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Distribution Lists linked at UG Index sidebar |
GRADUATE COURSES—FALL 2005 | ||||
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M.A. COURSES ENGL G5001x Masters Seminarsection 1: The Critic in Culture. David Damrosch (Monday 4:10-6). This seminar gives an introduction to the scholarly study of literature. It will offer readings in a range of contemporary theories and methods of literary study, looking closely at critics and theorists as writers: how do they approach and analyze their objects of study? How do they position themselves in relation to their material and to their readers? What are the relations between specifically literary studies and more general cultural criticism? Syllabus. section 2: Text, Image, Film, Performance, Event. Julie Peters (Monday 2:10-4). This seminar investigates how we interpret: texts, images, films, performances, and events. Drama will stand at the center of the course, as both normative and bastard literary genre, against which such categories as "literature," "performance," "ritual," "film" (etc.) may be measured. A series of dramatic and quasi-dramatic texts and films will serve as the background for readings in classical aesthetics (discussions of aesthetic medium, narrative genre, character, reception, and the ethical function of art) and in contemporary theory (the meaning of the avant-garde, the nature of material culture, the performance of sexuality, globalism and medium, etc). Students will present papers at a "mini-conference" at the end of the semester. Primarily geared toward MA students, but open to post-MA students by permission of the instructor. ENGL G5005x Masters Colloquium will take place on alternate Mondays from 12:30-2. MEDIEVAL CLEN G4093x Introduction to Old Norse (Richard Sacks) F 1:30-4. Lecture. An introduction to Old Norse language and literature, with the primary focus on learning to read Old Norse literature in the original. A few texts from a range of literary genres will also be read in translation. Some previous exposure to Old English or another Germanic language is useful though not required. Syllabus.CLEN G6045x Medieval Romance (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50. Seminar.
From its appearance in the later twelfth century through the end
of the Middle Ages, romance was the dominant long narrative genre
in western vernaculars. As such, it was an important imaginative
space for developing and reconsidering ideologies of identity, justice,
conquest, sexuality, faith, history, and more. This course will
only begin to introduce the genre's capacious reach. We will place
English romances in their Anglo-Norman and continental French context,
and we will focus on just a few of their many preoccupations. First
unit: courtship, homoeroticism, gender definition; second unit:
chivalric identity, honor, performance of identity; third unit:
nation, race, and faith. Romances likely to be on the syllabus:
Eneas, Tristan, Erec and Enide, Knight of
the Cart, Romance of the Rose, Romance of Horn,
King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blancheflor,
Squire's Tale, Morte Darthur. Course requirements:
two 10-12 page papers involving primary and secondary research;
class discussions; one or two presentations in class. RENAISSANCE CLEN W4122x The Renaissance in Europe: Figuring the Erotic (Anne Prescott) MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture. How did Renaissance writers imagine Eros? What obstacles does he meet? How does he relate to other kinds of love? To loss and to wit? Readings include Plato, Ovid, and Petrarch for background, then Stampa, Ariosto, Rabelais, Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Rabelais, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne. ENGL W4211x Milton (David Kastan) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Milton's writing has usually been more admired than enjoyed, recognized as towering monuments to "dead ideas," but Tom Paulin has recently called Milton "the greatest English poet and the most dedicated servant of English liberty." Through a study of the major poetry and prose of John Milton, focusing especially on Paradise Lost, the course considers Milton in terms of the literary and historical forces that affected his work and continue to affect his reputation. ENGL G6135x Tudor Drama: Dramatizing the Body Politic (Jean Howard & Paul Strohm) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course will consider the rich dramatic tradition of the eight or nine decades predating the opening of the commercial theaters in London in the 1570s. Its particular focus will be on the ways in which this theater represents the social polity or 'body politic,' and on the generic forms and representational strategies it employed. This course will consistently refuse subdivision of its materials into periodic categories of 'medieval' and 'renaissance.' Although viewing its texts historically, it will view their temporalities as inherently mixed, consisting of residual and emergent, as well as period-specific, materials. It will begin with a deliberate chronological interruption, starting 'in the middle' with Skelton's early Tudor Magnyfycence. It will then work backward (to medieval mysteries and moralities) and forward (concluding with two Shakespeare histories and the anonymous Elizabethan Jack Straw). Further details and schedule of classes. ENGL G6201x Seventeenth-century Texts: John Donne (Molly Murray)
W 6:10-8. Seminar. Perhaps no figure in the early modern literary
canon has inspired such wide-ranging critical responses as John
Donne from adulation to disgust to (current) near-neglect.
This seminar will consider the volatile critical fortunes of Donne
and the group of lyric poets sometimes designated “metaphysical.”
Our main concern, however, will be with problems of identity and
identification in Donne’s writing itself; through careful readings
of the poetry and a significant portion of the prose (sermons, essays,
letters), we will explore the ways in which Donne both encourages
and defies our attempts to fix his devotional, political, erotic,
and aesthetic coordinates. [Students are encouraged to buy any scholarly
edition of the poems with unmodernized spelling—the Everyman
edited by Patrides has good notes—and read as much as possible
over the summer.] 18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM The following seminar is offered at NYU and open to Columbia students through the Graduate Consortium. To register, students should see Craig Knobles in 301 Philosophy Hall.G41.3951 Genres of Enlightenment (Clifford Siskin & Mary Poovey) T 4:55-6:55. As literary historians, we can answer the infamous question "What Was Enlightenment?" in a material as well as philosophical way. If, after all, the trace that Enlightenment has left is the knowledge it produced, then how was it produced? With what tools? Using which procedures? With Britain as our focus, we will argue that the primary technology of Enlightenment was writing; the tools were the forms that writing assumed in the 18th century; the procedures were the characteristic ways those forms mixed. We'll range across the literary genres, tracing the interrelations of the lyric and experiment, facts and fictions, the novel and information, bank notes and travel narratives, biography and the encyclopedia. 19th CENTURY ENGL G6401x Nineteenth-century Texts: Oscar Wilde (Sharon Marcus) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Readings in Oscar Wilde's poetry, plays, fiction, prose, and autobiographical texts. We will focus on current critical debates about Wilde's provocative role in the history of sexuality and his interrogation of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.CLEN G6565x Occultism, Postcoloniality, Modernism (Gauri Viswanathan)
W 4:10-6. Seminar. This course probes the shaping of the modern
subject through such "occult" devices as mesmerism, ventriloquism,
hypnotism, telepathy, disembodiment, telekinesis, and clairvoyance.
We will examine the ways that occultism constituted a crucial enactment
of modernity's contradictions and provided postcoloniality with
the tools for critical definitions of selfhood and society. Several
questions raised by the course are: How does one account for occultism's
persistence in modernity? Is occultism a form of residual irrationalism,
a mode of thought superseded by Enlightenment rationality? Or is
it a constitutive element of modernity itself, reflecting its contradictions
and ambiguities? What is the relationship between occultism and
detection, anthropology, philology, science, Darwinian evolution,
psychoanalysis, capitalism, and technology? How does occultism become
a tool for both relating to the past and imagining future worlds,
especially for the decolonizing imagination? In what ways, if at
all, does occultism signal the emergence of a postcolonial moment
in literature? Readings include Freud, Adorno, Weber, Benjamin,
Blavatsky, Besant, Owen, Latour, Luckhurst, Connor, among others.
Note: exceptionally qualified undergraduates may be admitted to
the seminar; those interested should email Prof. Viswanathan by
August 15, explaining their interest in—and qualifications
for—the course. 20th CENTURY ENGL G6505x Modern Texts (Edward Mendelson) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, W. H. AudenCLEN G6820x The African Novel (Joseph Slaughter) W 6:10-8. Seminar.
What happens to the nationalism and individualism of the novel in
the African context? This course provides a formalist, socio-historical,
and theoretical overview of the "rise of the African novel."
We will consider the generic development in relation to colonialism,
post-colonialism and recent theories of the globalization of literary
forms and as a distinctly "African" phenomenon. AMERICAN ENGL W4503x Race, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Poetic Form (Michael Golston) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets to include Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Stein, H. D., Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, Zukofsky-read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.ENGL W4670x American Film Genres (Maura Spiegel) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Some critics contend that all Hollywood film is either melodrama or morality play, no matter what its claims to the contrary; others see it as purely wish-fulfillment fantasy. This course will examine a range of genres in Hollywood film, while also scrutinizing and questioning the formation and usefulness of genre distinctions. Our orientation will be formal as well as social and historical, as we explore codes and conventions of generic illusion and verisimilitude, the rise and fall of genres (the Western, the "weepie"), increasing self-reflexiveness (in noir, musicals, romantic comedy), genre and acting style, genre-bending and postmodernity, mis en scène. Why are certain genres linked to political parties, as are specific styles of heroism? Genres will include: the Western, War Movie, Romantic Comedy, Horror, Action, Gangster, Melodrama, Social Conscience, Musicals and "Women's films." Weekly screenings will be held MW 8-10 pm. ENGL G6601x Nineteenth-century American Texts: Contesting Emerson
(Ross Posnock) W 4:10-6. Seminar. We will construct and examine
the philosophical, aesthetic, political and cultural conversation
that animates the 19th-century literary response to Emerson in texts
by Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James.
This conversation will engage such matters as the intellectual in
the public sphere, the heritage of antinomianism, the response to
slavery, the emergence of American cosmopolitanism, the paradoxes
of individualism, the literary representation of what Emerson calls
the soul's becoming. THEORY CLEN G4563x Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) M 4:10-6. Lecture. Lacan's Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation with Hamlet, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis with Antigone; Seminar VIII: Transference with Plato's Symposium, Seminar X: Anxiety and Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality with selected novels. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan's thought to literature and culture and on his shift from desire and language to jouissance, love, and poetry.SPECIAL TOPICS CLEN G4011x Introduction to Scholarly Editing (G. T. Tanselle) T 6:10-8. An introduction of the theory and practice of preparing scholarly editions of both manuscript and printed materials.CLEN W4521x The World of Banned Books (Jonathan Abel) TR 9:10-10:25. Prodding the underbelly of the corpus of world literature, this course examines the politics of banned literature in various guises across several centuries and continents. Texts have been classified as taboo, seized, and burned and their producers fined, jailed, tortured, and killed throughout history and under a multitude of political regimes. Incorporating in our discussion a diverse range of systems of censorship in Europe, the US, Japan, and China, we will uncover differences amongst these modes of repression while uncovering sometimes surprising connections between church and monarchy, fascism and democracy. Syllabus and requirements. ENGL G8490x Advanced Research Seminar (James Shaprio) M 6-7:30. Limited to those in English and Comparative Literature completing their degrees and preparing for the MLA job search. |
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