ENGL W3011y Critical Reading, Critical Writing Seminar:

Section 1: R 11-12:50
Section 2: R 4:10-6
Section 3: F 11-12:50
Section 4: M 6:10-8

ENGL W3034y  Chaucer: Canterbury Tales (Paul Strohm)  MW 4:10-5:25.  Lecture.  We will read most of Chaucer’s Tales in their original Middle English, organizing our inquiry around the senses in which ‘experimental Chaucer’ engages in ceaseless and restless experimentation with language, style, narrative technique, generic expectation, and, above all, the status of the art object as a frankly ‘made’ or ‘created’ thing.’  In-class modernizations and commentaries and several papers.     

CLEN W3925y Topics in Medieval Literature: Medieval Animals (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50.  Seminar. Medieval writers often turn to (other) animals when commenting on human culture. Beast fables critique human social behavior; 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 argues about the nature of animals: do they reason? can they sin? how do they learn, and how express themselves? Medieval thought about animals contrasts intriguingly with our contemporary ideas. The goal of the seminar is to refine our understanding of what medieval animal literature says about human culture, what it says about the difference between humans and animals, and what it says about the identity and mentality of animals. The reading list sets a range of later medieval writing about animals in dialogue with emerging theoretical discourses on animals in philosophy and cultural studies.
       Medieval texts may include the lays and beast fables of Marie de France, Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis, Edward of York’s Master of Game, 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, Agamben, Foucault,  Derrida, Eco, Singer, and others will prepare us to think about how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. To further link medieval and contemporary understandings of animals, each seminar participant will report to the class on an influential contemporary work such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan), The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman), The Lion King (Walt Disney Productions), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick), Dominion (Matthew Scully), Animals in Translation (Grandin), and The Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway). 
       A few of the many possibilities for the research paper are metamorphosis and body hopping; the hermeneutics of beast fables; animal language and communication; exemplary and helpful animals; totemism (descent from animals, self-representation through animals, animals in heraldry); theological and philosophical views of animals in medieval and modern traditions; animal-human alliances in warfare and hunting; Adam’s naming of the animals (Genesis 2:18-20 and its commentaries); and scientific thought about animals in the bestiaries.   

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ENGL W3336y  Shakespeare I: Early Shakespeare  (James Shapiro) MW 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Limited to 70; priority to seniors and juniors. No Continuing Education students or Lifelong Learners admitted to this undergraduate lecture. Shakespeare's drama from "Titus Andronicus" to "Hamlet." There will be no graduate student sectioning. All term papers will be graded by the professor.

ENGL W3262y  English Literature 1500-1600: Literature for a new England (Alan Stewart) MW 1:10-2:25.  Lecture. This lecture course examines sixteenth-century English literature in the light of the new religious, social and political challenges of the period.  Texts, primarily poetry and prose, include lyric poetry by Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and John Donne; sonnet sequences by Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare; early narrative works by George Gascoigne and Thomas Nashe; works of early English literary criticism; travel writings by Walter Ralegh and Thomas Harriot; as well as longer texts including More’s Utopia, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

ENGL W3338y Shakespeare’s Poetry (James Shapiro) T 9-10:50.  Seminar. Enrollment limited to 15. Priority given to seniors. Prerequisite: the instructor's permission. Shakespeare's sonnets and longer poems.

ENGL W3340y Literature and Science in Early Modern England (Alan Stewart) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. This seminar course explores the relationship between literature and science in the period immediately before and during the so-called “Scientific Revolution”.  It examines representation of inquiry into the unknown; the relationship between magic and science; the central role of alchemy; the emergence of the virtuosi; the formation of the Royal Society, and challenges to it.  Throughout, attention will be paid to the active contribution of the “literary” to this supposedly “scientific” realm. Texts will range from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus to scientific writings by Isaac Newton, via works by John Dee, Francis Bacon, William Harvey,Thomas Browne, Margaret Cavendish, Henry More, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke.

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. Syllabus.

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.

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ENGL W3265y  Romanticism: William Blake (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Limited to 30 students; application (and interview) required for admission. Through intensive analysis of lyrics and shorter prophecies of William Blake the course explores the significance of his emergence from obscurity in the 19th   and early 20th centuries to become a major focus of interest in postmodern culture.  Through use of the Internet Website, The William Blake Archive, both the verbal and graphic dimensions of Blake’s art will be examined, along with a few relevant examples of  poems by his contemporaries, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats 

ENGL W3950y  Fictions of Pilgrimage, Exile, Captivity (Marianne Giordani) T 6:10-8. Seminar. We shall study in depth and in context the three most popular and enduring of English-language prose-fictions produced between 1660 and 1740: The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels. Those shall dominate our course of study, but one or more of the following shall also be considered for inclusion in the syllabus: Milton’s Paradise Regained, Behn’s Oroonoko,and Johnson’s Rasselas. Remarkably, though the above mentioned works by Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift stand quite apart from one another in nearly every other way, each is an original vision and modern prototype of exodus, wilderness, and deliverance: The mortal protagonist embarks upon a estranging journey that discloses his essential nature. Laying bare his limitations and straining his capacities, the journey resolves in patterns of faith and doubt, humiliation and exaltation, alienation and community, home being the increasingly elusive disposition of a purpose not itself to be transcended. Our materials comprise a rich and fascinating intersection of genres, modes, and styles—allegorical, naturalistic, didactic, fantastical, and satirical.  We shall examine carefully the literary and rhetorical elements of our texts and learn about the religious, intellectual, and social discourses in which they participated. Above all, we shall relish their imaginative forays into the wilderness within.

CLEN W3792y  The 18th-Century  Comparative  Novel (Jenny Davidson) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Readings in the eighteenth-century European novel.  Style, narratology, the “rise” of realism and the history of novel criticism will all figure in our discussions.  Readings by Defoe, Richardson, Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Austen and others. Syllabus.

ENGL W4302y  18th-Century 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 George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and 1984. Syllabus.

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CLEN W3390y  Hardy and Zola (Monica Cohen) W 11-12:50. Seminar. In stating that “men are but phenomena and the conditions of phenomena,” Emile Zola began the manifesto by which French naturalism would break away from what had until then been thought of as novelistic realism.  Writing in England at the same time, Thomas Hardy similarly crafted a fictional world in which a man’s – or a woman’s – interaction with the physical environment would form the novel’s primary source of meaning and regenerative – or degenerative – value.  In the twenty urban novels that constitute Zola’s Rougon-Maquart family saga and in the imagined rural geography of Hardy’s Wessex novels, the difficulties of representing work shift the late 19th c novel’s attention away from courtship and domestic relations and toward formal principles of determinism and tragedy.  Readings include L’Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

ENGL W3451y  Literature of Empire (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course looks at plots of empire in the British novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines not only how empire was represented but also how the novel form gave visibility to the strategies of empire and also showed the tacit purposes, contradictions, and anxieties of British imperialism. Among the themes this seminar will explore are: the culture of secrecy; criminality and detection; insurgency, surveillance, and colonial control; circulation and exchange of commodities; messianism and political violence. Readings include works by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Philip Meadows Taylor, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, among others.

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. Syllabus.

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. Syllabus.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3220y  Yeats, Eliot, Auden (Edward Mendelson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture.  Yeats, Eliot, Auden, possibly others. Syllabus.

CLEN W3208y Modern Comparative Fiction: New Literary Histories (Lejla Kucukalic) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture.  This class will examine how modern writers from around the world make use of innovative literary elements and narrative methods in order to re-conceptualize "history" and personal identity. In their fictions and histories, our chosen authors reinvent traditional notions of linear time and the discrete self, rewriting in the process the conventions of realistic representation. Whether their characters transcend several lifetimes (Woolf, Eliade, and Grass), travel in time to kill their own predecessors (Barjavel), reach different realms of existence (Kundera, Karahasan, Jabra), or find dreams to be truer than life (Murakami and Dick), their narratives allow us a fresh approach to the ways we perceive and record history, personal and national identity, and our sense of the past, present, and future. Students will therefore examine the relationship between form and idea, and reason and emotion in these works of modern world literature. We will trace how, in the modern novel, literature serves as a means to reconstruct memory and identity, face loss, and negotiate the quasi-objectivity of the twentieth century. New Literary Histories will provide material for discussion of why these stories were written, a chance to discuss narrative theory and the structure of the novel, as well as consider issues relating to historiography and ontology. Tentative reading list includes: Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Gunter Grass, The Flounder; Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Dzevad Karahasan, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Journals of Sarab Affan; Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude;  Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children;  Rene Barjavel, Future Times Three; Philip K. Dick, Valis; and Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth. Syllabus.

* * * NEW SEMINAR ADDED LAST WEEK OF JANUARY * * *

ENGL W3940y Modern Fiction: VIRGINIA WOOLF (Edward Mendelson) M 11-12:50. Seminar. Virginia Woolf's novels and essays in their literary and historical context. Four weeks on "Mrs Dalloway", two weeks each on "To the Lighthouse", "The Waves," and "Between the Acts"; also "A Room of One's Own," "Three Guineas," and other works. SYLLABUS [tentative: dates to be adjusted]. TO APPLY/REGISTER: Because this seminar was added late, students need not formally apply; they should notify Prof Mendelson (em36@columbia.edu) and cc Michael Mallick (mgm3@columbia.edu) before the first class meeting February 2 that they intend to take the course, but may go ahead and register before the end of the ADD COURSE period, January 30. But please NOTE: Should an unmanageable number of students seek admission, then preference will be given to seniors and juniors. Further, if too many students turn up for the first class, some who have registered may have to be cut, so please have a back-up in place (or hold off on dropping any course you may have cut from your schedule in order to be able to enroll in this seminar).

ENGL W3829y  Studies in Narrative: Modern British Fiction (Stephen Massimilla) W 6:10-8. Seminar. In this course, we will read profoundly influential works of British novelists who—partly through their interactions with one another and partly through their confrontation with political and intellectual upheavals—managed to define what we mean by modernist fiction. In what respects did the formal and thematic innovations of certain modernists constitute a break with prior practices? How can we make sense of these new practices? We will also consider works by those who either were looked upon dismissively by the major modernists or who themselves resisted what they saw to be the modernist agenda. Themes will include colonialism, empire, myth, urbanization, war, sexuality and gender, psychology, narrative and linguistic experimentation, and theories of the novel. We will also explore the usefulness of the term “modernist” and ask whether we must discriminate among a variety of “modernisms.” Authors will likely include: Wilde, Conrad, H.G. Wells, Bennett, James, Ford, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and Joyce.

CLEN W3750y  The Originators and the Modernist Vortex (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8.  Seminar.  This course will concentrate on the development of the modernist vortex by American and British poets in the first quarter of the twentieth century.  The work of W. B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Hilda.Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, E.E.Cummings, et al, will be studied, along with their interaction with European, namely French and Italian, contemporaries and predecessors.  Readings will also include “The War Poets” (Owen, Sassoon, Thomas) and, for contrast, some of The Georgians.  However, the focus will be on close readings of representative poems that arose out of a seeming welter of artistic movements—Realism, Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, Dada, and new approaches to Classical and Asian poetry—and the revolutionary influence the authors had on poetry in general for the rest of the century.

CLEN W3940y  Kafka: The short fiction of Franz Kafka (Mark Strand)  M 11-12:50. Seminar.  Limited to 12 students. A close reading of the major stories and parables of Kafka.   Those wishing to be admitted should submit a short letter in which they state their reasons for wanting to take the class. Syllabus.

CLEN W3980y Topics in Comparative Literature: Narratives from Underground (Deborah Martinsen) T 9-10:50. Seminar. This seminar will study twentieth-century narratives whose authors adapt different strategies developed by Dostoevsky as he created the highly self-conscious, first-person paradoxalist narrator of his Notes from Underground.  Starting with a close reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes, we will examine narrative structures and frames, identify strategies that differentiate authors from their unreliable narrators, consider how the paradox of shame contributes to the dynamics of underground narratives, and explore how authors adapt different features of the original underground man to their characters’ background and psychology, as well as to their own narrative ends.  During the course of the semester, we will establish criteria that differentiate underground men from underground narrators.  Works will include Yuri Olesha’s Envy/Zavist’, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno/La Coscienza di Zeno, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl/Būf-e Kūr, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Albert Camus’s The Fall/La Chute.  Students will vote on the final work.  Students should read Notes from Underground before the first class.

CLEN W3970y  Modernism and the City (Victoria Rosner) W 2:10-4.  Seminar. For the Victorians, the city was a wellspring of iniquity, a cistern of crime, filth, disease, and poverty.  Its dark corners offered shelter to a catalogue of villains, while also concealing from the public gaze the innocent suffering of the young and the old. In the early years of twentieth century, however, the city metamorphosed for many from a den of evil to a space of change, a machine driving the nation into the future. Quite literally, as cars and airplanes were seen more frequently in and above the street, the potential for increased speed transformed the experience of time in city.  Yet many individuals found these emerging urban rhythms alienating and disturbing.  For some, the city threatened to warp the texture of life, and render reality ghostly and perplexing. Distinct illnesses of soul, mind, and body seemingly caused by city life were described by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers. For women in particular, city spaces opened up a new world of freedom and possibilities for movement, but at the same time they presented new dangers to personal safety. This course will examine visions of the modern European city, as seen through the eyes of its architects, painters, writers, filmmakers, and social critics in the period 1890-1930.  We will concentrate on London, with occasional side-trips to Paris, Vienna, Dublin, and Berlin. Though focused on literature, this course is interdisciplinary in its design, drawing on perspectives from architecture, literature, sociology, urban planning, and the visual arts. Selected writers: Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Sophie Treadwell, and Virginia Woolf.           

ENTA W3920y British Drama Since World War Two (Jill Muller) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This course will explore a period of extraordinary creativity, energy, and radical experimentation in British theatre. Our readings will include plays by T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Joe Orton, Peter Schaffer, Martin Sherman, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane. In addition to examining the plays as reflections of and responses to massive post-war social changes, loss of empire, and anxiety about class, sexual, and national identities, we will also approach them as performances, looking at contemporary theatre practice and changing theories and techniques of acting and staging. Our study of British theatre in the second half of the twentieth century will be enhanced by investigation of parallel developments in film, television, and the visual arts.
 
CLEN W3721y  The Novel and Global Capitalism (Wen Jin) R 4:10-6. Seminar. “Cowboy capitalism” is arguably the most powerful symbol America has created for itself.  For some, the rise of the American variant of corporate capitalism during the Great Depression of 1873-96 constituted “a far more effective and radical departure from the dominant British regime of market capitalism than the variant that emerged at about the same time in Germany” (Arrighi 287).  The transnational expansion of this new kind of capitalism after WWII ushered in an era of American dominance in global political economy.  To understand the unprecedented levels of criticism to which the American “cowboy capitalism” and its financial component have been subjected recently, it is important that we study its history.   This course charts a short history of cultural perceptions of American capitalism through an exploration of twentieth-century American novels and other narratives.  We will discuss how these novels comment on the various issues surrounding “cowboy capitalism,” including upward mobility, social inequality, the circulation of money on national and global scales, etc.  The list of primary readings will include Frank Norris’s The Pit, L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Aryn Rand’s essays on capitalism, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, William Gaddis’ JR, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion, and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.  We will read these texts in conjunction with introductions to the history of American capitalism in the twentieth-century and selected criticisms of the cultural logic of American/transnational capitalism.  

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. Syllabus.

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ENGL W3267y  Foundations of American Literature I  (Andrew Delbanco) MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. Introduction to American thought and expression from the first English settlements to the eve of the Civil War. Writers include the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville. Themes include the rise of an American national consciousness, the transformation of religion, ideas of nature and democracy, debates over immigration, race, and slavery. The course proceeds through a combination of lecture and discussion—with the aim of deepening our understanding of the origins and development of literature and culture in the United States. In addition to the two lectures, a weekly discussion section is an integral and required part of the course for all students.

ENGL W3272y  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 Reconstruction. Authors to include: John W. De Forest, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. Syllabus.

ENGL W3401y African American Literature II  (Farah Griffin) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Lecture. This lecture/discussion course is intended as the second half of the basic survey in African American literature. We will study the development of black writing since the Harlem Renaissance. Readings will include fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose by Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others. We will read essays, poems, novels and short stories. Assignments include several unannounced quizzes, one eight page paper, and one take home final.

ENGL W3723y  Cultural Critique:  The American Intellectual from Emerson to Sontag (Ross Posnock) M 4:10-6. Seminar. Juniors/seniors only. This course will examine the paradoxical role and status of intellectuals in a nation famous for what Richard Hofstadter called "anti-intellectualism in American life." The notion of "public intellectual" will be of particular concern, especially as it evolves in the career of Emerson, who begins extolling "the infinitude of the private man" and later became a strong voice against slavery, in the career of Margaret Fuller, confined in American but who becomes a leading figure in the Italian struggle for independence, in the career of William James, Harvard philosophy professor and psychologist who becomes the leading public intellectual of the late 19th century, and James's student W. E. B. Du Bois, professor, activist, editor, writer. Randolph Bourne wrote influential essays on the eve of WWI on the responsibility of the Intellectuals and these have had wide influence and currency. The scientist as public intellectual is examined in the tragic career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a father of the atomic bomb. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (originally in The New Yorker) catapulted her into the public arena in 1962, as, later in that decade, for very different reasons, did Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation." We will round out the course with a look at the work and careers of two influential public intellectuals: pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and English professor and activist Edward Said. Requirements: 2 short papers, one term paper, one class presentation.

ENGL W3740y  James Baldwin (Marcellus Blount) R 6:10-8.  Seminar. Major fiction and collections of essays, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Just Above My Head, as well as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time. Themes include problems of gender and genre. Requirements: attendance and participation in class discussion; one fifteen-page essay.

ENGL W3874y  American Borderlands: Literature of the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canadian Borders (Rachel Adams) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. In our contemporary moment of globalization, it is sometimes said that national boundaries are eroding.  However, a basic assumption of this course is that borders have become more, rather than less, important in our time.  This is particularly true of North America, where sometimes the best understanding of U.S. culture comes from those who live at and directly on the other side of its borders.  This course studies the United States’ two land borders as a scene of injustice and limitation, as well as the genesis of rich cultural expression.  In contrast to most courses on “the borderlands,” which typically focus exclusively the U.S.-Mexico border, we will take a comparative look at the Mexican and Canadian borderlands.  Each week we will read the work of one major border author accompanied by one or more critical articles that will introduce key concepts and contexts to help us frame our discussion.  The first half of the course will be devoted to materials from the U.S.-Mexican border; the second to the U.S.-Canadian border.  Comparative perspectives will be encouraged throughout.  Major assignments include an in-class presentation accompanied by a short position paper and a longer final paper.

ENGL W3710y American Lit and Culture: AIDS and the Politics of Literary Form (Marcellus Blount)  R 2:10-4. Seminar. This seminar examines the formal and thematic tendencies of the artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the United States.  Aside from the historical and political significance of that response, what does it tell us about questions of authorship, literary history, and artistic genre.  This course will ask the larger theoretical question of the importance of sexuality in understanding artistic reception and production.  Is it possible to argue that responses to the AIDS crisis help us to define some of the persisting characteristics of gay literature?  In part, this course will focus on the elegy as a literary form that has been particularly useful in expressing same-sex erotic fulfillment and desire.  By looking at how artists have represented the AIDS crisis, we may also get a sense of how gay men, especially, have turned to the elegy as a form of historical agency and political desire.  We will analyze the work of a range of artists, theorists, and activists, especially Raphael Campo, Michael Cunningham, Douglas Crimp, Melvin Dixon, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Essex Hemphill, Paul Monette, Sonia Sanchez, Eve Sedgwick, and Susan Sontag.

ENGL W4603y  American Literary Realism (Ross Posnock) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Limited to 35 students. Open to graduate students to and to undergraduates of senior and junior standing only (in other words, not open to first-year students or sophomores). This course will look at the emergence of realism and naturalism-including novels by Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, W.E.B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton-as modes of literary representation that register tumultuous social and cultural changes in post-Civil War America: the rise of industrial technology, mass consumption, the impact of the urban metropolis on mental life, and the pervasive presence of the capitalist marketplace.

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 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 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.

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SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3960y Deep Sea Thought (Robert Ferguson) MW 9:10-10:25.  Lecture.  Living on the edge with Jonah, Solomon, Ishmael, Lily Briscoe, and those who "fear death by water." The course will explore the power, the dangers, and the rewards of thought in the literature of ideas. The emphasis will be on reading closely with special attention given to the philosophical problem of the human condition in major works. Texts will include  The Tempest, Ecclesiastes, Book of Jonah, the odes of Keats, Moby-Dick, The Waste Land, and To the Lighthouse with a number of shorter lyric poems and philosophical excerpts from Pascal, Montaigne, Kant, W. James, Rawls, Tayler, etc. A note on location: this lecture will be held at the Law School in William June Warren 107 (or WJW 107 as it's familiarly known); WJW can be found at 1125 Amsterdam Avenue, less than half a block South of 116th Street. Room 107 is on the lower level available by stairs on the right and an elevator on the left after entering.

ENTA W3701y Drama, Theatre, Theory (Katherine Biers) R 2:10-4. Seminar. This course explores issues central to the study of theatre in its social and political context. We will read modern European and American dramatic texts alongside theories of text, actor and stage drawn from a broader, mainly European, philosophical and aesthetic tradition. What is dramatic unity and how does it reflect or project social and national unity? What is realistic acting and how does it relate to ideology? Where does theatre happen? Does it take place only in particular spaces and places or potentially everywhere--as in ?theatres? of war or the law? We will also pursue broader questions about the relationship between theatrical spectacle and political transformation, and the role of theatre and theatrical presence in an age of mass media. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Schiller, Benjamin, Derrida, Weber, Schechner. Plays from the late 19th century to today by Glaspell, Shaw, Odets, Brecht, Lori-Parks, Kushner, and others.

ENGL W3995y  Studies in Poetry: Sonnets and Elegies (Erik Gray) F 11-12:50.  Seminar.This course examines two of the most important genres of Western lyric poetry.  We will begin our study of the elegiac tradition with classical pastoral elegies (Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, Virgil) before continuing with major English-language elegies from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including works by Milton, Shelley, Whitman, Hardy, and Auden.  The second half of the course will explore the tradition of the amatory sonnet sequence that begins with Petrarch; we will read works by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The course concludes with Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which offers a combination of both genres.

CLEN W3977y  Seminar in Literature and Culture: Literature and Torture, From Athens to Abu Ghraib (Joseph Slaughter) W 11-12:50.  Seminar. Every decade or so, citizens of Western democracies re-discover that their governments torture in their name. Indeed, the current public debate about torture shows a surprising lack of familiarity with the history and literature of torture in the Western tradition—proceeding as if torture (and the ethical and political issues around its use) is something altogether new in a post-9/11 world. However, in the Anglo-European tradition, torture has been practiced, and the morality and efficacy of that practice challenged, since at least Aristotle; contemporary popular culture (in TV shows like 24) and legalistic arguments advocating the use of “coercive interrogation” have simplified the problem of torture by reducing it to a simple narrative device. Torture, practiced under the pretext of seeking confessions, is a profoundly anti-narrative activity; studying literary, filmic, and visual representations of torture--along with legal, polemical, governmental, and theoretical materials--this course will examine the narrative consequences and literary implications of torture. Likely authors: Arias, Aristophanes, Auden, Bandele, Coetzee, Danticat, Dorfman, Duras, Hama Tuma, Kafka, Lartegúy, Machiavelli, Mirbeau, Orphée, Pinter, Rivabella, Valenzuela.

ENGL W4917y  Topics in Literature and Society: 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. Though pitched at a graduate level, undergraduates who think they are qualified, may apply for admission. 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. Undergraduates are welcome to enroll in the course; if they cannot do so automatically, they should see Michael Mallick in the Columbia English Dept. (602 Philosophy Hall) for an approval slip to take to the registrar.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

AMST W1010y Introduction to American Studies: Major Themes in the American Experience (Maura Spiegel and Casey Blake) MW 1:10-2:25. Conducted as a lecture/discussion, with weekly sections. A discussion section is required. Syllabus.

AMST W3931y Topics in American Studies Seminars:

Section 1: Food and American Life (Rachel Adams and Sarah Phillips) W 2:10-4. This course employs a cross-disciplinary perspective to blend examinations of food’s materiality (production and distribution) with its many meanings and functions (social, cultural, and aesthetic).  Using a place-based approach, it integrates these broader themes with class visits to New York locations and with a class project on food at Columbia University (where it comes from, who prepares it, where it goes).  Specific topics include early American foodways; farm industrialization and agribusiness externalities (environmental costs, labor issues); food processing and branding; gender and ethnicity; the supermarket; race, class, and inequities of access; health and nutrition; food stamps; organic shopping and dining; campus activism; and the overarching cultural significance of food (literary, visual, and filmic representations).  Enrolled students must be able to attend 3 or 4 field trips, the dates for which will not be known far in advance, and to attend the public talks of 2 prominent guest speakers.

Section 2: Equity in Higher Education (Andrew Delbanco and Roger Lehecka) M 4:10-6. In this seminar, we will examine the roles colleges and universities play in American society, the differential access to those institutions available to high school students based on family background and income, ethnicity, and other characteristics, the causes and consequences of this differential access, and some attempts to make the system more equitable. Readings and class meetings will include a study of the following subjects historically and in the 21st century: the wide variety of American institutions of higher education, financial aid policies (locally and nationally), affirmative action, and the role of the high school in helping students attend college.  Students in the seminar will be required to spend at least four hours each week as volunteers at the Double Discovery Center (DDC) in addition to completing assigned reading, participating in seminar discussions, and completing written assignments. DDC is an on-campus program that helps New York City high school students who lack many of the resources they need to attend college and to become more successful in gaining admission and finding financial aid.  The seminar will integrate its students' first-hand experiences with readings and class discussions. Note: An interview is required for admission to this course.

CPLS W3937y The Culture of Democracy (Stathis Gourgouris) M 11-1. Seminar. The point is to examine democracy not as political system, but as a historical phenomenon characterized by a specific culture: a corpus of ideas and values, stories and myths. This culture is not homogeneous; it has a variety of historical manifestations through the ages but remains nonetheless cohesive. The objective is twofold: 1) to determine which elements in democratic culture remain current, no matter what form they take in various historical instances; 2) to understand that the culture of democracy is indeed not abstract and transcendental but historical, with its central impetus being the self-interrogation and self-alteration of society. Syllabus.

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.

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ENGL W3261x  English Literature to 1500 (Susan Crane) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture.  A survey of early British writing in its cultural contexts. The course begins with Anglo-Saxon poetry, traces the changes brought to Britain by the Norman Conquest, focuses on the literature of aristocratic courts in the later Middle Ages, and ends as Caxton sets up London’s first printing press. We will read Anglo-Saxon works in translation and most Middle English works in their original language. The syllabus will include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Beasts, Saint Margaret, and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte Darthur.

ENGL W3920x  Medieval English Texts: Troilus and Gawain (Paul Strohm) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This seminar is designed for third and fourth-year undergraduate students  who have had experience reading Middle English literature in the original, such as a full semester Chaucer survey, or the first half of an English literature survey, or its equivalent.  The main motive is, quite simply, a ‘slow’ (but yet, I hope, enlivened) reading of these two medieval masterpieces in their original language.  The more particular emphasis, around which we will organize our discussions, will be each text’s description of the collision between its protagonist’s idealism and a more cynical or experienced ‘world.’  This emphasis will lead, in turn, to more particular discussions of medieval chivalric ideals, gender issues, the vexed relations between idealism and naivete, the question of medieval tragedy and the tragic view.  Five short papers; one ‘seminar paper’ on a subject to be agreed with the instructor.  Please contact the instructor by email [ps2143] prior to enrolling in this course (or arrange to see him in 604 philosophy on 2-4 Tuesday afternoon, to discuss your previous medieval experience and to forecast your preparedness for this course.

CLEN W4021x   European Literature in the Middle Ages: 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, destabilized, 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 of literary works and criticism 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 conque st. 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 we may consider are: 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.

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ENGL W3335x  Shakespeare (Julie Crawford) MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture.  Beginning with an introduction to Shakespeare’s career, focusing on the period after 1599, this class will cover Shakespeare’s later plays, including Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. While lectures will focus on close readings of the plays, they will also consider the society and culture in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, the theatres in which they were performed, and the publication and editorial practices by which they have come down to us. 

ENGL W3263x  English Literature 1600-1660 (Molly Murray) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Poetry and prose from the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, through the civil wars and  Cromwellian commonwealth, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  We will consider the linked revolutions in English politics, religion, science, philosophy, and social and erotic relations, and will ask how these cultural transformations influenced literary form.  Authors will include James I, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, as well as various Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and perhaps a Muggletonian or two. 

ENGL W3930x  Topics in Gender, Sexuality and Literature: Early Modern Women, Premodern Sexuality (Julie Crawford) W 2:10-4.  Seminar.  This class will focus on texts and theories about women and female sexuality in the period before the invention of the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” Primary texts will include Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly’s Gallatea, William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and Katherine Phillips. In addition, we will be reading a wide range of non-fiction, critical, and theoretical texts on the history of the body and reproduction, the history of sexuality, and the nature of women’s roles and relationships in premodern European and English literature and culture.

ENGL W3973x  Genre Theory: Sex and the City: Gender/Genre Negotiations in Early Modern City Comedy (Maiken Derno) T 11-12:50. Seminar. CANCELLED

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.

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ENGL W3950x  Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century  (Jenny Davidson) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Six plays by Shakespeare, alongside their bizarre and often highly revealing reimaginings by eighteenth-century British theatrical adapters, novelists and so forth.  Plays will probably include Lear, Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale and at least one history play.  We’ll work in a number of different modes: at times, we’ll be delving very deeply into Shakespeare’s own language and dramatic choices, but we’ll also explore questions of literature in relation to more broadly cultural trends, the nature and usefulness of popular theatrical adaptations and updatings, the cultural work performed by Shakespeare editions in eighteenth-century Britain and so forth.  No prerequisites, but students with a practical interest in theater are strongly encour-aged to enroll.  Admission will be done by application the previous semester, as for most departmental undergraduate seminars. Syllabus.

ENGL W3706x  Poetry, Progress, and Religious Sentiment (Marianne Giordani) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. Beginning with the Restoration, a careful study of neoclassical and romantic poems with regard to religious ideas that came to bear in developing the modern criteria for poetry. Close attention to rhetorical and prosodic elements; to characteristic genres, such as the hybridized epic and georgic in the long philosophical poem, as well as epistle, epitaph, ode, psalm, hymn, and song, and, later, the sonnet and “conversational” poem. With a view to rhetorical devices, we shall look at important prose genres, such as the sermon, letter, and essay; and also at modes of satire, throughout, in which untenable social and economic disparities are targeted, as are the vices associated with them. Upon addressing in context various religious and anti-religious dispositions alike (deism, fideism, evangelism, enthusiasm, and atheism), we shall heed the intersection of spirituality, science, and natural description, and its expanded cosmology of social and spatio-temporal relations, which would draw variously from neo-Platonic metaphysics, biblical mythopoiesis, and the physiology of passion. Seventeenth-century influences (Bacon, Milton, Bunyan) are treated. Authors include Dennis, Watts, Pope, Parnell, Thomson, Akenside, Gray, Johnson, Young, Blake, Wesley, Collins, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, others. Syllabus.

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 eighteenth-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 eighteenth century.  As we explore the novel’s debt to romance, including the immense popularity of the Gothic leading into the nineteenth 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 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 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 G4305x   Swift and Burke (Jenny Davidson) M 11-12:50.  Seminar. An additional required discussion section for undergraduates on W 11-11:50.  Major works of two of eighteenth-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.

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ENGL W3962x  Austen, Bronte, Eliot (Nicholas Dames) W 2:10-4. Seminar. A detailed consideration of major novels by the three central female novelists of Regency and Victorian Britain.  Our focus: the female protagonist’s relation to manners, conjugal and familial norms, property; the grammars of interior experience and social negotiation; the impact of cognate fields, including landscape aesthetics, theories of perception and cognition, evolutionary science.  Supplementary reading to include major critical assessments from the authors' times to our own.  

ENGL W3960x  Nineteenth-Century Thrillers (Monica Cohen) R 11-12:50.  Seminar. How is nineteenth-century realism shaped by the forces of sensation? How does the melodramatic imagination probe --even construct-- the parameters of narrative realism? What kind of kinship is there between the great nineteenth-century monster stories and the social-problem novel? Looking at representative samples from the gothic novels of the Romantic period, the mid-century novels of female incarceration, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860's, and fin-de-siècle psychological thrillers, we will explore how we might make sense of sensation. Readings include: Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Austen's Northanger Abbey, C. Brontë's Villette, E. Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Collins' The Woman in White, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Du Maurier's Trilby, Stoker's Dracula, James' The Turn of the Screw.

ENGLW3707x   Nineteenth-Century Texts: Dickens (Jill Muller) T 11-12:50. Seminar. The novels of Charles Dickens undermine all facile distinctions between high art and popular culture.  Dickens was the most widely read novelist in Victorian England.  His obituary notice in the Spectator described him as “the greatest humorist England ever produced,” and Trollope, a close contemporary, mockingly dubbed him “Mr. Popular Sentiment.”  Yet many twentieth-century critics have focused on Dickens’s scathing social satire and the brooding sense of evil that pervades his work, comparing his moral vision with that of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.  This class will examine the social and cultural context of Dickens’s writings, and the rhetoric of representative novels including Oliver Twist, Hard Times, The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, to test the strengths and limitations of Dickens’s social criticism and to illuminate the unique ways in which he made use of the forms of popular entertainment—laughter, horror, and romance—to create fables that resonated through all levels of Victorian society. 

CLEN  W4822x  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. Syllabus.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3230x  James Joyce (Philip Kitcher) MW 2:40-3:55.  Lecture. This course will focus on Joyce’s prose fiction. In the first weeks, we shall read and discuss Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The greater part of the semester will be devoted to close reading of Ulysses. At the end, as time permits, we shall explore some selections from Finnegans Wake (I anticipate spending four or five classes on parts of Joyce’s final masterpiece). Although I suspect that most students will already have read Portrait, no previous knowledge of Joyce’s writing is required.

ENGL W3219x  Modern Poetry (Stephen Massimilla) MW 1:10-2:25.  Lecture. In this comparative literature course, we will explore the works of major twentieth-century poets (both Anglophone and non-English-speaking), with attention to significant intellectual, political, psychological and spiritual dimensions, as reflected in language and form. We will consider, for instance, Whitman's Transcendentalism, Hardy's determinism, Mallarme's symbolism, Tagore's approach to Shaktism and Hindu philosophy, Yeats's engagement with Platonism and the occult, Lawrence's vitalism, Eliot's and Auden's very different approaches to Christianity and other matters, and Stevens's claims for poetry as a new religion. We will reflect on Romantic, Hellenic, Hebraic, and far Eastern traditions in a new context, one informed by trends such as urbanization and major upheavals, such as the two World Wars, the Irish Troubles, and the Russian Revolution. We will also examine the later projects of poets from Neruda to Milosz, all of whom offer “postmodern” and/or postcolonial responses to the formal and ideological legacies of the Anglophone modernists. Authors will likely include: Hardy, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Lawrence, H.D., Pound, Eliot, the War poets, Williams, Stevens, Auden, as well as Tagore (India), Mallarme and Rimbaud (France), Rilke (Austria), Pasternak and Mayakovsky (Russia), Lorca (Spain), Neruda (Chile), Vallejo (Peru), Montale (Italy), Walcott (the Caribbean), Heaney (Ireland), Milosz (Poland), and possibly others.

CLEN W3370x  Literatures of the Black Atlantic (Brent Edwards)  TR 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. This course will consider the ways the literatures of the African diaspora have imagined the interconnections and points of correspondence between Africa and the New World. We will focus especially on writing that imagines the Atlantic as a vibrant and treacherous space of dispossession, encounter, and transformation, whether in relation to the European slave trade or to colonialism and globalization in the twentieth century. Readings may include some of the following: theoretical and historical scholarship by C.L.R. James, Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh, and Sylvia Wynter; and autobiography, fiction, and poetry by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amos Tutuola, Maryse Condé, David Dabydeen, Charles Johnson, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, M. N. Philip. Requirements: a take-home midterm and a final paper. Syllabus.

CLEN W3220x   Science Fiction (Lejla Kucukalic) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. This course will offer a historical survey of canonical science fiction novels and short stories from the turn of the century, through the “pulp fiction” period of the 1920s-1940s, the Golden Age era of the 1950s, the New Wave works of the 1960s and the1970s, the Cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, to the current writings at the turn of the 21st century (probably best described as a hybrid between mainstream and science fiction literature). Science fiction has a broad reach in popular culture and is often considered a field that includes “Star Trek” as well as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In this course, we will focus on literary science fiction, not the broader media output rooted in the genre. The authors to be studied include: H. G. Wells, A. E. Van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, James Blish, Thomas Disch, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The course will feature a comparison between Russian and American science fiction and an overview of theoretical approaches. Students will apply these critical approaches to the novels and stories read throughout the semester.

ENGL W3966x  Gertrude Stein (Eric Haralson) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course will explore the life and work of the challenging and rewarding American author Gertrude Stein, while also taking up writings by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Dashiell Hammett, and others who crossed paths (and sometime crossed swords) with this major figure of modernism. Readings will include Stein’s early feminist story sequence Three Lives (which Fitzgerald called “utterly real . .  . a punctuation mark in literary history”); her playful evocation of domestic and erotic life, Tender Buttons (“prose poetry stretching the gamut of the imagination,” in the view of many of today’s writers); excerpts from her novel of immigrant family experience, The Making of Americans (which Hemingway deemed “one of the very greatest books I’ve ever read”); the charming tribute to her adoptive “hometown” Paris France; and her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), about American soldiers contemplating their return to the postwar United States. We will pay particular attention to Stein’s popular masterpiece The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, at once a forceful meditation on the emergence of modern art (Picasso, Matisse, and company), an engaging narrative experiment, and a shrewd commentary on the gender and sexual politics of her period. Our discussions will branch out to encompass the modernist avant-garde in painting, sculpture, music, and photography. The seminar will conclude with contemporary works that enter into dialogue with Stein’s writings, including poetry by Harryette Mullen (Recyclopedia) and Lyn Hejinian (Happily) and Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt, which re-imagines Stein and Toklas’s Parisian salon from the perspective of the couple’s Vietnamese servant.  Course requirements will include short response papers for each reading and a final research paper on a reading of your choice. We may also undertake a creative/analytical exercise modeled on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ("the story of my significant other that's all about me") and/or a group project such as the creation of a hypertext edition of Tender Buttons.

ENGL W3730x  Modern Texts: Literature, Culture, and War in the 20th Century (Sarah Cole) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This is a course 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 and the current war in Iraq. 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. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Each week we will explore a broad topic, including: conventions of leadership; the body in pain; the language(s) of protest; masculinity; commemoration and memory; the problem of mental disease (shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder); reporting, propaganda, and the press; experimental forms for representing war.  Syllabus.

CLEN W3740x   Coetzee and Ishiguro (Martin Puchner) T 2:10-4.  Seminar.  J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, contemporary masters of the novel in English, struggle with the most pressing problems of form, including the return of realism, the relation between novels and ideas, meta-fiction. At the same time, they examine central ethical challenges, such as the rights of animals, cloning, and the representation of war. The seminar combines minute literary analysis with a discussion of how literary style confronts the contemporary world.

CLEN W3935x   Narrative Texts and Theories: Multiculturalism and Narrative Form (Wen Jin) R 4:10-6. Seminar. What can narrative fiction teach us about how we should compare the different forms of multiculturalism that prevail in different nations?  How does the language of fiction embody and question the logic of analogy?  How does fiction do this by employing such figurative devices as metaphor and allegory and by translating between different cultures and histories?  These are the central questions we will explore in this course.  We will read recent English-language fiction that engages one or more of a cluster of interconnected geographical locations, including England, the West Indies, South Africa, Asia, as well as the United States.  The syllabus will include Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Michelle Cliff, Meena Alexander, J. M. Coetzee, and Alex Kuo, among others.  Discussion will focus on how these authors explore histories of racial and ethnic formation as well as the workings of personal and collective memory across multiple local or national contexts.  We will also look closely at selected readings in theories of narrative form, critical multiculturalism, and contemporary globalization. Syllabus.

CLEN W3791x   Aestheticism: Theory and Practice (Kevin Lamb) T 11-12:50. Seminar.  Oscar Wilde once remarked, “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” This course examines aestheticism as at once a theory of art, a literary movement, and a way of life. We will discuss, among other topics, the relationship of aestheticism to the so-called autonomy of the work of art, the motto of art for art’s sake, theories of beauty, cosmopolitanism, decadence, dandyism, perfectionism, perversion, and sexual and formal experimentation. Readings will combine fiction and poetry with works of criticism and philosophy, including several works that cross genres. Likely authors include: Stéphane Mallarmé, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes. French and German texts may be read in the original or in English translation. Syllabus.

ENTA W4723x Modern Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov (Zander Brietzke) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Intense reading of major works from the masters of modern drama. Course will focus on stylistic innovations, thematic concerns, and theatrical possibilities set forth by the three playwrights. Particular emphasis will be given to place of each on the contemporary stage and relevance to the 21st-century repertory. Syllabus (posted at Courseworks).

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 twentieth 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.

CLEN W4540x   Postmodernist Texts and Theory: 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.” Syllabus.

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ENGL W3283x  Post-1945 American Literature (Ross Posnock) TR 6:10-7:25.  Lecture. The innovative energy of post-war fiction and poetry-by Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison-will be read in the context of American modernity's post-war triumphalism. Under this proud exterior, these writers express the "bad conscience" of the American dream, exposing its contradictions while making vivid its seductions.

ENGL W3963x  American Poetry, Poe to Williams (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8.  Seminar. This course will focus mainly on poets whose innovative writing transformed American poetry: Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, etc. Readings will also include poems by their American and European contemporaries. Students will write two papers, short weekly responses to assigned readings, as well as imitations (required but not graded) of any two poets on the syllabus.

ENGL W3969x  Twentieth-century American Texts: American Modernism (Rachel Adams) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course focuses on American modernism, a phenomenon we will approach less as a movement or a set of specific aesthetic qualities than as a rather disparate series of response 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 1950s, our reading will help us to consider the relationship between key events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, World Wars, 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 may include novels and short stories by authors such as Anzia Yezierska, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway.  Major assignments include an in-class presentation, a short paper and a longer final paper. Syllabus.

ENGL W3733x  The Black South (Farah Griffin)  T 9-10:50. Seminar. This course will consider works of fiction, history, anthropology and criticism in an effort to re-conceptualize  “The Black South” as a cultural landscape that includes sections of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. 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 Black Atlantic. Our readings focus on significant historical, literal and mythic landscapes including but not limited to Haiti, Jamaica, Louisiana and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.

ENGL W3967x  Twentieth-Century Poetry: Wallace Stevens (Mark Strand) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This is an upper level seminar in which we will do close readings of Stevens' shorter poems and two of his long poems - "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "The Auroras of Autumn". The text we will use is The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. by Holly Stevens. Two short papers and participation in class discussion will be required.

ENGL W3710x  Seminar in American Lit and Culture: Studies in Sexuality: AIDS and the Politics of Literary Form (Marcellus Blount) R 2:10-4. Seminar. CANCELLED.

ENGL W3711x  American Literature Seminar: Family Fictions (Maura Spiegel) R 4:10-6.  Seminar. Looking closely at stories that center on the logic, dysfunction, romance, system, institution and curious maturation of American families. from Salinger’s Glass family to Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums.   We will explore renderings of “family cultures,“ family feeling, family values, the family as a narrative configuration, and home as a utopian space in the American landscape.  Authors include, Edward Albee, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Don DeLillo, Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen. Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates; films by Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike Nichols, Ang Lee and others.

ENGL W3985x  Masculinity and American Film (Marcellus Blount) F 2:10-4.  Seminar. This seminar explores how masculinity is defined in the work of a wide range of filmmakers from the 1950's to the present.  We will be particularly interested in how questions of race and sexuality complicate narratives of male identity.  Directors include Hitchcock, Lumet, Bill Condon, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, Issac Julien, and Spike Lee. Requirements: two 8-10 page papers.

ENGL W3732x  Postmodern Poetries (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. American poetry after WWII is marked by increasingly radical experimentation as poets continue Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” We will examine writers from the last half-century who respond formally and thematically to the complicated theoretical, political, and social displacements of post-modernity. Poets will include John Ashbery, various Black Mountain poets, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Harreyette Mullen, Myung Mi Kim, and others.

ENGL W4628x  U.S. Latino Literature (Frances Negron-Muntaner)  TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course will focus on Latino literature in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present and provide a historical, literary, and theoretical context for this production. It will examine a wide range of genres, including poetry, memoir, essays, and fiction, with special emphasis on works by Cubans, Dominicans, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Among the authors that the course will study are 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. Syllabus.

ENTA W4731x American Drama (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.

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SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3238x Religion, Literature, Modernity  (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. The course explores relationships between religious and literary imagining through scrutiny of causes for modern culture’s hostility to traditional spiritual beliefs. The main focus will be on texts of high artistic merit in which religious experience is primary feature. After identifying characteristics of modernist culture most salient to its anti-religious bias, we will evaluate William Blake’s argument, framed in response to the origin of the modernist-religious conflict, that imagination is the common source of religion and art. Analyses of important texts from polytheistic societies and representations of conversion experiences then will provide historical perspective for assessment of the emergence of Protestant Evangelicalism in the United States (illustrative of the contemporaneous surge of “fundamentalism” in other major religions). Focus here will be on the scientific apocalyptism underlying creationist/evolutionist debates, and the role of the modern charismatic evangelist.  After completing our term-long discussion of problems for 21st century readers of Paradise Lost (the most important religious text in the Anglophone literary tradition) we will conclude with an assessment of Crime and Punishment’s prescient dramatization of the consequences of conflict between modernism and religion, including is threat of emptying from contemporary art all moral significance and encouraging the popularity of torture as entertainment.

 CLEN W3851x Literature of Lost Lands (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course consists of readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. Often relegated to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost lands inspired a form of “occult ethnography”: one such example is Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), which drew on the popular fascination with buried land-masses to re-imagine alternative narratives in which the “imperial English” would be colonized by a new race of people rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. The unsettling of established and familiar conceptions of nation, history, and cultural identity through the exploration of lost or drifting lands reaches an apex in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft (1986), with which the course concludes. In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, and technology, as well as understanding the writing of history itself: i.e., what is included in mainstream accounts and what is left out.

ENTA W3976x  Seminar in Literary Genres: The Western (Paul Strohm) T 6:10-8.  Seminar. This seminar for third and fourth-year undergraduates will address questions of genre, both literary and cinematic.  We will get ourselves up to speed by reading several formative literary texts, including Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Twain’s Roughing It, several Bret Harte stories, and Wister’s The Virginian.  Attention will then shift to film, with Ford’s Straight Shooting and My Darling Clementine, possibly Hawks’s Red River, and, probably, Eastwood’s The Unforgiven.  Finally, we will turn to some works that interrogate or stretch the boundaries of the genre, including Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (milieu), Hawks’s Rio Lobo (age), Fonda’s The Hired Hand (masculinity, gender), Ford’s The Searchers (race).  We will read some classic genre essays, and will also pose some questions of our own: who ‘owns’ a genre, its producers or its audience?  where do new genres come from, and what can a genre ‘know’ about itself?  when does a western stop being a ‘western’ and become simply a ‘film set in the west’?  Members of the seminar will be asked to attend a Monday or Tuesday night screening (time and place to be   papers; one ‘seminar paper’ on a subject to be agreed with the instructor. 

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

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 questions 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?  How do we interpret the tension between theory and the current aggressive return of “history”?  This course will look back at certain thinkers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries (Rousseau, Kleist, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Bakhtin, Freud, Weber) who offer indispensable continuities with and counterpoints to the methodologies of academic literary theory from the New Criticism to the more recent practices of cultural studies. Though some knowledge of 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.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

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

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. NOTE: English majors and concentrators may use this course to satisfy their comparative geographical distribution requirement.

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19th CENTURY
ENGL W3257y Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot (Nicholas Dames) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. A survey of the three mid-Victorian novelists most ambitious in their attempts to represent society as a complex, interactive whole. Representative fictions--Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Daniel Deronda--will be read alongside lesser-known works. Our emphasis: how these novelists imagined an individual's relations to economic, national, and geographic collectivities in capitalist modernity.

ENGL W3933y Austen (Jenny Davidson) M 2:10-4. Seminar. Austen's cultural authority has never been higher (film adaptations, currency with neoconservatives and romance novelists alike, a spot in the Columbia Core). We will ask the following questions of Austen's novels: Is Austen a conservative or a subversive writer? How do we understand Austen's style? What do modern readers want or need from Austen?

ENGL W3960y Dickens (Eileen Gillooly) W 4:10-6. Seminar. No author occupies quite the place in both the popular consciousness and the literary tradition as Charles Dickens. A difficult author to study owing to the sheer volume of his writing (and the length of his novels, in particular), Dickens nevertheless offers perhaps the best vantage point from which to consider changing cultural views on almost every social and ethical problem that preoccupied the Victorians themselves–and, to a large extent, preoccupies contemporary readers as well. Along with four of his major novels--Nicholas Nickleby (1838), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), and Little Dorrit (1857)--readings will include selections from his letters, journalism, and his “Autobiographical Fragment.” We will consider both the private and the public Dickens; questions of history and moral psychology; and issues such as environmentalism, nationalism, and social reform.

ENGL W4404y Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 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) MW 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.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

AMST W1010y Introduction to American Studies (Andrew Delbanco and Maura Spiegel) MW 1:10-2:25. An introduction to fundamental themes and debates that span four centuries of American culture. Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, we will explore themes such as the question of national character; immigration, assimilation and the color line; opportunity and the pursuit of property; self-making, meritocracy, consumerism; Americans at work and leisure, American religion and spiritual life, educational ideals, and Americans at war. A partial list of authors includes: John Winthrop, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, R. W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, W.E. B. DuBois, Andrew Carnegie, Horatio Alger, Theodore Roosevelt, John Dewey, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Thorstein Veblen, Nella Larsen and Gish Jen. Conducted as a lecture/discussion, with weekly sections. Note to English Majors and Concentrators: this course satisfies the American geographical distribution requirement.

CPLS W3925y Wisdom Literatures (David Damrosch and Wiebke Denecke) R 11-12:50. This undergraduate seminar course will explore the ancient literary and philosophical traditions known as "wisdom literature." We will construe wisdom literature broadly as comprising works that offer political and religious instruction on living an ethical life in a corrupt world. Major examples of such writing have been foundational in China - in the teachings of Confucius and his successors - in the ancient Near East (Egypt, Babylonia, and Israel), and in the Greco-Roman world (Socrates/Plato and onward). We will look particularly at the rhetorical and narrative strategies that wisdom writers use to advance their views; at varieties of acceptance of power and resistance to it; at modes of religious orthodoxy and heterodox questioning; at intertextual relations as later writers build on and/or subvert their predecessors; and at ancient and modern Orientalisms in the understanding of "the wisdom of the East." Throughout the course, we will explore commonalities and differences between East Asian, Near Eastern, and Greco-Roman modes of wisdom writing, from minimalist expressions such as proverbs, to parables and emblematic anecdotes, to extended dialogues and full-scale fictional narratives. Note to English Majors and Concentrators: this course satisfies both a pre-1800 course requirement as well as the comparative/global geographical distribution requirement.

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 Majors and Concentrators: This course can be used as one of the ten courses required for the major (or one of the eight for the concentration), and it will satisfy the American geographical 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--no application necessary, the first 25 who register will be admitted and the course will then be closed to further registrants).. 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. Note to English Majors and Concentrators: This course can be used as one of the ten courses required for the major (or one of the eight for the concentration), and it will satisfy the American geographical distribution requirement.

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ENGL W4011x Chaucer (Paul Strohm) MW 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). 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.
           NOTE: Undergraduates are required to enroll in a discussion section; sections are listed under ENGL W4111x, below, along with registration instructions.

ENGL W4111x Discussion Sections for Chaucer:

—  Section 1: Wednesday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 2: Thursday 1:10-2 pm

Registration for Chaucer: You do not register directly for the Chaucer lecture (ENGL W4011x). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (ENGL W4111x). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself. (For more details, see Registration Instructions.)

ENGL W4091x An Introduction to Old English: Language and Literature (Patricia Dailey) MW 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 be using Hasenfratz and Jambeck's Reading Old English as our language textbook, and supplementing it with Mitchell and Robinson's An Introduction to Old English. Requirements: 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.

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ENGL W3340x Studies in the English Renaissance: Renaissance London (Alan Stewart) M 6:10-8. Seminar. This seminar course examines representations of London, and artistic works emanating from London, in the period from the Reformation to the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666. We will be studying a range of genres, from city comedy to rogue pamphlets to chorography, by authors including John Stow, Isabella Whitney, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Marston. Provisional syllabus.

ENGL W3973x Genre Theory: Tragicomic Transformations (Maiken Derno) T 11-12:50. Seminar. The purpose of this 3000 level undergraduate seminar is to critically engage the peculiar experiments in genre mixtures encountered in early modern English drama in the years leading up to and immediately following the Tudor-Stuart transition of 1603. Through close readings of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean play-texts (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Fletcher, and Webster, among others) we will explore the diverse anxieties invested in generic hybridity as well as the multiple cultural, social and aesthetic ramifications appertaining to such cross-fertilizations - esp. those between comedic and tragedic repertoires. The seminar will further frame these historically situated readings by looking at central debates in twentieth-century genre theory concerning issues of authorship, hermeneutic authority, intertextuality, performativity, textual materiality, as well as discourse and speech act analysis, respectively. Syllabus, plus requirements, from a prior offering of the course (some minor revisions may be made).

ENGL W4712x Shakespeare Lecture: Shakespearean Economies (Mario DiGangi) TR 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 undergraduates: active class participation (20%); a take-home midterm exam,(20%); a 10-page paper (40%); and a take-home final exam (20%).

ENGL W4211x Milton (Thomas Festa) TR 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.

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ENGL W4301x The Age of Johnson, 1740-1800 (James Basker) TR 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.

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ENGL W3962x 19th-century Novels of Education (Edward Mendelson) M 11-12:50. Seminar. English novels of education and development, mostly nineteenth-century. The reading list will probably include Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Tess of the D'Durbervilles, among other novels. If possible, the list may include one or two French and German novels from the same period (in translation).

CLEN W3770x Literature and Cultural History: Literature of Lost Lands (Gauri Viswanathan) W 4:10-6. Seminar. Readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the popular imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, developmentalism, and technology. The seminar will also explore, through the literature on lost lands, how the idea of the past itself becomes less stable in the cultural imagination. Readings include Plato's Timaeus and Critias, Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis, Blavatsky's A Land of Mystery, James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Jose Saramago's The Stone Raft, among others.

ENGL W3451x Literature of Empire: Imperialism & the Cryptographic Imagination (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. An examination of imperialism's use of codes, acrostics, maps, diagrams, and other forms of secret communication. Underscoring the indirect exchange of information as one of the key activities of British imperialism, the seminar will focus on how the culture of secrecy that accompanied imperial expansion defined the tools of literary imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Texts include Kim, Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, The Moonstone, The Sign of Four, She, King Solomon's Mines, and The Secret Agent, among others. Past syllabus.

CLEN W4822x The 19th-century Novel in Europe (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, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola. Tentative syllabus, with course overview and requirements.
          NOTE: Undergraduates are required to enroll in a discussion section; sections are listed under CLEN W4922x, below, along with registration instructions.

CLEN W4922x Discussion Sections for the 19c Novel in Europe:

—  Section 1: Wednesday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 2: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 3: Wednesday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 4: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 5: Wednesday 8:10-9 pm
—  Section 6: Thursday 8:10-9 pm

Registration for 19c European Novel: You do not register directly for the 19c European Novel lecture (CLEN W4822x). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (CLEN W4922x). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself. (For more details, see Registration Instructions.)

ENGL G4403x 19th-century Autobiography Seminar (John Rosenberg) W 9-10:50 [limit: 20]. 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. Note: Qualified undergraduates invited to apply. Requirements: an oral presentation; short critical essay; seminar paper of approximately 15 pages.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3269x Modern British Literature 1900-1950 (Edward Mendelson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture. Hardy, Wilde, Yeats, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, and others. Past syllabus, including course requirements, which will give you a clear picture of the class plan, though some minor revisions may be made.

ENGL W3230x James Joyce (Michael Seidel) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. The primary aim of this course is to read the works of James Joyce carefully and thoughtfully. The readings in Joyce are ample, including Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Exiles, Ulysses, and selected essays from Joyce's Critical Writings, with small forays into Finnegans Wake for the obsessed. Requirements: two sets of journal entries (amounting to a total of 10 pp.of writing); a a midterm and final of short identifications (which are more akin to reading quizzes than exams).

CLEN W3208x 20th-century Comparative Fiction (Bruce Robbins) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. The near-contemporary fiction of the second half of the 20th century, sometimes described as postmodern, seeks like its predecessors to mesh the novelistic intimacies of life and love with some response to the world-historical events of its time: World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of the European empires, and so on. Authors will include some of the following: Beckett, Salih, Calvino, Duras, Grass, Lessing, Kundera, Pynchon, Rushdie, Kincaid, and Ondaatje. Requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; two papers, 4-5 pages each, topics to be assigned (each paper worth 33% of grade); final exam (33% of grade).

CLEN W3740x Modernism and the City (Eric Bulson) R 6:10-8. Seminar. "To truly know a city one must learn to get lost in it." Walter Benjamin was not the only one talking about voluntarily "getting lost" in the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. This course will examine why so many other writers, visual artists, and cultural theorists from around the globe began to identify the urban experience with disorientation. Reading works by writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Marcel Proust, and F.T. Marinetti together with cultural histories and critical theories of the city, we will consider more broadly how disorientation has been represented and theorized in an effort to make the modern world intelligible.

ENGL W3967x Twentieth-century British and American Poetry (Stephen Massimilla) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course will entail intensive reading and discussion of selective works of major twentieth-century poets, with attention to exciting developments in style, form, and theme. We will explore breaks and continuities with earlier traditions, including subtle recuperations of Romantic and ancient traditions in an entirely new context. This context is informed by trends such as urbanization and major events, such as two World Wars. We will consider dynamic, often contrary ideas about what sociocultural, aesthetic, and ethical roles the poet ought to play in society. This course will also provide an opportunity for comparing the two major Anglophone traditions, with an eye to their complex and often neglected interrelationship. After briefly examining nineteenth-century forbears, we will focus on Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, the War poets, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Crane, Auden, Plath, Walcott, others.

CLEN W3390x Strange Fiction (Mark Strand) T 2:10-4. Seminar. An examination of selected short fiction by Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Tommaso Landolfi, and Dino Buzzati.

CLEN W3792x The Historical Novel After Modernism (David Damrosch) M 2:10-4. Seminar. Modernism emphasized ruptures with the past and the uncertainty of historical knowledge; one consequence of this emphasis was a general turning away from the historical novel, seen as the most deluded form of 19th-century realism. Virginia Woolf's one novel set before her own lifetime, Orlando, is a comic treatise on the implausibility of any serious artistic attempt to write a historical novel, and even realists like Arnold Bennett usually stayed chronologically close to home. This situation began to change around the time of World War II, when a growing number of novelists schooled in modernism began to write serious historical fiction; this course will explore the motives for such writing and the strategies of research, structure, style, dialogue, and characterization that once again made the historical novel a compelling form, on the far side of the modernist critique of history. The course will proceed from modernist anti-historical fiction by Akutagawa, Woolf, and Borges, to wartime turns to historical fiction based in a closely researched antiquity (Yourcenar), to varieties of medievalism (Tolkien, Endo, and Eco), to recent returns to the 19th century (Morrison and Byatt), ending with two fictive travelogues, one pre- and one post-modern, Marco Polo's Travels and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Course requirements: class participation and a 15-page term paper. Syllabus.

CLEN W4550x Narrative and Human Rights (Joseph Slaughter) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture (no auditors; no sectioning). We will study the convergences and interdependencies of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, we will consider 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 (both 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, etc. Syllabus.
          NOTE: There is no required enrollment in a discussion section, contrary to previous postings.

ENGL W4502x British Literature 1950-present (Maura Spiegel) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. English fiction (and a few films), 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. Requirements: two papers (one 5-7 pp., the other 7-8 pp.) and a take-home midterm.

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ENGL W3400x African American Literature I (Carlyle Van Thompson) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. The "Middle Passage" and its aftermath conjure up images of horrific displacement of African people. Using this site as a paradigm of tension, this innovative course will explore the connections within African American literature from the colonial period to the Harlem Renaissance. Through close reading, critical analysis, and discussion of several works of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth-century African American literature, this course aims to explore the historical, psychological, cultural, legal, political, and economic tensions that shape this literature within the context of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and the ongoing tensions of race, gender, pigmentocracy, and class in America.

ENGL W3283x Post-1945 American Literature (Ross Posnock) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. The innovative energy of post-war fiction and poetry--by Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison--will be read in the context of American modernity's post-war triumphalism. Under this proud exterior, these writers express the "bad conscience" of the American dream, exposing its contradictions while making vivid its seductions. Past syllabus, including requirements (though some minor revisions may be made, the course will substantially follow this plan).
          NOTE: Undergraduates are required to enroll in a discussion section; sections are listed under ENGL W3383x, below, along with registration instructions.

ENGL W3383x Discussion Sections for Post-1945 American Lit:

—  Section 1: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 2: Thursday 8:10-9 pm
—  Section 3: Monday 1:10-2 pm
—  Section 4: Wednesday 7:10-8 pm

Registration for Post-1945 American Lit: You do not register directly for the Post-1945 American Lit lecture (ENGL W3283x). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (ENGL W3383x). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself. (For more details, see Registration Instructions.)

ENGL W3932x The American Renaissance (Amanda Claybaugh) W 2:10-4. Seminar. The major figures and genres of the American Renaissance: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Writing requirement: bi-weekly one-page papers and a final paper of five to seven pages.

ENGL W3967x Twentieth-century British and American Poetry (Stephen Massimilla) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course will entail intensive reading and discussion of selective works of major twentieth-century poets, with attention to exciting developments in style, form, and theme. We will explore breaks and continuities with earlier traditions, including subtle recuperations of Romantic and ancient traditions in an entirely new context. This context is informed by trends such as urbanization and major events, such as two World Wars. We will consider dynamic, often contrary ideas about what sociocultural, aesthetic, and ethical roles the poet ought to play in society. This course will also provide an opportunity for comparing the two major Anglophone traditions, with an eye to their complex and often neglected interrelationship. After briefly examining nineteenth-century forbears, we will focus on Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, the War poets, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Crane, Auden, Plath, Walcott, others.

ENGL W3710x The Beat Generation (Ann Douglas) Section 1: Tu 6:10-8; Section 2: W 6:10-8. Seminar. Instructor's permission required; limited to seniors, preference to those who have taken at least one course in 20th-century American culture, especially history, jazz, film, and literature. Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

ENGL W3630x The American Long Poem (Marcellus Blount) R 6:10-8. Seminar. This course will focus on issues of poetic coherence, especially how fragmentary poems and poetic sequences hold together as continuous or progressive lyric narratives. Poets include Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Derek Walcott. Requirements: attendance and participation in class discussion; one fifteen-page final essay.

ENGL W3740x James Baldwin (Marcellus Blount) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Major fiction and collections of essays, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Just Above My Head, as well as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time. Themes include problems of gender and genre. Requirements: attendance and participation in class discussion; one fifteen-page essay.

ENGL W3925x Topics in Asian American Lit: Cosmopolitanism in the Asian American Diaspora (Wen Jin) M 4:10-6. Seminar. Cosmopolitanism is an important topic in Western intellectual and literary traditions; it refers to theories of world government and global civil society, ethical approaches to identity, as well as appreciation of cultural differences as aesthetic material. In what sense, then, can we describe Asian American and Asian diasporic narratives in the U.S. as cosmopolitan? How do these narratives participate in discussions of race, nationalism, and democracy at various moments throughout the twentieth-century? We will explore these questions by studying a wide range of novels, memoirs, and essays, mostly written in English, by Asian American and Asian diasporic authors. We will discuss the ways in which these texts articulate different forms of "cosmopolitanism" in the context of Western colonialism (Sun, Lin, Romulo, Hagedorn, Truong), globalization (Roy, Ghosh, Kuo), and military conflicts in Asia (Ishigaki, Sakamoto, Lee, Ondaatje, Law-Yone).

ENGL W4604x American Modernism (Rachel Adams) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. 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. Past syllabus (which will be somewhat revised).

ENGL W4612x Jazz & American Culture (Robert O'Meally) TR 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. Open to seniors, juniors, and sophomores.

ENTA W4731x American Drama (Zander Brietzke) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Why bother to see stage drama if an adaptation is available to see 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 of that span includes plays by Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, David Mamet, and 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. Evaluation: attendance & quizzes (30%); 7-10 pp paper (40%); final exam (30%).

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SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3770x Children's Literature: How Imagination Grows (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25. Lecture. Analysis of classics of children's literature to identify what literary imagining is, how it matures, and what may be its specific personal and social value in present-day culture. Tentative syllabus and requirements.

ENGL W4725x Shakespeare: Whose Contemporary? (Helen Barr) TR 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 play writing 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.
          Both undergraduates and graduates are welcome to attend this course. Undergraduate Requirements: a mid-term and final examination plus two short papers (5 pp).
          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.

CLEN W4996x Derrida (Gayatri Spivak) MW 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. Writing requirement: Weekly paper on assigned reading not exceeding 5 pages.

CLEN G4995x Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) T 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. Requirements: seven 1-page responses on discussion board (four before midterm); final essay-question examination; final 10-page paper.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

AMST 3930x Topics in American Studies:

Section 1: Hispanic New York (Roosevelt Montas, Claudio Remeseira) R 4-6. Seminar. New York City contains a wide spectrum of immigrants from all over Latin America and the Caribbean, including a large number of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Because of this rich diversity, New York is both one of the leading Hispanic cities in the U.S. and a pivotal node of Latin American culture. This seminar will be a survey of the cultural heritage that sustains this diversity. We will explore the history and the demographic evolution of New York's Latino and Latin American population, its racial, ethnic, and religious make-up, and its longstanding tradition in arts, music, and literature. Readings will include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry originally written both in English and Spanish (English translations will be provided for students who don't read Spanish). We will also analyze the connections between New York's Hispanic cultural tradition and the broader U.S. culture, as well as New York's place in the Spanish-American intellectual world. Finally, the seminar will address some of the most pressing sociological issues related to the immigration flow from Latin America and the increasingly decisive role played by Latinos in New York politics.

Section 2: Blacks and Jews (Ross Posnock) M 11-12:50. Seminar. We will be reading works by Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Ellison, Roth, Baraka, Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and others that dramatize the postwar literary representation of blacks and Jews. The fraught, tension filled relation between "the most unalike of America's historic undesirables," as Roth says in The Human Stain, is the source of compelling literature rich in sociological, cultural and psychoanalytic implications.

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ENGL W3436y Discussion Sections for W3336y Shakespeare II:

1. Section 1: Tuesday 1:10-2 pm
2. Section 2: Monday 1:10-2 pm
3. Section 3: Wednesday 1:10-2 pm
4. Section 4: Monday 8:10-9 pm

Registration for Shakespeare II: You do not register directly for the Shakespeare lecture (ENGL W3336y). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (ENGL W3436y). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself.

ENGL W3338y Shakespeare seminar II: Shakespeare: Poet Playwright (Edward Tayler) R 2:10-4. Seminar. Limited to juniors and seniors. Reading the poet in his own terms (his words, his meanings), with due attention to action, character, and the heft and swing of the iambic line. Emphasis on the so-called problem plays and the mature tragedies. One brief (ten-minute) class presentation, several short (three-paragraph) essays.

ENGL W3973y (Genre Theory) Tragicomic Transformations: Genre
Mixtures in English Renaissance Drama (Maiken Derno) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This seminar will critically revisit a number of conspicuously hybrid or mixed genre plays (by Shakespeare, Marston, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, among others) from the early years of the seventeenth century through the conceptual lens of poststructuralist notions of (archi)textuality (Genette), historicity (Foucault, Todorov, Jauss), literarity (Derrida) and discursive traffic (Bakhtin). By analytically engaging with the complex interplay between Renaissance poetics and the new experimental registers of revenge tragedy, city comedy, problem plays, romance, tragicomedy and pastoral drama, this course invites reflection on the theoretical and historical stakes of genre negotiations as these relate to questions of textual authority, hermeneutic desire, print culture, social anxiety, meta-theatricality, as well as the troubled dialectics of canonicity and marginalization.

ENGL W3259y Milton seminar: Paradise Lost (David Kastan) W 4:10-6. Prerequisite: W4211. Seminar. A close (bordering on obsessive) reading of the poem.

ENGL W4101y 16th-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.

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ENGL W3957y Romantic Poetry II: Byron, Shelley, Keats (Erik Gray) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This course focuses intensively on the major figures from the second generation of English Romantic poets. We will read extensively in the works of Lord Byron (including ample portions of his epic masterpiece, Don Juan), Percy Shelley (including his treatise, A Defence of Poetry), and John Keats (including selections from his letters).

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19th CENTURY
CLEN W3851y 19th-century Cities and Literature (Sharon Marcus) M 11-12:50. Seminar. In the nineteenth century, cities surged in size and the novel surged in popularity. How were the two phenomena related? What kinds of social relations and narrative structures do cities generate? We will answer these questions by reading urban theory and history alongside novels set in Paris, London, Manchester, New York, Chicago, Edo (Tokyo), Rome, and St. Petersburg.

ENGL W3933y Studies in the Novel: Women and the Plot of Vocation (Monica Cohen) R 11-12:50. Seminar. A nuanced exploration of touchstone nineteenth-century British writers with attention paid to questions of domestic labor and professional work, the feminine and the masculine, propriety and property, the psychological and the political, the home and the nation. We will begin by questioning the aesthetic representation of domestic interiority and then broaden our discussions to include how the narrative deployment of domesticity's metaphors appears to be rooted in conceptions of spiritual work that have formal, cultural and even political consequences. Readings include novels by Scott (The Heart of Mid-Lothian), Austen (Persuasion), Bronte (Shirley), Gaskell (Cranford and Wives and Daughters), Dickens (A Christmas Carol and Our Mutual Friend), Eliot (The Mill on the Floss and Felix Holt), Trollope (The Way We Live Now) and works by Barbara Bodichon, Sarah Stickney Ellis, Margaret Oliphant, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin and Queen Victoria.

ENGL W4405y 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 (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.

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CLEN W3208y 20th-century Comparative Fiction (Bruce Robbins) MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture. The near-contemporary fiction of the second half of the 20th century, sometimes described as postmodern, seeks like its predecessors to mesh the novelistic intimacies of life and love with some response to the world-historical events of its time: World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of the European empires, and so on. Authors will include some of the following: Beckett, Salih, Calvino, Duras, Grass, Lessing, Kundera, Pynchon, Rushdie, Kincaid, and Ondaatje. Note: Students are required to enroll in a discussion section; sections are listed under CLEN W3338y, below, along with registration instructions.

CLEN W3228y Discussion Sections for W3208y 20th-c Comparative Fiction:

1. Section 1: Monday 1:10-2 pm
2. Section 2: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
3. Section 3: Wednesday 8:10-9 pm
4. Section 4: Thursday 8:10-9 pm
5. Section 5: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
6. Section 6: Thursday 8:10-9 pm
7. Section 7: Thursday 1:10-2 pm
8. Section 8: Thursday 8:10-9 pm

Registration for 20th-century Comparative Fiction: You do not register directly for this lecture (CLEN W3208y). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (CLEN W3228y). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself.

ENGL V3270y British Literature 1950 to the Present (Maura Spiegel) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. This course will trace English fiction (and a few films) from the center and from the margins, from the post-WWII era to contemporary and postmodern preoccupations. Writers will include: Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Kelman, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, John Osborne, Salman Rushdie, W.G. Sebald, and films by Carol Reed, Michael Apted, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Frears. NOTE: This class is limited to 40 students, who must apply for the course during the November registration period.

ENGL W3730y Modern Texts (Edward Mendelson) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Altenatives to Modernism: H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and others.

CLEN W3940y Modern Fiction: Joyce & Co. (David Damrosch) W 2:10-4. Seminar. An examination of James Joyce and his place in international modernism, looking particularly at issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the politics of gender and of religion, and the legacy of realism in modernism. Readings will include Joyce's major prose writings, together with works by Ichiyo, Proust, Asturias, Barnes, Woolf and Lispector. Syllabus.

CLEN W3938y Comparative Postcolonialisms: Parody, Plagiarism, Postcolonialism (Joseph Slaughter) W 2:10-4. Seminar. This course examines historical, cultural, and theoretical notions of authorship, originality, singularity, and copyright as they intersect with colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization as processes of cultural reproduction, replication, and theft. We will study practices and ideas of plagiarism, borrowing, citation, mimicry, parody, literary influence, copying, falsifying, and other disparaged textual activities within the power/knowledge complex of imperial relations.

CLEN W3930y Caribbean Diaspora Literature (Frances Negron-Muntaner) M 11-12:50. Seminar. 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.

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.

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ENGL W3283y Post-1945 American Literature (Ross Posnock) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. The innovative energy of post-war fiction and poetry-by Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison-will be read in the context of American modernity's post-war triumphalism. Under this proud exterior, these writers express the "bad conscience" of the American dream, exposing its contradictions while making vivid its seductions.

ENGL W3520y Asian American Literature and Culture (Eric Gamalinda) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. This course serves as an introduction to Asian American literature and examines various literary, cultural and socio-political issues vital to different Asian communities in the U.S. Included are the writings of Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Arab Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. This course will consider all literary genres and pay special attention to how sexuality/gender, race/ethnicity, and class construct both material experiences and the psychic lives of Asian Americans.

ENGL W3874y Literature of the Early Republic (Ezra Tawil) R 4:10-6. Seminar. "From 1790 to 1820," wrote Emerson in his journal in 1852, "there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the state." Though speaking of Massachusetts, he may unwittingly have provided scholars with a slogan for the erasure of a page of American literary history. Early national literature has tended to suffer from relative critical neglect, sandwiched as it is between the foundational texts of colonial British America and the emergence of a bona fide national literary tradition in the mid-nineteenth century. But this middle child of our literary periodization ought to interest us for precisely that reason: because it bridges the aesthetic modes and concerns of an earlier colonial literary culture with that of a mature literary nationalism. This seminar will cover a broad range of poetry, plays and prose (including both imaginative literature and non-fictional prose) from the revolutionary period through around 1820. It aims to be selective rather than comprehensive, in order most deeply to explore a truly fascinating period of literary production in which-while few acknowledged American "masterworks" were produced-literature bore a unique relationship both to national formation and to aesthetic experimentation. Readings will likely include Thomas Paine, Philip Freneau, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Hannah Webster Foster, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper.

ENGL W3963y American Poetry Seminar: From Poe to Pound (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8. Seminar. This course, following a mostly chronological approach, will emphasize the close reading and appreciation of poems and selected criticism by those traditional and innovative poets whose influence transformed American poetry. Translation of poems by a few foreign writers along with a broad sampling of poetry by other Americans will be included for the sake of comparison and context, but readings and discussion will mainly focus on such poets as Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Pound.

ENGL W3875y 19th-century American Literature Seminar: Happily Ever After (Caleb Crain) R 11-12:50. Seminar. The novel began by telling stories of seduction and marriage. How did it change in nineteenth-century America, which granted married women the right to own property, liberalized and formalized divorce law, and imposed increasingly strict codes of etiquette on relations between the sexes? We will read novels by Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, as well as Transcendentalist essays on marriage and the sexes, papers from actress Fanny Kemble's divorce trial, newspaper debates from the 1850s and 1860s about the social role proper to wives, and the memoir of a cad who tried and failed to win a wife by kidnapping. Syllabus and requirements.

ENGL W3715y Major American Authors: Henry James's Peril (Rita Charon) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This course undertakes close readings of a selection of novels and stories of Henry James, taken from early, middle, and late phases, but stressing the late-late James. Our reading will be informed by autobiographical and critical writings of James and structured by rhetorical, narratological, and psychoanalytic considerations. We will pay particular attention to issues of intimacy, loss, and the body. Readers new to James and those habituated to his presence welcome.

ENGL W3966y 20th-century Literature Seminar: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Mark Strand) M 2:10-4. Seminar. This is an upper level seminar in which we will do close readings of Stevens' shorter poems and two of his long poems - "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "The Auroras of Autumn". The text we will use is The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. by Holly Stevens. Two short papers and participation in class discussion will be required.

ENGL W3985y Film Noir (Ann Douglas) T 6:10-8. This course will study Hollywood 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 imperial West, from 19th-century literary texts ("Heart of Darkness"; "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") onto depictions of gender and class conflict and the money economy in selected cinematic examples. Films will include: Citizen Kane, The Killers, Scarlet Street, Double Indemnity, Gilda, The Sweet Smell of Success, In a Lonely Place, Odds Against Tomorrow, A Double Life, and Vertigo.

ENGL W3980y Studies in Mass Culture: The Art of the Improvisers (Robert O'Meally) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Prerequisite: the instructor's permission. This course will consider some of the forms and meanings of improvisation both in the arts and in practical decision-making. With an accent on art in the United States-but with excursions beyond these borders-we will consider the work of improvisers in literature (including theater), dance, music, and painting. We will also read about improvisation as a set of philosophical stances and deliberate practices. And we will consider the work of neurologists on the ways of the improvising brain and body, exercising options in a world of chance and change. We will have a number of visitors representing these various fields of specialization. Readings will include William James, Mark Twain, Yeats, Ellison, August Wilson.

ENGL W3732y Postmodern Poetries (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8. Seminar. American poetry after WWII is marked by increasingly radical experimentation as poets continue Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new." We will examine writers from the last half-century who respond formally and thematically to the complicated theoretical, political, and social displacements of post-modernity. Poets will include John Ashbery, various Black Mountain poets, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Harreyette Mullen, Myung Mi Kim, p. inman, and others.

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. NOTE: This class is limited to 30 students (no application required; the first 30 students who register will be admitted). NOTE ALSO: Undergraduates are required to enroll in a discussion section listed under ENGL G4633y; the days/times of the two sections are Thursday 1:10-2 and Thurs 6:10-7 pm. Syllabus.

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CLEN W3792y Pre-Renaissance Short Fiction (Robert Stein) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This seminar examines the nature and function of narrative as a fundamental structure of literary representation and a fundamental mode of claiming a truth-telling intention. A consideration of early narrative texts in short forms, including texts that in the history of literature have become "non-literary"-such as Biblical parables, canonical and non-canonical gospels, classical lives of the philosophers and early Christian lives of the saints-as well as conventional literary forms such as Greek Romances, ancient and medieval comic tales and romances of chivalric adventure, and selections from the great medieval frame-tale collections such as the 1001 Nights and the Decameron, will also help us examine the idea of literariness itself. Readings in the primary texts will be accompanied by readings in theoretical material ranging from Aristotle's Poetics, to the work of M.M. Bakhtin and Hayden White.

ENGL W3409y Form in Poetry (David Yerkes) R 4:10-6. Seminar. Close reading of poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, and Cummings.

CLEN W3965y Studies in Literary Genres: Epic (Richard Sacks) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Close reading and comparative analysis of so-called epic texts from Homer to the present, with a focus on the ways in which epic challenges the seeming boundaries of narrative, traditionality, mythology, genre, history, and culture. Syllabus.

CLEN W3721y Literature and Politics (Richard Braverman) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Readings in the political novel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Topics to include revolution and reform; gender and class; exiles and intellectuals; the formation of ideologies. Works by Turgenev, Conrad, Silone, Camus, Orwell, Atwood, Naipaul, Coetzee, and others.

CLEN W3910y Women, Religion, Human Rights (Joan Ferrante) T 9-10:50. Seminar. This course addresses the role certain religious traditions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) have played and continue to play in the theory and practice of women's rights. Religious teachings will be considered in relation to theories of natural and human rights and current practices.

ENGL W3935y The Novel: Texts and Theories (Jonathan Arac) T 4:10-6. Seminar. Reading includes masterpieces of Western fiction since Cervantes from a range of national literary traditions (possible authors include Goethe or Mann, Melville or Ellison, Flaubert, Dostoevsky or Bely, Lessing, García Márquez) plus substantial reading from major studies in theory and criticism of the novel (such as Lukács, Bakhtin, Auerbach, Jameson, Said, Sedgwick). Frequent short writing.

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.

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AMST W1010y Introduction to American Studies (Maura Spiegel) MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture and discussion. Inquiry into the values and cultural expressions of the people of the United States. Examines literature, history, cultural criticism, social theory, music, the visual arts, and other genres with an eye to understanding how Americans of different backgrounds, in different times, have understood and argued about the meaning and significance of American national identity. (Barnard students: This course has been approved to fulfill General Education Requirement.) For the English Major/Concentration: this course may count for the major/concentration and fulfills the following distriubtion requirements: the American geographical requirement.

AMST W3931y War and American Values (Andrew Delanco) T 4:10-6. In this seminar, we will consider the politics, experience, and aftermath of war—focusing on how Americans have debated the morality of war, justified or protested the act of  warmaking, and come to terms with the pain and sacrifice war brings. Beginning with the Revolutionary War, we will observe the emergence of heroes and villains and the post-war debates over what the nation owes its veterans. We will study how the stated aims of the great war of the nineteenth-century, the Civil War, shifted on both sides of the conflict, and, in the twentieth century, how two world wars and the Vietnam War shocked and transformed American society. Readings will include memoirs, fiction, and films. The seminar will include presentations by visiting faculty on such themes as war and civil liberties and “just war” theory, and we will have the opportunity to meet with practicing journalists and commentators from outside the university who are struggling with the difficult issues presented by America’s most recent war, in Iraq. For the English Major/Concentration: this course may count for the major/concentration and fulfills the following distriubtion requirements: the narrative/prose fiction genre requirement and the American geographical requirement.

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ENGL W4311x Discussion Sections for W4211x Milton:

1. Section 1: Tuesday 1-2 pm
2. Section 2: Thursday 1-2 pm
3. Section 3: Wednesday 1-2 pm
4. Section 4: Thursday 8-9 pm

Registration for Milton: You do not register directly for the Milton lecture (ENGL W4211x). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (ENGL W4311x). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself. (For more details, see Registration Instructions.)

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ENGL W3369x Discussion Sections for W3269x Brit Lit 1900-1950:

1. Section 1: Monday 8-9 pm
2. Section 2: Thursday 1-2 pm
3. Section 3: Tuesday 1-2 pm
4. Section 4: Wednesday 8-9 pm

Registration for Brit Lit 1900-1950: You do not register directly for the lecture (ENGL W3269x). Instead, you ONLY register for one of the discussion sections listed above (ENGL W3369x). The department will later register you officially for the lecture itself. (For more details, see Registration Instructions.)

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reading lists and requirements for selected courses


ENGL W3801x History of the Novel I (Richard Braverman)

Reading list (tentative and partial)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Henry Fielding, Shamela
John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art
William Godwin, Caleb Williams
Maria Edgeworth, Ennui
Jane Austen, Emma
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

ENGL W3257x British Novel 1800-1900 (Edward Mendelson)

Reading List   [Penguin editions in every case]
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872-73)

Requirements
This class can be of value to you only if you read the books with enough attention to remember details; to encourage attentive reading, there will be one or two unannounced ten-minute quizzes during the semester.

Assignments will be specified shortly before the term begins, but will definitely include two papers, some brief notes, and a two-hour final exam.

ENGL W3829x Studies in Narrative Fiction (Michael Rosenthal)

Texts
Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Conrad: The Secret Agent
Wells: Tono-Bungay
Forster: Howards End
Ford: The Good Soldier
Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Lawrence: The Fox
Greene: Brighton Rock
Isherwood: Berlin Stories
Hartley: The Go-Between
Ishiguro: Remains of the Day
McCabe: Butcher Boy
. . . and a couple of others, not yet determined

Requirements
Six or seven short (3-page) papers

ENGL W3272x American Realism (Ross Posnock)

Reading List
James, Washington Square
Chesnutt, The House Behind The Cedars
Chopin, The Awakening; "A Pair Of Silk Stockings"
Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
Stephen Crane, Maggie, The Monster, "The Open Boat"
Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Wharton, The House Of Mirth

Requirements
— Class presentation, 5-10 minutes
— Short paper, 5pp. typed, double spaced, Due October 6
— Take-Home Midterm: Due NOV 10 (handed out Nov. 5)
— Long paper, 8 pp. typed, double spaced, Due Dec 10 (topics to be handed out)

ENGL W3711x Lit of the Civil War & Reconstruction (Amanda Claybaugh)

Reading List
Charles Chestnutt, Conjure Tales
Charles Chestnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
John de Forest, Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
Henry James, The Bostonians
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Requirements:
— biweekly short papers (1-2 pages)
— final paper (5-7 pages)

ENGL W3714x Hawthorne & James (Amanda Claybaugh)

Reading List
Charles Chestnutt, Conjure Tales
Charles Chestnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
John de Forest, Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes
Henry James, The Bostonians
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Requirements:
— biweekly short papers (1-2 pages)
— final paper (5-7 pages)

ENGL W3271x U.S. Latino Literature (France Negrón-Muntaner)

Required Materials
Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos, The Latino Reader
Richard Rodríguez, The Hunger of Memory (1982)
Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (1967)
Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993)
Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (1992)
Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1992/1993)
Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)
Miguel Piñero, Short Eyes (1973)
Laura Esquivel, Like Water For Chocolate (1990)
Course Reader

ENTA W3785x Theatrical Language, Performance, and Sexuality (John Robinson-Appels)

Reading List (10 of the 15 listed, to be decided during the initial class meetings)

Schumacher (ed) Artaud on Theatre
deBeauvoir in Plays by Women: Ten
Sartre No Exit and Three Other Plays
Richards At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions
Kantor A Journey Through Other Spaces
Bernhard Histronics: Three Plays
Chekhov The Major Plays
Gorky The Lower Depths and Other Plays
Boal Games for Actors and Non-Actors
Soyinka Collected Plays I
Standley and Pratt (eds) Conversations with James Baldwin
Stein Last Operas and Plays
Harrington & Bellamy Positive/ Negative: Women of Color and HIV/AIDS: A Collection of Plays
Wittgenstein Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psyschology: The Inner and the Outer, Volume 2
Feld Sound and Sentiment

Recommended

Bergson Matter and Memory
Bergson An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Butler Subjects of Desire
Foucault History of Sexuality
Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception
Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Barba A Paper Canoe: Guide to Theatre Anthropology

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ENGL W3044y Discussion Sections for W3034y Chaucer (0 pts):

1. Section 1: Wednesday 8:10-9:10 pm
2. Section 2: Thursday 8:10-9:10 pm

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19th CENTURY
CLEN W3218y Short Fiction of the 19th & 20th Centuries (Karl Kroeber) MW 10:35-11:50. Lecture. See 20th Century for description.

ENGL W3933y Studies in the Novel: Jane Austen (Jenny Davidson) M 6:10-8. Seminar. Austen's cultural authority has never been higher: her novels have been adapted into highly successful films, her ideas are mobilized by everyone from neoconservative political philosophers to romance novelists, and one of her novels holds a spot on Columbia's Core Curriculum. We will read all of Austen's novels, considering cultural and historical contexts as well as the relationship between Austen's fiction and that of her contemporaries. Is Austen a conservative or a subversive writer? How does she respond to and transform the most pressing political issues of her day into comedies of manners? What do modern readers want or need from Austen's novels?

ENGL W3990y 19th-century Poetry (John Rosenberg) W 9-10:50. Seminar. Close readings of major poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins. Primary focus on the particularities of language, supplemented by study of historical context and recent criticism.

CLEN W3770y Literature and Cultural History: Literature of Lost Lands (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. Seminar. Readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the popular imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, developmentalism, and technology.

CLEN W4822y The 19th-century European Novel (Nicholas Dames) MW 4:10-5:25. 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, Balzac, Gogol, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.   Note: Undergraduates must also register for a discussion section; sections are listed under CLEN W4832y, below.

CLEN W4832y Discussion Sections for W4822y 19c European Novel (0 pts):

1. Section 1: Thursday 1-2
2. Section 2: Thursday 1-2
3. Section 3: Thursday 8:10-9:10 pm
4. Section 4: Friday 1-2
5. Section 5: Friday 10-11
6. Section 6: Friday 11-12

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CLEN W3228y Discussion Sections for W3208y 20c Comp Fiction (0 pts):

1. Section 1: Wednesday 8:10-9:10 pm
2. Section 2: Thursday 1-2
3. Section 3: Friday 2-3
4. Section 4: Friday 4-5
5. Section 5: Monday 1-2
6. Section 6: Wednesday 1-2

ENGL W3230y Joyce (Michael Seidel) MW 2:40-2:55. Lecture. The primary aim of this course is to read the works of James Joyce carefully and thoughtfully. The readings in Joyce are ample, including Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Exiles, Ulysses, and selected essays from Joyce's Critical Writings, with small forays into Finnegans Wake for the obsessed.

CLEN W3218y Short Fiction of the 19th & 20th Centuries (Karl Kroeber) MW 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Traces deep social and intellectual disturbances produced by the globalization of European culture from 1800 to the present day through critical readings of a variety of brief novels from every continent.

ENGL W3730y Seminar in Modern Texts: Woolf and Modernism (Judith Greenberg) R 6:10-8. Who's (afraid of) Virginia Woolf? Woolf assumed many roles: an innovator in language and narrative form, a pioneer in women's rights, a voice for gay and lesbian characters, a critic of war, and a victim of trauma and sexual abuse. She both shaped and responded to Modernism, challenging literary, historical and social conventions and exploring questions of time, the psyche, and the details of everyday life. Reading her fiction and nonfiction, this seminar will explore the impact of a variety of elements of the Modern era upon her writing-the intellectual culture, the two world wars, the traumas of shell-shock and sexual abuse, the changing city and developing consumer-based society, and the politics of women's rights and gender roles. Woolf remained engaged in advancing social and literary progress until the end, but questioned whether art can actually affect change. This seminar will engage with Woolf in her investigations. Works studied will likely include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, Between the Acts, and several essays and critical secondary sources.

CLEN W3740y Comparative Modern Texts: Trauma, Narrative, and Gender (Marianne Hirsch) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Trauma has become a pervasive (perhaps overused) explanatory structure for catastrophe and its psychic, social and literary after- effects. If trauma, as theorists claim, shatters language and the self, does gender matter? Through novels, memoirs, case studies, testimonies, visual and theoretical texts, this course will trace the crises of witnessing produced by war and genocide, rape and sexual abuse, racism and poverty in modern culture. Authors studied will include Freud, Woolf, Faulkner, Camus, Delbo, Salomon, Spiegelman, Cortazar, Ondaatje, O'Brien, Morrison, Jones, and Sebald.

CLEN W3792y Comparative Literature Seminar II: The Historical Novel After Modernism (David Damrosch) F 2-4. Modernism emphasized ruptures with the past and the uncertainty of historical knowledge; one consequence of this emphasis was a general turning away from the historical novel, seen as the most deluded form of 19th-century realism. Virginia Woolf's one novel set before her own lifetime, Orlando, is a comic treatise on the implausibility of any serious artistic attempt to write a historical novel, and even realists like Arnold Bennett usually stayed chronologically close to home. This situation began to change around the time of World War II, when a growing number of novelists schooled in modernism began to write serious historical fiction; this course will explore the motives for such writing and the strategies of research, structure, style, dialogue, and characterization that once again made the historical novel a compelling form, on the far side of the modernist critique of history. The course will proceed from modernist anti-historical fiction by Akutagawa, Woolf, and Borges, to wartime turns to historical fiction based in a closely researched antiquity (Broch, Yourcenar), to varieties of medievalism (Tolkien, Endo, and Eco), to recent returns to the 19th century (O'Brian, Morrison, Byatt, and Faber), ending with two examples of minor-literature counterhistories (the Serbia Pavic and the Tibetan postmodernist Norbu).

ENGL W3967y 20th-century Poetry: Poetry of the African Diaspora (Brent Edwards) T 2:10-4. This seminar will focus on twentieth-century poetry written by authors of African descent in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The readings will allow us to cover some of the most significant poetry written during the major black literary movements of the century, including the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and the Black Arts movement. In particular, the course will be designed around a selection of books of poetry by black writers, such as Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew, Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn, and Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah. We will thus spend a substantial amount of time reading each poet in depth, as well as discussing various strategies for constructing a book of poetry: thematic or chronological arrangements, extended formal structures (suites, series, or montages), historical poetry, attempts to imitate another medium (particularly black music) in writing, etc. Other authors covered may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Christopher Okigbo, Amiri Baraka, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Harryette Mullen.

ENGL W4501y 20th-century British Literature (Sarah Cole) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. 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.
        Written work for undergraduates consists of several short papers and a final exam. Note: Undergraduates must also register for a discussion section; sections are listed under ENGL W4511y, below.

ENGL W4511y Discussion Sections for W4501y 20c British Lit (0 pts):

1. Section 1: Monday 1-2
2. Section 2: Monday 8:10-9:10 pm
[ Note: More sections may be added as needed ]

CLEN W4200y Caribbean Diaspora Literature (Frances Negrón-Muntaner) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. 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.

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ENGL W4593y The American Novel 1789-1865 (Ezra Tawil) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. 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.

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AFAS C1001y Introduction To African-American Studies (Farah Griffin) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Examines the African-American experience since the Civil War. Introduces the basic methods of analysis and interpretation in the field. Topics include Jim Crow segregation; institutional racism; protest traditions; the modern civil rights movements; Black Power; and an analysis of the recent literature, culture, social organization, political behavior, and ideological debates within the black American community. Note: This course may be counted towards the English Major or Concentration; and it satisfies the American distribution requirement.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3269x British Literature 1900-1950 (Edward Mendelson) MW 9:10-10:25. Hardy, Wilde, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Auden, perhaps others.

ENGL W3829x Studies in Narrative Fiction (Michael Rosenthal) W 4:10-6. Admission by interview only. The modern British novel from Hardy to Ishiguro.

ENGL W3940x Modern Fiction: Finnegans Wake (Michael Seidel) M 2:10-4. This course is designed for students who have already studied Ulysses in some depth either in the lecture course offered at Columbia or in another course in which Ulysses was fully read and discussed. We will re-read Joyce's mock-epic and try to take the level of analysis up to seminar speed. And then we will put Finnegans Wake on the table and workshop it into relative degrees of submission. Part of the reading will incorporate key satellite texts for the Wake, but nothing in such bulk as to detract from the effort at hand. Imagine a strategic foray into Vico, Irish history, the Tristan legend. Imagine also a sequence of journal entries, class discussion, and, at term's end, a revision and expansion of selected journal entries that best reveal your efforts and insights as a reader.

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.

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SPECIAL TOPICS
ENGL W1015x Imaginative Writing (Paul Violi) R 6:30-9. This course is for students who enjoy writing short fiction and/or poetry and want to refine their style. They will be encouraged to read and write independently and to broaden their appreciation of traditional and experimental techniques. The emphasis will be on originality and inventiveness in both form and content. Beside discussion of a variety of authors, a good part of each class will be devoted to reviewing students' work.

ENGL W3215x Introduction to Poetry & Poetics (Michael Golston / Molly Murray) TR 6:10-7:25. This lecture course will offer a broad survey of principles of poetic composition, examining poetry in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Students will learn methodologies of the formal analysis of poetic structure, prosody, metrics and verse forms. It will also introduce students to theories of poetics, from the classical period through postmodernism, focusing on texts written by practicing poets.

CLEN W3390x Studies in Narrative: The Road Movie (Paul Strohm) R 4:10-6 (with screenings T 8-10 pm).

ENGL W3409x Form in Poetry (David Yerkes) R 6:10-8. Close reading of poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, and Cummings.

ENTA W3702x Drama, Theater, Theory (Julie Peters) M 4:10-6. What is theater? What is the dramatic text? How do stage languages communicate? This course will offer an introduction to theories of drama, theater, and the performance of everyday life, exploring such issues as the relation between theater and ritual, the status of the actor and spectator, the place of emotion on the stage, the function of dramatic genres (comedy, tragedy, farce, etc.), the nature of dramatic structure. We will read theoretical essays from Aristotle to contemporary (Derrida, Peter Brook, Richard Schechner) against the background of modern drama (Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, etc.).

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.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

AFAS C3936x Colloquium: Black Intellectuals (Farah Griffin) W 11-1. Prerequisites: completion of courses equal to at least 9 points in African-American Studies and the instructor's permission. Examines critical ideas and theories by African-American, Caribbean, and African scholars and writers. Reviews the impact of the black intellectual tradition in the social sciences and humanities. Guest scholars also discuss their research. Note: This course may be counted towards the English Major or Concentration; and it satisfies the American distribution requirement.

CLLT W4300x The Classical Tradition (Kathy Eden) TR 4:10-5:25. An introduction to the humantistic 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. Note: This course may be counted towards the English Major or Concentration; and it satisfies the pre-1800 and comparative distribution requirements. (Syllabus posted on Courseworks; Reading List posted below.)

JAZZ W3100x Jazz and American Culture: Gender, Race and Jazz (Sherrie Tucker) TR 4:10-5:25. This course is not a survey of styles and musicians, but an introduction to theories of gender and race (in conjunction with other social categories such as class, nation, and sexuality) as lenses for studying how people have used jazz to struggle over ideas that mattered to them. How have contests of meanings of gender and race played out in a variety of historically specific jazz arenas? How have these often intensely social and political improvisations over gender and race shaped our understandings of jazz history: who played it, who wrote about it, who listened to it, who danced to it, who policed it, who marketed it, who rebelled to it, who survived to it? Through intensive reading, listening, writing, and discussions, students will gain and sharpen skills in analyzing meanings of gender and race as they circulate in music and other forms of popular culture. While focused on jazz, the skills gained in this course will be transferable to other topics in cultural studies and popular culture studies. Students will also gain historical knowledge of jazz as a participatory social, cultural, economic, and political set of sounds and practices, including little-known histories of women jazz instrumentalists. Note: This course may not count towards the English Major or Concentration.

LATS W1601x Introduction To Latino Studies (Frances Negrón-Muntaner) MW 2:40-3:55. This course provides an introductory, interdisciplinary discussion of the major issues surrounding this nation's Latino population. The focus is on social scientific perspectives utilized by scholars in the field of Latino Studies. Major demographic, social, economic, and political trends are discussed. Key topics covered in the course include: the evolution of Latino identity and ethnicity; the main Latino sub-populations in the United States; the formation of Latino communities in the United States; Latino immigration; issues of race and ethnicity within the Latino population; socioeconomic status and labor force participation of Latinos; Latino social movements; and the participation of Latinos in U.S. civil society. Note: This course may be counted towards the English Major or Concentration; and it satisfies the American distribution requirement.

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MEDIEVAL

RENAISSANCE

18th CENTURY

19th CENTURY

20th CENTURY

AMERICAN

SPECIAL TOPICS