, and Latin writing about animals in dialogue with emerging theoretical discourses on animals in philosophy, cultural studies, and the animal rights movement. Essays on animals by Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Nagle, Regan, Singer, and others will prepare us to think about how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. RENAISSANCE

ENGL W4101x Renaissance in England: Studies in the 16th-century Lyric (Molly Murray) TR 6:10-7:25. 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.

CLEN G4721x European Drama Renaissance to 1700: Texts, Spectacle, Bodies, Culture (Julie Peters) M 11-12:50. Focusing on texts, spectacle, and the human body as interrelated instruments of cultural communication, this course will look at the drama and performance cultures of Renaissance Italy, Baroque Spain, Neoclassical France, and Restoration England, investigating such issues as carnival and charivari, spectacularity and power, theatre as disciplinary system, itinerancy and improvisation, the representation and performance of empire, sacrament and conversion. While offering a general introduction to Early Modern European dramatic culture (situating Shakespeare and his English contemporaries in the broader European background), the course will also serve as a vehicle for thinking about how to do cultural history, addressing the conceptual problems involved in creating narratives about the past and investigating the special role of theatre history as a mode of cultural history. Readings include Renaissance festival books, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and plays by Machiavelli, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Corneille, Molière, Behn, and Dryden, along with numerous theatrical, visual, and other cultural documents.

CLEN G6128x Comparative Renaissance Texts: Trade and Traffic in the Early Modern World (Alan Stewart) R 2:10-4. This course will interrogate early modern England's sense of itself, focusing on the hopes and fears provoked by the multifarious trade and traffic between the English and other peoples, both inside and beyond the country's borders, raising questions of economics, ethnicity, religion and nationality. Materials will draw on drama by Robert Wilson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, William Haughton and various 'Turk' plays; economic treatises, acts and proclamations, and travel narratives; in relation to evolving current critical work. 18th CENTURY

CLEN G4321xReformation to Romanticism: The Violent Origins of Modern Thought (Ross Hamilton) W 6:10-8. This course will investigate significant works of this transformative period in order to construct a useful "history" to the notion of modernity. We will consider the historical conditions of modern consciousness, beginning with the violent struggle during the Reformation over the nature of the Eucharist (and the recent work of Miri Rubin, Stephen Greenblatt, and John Guillory on this question). We will then explore the great shift from cosmology into scientific method, and from ontology to a modern psychology of the individual, whose uniqueness we shall formally consider in the autobiographical projects of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth. We will devote the final weeks to the afterlife of these notions in a synthetic reading of the late nineteenth-century "grand theories" of Darwin and Freud. Readings in literature, philosophy, theology. Authors include Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Bacon, Cavendish, Locke, Rouseeau and Wordsworth. Theorists include Darwin, Freud, Michel Foucault, Hans Blumenberg, Stephen Toulmin.

ENGL W4301x Age of Johnson (James Basker) MW 9:10-10:25. Literature from 1740 to 1800. The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their circle 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 transition to romanticism, and the democratization of culture. 19th CENTURY

CLEN W4822x19th-century European novel (Nicholas Dames) TR 4:10-5:25. 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, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola. 20th CENTURY

CLEN W4775x The European Avant Garde & its Transformations in the Americas (Ursula Heise) TR 9:10-10:25. Focus on the tradition of experimental literature that originated in the European avantgarde of the early twentieth century (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Generation of 27) and spread to the Americas (Brazil, Peru, Chile, Martinique, Canada, US). We will discuss manifestos, poetry, visual art and some narrative texts so as to explore avantgarde strategies in their formal as well as their cultural and political implications.

ENTA W4723x Modern Drama (Martin Puchner) TR 4:10-5:25. This course offers an account of modernism and modernity by examining the reforms and experiments in the modern drama as well as the intersections and rivalries between the theater and the other art. Central issues include realism, meta-theater, dream-play, symbolism, and political theater. Readings include Wagner, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Yeats, Symons, Craig, Wilde, Shaw, Apollinaire, and Jarry.

CLEN G4540x Postmodern Texts / Theory: Space, Place, and Travel in Postmodern Literature (Ursula Heise) W 2:10-4. This class will focus on the imagination of place and travel in narrative and poetic texts from the 1960s to the present, and will explore theoretical approaches to space and place in literary/cultural criticism, critical geography, ecocriticism, anthropology and media theory. Readings of literary texts that define new perspectives on natural, suburban, urban and cyber-environments in the present and in imaginary futures will include novels, short stories and poems by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Gary Snyder, John Cage, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Maxine Hong Kingston, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Theoretical readings will include Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, James Clifford, Marc Augé, Howard Rheingold, and others. How do modernization, urbanization and technological innovation change the perception and experience of space? How do humans alter their environments, and how are they themselves transformed by these changes? How does the human body adjust to environmental change? Is there still such a thing as a "natural" environment, and how could it be defined? How does the experience of virtual space relate to that of real places? How are mobility, migration, tourism and travel defined in relation to these spaces? These are some of the questions the class will address.

ENGL G6505x 20th-c British Texts (Edward Mendelson) W 11-12:50. Probably but not certainly, all Woolf, all the time.

CLEN G6566x Transnational Culture: Theory and Practice (Bruce Robbins) W 4:10-6. A critical survey of cultural theories and literary texts that assert, test, qualify, or respond to the double proposition that 1) in an era of so-called "globalization," culture has now expanded beyond the scale of the nation-state, and 2) it can no longer be made proper sense of within a critical vocabulary that assumes the centrality of the nation. Reference will be made to the disciplinary areas of human rights, humanitarian intervention, anthropology, and "world literature." Authors to be discussed include Immanuel Wallerstein, Arjun Appadurai, Susan Sontag, and Michael Ondaatje. AMERICAN
ENGL W4593x Theory and History of the American Novel, 1789-1860 (Ezra Tawil) TR 10:35-11:50 . 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, C.B. Brown, Cooper, Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Webb.

ENGL W4604x American Modernism (Rachel Adams) TR 2:40-3:55. This course surveys cultural responses to the historical, technological, intellectual, and political conditions of modernity in the United States. Spanning the period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II, we will consider the relationship between key events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, World War I, 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.

ENGL W4930xPolitics in American Film (Maura Spiegel) MW 6:10-7:25. Some have argued that there is no politics in Hollywood films, only ideology. Hollywood's range of pressures and strategies to soften or disguise political "messages" will be one of the focuses of this course, as well as ways in which films indirectly or covertly speak to specific political hotspots of their moment. Our subjects will include early social problem films, pro-New Deal, anti-isolationist, Post-War Liberal Conscience film, conspiracy films, and treatments of the War in Vietnam. Films will include: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Meet John Doe, Casablanca, High Noon, The Manchurian Candidate, Twelve Angry Men, The Defiant Ones, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nothing But a Man, The Pawnbroker, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Dog Day Afternoon, Parallax View, Platoon.

ENGL G6601x Melville (Andrew Delbanco) T 4:10-6. The works.

ENGL G6610x Cold War Culture (Ann Douglas) W 6:10-8. Interdisciplinary study of the culture of post-WWII U.S. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War (notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Rosenbergs, Hiss, Chambers), to film noir (Gilda, Double Indemnity, among others), and the "Beat" writing of Jack Kerouac. Background readings in gender/race/political tensions of the era and recent postmodern and postcolonial theory about forms of Cold War culture. THEORY

CLEN G6801x Theory of the Novel (Nicholas Dames) R 6:10-8. A survey of the major canonical theories of the novel alongside some of the now-forgotten foundations of "novel theory." The seminar will begin with early formulations arising out of Victorian physiology and literary sociology, and will take into account the contributions of Anglo-American formalisms, Marxist genre theories, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, identity studies. Our first intent will be to come to terms with the recurrent concerns or interests of novel theory: the epistemology of narration; the meaning of novelistic "character"; realism; representations of subjective experience; homologies between post-Enlightenment society and novelistic form. We will, however, seek to understand the lacunae in novel theory's usual set of questions and answers, as a prelude to possibly developing new approaches. The seminar will be structured by intensive readings of three key examples from the form's dominant period: Austen, Emma; Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale. Alongside these novels we will read key texts by Diderot, Lewes, James, Lukács, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Lubbock, Watt, Goldmann, Booth, Genette, Girard, Barthes, Brooks, Bersani, Miller, Armstrong, McKeon, Bourdieu, Banfield, among others.

SPECIAL TOPICS

CLEN G4010xIntroduction to Bibliography (G. Thomas Tanselle) T 6:10-8. Bibliography as a field of knowledge, emphasizing the analytical and descriptive techniques used in historical study of books as physical objects. Topics: enumerative (or reference) bibliography, historical bibliography, analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography.

ENGL G6913x Teaching Writing: Theory and Practice I (Joseph Bizup, Lexi Rudnitsky, Nicole Wallack) M 4:10-6. This introduction to the field of rhetoric and composition contributes to the professional development of graduate students while preparing them to serve as instructors in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Topics include the history of writing instruction in American colleges and universities; expressivist, constructionist, and cognitive theories of writing; theories of argument, style, and grammar; English for non-native speakers; the writing process; the social dynamics of the writing classroom; writing and technology; and practical teaching techniques. Graduate students in the Department English and Comparative Literature may take the course as a 3-credit, ungraded lecture or as a 3-credit, graded seminar. Requirements for the lecture include regular attendance and active participation, completion of assigned readings, practical exercises such as designing assignments and evaluating sample papers, and one short paper. The seminar requires, in addition to the above, a longer final essay. Prospective instructors typically take the course the spring before their first year of teaching. Successful completion of the course is a prerequisite for teaching in the UWP. From the Center for Comparative Literature and Society

CPLS G4900x Introduction to Comparative Literature & Society (Gayatri Spivak) W 9:00-10:50. How can the comparative study of literature and the social-scientific study of the world supplement each other? Revisions are necessary on both sides. How does the beginning graduate student prepare her/himself for this new interdisciplinary field? Students share in work in progress. Critical, historical, literary, and social-scientific syllabus.

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SPRING 2003
MEDIEVAL
CLEN W4023y Dante and Medieval Culture (Joan Ferrante).
TR 1:10-2:25. A brief survey of the major classical and medieval traditions of literature, philosophy, and history that influenced Dante and his culture. Dante's minor works, particularly the Vita Nuova and the Monarchy, and a detailed reading of the Divine Comedy.

ENGL G6701y Medieval Cycle Drama (Margaret Pappano). W 6:10-8. This course will involve a close-study of two fifteenth-century English "cycle" plays, York and N-Town, designed to introduce students to studying medieval drama within the framework of urban history as well as devotional culture. The York cycle, located in the city of York, will be analyzed in relation to the civic and economic structure of the town, with special attention to topics such as women and work, local identity, civic governance, conditions of production. The study of the N-Town cycle, an East Anglian text of uncertain provenance, will be paired with readings on late medieval devotional practices, Lollardy, and criminal procedure. Both cycles will be investigated in their manuscript contexts.

RENAISSANCE
CLEN W4122y Renaissance in Europe (Kathy Eden).
MW 10:35-11:50. Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.

ENGL W4702y Tudor-Stuart Drama (James Shapiro). MW 9:10-10:25. The course will cover plays by Kyd, Lyly, Marlowe, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, Beaumont, Massinger, Chapman, Webster, and Ford. Attention will also be paid to the social, economic, historical, and theatrical contexts in which these plays were written.

ENGL W4211y Milton (Julie Crawford). TR 10:35-11:50. This course will look at the major works of John Milton in the context of seventeenth-century English religious, political and social events. In addition to reading Milton's poems, major prose (including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth), and the full texts of Paradise Lost and Sampson Agonistes (the course text will be Orgel and Goldberg, eds. John Milton), we will look at the authors and radicals whose activities and writings helped to provide the contexts for Milton's own: poets and polemicists, sectarians and prophets, revolutionaries and regicides, Diggers and Levelers. Requirements for this course include two short primary research papers (3 pp.) and an exam. Graduate students will also be required to write a seminar paper.

ENGL G6200y Studies in Early Modern Literature: Writing London (Jean Howard). W 11-12:50. Taking advantage of new scholarship on the early modern city, this course will investigate texts written about London in the period 1590 to 1640 in relation to material developments within the city and the city's links to the global arena in which England was striving to establish a new place for itself. Texts will include city comedy, poems and pamphlets about life in London, urban satire, city pageants, and Stow's Survey of London. We will investigate topics such as the gendering of spaces in the city, the effects of commercial expansion on urban life, London's role in English protocolonial activity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism as competing forces in urban life, and the relationship of urban institutions such as the public theaters, Gresham's Exchange, St. Paul's Cathedral, Bridewell, and Covent Garden to the creation of distinctively urban identities and practices. There will be a strenuous attempt to relate "literary" texts to the new material history of the city.

ENGL G6121y Spenser (Andrew Hadfield). R 12-1:50. Edmund Spenser is probably the most significant non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance who, as much as any writer, invented English Literature as we have come to understand it. It is often pointed out that much of his work - The Shepheades Calender, The Compliants, The Amoretti and Epithalamion would be far better known had he not written his epic romance, The Faerie Queene. Even that work is not often read by non-specialists and is all too often read as a sycophantic paean to the queen rather than a bold and scandalous experiment. This course will trace the development of Edmund Spenser's work, from his ambitious first major poem, designed to announce his arrival as England's premier poet, to his last, aggressive and despairing works written just before his death. We will explore Spenser's poetic experiments, his use of pastoral, romance and epic genres to forge new styles of writing in English; his uneasy position in relation to the court; his life in Ireland and his views of Britain and England; his political views; his religion; his intellectual and cultural influences and his legacy. Spenser is a poet who is often read in small extracts but he can only really be appreciated when studied carefully and at length.

18th CENTURY
ENGL W4302y 18th-century Texts: The Advent of Print Culture (Clifford Siskin).
TR 4:10-5:25. As with the rise of digital culture today, Britain's transformation into a print culture was a matter of saturation-of the technology becoming so pervasive that people began to think and behave through the practices of print. Heroic bibliographic efforts have now mapped their chronological and geographical spread. We'll use the results to empower our study of Literature by putting it into a mutually-illuminating historical relationship to the practices that enabled it. Readings from novels (Manley and the Fieldings to Godwin and Wollstonecraft), poetry (Pope and Egerton to Swift and Blake), and prose (Cavendish and Haywood to Johnson and Reeve).

ENGL G6301y Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Fate of System (Clifford Siskin). W 11-12:50. Was there a period shift in the late eighteenth century? Do the terms "Enlightenment" and "Romanticism" describe it? The stakes are high here, for the troubles of the last two centuries have been woven into histories of blame which feature these periods as protagonists. Enlightenment is the culprit in the Adorno/Horkheimer variety, with Romanticism just a vehicle for the sinister unraveling of its dialectic. For others, Romanticism is the active historical agent, its loss of scientific nerve a betrayal of Enlightenment's promise of complete and unified knowledge of the world. As literary historians, we'll sort this out by turning to a genre-one with a special place in the history of blame. Back then, "system" was not just an idea but a powerful form of writing; we'll follow its fate across the literature of the long 18th century, from Astell, Swift, Newton, and Finch to Smith, Robinson, Wordsworth, and Barbauld.

ENGL G6321y Women, Politics and the Novel, 1790-1818 (Jenny Davidson). M 6:10-8. 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
ENGL W4401y Romanticism (Ross Hamilton).
TR 2:40-3:55. Close readings of selected poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Cole ridge, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans Shelley, Keats and Byron,as well as the "pre-Romantic" poetry of Cowper, Collins, and Gray, with reference to contemporary movements in philosophy, painting and music.

ENGL G6933y 19th-century Autobiography (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Versions of the self from Wordsworth to Woolf. Themes include the problematics of autobiographical truth; cultural roots of the self; "I" as metaphor; crisis, conversion and unconversion; Biblical typology and autobiographical narrative; gender, subjugation, and identity; novelized autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Writers: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Carlyle, Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Nightingale, Newman, Ruskin, Darwin, Pater, Hopkins, Gosse, and Woolf.

20th CENTURY
ENGL W4501y Modernism and Its Enemies (David Damrosch).
TR 4:10-5:25. British modernism was less a movement than a series of heated arguments. This course will explore the aesthetic and cultural stakes in the oppositions between contrasting figures: Woolf-Bennett, Barnes-Woolf, Wilde-James, Shaw-Wilde, James-Wells, Wells-Conrad, Eliot-Hardy, Jones-Sassoon, Joyce-Wodehouse, Rhys-Joyce, Blast versus itself.

ENGL G6506y Modern British Narrative (Edward Mendelson). M 11-12:50. Hardy, Conrad, Wells, Bennett, Joyce, Woolf, and perhaps others.

CLEN G6565y Occultism, Postcoloniality, Modernism (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. This course probes the shaping of the modern subject through such "occult" devices as mesmerism, ventriloquism, hypnotism, disembodiment, telepathy, spirit photography. 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, in what Fanon called a "zone of occult instability." Some of the questions the course hopes to raise 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? To what extent can occultism be understood as a product of clashing world views? 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? As these questions suggest, the course takes as its point of departure the modern Weberian notion of disenchantment and the split between the magical and the mundane that it prefigured. Occultism reemerged in the 19th century not in continuation with an earlier tradition of esotericism but in a variety of discrete forms that collectively posed a challenge to the disenchanted world view of science. Yet, in reinterpreting contemporary society and culture, occultism also adopted the techniques and aims of science, fashioning a new composite of matter and spirit, seen and unseen, empiricism and mysticism. Notions of invisibility, disembodied experience, and a hidden, inner self combined to create modern understandings of subjectivity. At the same time the blurred lines between seen and unseen allowed for new negotiations of colonial power: mesmerism is only one instance of lines that were crossed, creating new intimacies, racial fears, and sexual attractions. Primary readings include Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race, Zanoni; Rider Haggard, She; Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone; Arthur Conan Doyle, Sign of Four; Richard Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Practical Occultism, selected essays; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Invisible Man; George du Maurier, Trilby; Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa.

CLEN G6707y Modernism, Modernity, and the Manifesto (Martin Puchner). R 2:10-4 . This course takes the history of the manifesto as a lens through which to examine the intersection of art, philosophy, and revolution in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. Readings include Althusser, Artaud, Breton, Burke, Cage, Eliot, Hulme, Lewis, Marinetti, Marx, Pound, Sorel and others.

AMERICAN
ENGL G6602y American Renaissance: Literature and Theory (Ezra Tawil).
R 6:10-8. In this seminar, we will aim to do two things at once: first, to read the literary texts inside--and outside--the category "American Renaissance" or "Classic American Literature." Second, to analyze the twentieth-century literary histories that have produced, defended, and contested this tradition. What texts, or parts of texts need to be valorized or emphasized, or devalued and forgotten, in order to make a tradition such as this one? When and with what effects are literary histories themselves structured and emplotted like the literary texts they privilege or devalue as American Literature?

ENGL G6606y Literature of the Americas (Rachel Adams). T 2:10-4. This course attempts to reposition the study of American literature within the broader context of the Americas, tracing lines of influence that extend across national borders and local cultures that resist the terms of national identification. Focusing on the Northern Hemisphere, we will read literature from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Each week will pair a fictional text with works of criticism on topics such as globalization, diaspora and migration, borderlands, transnationalism, hybridity, creolization and mestizaje, translation, bi- or multilingualism. In addition to close consideration of individual works, the semester will be organized around the following broad questions: What conceptual shifts are entailed in thinking about literature in continental rather than national terms? What are the challenges and possibilities created by positioning U.S. literature in a pan-American framework? How does comparative study allow us to rethink accepted notions of periodization, genre, and curriculum within American literary history?

THEATRE / FILM
ENTA W4724y Modern Drama II (Martin Meisel).
MW 11-12:15. Major playwrights and innovating trends in the modern drama from about 1900 through WWII. Readings will include Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Cocteau, Gorki, Andreev, Wedekind, Capek, Treadwell, Lorca, Sartre, Artaud, and others, with attention to such programs as Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism, and the varieties of modern consciousness.

ENGL W4670y Film Noir (Ronald Schwartz). MW 6:10-7:25. This film course explores the style of "film noir" originally named by French critics in the early 1940's as an outgrowth of their own "poetic realism" style of cinema. Seven to eight sets of films will be viewed with the aim of tracing the development of "film noir" from the early forties to its logical outgrowth--"the new noir" which continues into the millennium.

THEORY
CLEN W4563y Psychoanalysis and Literature: Reading Lacan II (Maire Jaanus).
MW 2:40-3:55. An intensive reading of Lacan's Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis and selections from its intra-texts (Freud, Descartes, Plato among others). Emphasis on Lacan's redefinitions of the unconscious, the body, the drives, the object a, transference, repetition, jouissance, love, and their implications for the aesthetics and ethics of literature and film.

CLEN G6566y Transnational Culture: Theory and Practice (Bruce Robbins). W 2:10-4. A critical survey of cultural theories and literary texts that assert, test, qualify, or respond to the double proposition that 1) in an era of so-called "globalization," culture has now expanded beyond the scale of the nation-state, and 2) it can no longer be made proper sense of within a critical vocabulary that assumes the centrality of the nation. Reference will be made to the disciplinary areas of human rights, humanitarian intervention, anthropology, and "world literature." Authors to be discussed include Immanuel Wallerstein, Arjun Appadurai, Susan Sontag, and Michael Ondaatje.

SPECIAL TOPICS
ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes).
TR 6:10-7:25. No prerequisites; no knowledge of history or of language required. The course is half history, half ideas about language. Original texts from Beowulf to the present are scrutinized. For starters, read Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct.

ENGL W4621y The World of Duke Ellington (Stanley Crouch). TR 2:40-3:55. This course will focus on perhaps the greatest of all jazz musicians, Duke Ellington, and his "mad, mad world," which crossed that of music, show business, color, organized crime, film, cartoons, newspapers, social movements, regional distinctions, and international celebrity. His music will be listened to and his life will be studied and discussed. Duke Ellington wrote over 2,000 compositions spanning over half a century: works for concert stage, dance hall, theater, and cathedral. He also appeared in and wrote music for many films. As we study works from these various categories, we will read Ellington's autobiography along with the most important biographical and analytical studies. By studying Ellington we will study jazz's geographical and political dimensions along with its history as an aesthetic form. We will consider the evolution of the jazz piano and the jazz orchestra. There will be several guest lecturers who either personally knew Ellington or have studied him and his work closely.

CLEN G6820y Theory of the Novel (Edward Said). M 2:10-4. The course will focus on the following works: The Historical Novel and The Theory of the Novel by Gyorgy Lukacs; The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt; and novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Defoe, Conrad and others.
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FALL 2002

MEDIEVAL
ENGL W4001x Middle English Literature. Topic: "Texts of Ricardian Culture: Trilingual England 1350-1400" (Robert Hanning). MW 4:10-5:25. An analytic survey of literary, religious, and historical texts in the context of the economics and politics of the England of Edward III and Richard II, culminating in Richard's deposition in 1399. Special attention to the cultural and textual implications of a trilingual (Latin, French, English) society.

ENGL W4091x Anglo-Saxon (David Yerkes). TR 6:10-8 (4 pts.) The goal is to learn to read Anglo-Saxon verse and prose with the help of a glossary and grammar.

CLEN G6031x The Apocalypse in Medieval Tradition (Sandra Prior). R 2:10-4. A course in the uses and understandings of the Apocalypse in medieval tradition, beginning with biblical apocalypses and their related iconography and exegesis and then moving onto examples of apocalyptic modes and texts in medieval literature, including Hildegard of Bingen, Piers Plowman, and Pearl, among other texts. We will work towards defining "apocalypse" and "apocalyptic"-at least in terms of the medieval understanding; we will also make use of twentieth-century definitions (both scholarly and popular) and various theoretical approaches. Some knowledge of the original languages of our texts-especially Latin, Middle English, and Italian-would be highly useful, but is not required. Reading assignment for the first class meeting -all those interested in taking this course should complete these readings in the Bible [any edition/translation]: The Book of Daniel; The Book of Ezekiel, chapters 1-5; 2nd Epistle of Peter; 1 & 2 Thessalonians; the "Little Apocalypse" from Matthew's gospel (chapter 25).

ENGL G6043x Chaucer. Topic: "Having the World by the Tale: Constructing Fictions and Society in The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales" (Robert Hanning). R 11-12:50. Prerequisite: instructor's permission, based on some previous exposure to Chaucer and/or Boccaccio. Reading knowledge of Italian helpful but not required. A study of selected Decameron novelle and Canterbury Tales, with emphasis on how the two collections appropriate dominant cultural discourses and respond to contemporaneous ideological agendas and social anxieties.

RENAISSANCE
ENGL W4711x Shakespeare: History, Politics and the Nation (Andrew Hadfield). MW 2:40-3:55. This course will examine the representation of English, British and other histories in a variety of Shakespeare's poetry and plays. We will examine and explore the political significance of Shakespeare's varying conceptions of national identity throughout his career, paying particular attention to questions of kingship and legitimacy; inheritance; rebellion; republicanism and other forms of government; virtue and rights; and the law. Works studied will include Henry VI, part two, Coriolanus, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Richard II, and The Rape of Lucrece.

ENGL G6131x More, Erasmus, and Their Circle (Anne Prescott). W 11-12:50. In this seminar we will examine a number of works by those often ironic and always complex Renaissance Humanists (not to be confused with what a number of postmodern critics call "humanists"-that is, the writers we will read are seldom either "liberal" or "essentialist" as those words are currently used), Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. We will also look at some related texts: jest books, an interlude or two, satirical epistles, polemics, and maybe a few classical sources for background. We will focus on Erasmus' Praise of Folly, Adages, Colloquies, and passages from his Encheiridion, works on rhetoric, and his (futile) advice to princes, and More's Utopia, Richard III, epigrams, Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (a surprisingly funny text, often, granted that it was composed in the Tower of London while the author awaited execution), some engaging letters, and pages from his retina-scorching polemics against Luther and Tyndale. We will discuss these writers' take on the uses of irony, their playful but often disturbing ambiguity, their fascination with language and doubts about its stability, their taste for "merry tales," and their claims (unjust, medievalists would say) to be fighters against the obscurantism of the past. There will be some class reports, if students so wish, and one substantial paper due at the end of the term.

ENGL G6711x Shakespeare Seminar (James Shapiro). R 11-12:50. This seminar focuses on a year in the life of Shakespeare. Readings will include the plays he wrote or began writing in 1599 (Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet) as well as a broad range of literary, social and economic texts published in this year. The seminar will locate Shakespeare's life and work within the theatrical and political events of 1599--including the building of the Globe Theatre, the Bishops' Ban, Essex's Irish campaign, and the establishment of the East India Company.

18th CENTURY
ENGL W4301x 18th-century Literature: Manners and Morals (Jenny Davidson). MW 11-12:15. 18th-century writers used the concept of manners to secure a wide range of political and domestic virtues; the partial displacement of morals by manners in turn raised new questions about the relationship between language, politics, and power. As ethics devolves into etiquette, what is left for moral writing? To what extent does the literature of conduct replace political writing as the most convenient genre in which to develop moral and political arguments? How does the rising genre of the novel (we will read Richardson's Pamela, Burney's Evelina and Austen's Emma) both secure and undermine the dominance of manners? How do women writers gain jurisdiction over manners (and perhaps over morals as well)? The eighteenth-century authors we consider include Locke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Pope, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Hume, Smith, Sheridan, Burney, Chesterfield, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Austen. Theoretical and critical readings by N. Elias, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu, J.G.A. Pocock, N. Armstrong, G.J. Barker-Benfield, C. Kay, C. Johnson, L. Klein.

19th CENTURY
ENGL W4404x Victorian Poetry (John Rosenberg).
W 9-11. Close readings of the major poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, D. G. and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins, with stress placed on continuities in English poetry from Wordsworth through T. S. Eliot.

ENGL G6402x Romanticism (Ross Hamilton). W 6:10-8. This seminar explores the origins and effects of modernity by following the path of accident from its pre-modern signification as the philosophical inessential to romantic writing and a rupture within deterministic narratives of history. We will reflect on the interrelation between literary history, philosophy, and theory. Authors include Montaigne, Shakespeare, Locke, Defoe, Wordsworth, Keats, Kleist, De Quincy. Theorists include Hegel, Freud, Althusser, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Toulmin, Greenblatt.

ENGL G6841x Everyday Life and the Victorian Novel (Nicholas Dames). T 4:10-6. A study of representative nineteenth-century fiction with particular emphasis upon the novel's capacity to represent the "everyday" or the "ordinary." Theories of everyday life, from historiography, sociology, philosophy, and literary theory, will be brought to bear upon the classical novel in the interest of rethinking some dominant assumptions about narrative form and thematics. Of particular concern: the everydayness of the novel, its connections to the newspaper and to a temporality defined by serial publication; psychologies of repetition and habit; the tension between melodramatic "event" and the depiction of "usual," recurrent conditions; the question of "ordinary" culture ("customs in common") and its political implications; the minute- manners, style, objects- and its distinctions; the novel's techniques for representing a mentalité defined by ordinary, even banal, interactions; novel-reading itself as an act with intimate connections to everyday forms of consumption. Novels by Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, Gissing; additional readings from Hegel, Weber, Benjamin, Barthes, Lefebvre, Braudel, Williams, Thompson, De Certeau, Bourdieu, Ginzburg, and others.

20th CENTURY
CLEN W4740x The Third World Bildungsroman: Dependency and Development (Joseph Slaughter). TR 6:10-7:25. This course looks at the generic negotiations with the story of individual development in non-western literature through the literary lens of the bildungsroman, the human rights-enshrined notion of the "full development of human personality," and the historical and cultural specificity of the authors' writing.

CLEN G6532x Poetry, Machines, and Media (Ursula Heise). F 11-12:50. The seminar will explore theoretical debates about technology, aesthetics and literature in the 20th century and analyze how poetic texts address technological issues both in their thematic concerns and through formal strategies and choices of media. Theoretically, the seminar will focus on three areas: the debate about technology, technique and politics between Benjamin, Brecht and Adorno in the 1920s and 30s, theorizations of visual media and spectacle in the 1960s (McLuhan, Debord) and recent approaches to electronic textuality and hypertext. A multitude of poetic and hybrid texts throughout the 20th century address questions of technology. Our readings will start out with Futurist and Dadaist manifestoes, poetry and ciné-poemes, poetry by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and an Ezra Pound essay to set the tone for a sequence of poetic texts all of which evolve out of or refer back to the modernist avant-garde: the works of the French-American Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, the poetry of John Cage, and texts of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group (Silliman, Andrews and, more loosely, Scalapino); in the last phase, we will look at poetry created with hypertext software, and study poetry sites on the World Wide Web.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4593x The American Novel, Revolution to Civil War (Ezra Tawil). TR 10:35-11:50. A history 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, Stowe, Hawthorne, Delany, Jacobs.

ENGL W4444x Traditional Native American Literatures (Karl Kroeber). MW 4:10-5:25. Instructor's permission required. Study of the cultural and artistic significance of traditional oral narratives, myths, and ceremonies of a wide variety of Native American peoples.

ENGL W4605x Asian American Literature (Robert Ku). MW 4:10-5:25. This course serves as an introduction to some of the key critical issues in Asian American literary studies. Through a survey of Asian American literature since 1945, we will explore figurations of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality and class in the ongoing process of Asian American identity formation.

ENGL W4612x Jazz and American Culture (Robert O'Meally). TR 10:35-11:50. Limited to 85; restricted to graduate students, senior and selected junior undergraduates. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of jazz's influence on the visual arts, dance, literature, film; introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

ENGL G6601x Transcendentalism -Literature and Reform, 1836-1865 (Caleb Crain). M 6:10-8. In the 1830s, several generations of European philosophy and literature hit New England in a single blow. When Kant, Cole ridge, and Carlyle reached America, they spurred the movement known as Transcendentalism, whose hierophant was a Unitarian preacher turned essayist named Waldo Emerson. Early on, the movement struck a keynote of reform, but at first Transcendentalists declined to commit themselves to anything more particular than a dissent from Unitarian orthodoxy. Gradually, however, Emerson's followers drew him into difficult engagements - Henry Thoreau brought him to abolition, Margaret Fuller to women¹s rights, George Ripley to economic justice - that resulted in new experiments in living as well as writing. We will read the classic public texts of Transcendentalism, the letters and private writings behind them, and recent critical interpretations.

ENGL G6622x 20th-century American Fiction (Maura Spiegel). R 4:10-6. This course will examine two clusters of novels, one group from the period 1960-72, the other from 1990 to the present. Authors will include: John Barth, Truman Capote, Don Delillo, Richard Farina, Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen, Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed and Philip Roth.

THEATRE / FILM
ENTA W4723x Modern Drama I (Martin Puchner). TR 4:10-5:25. This course offers an account of modernism and modernity by examining the reforms and experiments in the modern drama as well as the intersections and rivalries between the theater and the other art. Central issues include realism, meta-theater, dream-play, symbolism, and political theater. Readings include Wagner, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Yeats, Symons, Craig, Wilde, Shaw, Apollinaire, and Jarry.

SPECIAL TOPICS
CLEN G4011x Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.

ENGL W4609x American, British, and Irish Poetry (Tom Paulin). M 10-1. The influence of American poetry on British and Irish poetry has not received much critical attention. Whitman is a crucial influence on Hopkins and Lawrence, Dickinson a major influence on Ted Hughes, Frost exercises a profound influence on Heaney and Muldoon. This course will examine the work of these poets, and will also look at Eliot and Christina Rossetti.

CLEN W4902x Introduction to Literary Theory (Bruce Robbins). MW 1:10-2:25. A selective introduction, aimed at graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who have little or no prior acquaintance with theory, to significant authors and issues from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel to Foucault and Derrida.

ENGL G6380x Milton's Influence on Romantic Poetry (Tom Paulin). T 11-12:50. This course will concentrate primarily on Milton's influence on Romantic poetry. In order to trace his influence and the transmission of his idea of liberty, we shall consider Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Thomson's The Seasons. Among the texts studied will be Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Prelude, Blake's Milton, Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age, Byron's Don Juan. Gray's phrase in his Elegy - "Some mute inglorious Milton" - will introduce John Clare, whose work is seminally influenced by Thomson, and who is a relatively neglected figure, despite being the greatest nature poet in English and a significant political poet. We will consider how Samuel Johnson's chJonathan Aracterization of Milton as 'an acrimonious and surly republican' is reflected in later criticism of Milton. As Lucy Newlyn shows in Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, Milton is identified by his followers as spokesman for the libertarian cause, and then transformed into "Hero, prophet, sage." We will consider his still uneasy position in British culture, and the reasons for the relative neglect of his work outside the academy.

ENGL G6431x Anti-Vivisection, Feminism, and the Critique of Progress (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. Why was the movement against vivisection of animals so heavily dominated by women? And what connections exist between antivivisection and the many conflicting causes that comprise the late nineteenth-century women's and working class movements? This course examines how the protection of animal rights introduced new dichotomies into which women's struggles could be inserted. Scientific and medical advances highlighted these dichotomies for women far more sharply than any other comparable developments. The discourse of progress that cited the improved mortality rates of women blocked criticism of either science or the men who practiced it. But the vivisection of animals for experimental purposes cracked open the supposedly noble intentions of science and exposed the raw suffering that was inflicted in the name of knowledge: improvement at a price, in other words. Modern science, which made animals expendable in the search for cures for modern diseases, created new hierarchies of ontology that subordinated animal suffering to worldly ends. The ontological divisions between the materialism of science and the sanctity of biological life (human and animal) created a new ethical awareness about the nature of pain. But mainstream religion had little to offer by way of developing this awareness into action. Ideas of suffering as Christian atonement were too severely undermined by science to be effective in a battle that depended for its success on recognition of the visceral quality of pain. The intellectual biographies of some of the nineteenth century's greatest female reformers reveal their confrontation with the limitations of the religion in which they were born and their search for ways of making social activism responsive to the physical reality of pain. Their writings are paralleled by the novels of major figures like H.G. Wells and Wilkie Collins exploring the nexus between violence against animals and the abuse of women and workers. The course will probe the uses of antivivisection in advancing the causes of women and the English working classes, as well as the extent to which animal advocacy was served by these connections and by the translation of animals into fiction and fable. Primary works include Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau; Blavatsky, Have Animals Souls?; selected writings of Darwin, Huxley, Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, and Elizabeth Blackwell; J.M. Coetzee, Lives of Animals. Secondary works include Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic; Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate; Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900; Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog.

ENGL G8490x Advanced Research Seminar (Jonathan Arac). W 6:10-8. This seminar aims to elicit and elucidate issues and problems that define the current state of English studies. It should enable advanced doctoral students to reach beyond the necessary focus of their particular specializations and to participate in inquiry and debates that structure the overall field. The members of this seminar will be students, in any and every field represented in the department, who have already had at least one dissertation chapter accepted, preferably students who are entering the job market (in 02-03) or intend to do so the following year. The core texts of the seminar will be, in the first instance, members' dissertation work in progress, supplemented as the conversation develops by further brief readings. This is not intended to compete with the existing dissertation seminars but to complement them by serving quite a different function. As discussion evolves, the department's faculty may be invited to participate in discussion of members' presentations.

COURSES OF RELATED INTEREST

From Women's Studies:

WMST G8010x Studies in the Histories of Sexuality and Gender (Jean Howard). R 4:10-6. Using the early modern period (1500 to 1800) for its materials, this seminar will explore the sex and gender systems of an historical period before modern sexual identities were invented and before gender difference was firmly anchored to the notion of male-female bodily difference. We will begin by reading Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex and then turn to a series of historical, critical, literary and visual materials through which we can explore such questions as: how is gender difference secured in a one-sex model of culture? how does humoral theory affect notions of gender difference in such a culture? how is gender difference constructed through particular forms of ideological interpellation, divisions of labor, and outward transformations of the body such as clothing, jewelry, cosmetics and hair styles? how do we speak about same-sex relations in a culture that did not think in terms of normative heterosexuality? was the early modern period a "golden age" for same-sex practices? what kinds of institutions regulated sexual practice in this culture? Critical readings will include selections from Paster's The Body Embarrassed, Goldberg's Sodometries, DiGangi's The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Stallybrass and Jones' Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Traub's The Renaissance of Lesbianism, and Edward Mendelson and Crawford's Women in Early Modern England. Primary materials will include Shakespeare's sonnets, miniatures by Isaac Oliver, portraits by Van Dyke, Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure, and other artifacts that raise interesting questions about sex, gender difference, marriage, and same-sex communities in the early modern period. I welcome students from English and foreign languages, but also from history, art history and anthropology, in particular. In writing seminar papers, participants can work on material particular to their own disciplines. For application instructions, click here. Note: Though designated as an 8000-level seminar, this class is open to all graduate students, including first-years.

From the Center for Jazz Studies:

ENGL G6610x Jazz, Improvisation, and American Culture (Stanley Crouch). T 2:10-4. This course will investigate how improvisation functions in a particularly American way. What is improvisation, and what is American or perhaps jazz-shaped about American culture and so much American art? While improvisation is central to jazz and aesthetically reflects the democratic process in which the individual attempts to balance mutual respect with the mass, it is also central to American politics, culture, and art. Among the film directors to be considered will be John Ford. Among the musicians to be studied will be Charlie Parker. Readings will include Ralph Ellison and John Kouwenhoven. Students signing up for this course should read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Moby-Dick over the summer. For application instructions, click here.

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SPRING 2002
MEDIEVAL
CLEN G6031y Studies in Medieval Literature: Trilingual England (Robert Stein). T 11-12:50. An examination of literary production in England from the conquest to 1215. The multiple relations between writing in Latin and in the newly emergent literary vernaculars of French and English will be considered in relation to their circles of production and reception--the court, the monastery, the city.

RENAISSANCE
CLEN W4122y Renaissance in Europe: Figuring the Erotic (Anne Prescott). TR 11-12:15. 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 G6201y Women Readers and Writers in 17th-century England (Frances Dolan). W 4:10-6. This seminar will focus on in-depth analysis of women writers working in the 17th-century. These will include Amelia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Katharine Philips, and Mary Astell. We will approach their work from theoretical and historical perspectives, and in relation to men's writings from the period. How did these writers respond to and influence the work of, for instance, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Milton? How did gender and genre intersect in this period? How did women--as publishers, writers, and readers--participate in a 17th-century culture of writing and of politics? How did social differences among women shape their opportunities and achievements? This seminar hopes to be of use not only to specialists in 17th-century, but also to students of women writers in earlier and later periods, and to those with a general interest in gender, genre, histories of literacy and printing, and the relationship of private and public.

ENGL G6711y Shakespeare Seminar: Pen and Player (David Kastan). W 11-12:50. What is the relation of a text of Hamlet and a performance of the play? Are both Hamlet? What then is Hamlet? By working at a number of plays (often existing in multiple early versions) the seminar will explore the relation of print to performance as a set of material, historical, and theoretical problems--as well as a new provocation to engage these plays.
18th CENTURY
CLEN W4321y Enlightenment to Romanticism: The Shock of Experience (Ross Hamilton). MW 11-12:15. The shock of experience courses through 18th-century literature. We will read violent experience and burning desire (romantic love and its opposite, Sadean perversion) in an astonishing array of texts, texts which write a strikingly modern model of selfhood. Close readings in poetry, philosophy, and visual art.
19th CENTURY
ENGL W4405y Victorian Literature (John Rosenberg). TR 1:10-2:25. The Victorian Imagination: Close readings of the more important works by major poets, critics, autobiographers, and novelists. Attention will be paid to historical context and recent criticism, but our primary focus will be upon the particularities of language in the work before us. Authors: Carlyle, Ruskin, Pater; Tennyson, Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins; Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot.

ENGL G6401y British Romantic Texts (Karl Kroeber). F 11-12:50. The primary text for the seminar will be Don Juan. Byron's poem will be examined in conjunction with diverse poems and fiction from the 1790s into the 1820s. These juxtapositions will be used to define significant innovations of romantic literature as well as the principal problems it bequeathed to post-romantic criticism.
20th CENTURY
ENGL W4501y Modern British Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and the Body (Sarah Cole). TR 2:40-3:55. In this course, we will consider British literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on the material body, paying particular attention to issues of violence and sexuality. Topics include war and injury; representations of psychic drama, including hysteria, masochism, and childhood memory; imperial and post-imperial discourse; and constructions of gender.

ENGL G6851y 20th-century English Literature (Edward Mendelson). M 11-12:50. Beckett, Woolf, Auden, but everything is open to change.

AMERICAN
ENGL G6601y 19th-century American Texts: Contesting Emerson (Ross Posnock). W 2:10-4. This course sets Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Hawthorne and Melville in contentious conversation with Emerson. The role of the intellectual, the fate of radical individualism, the tensions and reciprocities between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the creation of a democratic public sphere: these are among the topics we will pursue, as well as how (in Fuller and Douglass) the presence of women and African Americans complicate the above matters.

ENGL G6623y Modern American Poetry (Marcellus Blount). T 6:10-8. Exploration of the relations of poetic voice, language, and identity, focusing on how poetry might be incorporated into current discourses of identity politics. Poetic examples: Whitman, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Audre Lorde. Course requirements: seminar presentation and 20-page essay.

ENGL G6631y American Literary and Cultural History: Mellon Colloquium on Higher Education in the United States (Andrew Delbanco). M 6:10-8. Open to graduate students in English and History beyond the first year of study. Themes include the history of public and private institutions, democratic educational ideals, curricular debates past and present, access to higher education (quotas, financial aid, affirmative action), university governance, and the rise of science and technology in the modern research university. This course is designed to prepare students for academic citizenship as faculty members in colleges and universities.

THEATRE / FILM
ENTA W4730y Contemporary Drama (John Russell Brown). MW 11-12:15. This course is concerned, equally, with innovative work of the last ten years and with that of earlier work by masters--including Brecht, O'Neill, Beckett, and Brook--who are major current influences. While the main focus will be on theatre in European and North American traditions, attention will also be given to the theatres of Africa, Asia, and South America and to film and TV. Extensive reading will be required and students will be expected to see 3 or 4 current New York productions.

SPECIAL TOPICS
ENGL W4600y History American Language (David Yerkes). MW 6:10-7:25. A language, not a literature, course, with no prerequisites other than what anyone coming to Columbia should have: comfort discussing grammar.

CLEN G6820y Studies in the Novel: Novel and Anti-Novel (David Damrosch). R 4:10-6:40. This course will explore twentieth-century definitions of the novel and the novelistic, pairing major theoretical statements and critical explorations with works that illustrate and resist them. Beginning with several precursors to the novel, the course will center on the modern and postmodern European novel. Readings in Gilgamesh, Apuleius, Murasaki, Proust, Woolf, Barnes, Rhys, Calvino, Brooke- Rose, Mishima, Walcott, and Pavić, with associated readings by Lukács, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Girard, Cixous, Kristeva, Hutcheon, Moretti, Miyoshi, Shirane, Hayles, and others.

ENGL G8491y Advanced Research Seminar II (Jonathan Arac). T 6:10-8.

THEORY
CLEN W4902y Introduction to Literary Theory (Stathis Gourgouris). TR 1:10-2:25. The nominal purpose of this course is to provide a range of understanding how the notion "literary theory" emerged and developed since the late-18th century. The more precise aim, however, is to question and elucidate what constitutes the domain of theory (and assumptions as to what qualifies as theoretical understanding) under different historical conditions. The mystery of literature's relation to knowledge as raison d'être of literary theory will serve as the key point of interrogation. The overall impetus is to provide both a historical and a philosophical understanding of the 'technologies' of theory as 'agencies' of modernity.
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FALL 2001

MEDIEVAL
CLEN W4021x European Literature of the Middle Ages (Joan Ferrante). MW 1:10-2:25. Major literary genres of the Middle Ages with particular attention to French, German,and Italian literature: epic, romance, lyric, autobiography, allegory.

CLEN G6023x Provencal Poetry (Joan Ferrante). W 9-10:50. An introduction to the language and the major early poets of the courtly love tradition.

RENAISSANCE
CLEN G6128x Comparative Renaissance Texts: Satire (Anne Prescott). W 4:10-6. Northern Renaissance prose satire in the "Menippean" style. After a look at such classical precedents as Petronius' Satyricon, Lucian's True History, and Apuleius' Golden Ass, we turn to Erasmus' Folly, The Letters of Obscure Men by Ulrich von Hutten and others, some jest books, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, extracts from the multi-authored French Satyr Menippized, Nashe's fiction and pamphlets, Harrington's scatological Metamorphosis of Ajax, Hall's dystopic Mundus Alter et Idem, Donne's Ignatius his Conclave (with samples from one of his models, Curio's Pasquin in a Trance). Topics: satire's relation to politics and censorship, the linguistic and social implications of taking satire as Satura (stuffed,like a hodgepodge or sausage), concepts of authorship, the grotesque body, the nature of the risible, obscenity and misogyny (or what can look like it), shift sin perspective, and carnival reversal.
18th CENTURY
ENGL W4301x The Age of Johnson (James Basker) MW 9:10-10:25. Literature from 1740 to 1800. The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their circle 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 transition to romanticism, and the democratization of culture.

ENGL W4703x Restoration and 18th-century Drama (Jenny Davidson) MW 11-12:15.

ENGL W4801x History of the Novel I (Adam Potkay). TR 9:10-10:25. British fiction from its beginnings through 1818, with attention paid to its historical, political and cultural contexts. Focus on such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Austen and Mary Shelley.
19th CENTURY
CLEN W4821x The 19th-century Novel in Europe (Maura Spiegel). TR 4:10-5:25. Readings in the 19th-century European novel: works by Gogol, Dostoyevsky,Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Dickens, and others. Themes include class mobility, self-making, urban life, alienation; intimacy and consumerism.

CLEN G6490x Comparative Romantic Texts (Ross Hamilton). W 6:10-8. This course will serve both as a close reading of romantic texts and as an overview of recent theoretical debates concerning the history of subjectivity. Our goal: a historical understanding of the romantic individual, moved as it is by feeling and (as we shall see) strangely attracted to accident. The question of modernity--a problem that has revivified recent intellectual literary history--is linked to the history of the subject. Yet many recent histories--whether idealist or materialist--ignore the ontological significance of mind and body in early modernity. This significance is effaced by the empirical attempt to write a language of experience, and yet is the necessary precondition for a properly historicist understanding not only of the romantic individual, but of the bourgeois subjectivity of the 19th century and the fractured Modernist self. We will begin by considering certain postulates of literary history generated during the period we define as "romantic" as well as later responses. We will then turn to philosophy to explore the fundamental shift from late renaissance ontology of substance to a "modern" empirical understanding, and trace the curious afterlife of this ontology in the modern experience of accident. Accident appears as a rupture in both history and personal experience, but its history is the history of the self in modernity. The body of the course will be devoted to three case studies--Rousseau, Wordsworth, and "late Romanticism" of Austen and Kleist--which we shall interpret within their relation--literary, philosophical, cultural--to the romantic individual. Other writers considered include Coleridge, Novalis, Stendhal, and perhaps, as a Modernist foil, Pessoa.

ENGL G6841x The Victorian Novel (Bruce Robbins). T 2:10-4. Readings of selected classics of nineteenth-century fiction (including Dickens, Gaskell, Flaubert, Eliot, and Hardy). These texts will be set against, and read in relation to, such related materials as E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (and its critics), two working-class autobiographies, Flaubert's Bohemia as described by Pierre Bourdieu, and the Perry Anderson/Tom Nairn theses about how British nineteenth-century culture is shaped by its position within the global context of empire and finance capital.

20th CENTURY
ENGL G6506x Literature, Culture, and War in the Twentieth Century (Sarah Cole). R 4:10-6. This is a course about war and culture, about how literary forms have developed to make sense of the twentieth century's mass wars, about how wars are remembered and forgotten, about the assimilation and/or erasure of war from some of the dominant aesthetic and cultural movements of the century. The bulk of our readings will center on the First World War, primarily from the British perspective, and on the Vietnam War, primarily from the American perspective, but we will also read material from the Second World War and from recent conflicts such as the Persian Gulf War. Issues of national identity, memory, gender, irony, and protest will be at the forefront of our inquiry. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Each week we will explore a broad topic, reading a range of literary and theoretical materials. Topics may include: conventional war language and its undermining; the body in pain; the language(s) of protest; masculinity resplendent and masculinity under siege; commemoration and memorialization; the problem of mental disease (shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder); reporting, propaganda, and the press; experimental forms (absurdism, black humor). We will read both combatant and civilian writers, and our readings will be drawn from a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, film, cultural studies, and theory.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4444x Native American Traditional Literatures (Karl Kroeber). MW 4:10-5:25. Admission only by permission of instructor. Focus is on mythic and ceremonial discourse of representative Native American cultures. Emphasis is on recovery of special qualities and functions of oral narrative. Active class discussion, frequent brief written assignments, and final paper required.

ENGLW4605x Introduction to Asian American Literature and Culture (Robert Ku). MW 10:35-11:50. This class serves as a broad introduction to Asian American literature, literary criticism, and culture. We will read at least one book-length work from each of the following ethnic groups: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian. In addition, we will read a selection of Asian American poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as screen several videos by established and emerging Asian American directors. Throughout the semester, we will pay particular attention to how sexuality/gender, race/ethnicity, and class construct both the material experiences and the psychic lives of Asian Americans. In order to provide a more engaged political framework for discussion, we will analyze a number of theoretical essays from psychoanalytic, feminist, post colonial, critical race, and queer studies.

ENGL W4612x Jazz & American Culture(Robert O'Meally). TR 10:35-11:50. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of jazz's influence on the visual arts, dance, literature, film; introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

ENGL G6610x Cold War Culture (Ann Douglas). F 3:10-5:30. Interdisciplinary study of the culture of post-WWII U.S. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War (notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Rosenbergs, Hiss), to film noir (Gilda, Double Indemnity, among others), and the "Beat" writing of Jack Kerouac. Background readings in gender/race/political tensions of the era and recent postmodern and postcolonial theory about forms of Cold War culture.

ENGL G6633x The Art of Thelonius Monk (Robin Kelley). T 2:10-4. This course explores 20th-century cultural history through the music, ideas, and images of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. We are particularly interested in how Monk has been "constructed" by critics,fans, writers, visual artists, the music industry, the media, etc., and how Monk himself shaped his public image. Sifting through a broad range of cultural materials, we will examine how Monk has been read through his music, his body, his sartorial style, representations of black masculinity, narratives of eccentricity, and the prism of modernism. We will also examine the critical responses to Monk's work and how it changes over time, asking whether the shifts in criticism to his music had more to do with a changing political climate than with changes in his work. By paying attention to the music, we hope to reveal something of how Monk's presence affected the formation of jazz as a genre/tradition, just as his persona contributed greatly to the phenomenology of jazz experience as a whole.

CLEN G6651x American Literature in Transnational Context (Rachel Adams). M 6:10-8. Beginning with the premise that U.S. culture is profoundly shaped by its encounters with the rest of the world, this course examines a range of approaches to the study of American literature in transnational context. How might our understanding of U.S. literary history change by approaching it as one of many global literatures in English? Our readings will cover a series of overlapping and interconnected critical paradigms, including theoretical writing on transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, (post) coloniality, diaspora, borderlands, and globalization. Discussions of these concepts will emerge in tandem with our reading of literature by a diverse group of authors such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, W.E. B. DuBois, Abraham Cahan, Americo Paredes, Carlos Bulosan, Toni Morrison, and Russell Banks. Primary texts are intended to serve as test cases for trying out and debating the usefulness of different theoretical models. Specific couplings of theory and literature are not meant to imply a precise correspondence or to preclude discussion of alternative interpretive models. Instead, we will work on developing an increasingly rich and varied critical vocabulary over the course of the semester.

THEATRE / FILM
ENTA W4723x Modern Drama (Rhonda Garelick). TR 1:10-2:25.A course examining modern drama's creation of new onstage realities. Questions considered include: What does the actor represent? How can drama make use of audience expectation? What is appropriate stage action? Does language always convey meaning? Authors include: Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Apollinaire, Jarry, Brecht, Cocteau, Pirandello, Ionesco, Sartre, Beckett, O'Neill, Miller, Hellman.

ENGL W4930x Politics in American Film (Maura Spiegel). M W 5:40-6:55. Some have argued that there is no politics in Hollywood films, only ideology. Hollywood's range of pressures and strategies to soften or disguise political "messages" will be one of the focuses of this course, as well as ways in which films indirectly or covertly speak to specific political hotspots of their moment. Our subjects will include early social problem films, pro-New Deal,anti-isolationist, Post-War Liberal Conscience film, conspiracy films, and treatments of the War in Vietnam. Films will include: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Meet John Doe, Casablanca, High Noon, The Manchurian Candidate, Twelve Angry Men, The Defiant Ones, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nothing But a Man, The Pawnbroker, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Dog Day Afternoon, Parallax View, Platoon.

ENTA G6725x Modernism in Theater: Mechanicity, Virtuosity, and the Body (Rhonda Garelick). R 4:10-6. This interdisciplinary course examines the modernist body in performance, how it is represented, disrupted, fragmented, mechanized, and celebrated. We will look at the bodily "shock" of modernism in drama, as well as in critical writings, and some non-text based performances. Works by: Zola, Sophocles, Strindberg, Jarry, Genet, Apollinaire, Wilde, Mallarmé, Kleist, Marinetti, Freud, Beckett, Cocteau, Craig, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham.

THEORY
CLEN W4540x Postcolonialism (Joseph Slaughter). T R 6:10-7:25. A survey of postcolonial theory and approaches to literature through readings of twentieth-century "Third World" fiction.

CLEN W4563x Theory, Criticism, Literature: Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus). MW 2:40-3:55. An intensive reading of Lacan's Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and selections from its intra-texts (by Freud, Kant, Sade, Aristotle, Luther, Bataille, Sophocles, among others). Emphasis on Lacan's redefinitions of the body, the drives, the Thing, transference, sublimation, transgression, pleasure, the unconscious, and their implications for aesthetics and tragedy.

SPECIAL TOPICS
CLEN G4010x Introduction to Bibliography (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. Bibliography as a field of knowledge, emphasizing the analytical and descriptive techniques used in historical study of books as physical objects. Topics:enumerative (or reference) bibliography, historical bibliography, analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography.

ENGL G8490x Advanced Research Seminar (Jonathan Arac). T 6:10-8. This seminar aims to elicit and elucidate issues and problems that define the current state of English studies. It should enable advanced doctoral students to reach beyond the necessary focus of their particular specializations and to participate in inquiry and debates that structure the overall field. The members of this seminar will be students, in any and every field represented in the department, who have already had at least one dissertation chapter accepted, preferably students who are entering the jobmarket (in 01-02) or intend to do so the following year. The core texts of the seminar will be, in the first instance, members' dissertation work in progress, supplemented as the conversation develops by further brief readings. This is not intended to compete with the existing dissertation seminars but to complement them by serving quite a different function. The department's faculty will be invited to participate in discussion of members' presentations. The class will meet every other week and will continue during the spring term.

ENGL G5001x MASTER'S SEMINARS

1. The Critic in Culture (David Damrosch). The history and contemporary practice of the essay in cultural criticism, with particular attention to critical voice, essayistic form, the essayist's self-placement and positioning of the reader, and strategic re-readings of earlier essayists. The first half of this course will discuss examples of the history of the cultural-critical essay, focusing on Arnold and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and Woolf in the first half of this century. The balance of the course will consider postwar developments, reading Barthes, Foucault, Lentricchia, Cixious, Haraway, Menchú, Kermode, Kaplan, and others. Assignments will include a review essay and a cultural-critique essay.

2. Early Women Writers (Frances Dolan). This seminar will introduce participants to the work of the most widely discussed and readily accessible women writers. We will begin with Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies (c. 1405) and end with Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), spanning in the process not only vast sweeps of time and space but also a broad range of genres. This seminar hopes to be of use not only to specialists in the Renaissance, but also to students of women writers in later periods, and to those interested in gender as a category of analysis.

3. Ralph Ellison (Robert O'Meally). In this seminar we will investigate issues in contemporary criticism through the alembic provided by the work of Ralph Ellison. We will read the complete fiction of this writer, including Invisible Man, the posthumous novel Juneteenth, the recently collected short stories, and the uncollected stories (including sections dropped from Invisible Man and Juneteenth). We will read Ellison's essays, collected and uncollected. As we weigh the cultural perspectives of this major writer, problems of identity (race, nation, geography, gender, class) will be in the foreground. Further, we will be concerned about Ellison's strategies as a writer who uses musical metaphors as part of his symbolic language and for whom "the American joke" (in Henry James's phrase) is at the core of what it means to be a citizen of the United States-and a hero of Ellison's fiction. These readings and deliberations will be coordinated with the department's series of lectures for first year students.
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SPRING 2001
MEDIEVAL
CPLT G6035y Medieval Women (Joan Ferrante). W 9-10:50. In the course we will not only 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), but for the first time 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.

CLEN G6031y The Writing of History in the Middle Ages (Robert Stein). T 11-12:50. The emergence of varieties of historical writing in Anglo-Norman England and 12th-century France, considering both the literary consequences of this new narrative genre and the political and social dimensions of its production and reception. Texts include the chronicles of William of Malmesbury and Galbert of Bruges, and the "fictional" history of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

RENAISSANCE
ENGL W4712y Shakespeare (David Kastan). MW 2:40-3:55. A study of Shakespeare, focusing on representative comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. The course is designed to explore the relationship of the imaginative achievement of the plays to the theatrical, literary, social, and intellectual world in which they were produced.

ENGL W4211y Milton (David Kastan). MW 11-12:15. 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 G6133y Renaissance Poetry: Poetic and Critical Coteries (Julie Crawford). W 2:10-4. This class will focus on three major poetic coteries of early modern England: the Sidney circle, including Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and Fulke Greville; the coteries of John Donne, including Lucy Harrington and Magdalen Herbert; and George Herbert, his church, and the community at Little Gidding. The course will examine the reception of these writers and their poetry in their own time, as well their treatment by twentieth-century "critical coteries" such as new critics, new historicists, feminist critics, and manuscript/bibliographical scholars.
19th CENTURY
ENGL G4404y Major Victorian Poets (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Close readings of the major poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, D. G. and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins, with stress placed on continuities in English poetry from Wordsworth through T. S. Eliot.

ENGL G6404y Victorian Reading (Nicholas Dames). T 6:10-8. A detailed study of the novel reader as shaped by the British novel of the nineteenth century. We will consider how the large and increasingly technically sophisticated Victorian novel allowed for, demanded, shaped, and altered such readerly facts as: reverie; emotion, sensation, and vicarious participation; memory; interruption and inattention; thematic and motivic connection; speed and pace. Our investigation will consider adjacent fields (psychology, music theory, philosophies of labor and leisure), historical accounts of readership, and the evidence of the novels themselves. Authors to include C. Brontë, Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Doyle.

CLEN G6420y Romantic Agencies (Deborah White). T 4:10-6. The seminar will explore works of British, French, and German Romanticism with an emphasis on representations and theorizations of "action," "agency" and "performativity." In particular, we will consider shifting notions of subjectivity and their relation to shifts in romantic figurations of linguistic, geographical, and historical agencies. Authors to be considered may include Hays, Wordsworth, Novalis, De Staël, Kleist, Byron, Shelley, and De Musset as well as further readings from Austin, Butler, Carlson, Christensen, De Man, and Derrida.
20th CENTURY
ENGL W4501y Modernism and Its Enemies (David Damrosch). TR 2:40-3:55. British modernism was less a movement than a series of heated arguments. This course will explore the aesthetic and cultural stakes in the radically varied constructions of modernity by such opposed figures as Woolf versus Bennett, Barnes versus Woolf, Wilde versus Shaw, Kipling versus Conrad, Conrad versus Wells, Eliot versus Hardy, Joyce versus Wodehouse, Rhys versus Joyce and Woolf, Blast versus itself.

ENGL G6505y Modernism and the Body (Sarah Cole). R 4:10-6. Modernism is often represented as a literary preoccupation with mental consciousness. In this course, we will reverse the ordinary dualism to ask what happens to the body in modernism. The idea is to theorize modernist texts according to multiple and perhaps conflicting perspectives, bringing together canonical literature (primarily fiction) with varied historical and theoretical material. Topics might include: the Victorian body; the homosexual body; the body at war; injury and dismemberment; women's sexuality; the body in pain; the colonized body; the body under surveillance. We will read works by such figures as Wilde, Conrad, Woolf, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, Rhys, Mansfield, and Ford. Theorists from a variety of traditions, including feminist/gender studies, queer theory, materialism, and post-colonial theory, as well as a limited amount of literary criticism. Students are expected to come to all class meetings and to participate actively in the discussion. In addition to a final paper, students will be required to prepare and present a brief annotated bibliography for one class meeting.

CLEN G6566y Highlands and Homelands: Literature and Postcolonialism in Guatemala and South Africa (Joseph Slaughter). W 4:10-6. Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo writes in his poem "Nuestra Voz," "So that no one says, 'This land is mine,'/ with all of nostalgia's conviction/ I sing!" And in his review of black South African prose production, Njabulo Ndebele writes, "South Africa has been known in Africa as the land of the short story" and "the history of prose is inseparable from the history of society and the manner of its organization." This course explores the connections and divergences between these two statements: the material matters of socio-cultural identity and publication and the imaginative politics of culture and nationalism. These two countries have held import, both domestically and abroad, as sites of imaginative and materially activist struggle. While this course engages the literature, culture, and politics of the two countries, questions of what it means to study, and specifically to situate these countries, in terms of a "postcolonial" approach, will underpin our reading, writing, and conversation. The course will be thematically organized, but issues of race, class, gender, indigenousness, and nationalism thread each of the sections through investigations of memory and imagination, truth and testimony, narrative genre and identity. Most of the primary reading will come from authors who identify themselves as "nationals," with the full complexity of that term, but we will also read works by cultural and political "visitors," texts in which the countries assume particular imaginative, if not always affiliative, importance. Guatemalan authors (read in translation,though you are encouraged to read them in Spanish if you can) may include: Arias, Asturias, Foppa, Harbury, Menchú, Montejo, Monterroso, Payeras, René Castillo, Rey Rosa, Vidal. From South Africa, Abrahams, Brink, Coetzee, Fugard, Gordimer, Head, Krog, La Guma, Magona, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Nkosi, Paton, Schreiner, Wicomb.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4621y The Harlem Renaissance (Robert O'Meally). MW 2:40-3:55. What was the Harlem Renaissance movement? What caused it? What were its dates and locations--beyond Harlem--of greatest cultural activity? How does it relate to other modernist movements? While the focus is on writers (Locke, Hurston, McKay, Hughes, Toomer, and Fauset), we also consider work by the painter Aaron Douglas and the musicians Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday.

ENGL G6610y Cold War Culture (Ann Douglas). F 3-5:30. Inter-disciplinary study of the culture of post-WWII U.S. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War (notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Rosenbergs, Hiss), to film noir (Night and the City, Gilda, Double Indemnity), Bop, and the "Beat" writings of Jack Kerouac and Leroi Jones. Background readings in gender/race/political tensions of the era and recent postmodern and postcolonial theory about forms of Cold War culture.

ENGL G6601y Melville (Andrew Delbanco). T 2:10-4. The works.

THEATRE / FILM
CLEN W4722y Enlightenment and Romantic Drama (Martin Meisel). MW 4:10-5:25. Bourgeois modulations, musical-dramatic forms, drama of ideas, and Romantic psychodrama in a changing theatrical culture. Works of Gay, Lillo, Marivaux, Goldoni, Beaumarchais, Mozart, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Hugo, Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovsky, and Wagner are among those studied.

ENTA G6707y 20th-century Dramatic Texts: Theatre and Machine Art (Martin Puchner). W 11-12:50. From Shaw's Pygmalion to the Bread and Puppet Theater, the modern theater has continually been rebuilding the dramatic chJonathan Aracter as puppet, marionette, statue, decoration, or automaton. Actor training, choreography, but also dramatic texts and other forms of textual representation revolve around the enigma of the depersonalized machine on stage. What are the consequences of this machine modernism for the aesthetics and ethics of the theater? What are its philosophical underpinnings? How does it affect the practice of the theater? Readings in Shaw, Craig, Jarry, Maeterlinck, Taylorism, Meyerhold, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Bauhaus, Pound, Marinetti, Beckett. Supplementary readings by Winnicott, Lacan, Benjamin, and Kleist.

THEORY
CLEN W4902y Introduction to Literary Theory (David Damrosch). TR 10:35-11:50. Major trends in European and American literary criticism and theory in the 19th and 20th centuries. Readings in Cole ridge, Kleist, Pater, Arnold, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wilde, Eliot, new criticism, formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist, and political theory.

CLEN G6532y Media Theory (Ursula Heise). M 6:10-8. This seminar will explore theories of communication media in their relation to literature: oral story-telling, print, film, radio, television, and the computer. We will discuss in what ways different media have shaped the formal structures, thematic possibilities and socio-cultural significance of literary texts, how the emergence of visual and digital media has changed the production, reception and status of print literature over the course of the twentieth century, and what these changes might imply for the future of literary and cultural studies. We will address a variety of media, with an emphasis on twentieth-century literature and its transformations in the context of rapidly evolving computer technologies. Readings will include Havelock, Kittler, Debord, Williams, McLuhan, Innis, Baudrillard, Jameson, Bolter, Turkle, Murray, and Landow.

WMST G6001y Psychoanalysis and Ethics (David Eng and Ann Pellegrini). W 4:10-7. This course explores various approaches to thinking about the emergence as well as the divergence of the ethical from the psychical. We will explore several different genealogies of the ethical as that which is created from the tension between two-sometimes complementary, sometimes opposing-psychoanalytic terms: representation and signification, conscience and guilt, mourning and forgiveness, community and responsibility, and injury and care. This seminar is intended not only to give students a broad introduction to Freud but also to put the Freudian oeuvre in productive dialogue with a number of other schools of Western critical thought. Throughout the semester we will also read a group of literary works and screen a number of contemporary films.

SPECIAL TOPICS
CLEN G4930y Critical Method and Postcoloniality (Gauri Viswanathan). W 2:10-4. This course addresses such issues of modern cultural history as: the psychological impact of colonialism; construction of colonial masculinities; gender and nationalism; myth and theories of development; ecology and sustainable development; religious strife and violence. In essence, the course adopts a perspective that can roughly be called "postcolonial," but does so in a manner that situates postcolonial identity very specifically in history.

ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes). MW 6:10-7:25. No prerequisites; no knowledge of history or of language required. The course is half history, half ideas about language. Original texts from Beowulf to the present are scrutinized. For starters, read Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct.

ENGL G6935y Anglo-Jewish Issues of Conversion, Marriage, Identity 1400-2000 (James Shapiro). R 2:10-4. Focusing on a range of medieval and modern literary texts, this seminar examines how emerging notions of Englishness were repeatedly redefined in relation to Jewishness. At the center of course will be the early modern period, during which the traditional binary of 'Jewish/Christian' was gradually superseded by that of 'Jewish/English,' complicating stable notions of racial, religious, national, and familial identity. Among the authors we will read are: Chaucer, John Foxe, Marlowe, Shakespeare, John Donne, Francis Bacon, Eliza Haywood, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Amy Levy, Julia Frankau, Leonard Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham, and T. S. Eliot.
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FALL 2000
MEDIEVAL
ENGL W4092x Beowulf (Richard Sacks). MW 10:35-11:50. A close reading of the poem in Old English, as well as an examination of various issues and approaches-both accepted and controversial, ranging from the poem's linguistic and manuscript problems to its cultural and narrative strategies-critical to interpreting the text. Some previous exposure to Old English is preferred but not required, and there will be an optional yet regularly scheduled extra hour offered each week designed to provide ongoing exposure to and review of Old English grammar.

ENGL G6043x Chaucer (Robert Hanning). R 11-12:50. This term's topic: Chaucer in Love: Troilus and Criseyde and Europe's amatory discourse, Ovid through Boccaccio. Analysis of Troilus and Criseyde's debt to, variations on, and departures from, theories and rhetorics of desire articulated in Ovid's amatory poems, troubadour lyrics, Andreas Capellanus's De amore, Guillaume's Roman de la rose, Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor, Boccaccio's Filostrato. Topics: codings and decodings of desire; the rhetorical construction of desiring subjectivities; gender and politics / the politics of gender; major critical approaches to Troilus and Criseyde.

RENAISSANCE
ENGL G6128x Studies in Tudor-Stuart Drama: Genre, Geography, & Commerce (Jean Howard). W 11-12:50. An examination of the relationship between the development of Early Modern theatrical genres and England's changing place (imaginative, cultural, economic, political, cartographic) in a world system in which, in the 17th century, Northern Europe came to play a more dominant role. Readings will include plays, as well as world systems and genre theory. Specifically, we will read several city comedies, several adventure plays, several Jacobean tragedies, and a good number of tragicomedies. Certain to be included: The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi, Philaster, The Island Princess, Pericles, A King and No King, The Fair Maid of the West, Fortune by Land and Sea, A Christian Turned Turk, Epicoene, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. We will read historical and theoretical work by Fredric Jameson, Ralph Cohen, Robert Brenner, Sumir Amin, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Jeremy Brotton, and Bruce McLeod.

ENGL G6121x 16th-century Texts: Spenser (Anne Prescott). W 6:10-8. We will examine Spenser's Shephearde's Calendar, Faerie Queene, selections from Complaints, Amoretti and Epithalamion, Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and Colin Clouts Come Home Again, and passages from Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. Classroom discussion will focus on the primary texts and on the religious and political issues, generic play, and cultural dynamics they inscribe. Students are, though, encouraged to investigate current criticism on whatever aspect of Spenser's work interests them. (We will use T.P. Roche's or A.C. Hamilton's Faerie Queene and W. Oram's edition of the shorter poems.)

18th CENTURY

ENGL W4301x 18th-century English Literature: Manners and Morals (Jenny Davidson). MW 1:10-2:25. Eighteenth-century writers used the concept of manners to secure a wide range of political and domestic virtues; the partial displacement of morals by manners in turn raised new questions about the relationship between language, politics, and power. As ethics devolves into etiquette, what is left for moral writing? To what extent does the literature of conduct replace political writing as the most convenient genre in which to develop moral and political arguments? How does the rising genre of the novel participate in and complicate the dominance of manners? How do women writers gain jurisdiction over manners (and perhaps over morals as well)? The eighteenth-century authors we consider include Locke, Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Pope, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Hume, Smith, Sheridan, Burney, Fordyce, Gregory, Chesterfield, Burke, More, Wollstonecraft. Theoretical and critical readings by N. Elias, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu, J. Butler, J.G.A. Pocock, N. Armstrong, G.J. Barker-Benfield, J. Mullan, C. Kay, C. Johnson, L. Klein.

19th CENTURY

ENGL W4401x Romanticism (Deborah White). MW 11-12:15. Survey of British romantic poetry and prose. Special attention to the role of aesthetic thought in romantic conceptions of literariness and in its literary articulations (or interruptions) of other discursive "spheres"-social, political, cultural. Authors to be considered may include Blake, Wordsworth, Cole ridge, Radcliffe, Tighe, P. B. Shelley, and Keats.

ENGL G6401x Melodrama and the Melodramatic Mode (Martin Meisel). F 11-12:50. Melodrama in (for the most part) 19th-century narrative and drama, as a mode of representation, a structure of feeling, and a historical style; with attention to its social bearings, its metaphysics, and its continuing appeal.

ENGL G6933x Seminar on Autobiography (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Versions of the self from Wordsworth to Woolf. Themes include the problematics of autobiographical truth; cultural roots of the self; "I" as metaphor; crisis, conversion and unconversion; Biblical typology and autobiographical narrative; gender, subjugation, and identity; novelized autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Writers: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Carlyle, Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Nightingale, Newman, Ruskin, Darwin, Pater, Hopkins, Gosse, and Woolf.
20th CENTURY
CLEN G6565x Modern and Postmodern Cities (Ursula Heise). T 6:10-8. This seminar will focus on representations of the metropolis and urban life from the 1920s to the 1990s. We will discuss how literary texts and films represent modernist and postmodernist cities, how they redefine individual and collective subjects, and what new techniques they invent to achieve these descriptions. Readings will include some classics of the high-modernist urban novel (Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz), its postmodernist transformations in novels of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, Karen Tei Yamashita and William Gibson as well as films by Fritz Lang and Alex Proyas and some readings in urban theory. Prerequisite: having read Ulysses (which will not be read in class).

AMERICAN
ENGL W4444x Native American Traditional Literatures (Karl Kroeber).
MW 4:10-5:25. Instructor's permission required. Readings of diverse American Indian songs, stories, and ceremonial art, with brief attention to contemporary Indian fiction. Emphasis on challenges to modern assumptions about aesthetics and culture posed by these literatures.

ENGL W4612x Jazz and American Culture (Robert O'Meally). TR 10:35-11:50. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of jazz's influence on the visual arts, dance, literature, film; introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

ENGL G6623x Modern American Poetry (Marcellus Blount). W 2:10-4. Exploration of the relations of poetic voice, language, and identity, focusing on how poetry might be incorporated into current discourses of identity politics. Poetic examples: Whitman, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Audre Lorde. Course requirements: seminar presentation and 20-page essay.

THEATRE / FILM
ENGL W4930x Politics in American Film (Maura Spiegel). MW 4:10-5:25. Screenings: TR 8-10 p.m. Some have argued that there is no politics in Hollywood films, only ideology. Hollywood's range of pressures and strategies to soften or disguise political "messages" will be one of the focuses of this course, as well as ways in which films indirectly or covertly speak to specific political hotspots of their moment. Our subjects will include early social problem films, pro-New Deal, anti-isolationist, Post-War Liberal Conscience film, conspiracy films, and treatments of the War in Vietnam. Films will include: I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Fury, The Grapes of Wrath, Wilson, High Noon, Bad Day at Black Rock, Crossfire, Twelve Angry Men, The Defiant Ones, Nothing But a Man, The Pawnbroker, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, Dog Day Afternoon, Parallax View, The Chase, The Candidate, Platoon.

ENTA W4724x Modern Drama II (Martin Meisel). MW 4:10-5:25. Major playwrights and innovating trends in the modern drama from about 1900 through WWII. Readings will include Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, Cocteau, Gorki, Andreev, Wedekind, Capek, Treadwell, Lorca, Sartre, Artaud, and others, with attention to such programs as Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism, and the varieties of modern consciousness.

THEORY
ENGL G6431x Literature and Society (Gauri Viswanathan). T 4:10-6. This course examines the disciplinary developments of the 19th century (e.g. English studies, anthropology, economics) against the concerns of the late 20th century academy. By the end of the 19th century, developing intellectual fields were engaged in complex relationships with a range of social developments and political programs whose influence was to grow over the next century. While questions of religious emancipation, citizenship, and colonial governance were of paramount importance in the 19th century, their effect on the shape of the literary curriculum-not always direct or even palpable-bears comparison with institutional responses to similar questions in the current moment. To what extent were academic disciplines in the 19th century shaped by questions of political representation of multiple groups? Did the literary curriculum have a more assimilative effect than parliamentary process? The course examines concepts of literary value, canonicity, and authority against the backdrop of social representation and curricular change. Primary readings include works by Matthew Arnold, T.B. Macaulay, Adam Smith, Carlyle, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Williams. Among the secondary works studied are Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Studies; Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature; Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic; John Guillory, Cultural Capital; Ian Hunter, Culture and Government; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland.

CLEN G6531x Poststructuralism (Gayatri Spivak). W 9-10:50. Close study of selected texts by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. Advanced knowledge of French, as well as previous work on these authors, required. This is not an introductory course. Course requirements: one oral presentation, one final research paper. No incompletes will be accepted. Admission by interview only.

SPECIAL TOPICS
CLEN G4011x Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle). Tu 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.

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SPRING 2000
MEDIEVAL
ENGL W4791y Medieval Drama: Magic, Devotion, and Spectacle (Margaret Pappano). MW 1:10-2:25. What can be considered "drama" in a period when literary production was, for the most part, orally performed? To address this question, we will investigate the various sites of performance-churchyard, city, street, monastery, court, tavern, etc.-as ways of understanding the interplay of spectacle, production, and audience. Topics include: the mass as ritual and performance, folk plays and pious practices, punishments and executions, spectacles both royal and civic, devotional drama, and anti-theatricality.

ENGL G4002y Codex and Criticism (Christopher Baswell). R 11-12:50. This aim of this course is to re-embed the editorially created "texts" of the Middle Ages within their original sites in the physical culture of the past: that is, in manuscripts and early printed editions, and in the settings of cultural creation and consumption those codices intimately reflect. Readings in recent work on the Chaucer and Langland tradition, and in other medieval vernaculars as they negotiated the unstable divide of performed and bookish culture. Study of exemplary manuscripts in New York collections, in facsimile, and on line. The thematics of writing and the book within medieval literature. Projects and seminar presentations can pursue areas of individual interest.

CLEN G6031y Studies in Medieval Literature: Trilingual England (Robert Stein). T 4:10-6. An examination of literary production in England from the conquest to 1215. The multiple relations between writing in Latin and in the newly emergent literary vernaculars of French and English will be considered in relation to their circles of production and reception--the court, the monastery, the city.

RENAISSANCE
CLEN W4122y Renaissance in Europe (Kathy Eden). TR 10:35-11:50. Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Rabelais, and Sidney.

CLEN G6128y Comparative Renaissance Texts: Satire (Anne Prescott). W 4:10-6. Northern Renaissance prose satire in the "Menippean" style. After a look at such classical precedents as Petronius' Satyricon, Lucian's True History, and Apuleius' Golden Ass, we turn to Erasmus' Folly, The Letters of Obscure Men by Ulrich von Hutten and others, some jestbooks, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, extracts from the multi-authored French Satyre Menippized, Nashe's fiction and pamphlets, Harrington's scatological Metamorphosis of Ajax, Hall's dystopic Mundus Alter et Idem, Donne's Ignatius his Conclave (with samples from one of his models, Curio's Pasquin in a Trance). Topics: satire's relation to politics and censorship, the linguistic and social implications of taking satire as Satura (stuffed, like a hodgepodge or sausage), concepts of authorship, the grotesque body, the nature of the risible, obscenity and misogyny (or what can look like it), shifts in perspective, and carnival reversal.

ENGL G6711y Shakespeare and the Book (David Kastan). M 2:10-4. A study of the transmission of Shakespeare's plays and of the resistant materiality of the forms in which they circulate, the seminar will focus mainly on the early print history but also on the subsequent editorial tradition and the inevitable move into electronic representation.

19th CENTURY
ENGL G6404y Major Victorian Poets and Critics (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Carlyle, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Arnold, Darwin, Pater, Hopkins, Wilde. Portrait of a culture through close readings of its poetry, criticism, and imaginative prose.

20th CENTURY
ENGL G6431y Literature and Society (Gauri Viswanathan). R 4:10-6. This course examines the disciplinary developments of the 19th century (e.g. English studies, anthropology, economics) against the concerns of the late 20th century academy. By the end of the 19th century, developing intellectual fields were engaged in complex relationships with a range of social developments and political programs whose influence was to grow over the next century. While questions of religious emancipation, citizenship, and colonial governance were of paramount importance in the 19th century, their effect on the shape of the literary curriculum-not always direct or even palpable-bears comparison with institutional responses to similar questions in the current moment. To what extent were academic disciplines in the 19th century shaped by questions of political representation of multiple groups? Did the literary curriculum have a more assimilative effect than parliamentary process? The course examines concepts of literary value, canonicity, and authority against the backdrop of social representation and curricular change. Primary readings include works by Matthew Arnold, T.B. Macaulay, Adam Smith, Carlyle, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Williams. Among the secondary works studied are Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Studies; Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature; Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic; John Guillory, Cultural Capital; Ian Hunter, Culture and Government; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland.

ENGL G6506y Modern British Texts (Edward Mendelson). M 11-12:50. Probably but not certainly, all Woolf, all the time.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4602y The American Renaissance (Jonathan Levin). TR 9:10-10:25. Readings in major American writers from 1820 to 1870, with particular emphasis on the formation of an American literary sensibility in works by Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Douglass, and Fuller.

ENGL W4604y American literature 1880-1940 (Jonathan Gill). MW 11-12:15. Realist and naturalists as precursors to modernist revolutions, with an emphasis on canonical fiction by Twain, Chopin, Wharton, Chestnutt, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Faulkner, and others. U.S. identity as inflected by evolving ideas of race, gender, class, nation, and new scientific developments inform this course's sense of literary history.

ENGL G6608y Ecocriticism (Jonathan Levin). R 2:10-4. A forthcoming Forum in PMLA is focused on "the growing importance and expanding scope of the fields of environmental literature and ecological literary criticism." This course will provide an advanced introduction to these fields. Readings will be broadly interdisciplinary, though we will also attempt to address the challenges of a distinctively literary ecology. Primary texts will include Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyon, Thoreau's Walden and shorter essays, Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, poems by Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, and Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. In addition, we will read selected works by environmental historians Roderick Nash, Donald Worster, William Cronon, Carolyn Merchant, and Neil Evernden, philosophers Arne Naess (and other commentators on Deep Ecology), Max Oelschlaeger, David Abram, and Luc Ferry, and a various literary critics. Though the emphasis of the readings will frequently be on American environments and their cultural contexts, participants are welcome to submit projects based in other periods, spaces, or places.

ENGL G6610y American Studies (Rachel Adams). M 6:10-8. This course will study the multi-disciplinary scholarship and critical debates that have shaped American Studies. We will read major scholarly works that have defined the field by authors such as Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, Constance Rourke, and Carol Smith Rosenberg. In addition to classic texts, particular emphasis will be placed on understanding how post-structuralism, recent work in ethnic and gender studies, and postcolonial theory have changed the boundaries of American Studies and sparked new debates among its practitioners.

ENGL G6633y Seminar on Miles Davis (John Szwed). M 2:10-4. Miles Davis is one of the five or six most important figures in the history of jazz. But where other musician/composers are typically known for a single line of artistic development, Davis' importance derives from a personal evolution which took him through a series of radical musical changes, and eventually led him - some would say - outside of the jazz tradition altogether. Beginning first as a rhythm and blues and swing player in southern Illinois, he quickly become one of the central figures in bebop with Charlie Parker in New York City; almost immediately, however, he established a new form of music known as cool jazz which would forever be counterpoised to bebop. Again he changed, and next helped create a very different music - hard bop - only to momentarily jettison it for the mixture of classical and jazz which Gunther Schuller called third stream. From there Davis moved on to modal jazz, then jazz-rock, finally settling almost completely into a pop style. The change from jazz to pop made Davis the perfect figure for biographers who sought to write his life as tragedy rather than romance. As a result of these changes Davis' influence was arguably longer and more far-reaching than almost any other 20th-century musician. His personal life sometimes threatened to eclipse his music, and for many years he was the quintessence of what became known as cool. Over the years he was in the company of Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Juliette Greco, Louis Malle, Sugar Ray Robinson, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer, Dennis Hopper, Prince, and married Frances Taylor, Betty Davis, and Cecily Tyson, each of them famous in different branches of the entertainment world. This seminar will examine Davis' music in detail, locating it in the musical and social periods in which it emerged, and will follow the development of his public persona, reading his autobiography and the four biographies, as well as two novels and many poems and plays based on his life. We will also examine published articles and reviews, a heretofore unknown and unpublished autobiography written by Alex Haley, video-and audio-taped interviews, photos, and family documents. We will attempt to assay his musical importance and understand his social impact, and in the process also critically discuss the means by which biographies of artists are created. Some possible texts: Davis, Miles. Miles Davis: The Autobiography; Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography;Chambers, Jack. Milestones; Carmer, Gary. The Miles Davis Companion.

ENGLISH THEATRE ARTS
ENTA W4730y Contemporary Drama (Martin Meisel). MW 4:10-5:25. Innovation, retrospection, and critique in European and American drama from 1950 to the present. Trends and playwrights, including Ionesco, Beckett, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Weiss, Genet, Havel, Handke, Arden, Pinter, Soyinka, Stoppard, Churchill, Friel, The Living Theater, Shepard, Mamet, Wilson, Hwang, Kushner.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/SPECIAL TOPICS
ENGL G4011y Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials

[Comparative Literature-Anthropology]
CLAN G6035y Experimental Ethnography (Gauri Viswanathan and Michael Taussig).
T 4:10-6. This course aims to provoke students of the social sciences and humanities to rethink the work of "ethnography" and "literary criticism" by attending to the details of their own writing in terms of style, tone, perspective, as well as the politics and history of representation. The essential ploy here, and one for which co-teaching from the different disciplines seems nicely situated, is to reflect one enterprise, "ethnography," against another, "lit crit," so that a creative tension and friction is achieved to the benefit of some untested third position which we could tentatively call "fictocritism" or "experimental ethnography. Entailed in the analytic windfall from such a cross-disciplinary encounter, therefore, is an encouragement of poesis, specifically experimental writing and experimental ethnography which combine cultural critique with the making of new cultural forms. Of particular interest is the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction, no less than between rational and non-rational ways of knowing, and experiencing, the world. To this end this course would explore the possibilities of theory as story-telling, a range of estrangement effects, fantasy, open-ended texts, and self-reflection and reflexivity. We propose reading a variety of works that can be seen as hovering between ethnography and literature so as to problematize the depiction of reality and allow for a more nuanced relation between perceiver and perceived: such as Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's The Trial (with commentary by Benjamin), Nawal el-Sadawi, The Fall of the Iman, Mahesweta Devi, Stories; Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, Genet's Prisoner of Love; Jimmie Durham's Between the Furniture and the Stone; Edward Said, Orientalism; Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land; John Searle, Intentionality; Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State; Stephen Muecke et al, Writing the Country; Alfonso Lingus, Abuses.

CLEN G6120y Ancient Literary Theory (Kathy Eden). W 11-12:50. Major works of ancient literary theory from Plato to Augustine; special attention to rhetorical principles in the development of the so-called classical tradition and including Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Longinus, Demetrius, Tacitus, Seneca, Quintilian, and Basil.

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FALL 1999
MEDIEVAL
ENGL W4001x Literary Texts of Ricardian Culture (Robert Hanning). MW 11-12:15. An exploration of political, social, commercial,and religious discourses and practices, controversies and crises, in their varied relation to literary texts composed in late medieval England for courtly and other audiences. The main (but not exclusive) temporal focus will be the reign of Richard II (1377-99).

CLEN G6021x Medieval Allegory (Joan Ferrante). T 9:10-10:50. Major medieval allegories late medievalius to the Roman de la Rose and traditions of allegoribut notterpretation (classical and biblical exegesis).

RENAISSANCE
ENGL W4211x Milton (David Kastan). MW 2:40-3:55. 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 W4701x Tudor-Stuart Drama (David Kastan). MW 11-12:15. Explores the major plays of the English Renaissance in the literary, theatrical, political, and social environment in which they were produced.

ENGL G6128x Comparative Renaissance Texts: Early Modern Women Writers (Julie Crawford). R 2:10-4. This course will offer a broad overview of early modern women writers, primarily English, of the 16th and 17th centuries. We will begin with medieval, humanist, and reformation influences and end with the radical sectarian, political, and prophetic movements of the 1640s-60s.We will read the work of court writers and aristocrats such as Marguerite de Navarre and Lady Mary Wroth, as well as the works of middle-class women such as Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.We will read prose romances, sonnet sequences and poems, plays, diaries, feminist pamphlets and petitions to Parliament. There will be extensive secondary readings in 17th-century legal and political theory, 'Puritan' polemic and the new world, domestic conduct books, social, economic and women's history, the history of print and publication, and feminist theory. We will be doing work with the STC, Wing and Thomason Tracts and interdisciplinary projects (art, history, political theory, comparative literatures, etc.) will be actively encouraged.

18th CENTURY
ENGL W4703x Restoration and 18th-century Drama (Julie Peters). T 2:10-4. (See "English-Theatre Arts" below.)

19th CENTURY
ENGL W4404x Major Victorian Poets (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Close readings or poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, D.G. and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins, with stress placed on continuities in English poetry from Wordsworth through. T.S. Eliot.

ENGL G6404x Victorian Psychologies (Nicholas Dames). T 4:10-6. Memory, will, imagination, sensation, perception, nervousness,the reflex in selected British novels from 1810 to 1890, with reference to the psychologies and theories of mind that surrounded the novel and which the novel in turn "novelized" or activated. Our focus will be on the fluid interplay between novelistic consciousness and psychological/social pathologies of the British nineteenth century. Readings from Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens,Collins, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy; J.S. Mill, William James, G.H. Lewes, and others.

CLEN G6420x The Romantic Fragment (Deborah White). T 2:10-4. A consideration of Romanticism's predilection for and theorizing of fragmentary, incomplete, aphoristic, and interrupted forms--particularly how Romanticism transforms the concept of the fragment from that which is left behind by an encompassing totality into that which puts into question the very possibility of an encompassing totality (including the totality of any 'concept'). Primary texts by F. Schlegel, Novalis, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats; further criticism by De Man, Derrida, Gashe, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinson, McGann, Nanc.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4600x History of the American Language (David Yerkes). MW 6:10-7:25. No prerequisites; required books: Pinker, The Language Instinct; McWhorter, Heard on the Street; Mencken, American Language.

ENGL W4611x Jazz Studies: Jazz and American Culture (Robert O'Meally). TR 2:40-3:55. An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of the influence of jazz on the visual arts, dance, literature, and film; an introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

ENGL G6610x Cold War Culture (Ann Douglas). F 3-5. Screenings W 8-10. An inter-disciplinary course about the culture of post-WWII U.S. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War (notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Rosenbergs, Hiss), toil (Night and the City, Gilda, Double Indemnity), Bop, and the "Beat" writings of Jack Kerouac and Leroi Jones. Background readings in gender/race/political tensions of the era and recent postmodern and postcolonial theory about forms of Cold War culture.

ENGL G6622x Contemporary American Narrative (Maura Spiegel). R 4:10-6. Close readings of post-WWII American fiction. Readings will include: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis' JR, Nabokov's Lolita, Richard Powers' Galatea 2, Don Delillo's Underworld. Selected films will be viewed.

ENGL G6623x Modern American Poetry (Marcellus Blount). W 2:10-4. Exploration of the relations of poetic voice, language, and identity, focusing on how poetry might be incorporated into current discourses of identity politics. Poetic examples: Whitman, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Audre Lorde. Course requirements: seminar presentation and twenty-page essay.

ENGLISH THEATRE ARTS
ENGL W4703x Restoration and 18th-century Drama (Julie Peters). T 2:10-4. English drama and theatre 1660-1800, from the Restoration of Charles II to the Age of Revolution and the high era of the British Empire, read against the theoretical, political, literary, and socio-economic background (the Royal Society, religious sectarianism, liberal political theory, sentimentalism, mercantilism, colonialism, the"Rights of Man," etc.). While focused on drama and theatre, the course offers a general introduction to the period. Readings include Milton, Dryden, Behn, Gay, Sheridan, and others.

ENTA W4728x Anglo-Irish Drama (Martin Meisel). MW 4:10-5:25. Drama from DionBoucicault's Shaughraun to Brian Friel's Translations, with an emphasis on language and politics and the period of the IriDrama Iaissance. Playwrights include Yeats, Lady Gregory,Synge, Shaw, O'Casey, Behan, Beckett and others.

ENTA G6740x Staging Modernism (Martin Puchner). W 11-12:50. This course explores the relation between modernism and the theater. Not only has the theater been one of the primary art forms through which modernism is articulated, modernism has also extensively drawn from the theater its modes of presentation and theorization. Notions such as play, staging, performance, and demonstration are the recurring theatrical tropes of modernism; modernism is, therefore, an inherently theatrical and theatricalized project. The seminar will investigate the modernist theater of the variousisms--such as symbolism, expressionism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism--and relate them to such theatrical genres as the manifesto, poetry performance, and forms of public demonstration. Readings include Joyce, Pound, Stein, T.S. Eliot, O'Neill, Artaud, Yeats, Marinetti, Breton, Wyndham Lewis, Ball, Tzara, Beckett, and others.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/SPECIAL TOPICS
ENGL G4010x Introduction to Bibliography (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. Bibliography as a field of knowledge, emphasizing the analytical and descriptive techniques used in historical study of books as physical objects. Topics: enumerative (or reference) bibliography, historical bibliography, analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography.

CPLS G4900x Introduction to Comparative Literature (Gayatri Spivak and Hamid Dabashi). W 9-10:50. This course will be team-taught by Professor Hamid Dabashi and Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak with Ph.D.s in Sociology of Culture and Comparative Literature respectively. The course seeks to introduce beginning graduate students to Comparative Literature by 1) examining the Eurocentric foundations of the discipline and 2) introducing interdisciplinary methods in literary study and sociology. We study the first Europeann comparativists such as Goethe, Propp, Auerbach, and Curtius to establish some theoretical parameters. We then proceed to 1) study theoretical texts in Arabic, Persian, Indian, and African (American) traditions and 2) engage in close readings in the original texts already appropriated by the European tradition. (Goethe on Hafez and Tayeb Saleh on Conradare two of our examples.) We seek to create an interface between literary-critical and sociological methodology by 1) consulting new interdisciplinary work in the field and 2) reading excerpts from such past greats as Weber, Simmel, Mannheim, Williams.

CLEN G4905x Literature and Human Rights (Julie Peters).
T 9-10:50. Third hour for undergraduates Tu 11-11:50. Looks at the literature of human rights, both legal texts that shape formal conceptions of rights and literary texts (classic and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction) that elucidate situations in which rights are at issue. Addressing the various critiques of legal accounts of "human rights," the course explore show literature and literary ways of reading legal texts may grantus an opportunity for more nuanced reflection on such concepts as "freedom of expression," "due process," "torture," and "genocide." Readings include George Orwell, Primo Levi, Alexander Solzenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Jamaica Kincaid, Nawal El Saadawi, and a variety of theoretical essays and human rights cases.

CLEN W4995x Assimilation and Its Discontents—Central European Jewish Literature in the 20th Century (Ivan Sanders). R 6:10-8. This course examines prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to the American student, written in the major Central European languages: German, Hungarian, Czech and Polish. The problematics of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these writers are to varying degrees removed from their Jewishness, their perspective on these events and issues may differ. Specifictopics will also include the influence of Kafka on Central European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, as well as the difficult question of what constitutes the "Jewishvoice" in an otherwise disparate body of works.

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SPRING 1999
MEDIEVAL
CPLT G6035y Women in Medieval Life and Literature (Joan Ferrante). W 9-10:50. Women chJonathan Aracters in, and women authors of, medieval literature, including Hrotsvit, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan.
RENAISSANCE
ENGL W4712y Shakespeare (David Kastan). TR 5:40-6:55 . A study of the "Jacobean" Shakespeare, focusing on the tragedies and romances. The course is designed to explore the relationship of the imaginative achievement of the drama to the theatrical, literary, social, and intellectual world in which they were produced.

ENGL G6101y Spenser (Anne Prescott). M 6:10-8. We will examine Spenser's Shephearde's Calendar, Faerie Queene, selections from Complaints, Amoretti and Epithalamion, Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and Colin Clouts Come Home Again, and passages from Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. Classroom discussion will focus on the primary texts and on the religious and political issues, generic play, and cultural dynamics they inscribe. Students are, though, encouraged to investigate current criticism on whatever aspect of Spenser's work interests them. (We will use T.P. Roche's or A.C. Hamilton's Faerie Queene and W. Oram's edition of the shorter poems.)

ENGL G6201y 17th-century Texts: Wiat to Marvel (Edward Tayler). W 6:10-08.

19th CENTURY
ENGL G6404y Readings in Victorian Literature (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. Intensive study of works by Arnold, Carlyle, Eliot, Dickens, Edgeworth, Disraeli, Gaskell, Hardy, Mill, Macaulay, among others.

ENGL G6801y Jane Austen Today (D. A. Miller). T 2:10-4. The course will read the novels of Jane Austen alongside selected examples of latter-day cultural production that seek to rewrite her project, or to efface it, or whose relations of displacement with that project are most telling in evaluating it.

ENGL G6933y Seminar on Autobiography (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Versions of the self from Wordsworth to Woolf. Themes include the problematics of autobiographical truth; cultural roots of the self; "I" as metaphor; crisis, conversion and unconversion; Biblical typology and autobiographical narrative; gender, subjugation, and identity; novelized autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Writers: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Carlyle, Mill, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Nightingale, Newman, Ruskin, Darwin, Pater, Hopkins, Gosse, and Woolf.

20th CENTURY
ENGL G6506y The Persistence of Memory: Migration and Cross-Cultural Identity (Rob Nixon). W 11-12:50. The course will focus on the aesthetics, psychology, and politics of memory in a range of literary and cultural contexts. There will be a strong focus on the place of memory in the experience of migration and transculturation. Issues to be considered include: the current resurgence and imaginative status of the memoir; border zones between fiction and nonfiction; the nexus between personal and collective memory; memory and the sensual body; memory and the body politic; trauma, amnesia, and testimony; the photographic past. We will consider psychoanalytic approaches to these concerns as well as referring to salient historical examples: the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas, German nationalism, the Caribbean, and the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The international cast of writers will be drawn from: Eva Hoffman, Amitav Ghosh, Sigmund Freud, C.L.R. James, Jane Kramer, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison, Richard Rodriguez, Edward Said, and Derek Walcott.

ENGL G6550y Yeats (George Stade). W 2:10-4. The poems, Autobiography, A Vision, the Cuchulain plays: poetry and politics; the lure of the occult; modernist poetics; Yeats's representation of women; the creation of a public persona; symbolist history; the body as aesthetic norm.

AMERICAN
ENGL W4444y Traditional Native American Literature (Karl Kroeber). MW 11-12:15. Readings of diverse Native American songs, myths, and ceremonies, with brief attention to contemporary Indian writing; emphasis on challenges to contemporary presuppositions about aesthetics and multiculturalism.

ENGL W4621y Introduction to Jazz Studies (John Szwed). F 12-2. Jazz is approaching the end of its first century, and has played a large part in defining that century, especially in the United States. The study of jazz has grown up largely outside the academy, and, for better or worse, lacks a canon, a satisfactory bibliography, and many of the research tools of academic study. Yet a formidable literature nonetheless exists, both in print and on film and recordings, and there is much to be learned by exploring it. Discography, for example, was developed first within jazz, and the state of jazz discography is in much better shape than for any other form of music. Even though no adequate history of the music exists, hundreds of journals, several thousand books, and several major library collections provide the basis for serious scholarship. And if jazz has not been given proper attention within the academy until very recently, it has for a long time had considerable influence on the other arts--especially dance, painting, poetry, and fiction. This course will explore the resources which exist, examine the means for developing jazz scholarship, and offer instruction for using bibliographies, filmographies, and discographies. We will read some of the best books on the subject, explore some of Columbia's holdings in recordings, journals, and photos, and hopefully visit the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark. Built into the course will be a brief history of jazz which will highlight key figures and styles, and much of the term will be spent on a critical survey of the influence of jazz on film, literature, the visual arts, and dance.

ENGL G6615 Early African-American Literature (Quandra Prettyman). W 2:10-4. Focus on the period 1760-1890, with special attention to the slave narrative. Major writers include Wheatley, Douglass, Brown, and Harper. Sermons, speeches, essays, novels, and other written documents of the period will be considered as well. This course will be conducted as a seminar.

ENGL G6623y Poetry/Technology in Late 20th-century America (Ursula Heise). F 2-4. This seminar will focus on the ways in which American poetry after WWII has redefined its relationship to technology under the pressure of newly emerging media such as television and film, and how it has participated in and reacted to the surge of interest in information technologies since the 1980s. Readings will include theories of the postmodern media landscape and poetry from William Carlos Williams to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

ENGLISH THEATRE-ARTS
ENTA W4702 Problems in Theatre History: The Classics in Performance (Marina Kotzamani). MW 11-12:50. An exploration of major twentieth-century approaches to directing the classics, with special emphasis on production analysis. Case studies will be discussed within a comparative and inter-cultural framework and will be drawn from historical, as well as from contemporary productions. Selections include the work of directors C. Stanislavsky, M. Reinhardt, V. Meyerhold, B. Brecht, A. Serban, K. Koun, and P. Stein.

ENTA G6740y Modern Drama (Martin Puchner). R 2:10-4. From Shaw's Pygmalion to the Bread and Puppet Theater, the modern theater has rebuilt the chJonathan Aracter as puppet, marionette, statue, decoration, or automaton. Actor training and choreography, but also dramatic texts and other forms of textual representation revolve around the enigma of the depersonalized acting machine on stage. What are the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of this machine modernism? How does it affect the aesthetics, the ethics, and the practice of the theater?

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/SPECIAL TOPICS
LITR G4011y Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.

Comparative Literature-Indic Studies
CLIN G4635y Critical Method and Postcoloniality (Gauri Viswanathan). R 4:10-6. This course introduces students to key texts in South Asian and Middle Eastern studies which have had a significant impact on critical approaches to the study of these regions. The course addresses such issues of modern cultural history as: the psychological impact of colonialism; construction of colonial masculinities; gender and nationalism; myth and theories of development; ecology and sustainable development; religious strife and violence. In essence, the course adopts a perspective that can roughly be called "postcolonial," but does so in a manner that situates postcolonial identity very specifically in the history of these regions.

ENGL W4901y History of English Language (David Yerkes). MW 6:10-7:25. A linguistic, historical, social overview. There are no course prerequisites, but on the first day of class each student has to pass an elementary general grammar test for current English.

CPLT G6531y Theories of Transnationalism (Zita Nunes). T 11-12:50.

CPLT G6532y Derrida's "Glas" (Gayatri Spivak). W 6:10-8. An excellent knowledge of French is a prerequisite for this class. If I have enough serious pre-registrants by the end of Spring, 1998, I will start us off on a project basis, investigating individual entries in Derrida's most ambitious book, Glas. Thios book is necessarily a failure. It will allow us to look into some of the problems with mainstream literary criticism, which almost always mistakes "the aim of the poem" (I.A. Richards) for the unmediated aim of the author; and reads a rhetorical representation of desire as a logical expression of its fulfillment. Therefore, this class is also a seminar on reading. We will begin by relating our project with the Language Poetry in the United States in the 1970s, the time of publication of Glas.

CPLT G6905y Seminar on Epic: Homer and Walcott's Omeros (Richard Sacks). R 4:10-6. An intensive examination of the ways in which so-called epic texts challenge the seeming boundaries of narrative, traditionality, mythology, genre, history, and culture. Areas of focus for spring 1997: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the dynamics of ancient epic traditions, and Walcott's Omeros and the dynamics of modern epic.

ENGL G6935y Englishness and Jewishness (James Shapiro). R 9-10:50. The seminar explores how various aspects of English identity--national, political, racial, and sexual--have emerged in response to changing notions of "Jewishness." Authors to include Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Locke, Eliza Heywood, Maria Edgeworth, de Quincey, George Eliot, Amy Levy, Grace Aguilar, Sir Richard Burton, Leonard Woolf, T.S. Eliot and E. M. Forster.

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FALL 1998
MEDIEVAL
CPLT W4021x Literature of the Middle Ages (Joan Ferrante). MW 1:10-2:25. Major literary genres of the Middle Ages with particular attention to French, German, and Italian literature: epic, romance, lyric, autobiography, allegory.

ENGL W4091x Anglo-Saxon (David Yerkes). MW 6:10-8. The goal is to learn to readAnglo-Saxon verse and prose with the help of a glossary andgrammar. There are no course prerequisites, but on the first day of class each student will have to pass and elementary general grammar test for current English.

CPLT G6023x Provençal Poetry (Joan Ferrante). W 9-10:50. An introduction to the language and the major early poets of the courtly love tradition.

ENGL G6043x Chaucer (Robert Hanning). R 11:00-12:50. This term's topic: "Having the World by the Tale"— constructing fictions and society in The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron.

RENAISSANCE
ENGL W4211x Milton (David Kastan). TR 5:40-6:55. 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 G6200x Renaissance Histories: London (Jean Howard). W 11-12:50. This course will focus on writings which represent London in the period from roughly 1590 to 1625. How was London constituted in city chronicle, in city comedy, in city pageants, in travellers' accounts, in urban satire, in cartographic representations? What did it mean for London to be a capital city/ a commercial center/a seat of government/ a densely populated port city opening to Europe and the world beyond? Writings by Stow, Middleton, Donne, Marston, Jonson, Dekker will be read in light of historical work by Beier, Archer, Boulton, and others on early modern cities andon London in particular.

ENGL G6711x Shakespeare (Edward Tayler). W 6:10-8.

18th CENTURY
ENTA W4722x European Drama 1700-1850 (Julie Peters). M 2:10-4. (See "English-TheatreArts" below).

19th CENTURY
ENGL W4404x Major Victorian Poets (John Rosenberg). W 9-10:50. Close readings of the major poems of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, D.G and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins, with stress placed on continuities in English poetry from Wordsworth through T.S. Eliot.

ENTA W4722x European Drama 1700-1850 (Julie Peters). M 2:10-4. (See "English-TheatreArts" below).

ENGL G6401x Coleridge and the Academic Institution (Deborah White). T 2:10-4. A survey of Coleridge's writings across a rangeof topics—literature, politics, philosophy, psychology, theology— with special attention to ways in which his vision of an intellectual class or "cleresy" continues to shape contemporary ideas about cultural labor and the university.

20th CENTURY
ENGL G6505x Modern Texts (Edward Mendelson). M 11-12:50. Woolf, Auden, Beckett.

ENGL G6511x Joyce & (Kevin Dettmar). R 1:30-4. A fluid and wide-ranging exploration of Joyce's texts and shifting contexts. Reading and discussion will focus on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; our goal will be to account for Joyce's continuing literary, artistic, and cultural force.
AMERICAN
ENGL G6610x Cold War Culture (Ann Douglas). F 3:10-5. An inter-disciplinary course about the culture of post-WWII U.S.A. Attention to political strategists of the Cold War(notably George Kennan), the trials of the day (Rosenbergs, Hiss), to film noir (Night and the City, Gilda, Double Indemnity), Bop, and the "Beat" writings of Jack Kerouac and Leroi Jones. Background readings in the gender/race/political tensions of the era and recent theory about forms of Cold War culture.

ENGLISH THEATRE-ARTS
ENTA W4722x European Drama 1700-1850 (Julie Peters). M 2:10-4. 18th- and 19th-century French, Italian, German, and English precursors to modern drama, in their contemporary theatrical and cultural contexts (the development of the bourgeois drame, revolutionary street theatre, romantic scenography, opera, commedia dell'arte, pantomime), with a view toward such central issues in 18th- and 19th-century aestheticsas the doubleness of the actor, the nature of the passions, the function catharsis, the identity of the beautiful, the grotesque and the sublime, etc. Readings include John Gay, Carlo Goldoni, Beaumarchais, Victor Hugo, Friedrich Schiller, Goethe, Georg Büchner, Alexandre Dumas.

ENTA W4723x Modern Drama I (Martin Puchner). MW 4:10-5:25. This course will focus onthe reforms and experiments in the modern drama and on the intersection between the theater and the other arts. Issues suchas ritual, play, performativity, Noh theater, dream-play, and expressionism. Readings include Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Pirandello, Brecht, Toller, Stein, Breton, Artaud, O'Neill, Beckett, Genet; supplementary readings by Wagner, Nietzsche, Craig, and others.

ENTA G6725x Contemporary American Performance and Performance Theory (David Savran). F 11-12:50. This course studies the relationship between recent American writing for the theatre and theories of performativity. It begins with an examination of queer performativity and its connection to identity politics and poststructuralist epistemologies. The course then analyzes the contours of a new, deconstructionist American theatre and the simultaneous development of performance studies as a discipline, attempting not only to understand their interrelationship but also to historicize their emergence. It aims, in short, to read playwriting as theory and theory as a mode of performance. The playwrights to be studied include Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mac Wellman, Anna Deavere Smith, and Holly Hughes. The theorists include Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Elin Diamond, and Peggy Phelan.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/SPECIAL TOPICS
LITR G4010x Introduction to Bibliography (G. T. Tanselle). T 6:10-8. Bibliography as a field of knowledge, emphasizing the analytical and descriptive techniques used in historical study of books as physical objects. Topics: enumerative (or reference) bibliography, historical bibliography, analytical bibliography, descriptive bibliography.

LITR G4900x Introduction to Comparative Literature (Ursula Heise). F 11-12:50. Survey of literary theory with special emphasis on those currents which have had the greatest relevance for Comparative Literature. The course will examine the emergence of Comparative Literature in the context of 19th-century nationalism and internationalism, and its development as a discipline in the 20th century in relation to the evolving paradigms of literary and cultural theory: New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, New Historicism, multiculturalism, and Cultural Studies. Particular attention will be given to problems of plurilingualism, interdisciplinarity, and theories of the"modern" and the "postmodern" as they affect the study of literary texts across languages and cultures.

CPLT W4905x Literature and Human Rights (Julie Peters). M 11-12:50. This course will look at the literature of human rights--both legal texts that shape formal conceptions of rights and literary texts (classic and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction) that elucidate situations in which rights are at issue. Addressing the various critiques of legal accounts of "human rights", thecourse explores how literature (broadly construed) grants us a deeper understanding of what we might mean by such concepts as"freedom of expression," "due process," "torture," and "genocide." Readings include:the Bible, The Qu'ran, Franz Kafka, Alexander Solzenitsyn,Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, cases from the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, and contemporary works from Nigeria, Argentina, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

WMST G6001x Black Feminisms in the Americas (Zita Nunes). T 11-1. Feminist approaches to the study of race and gender in the Americas.

ENGL G6431x Disciplinary Formations (Gauri Viswanathan). W 4:10-6. This course examines the disciplinary developments of the 19th century (e.g. English studies, anthropology, economics) against the concerns of the late 20th century academy. By the end of the 19th century, developing intellectual fields were engaged in complex relationships with a range of social developments and political programs whose influence was to grow over the next century. While questions of religiouse mancipation, citizenship, and colonial governance were of paramount importance in the 19th century, their effecton the shape of the literary curriculum— not always direct or even palpable— bears comparison with institutional responses to similar questions in the current moment. To what extent were academic disciplines in the 19th century shaped by questions of political representation of multiple groups? Did the literary curriculum have a more assimilative effect than parliamentary process? The course examines concepts of literary value, canonicity, and authority against the backdrop of social representation and curricular change. Primary readings include works by Matthew Arnold, T.B. Macaulay, Adam Smith, Carlyle, T.S.Eliot, and Raymond Williams. Among the secondary works studied are Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Studies; Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature; Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic; John Guillory, Cultural Capital; Ian Hunter, Culture and Government; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland.

CPLT G6920x Melancholia and the City (David Eng). W 4:10-7. This seminar focuses on the relationship between subjectivity and space. In particular, it explores the ways in which melancholia structures subjects and social difference in narrative, visual, and cinematic texts of the city. We will be reading primarily from psychoanalysis, architecture/urban studies, and feminist/queer theory (Abbas, Benjamin, Burgin, Butler, Davis, deCerteau, Deutsche, Foster, Foucault, Freud, Grosz, Klein, Lacan, Sassen, Silverman, and Vidler), and the seminar will be organized in part around case studies of the Asian diaspora.

CLFM G6940x Literature and Film: Theorizing Sex in the Movies (Maura Spiegel). M 6:10-8. Readings in film theory in conjunction with weekly viewings of both commercial and avant-garde films. Themes will include: theories of viewer-identification and spectatorial pleasures; gay "camp classics"; women's pictures; feminist "corrections" of cinematic language; violence, bonding and the interracia l"buddy film." Films will include: The Sheik, Flesh and the Devil, Princess Tam Tam, The Shanghai Gesture, The Man Who Envied Women, Johanna of Arc of Mongolia, M. Butterfly, Numero Deux, Peeping Tom.

WMST G8010x Gender and the Environment (Rob Nixon). W 11-1. This course will address major environmental issues and natural history texts. Issues include: ecofeminism; tourism; globalization and the environment; rival conceptions of wilderness. Among the authors we will read are Rachel Carson, Susan Zakin, Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Abbey, Ken Saro-wiwa, Donna Haraway, Raymond Bunner, Alice Outwater, Patrick Wright, and Andrew Ross. This course satisfies degree requirements for graduate students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature program.
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