|
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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/.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back
to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
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.
back to top
|