M.A. COURSES

•  Section 1. Sarah Cole. Thursday 2:10-4
•  Section 2. Ezra Tawil. Thursday 4:10-6
•  Section 3. Julie Peters. Thursday 6:10-8

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

MEDIEVAL

ENGL G4092x Beowulf (Patricia Dailey) T 4:10-6. Limited enrollment. This course will involve close reading in the original language of the entirety of this challenging and very well known Anglo-Saxon epic poem. Each student will work through his or her own individual translations from Old English to Modern English over the course of the semseter. Preference given to those who already have a working knowledge of the language or have already taken a class on Old English. Our primary text is Klaeber's edition of Beowulf. We will also compare various translations (Liuzza, Heany, Donaldson) with our own. Secondary materials will include The Postmodern Beowulf, as well as other materials to familiarize us with historical context, possible literary sources, contemporary and past scholarship (on the poem, the Cotton Vittelius manuscript, theories of orality and epic, and the epic hero). Essential books: Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, D C Heath & Co. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (University of Toronto Press). The Postmodern Beowulf (optional), eds. Joy, Ramsey, and Gilchrist (West Virginia University Press).

ENGL G6110x Medieval-Renaissance English Texts: "Conscience" (Paul Strohm) T 2:10-4. Seminar. This seminar, divided equally between medieval and early modern texts, will treat conscience in its permutations from the earli er fourteenth to the late sixteenth century. Much of substance-and interpretative value-is to be learned from considering its varied meanings, ranging from something closer to modern consciousness to something akin to our modern 'gnawing' thing. Added complexity derives from a crucial reorientation of conscience in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, with its point of origin moving from outside to inside, from external authority to a more personal and even idiosyncratic locus within the potentially dissenting self. We will read a number of texts in common, and seminar members will be asked to select among additional texts or special cases for more detailed consideration culminating in a seminar paper. Texts 'in common' will include Piers Plowman B-Text (to be read in the Schmidt edition), excerpted letters and papers of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, More's Dialogue against Tribulation, and, in conclusion, that repository of all conscience's possible meanings: Hamlet. Application procedure: Those interested in enrolling should email Professor Strohm (ps2143@columbia.edu) with a short description of their current status, relevant coursework, and the nature of their interest in the course, between now and 1 September. He'll reply about eligibility for admission and other matters. Consortium enrollments, as well as Columbia enrollments, are encouraged.

RENAISSANCE

ENGL W4101x Literature of the 1590s (Alan Stewart) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. This lecture course explores English literature of the 1590s paying particular attention to the social, political and economic worlds that produced it, and with which it deals. The period from the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) to the death of Queen Elizabeth (1603) was a particularly fraught time in English history, with fears of a second Spanish invasion attempt, concern about the succession of the throne, widespread civil unrest, plague and bad harvests all contributing to the country's mood. At the same time, it saw the writing and publication of some of English literature's greatest works. We'll be reading works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene, among others, alongside a variety of non-literary documents.

ENGL W4211x 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.

ENGL G4205x Religious Difference & the English Revolution (Achsah Guibbory) W 4:10-6. Limited enrollment. The course will explore the intertwining of religion, politics, and literature during the seventeenth century, focusing on the English Revolution (1640-1660). What was the role of religion, and the nature of religious differences in post-Reformation England? Beginning with brief selections from Herbert's The Temple but focusing on writings by religio-political radicals and self-proclaimed prophets such as Gerrard Winstanley and Anna Trapnel but especially Milton (e.g., probably "Areopagitica," "Paradise Regained"), we will consider the proliferation of religious divisions and sectarian options, anti-Catholicism, the question of Jewish readmission, and the relation between religion and "nation."

CLEN G6128x Trade & Traffic in the Early Modern World (Alan Stewart) W 6:10-8. Seminar. This course will interrogate early modern England's sense of itself, focusing on the hopes and fears provoked by the multifarious trade and traffic between the English and other peoples, both inside and beyond the country's borders, raising questions of economics, ethnicity, religion and nationality. Materials will draw on drama by Robert Wilson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, William Haughton and various 'Turk' plays; economic treatises, acts and proclamations, and travel narratives; in relation to evolving current critical work.

18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM

ENGL G6629x The Idea of Culture (Jenny Davidson) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Raymond Williams called it "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language," and the term culture appears in a bewildering range of contemporary contexts (cultural studies, the culture wars, culture versus nature, the cultured classes, etc.). This class will examine the idea of culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain through the lens of more recent writing about the meanings of culture. One intellectual context for our investigation is the history of cultural studies in the academy; another, the new dominance in the United States of an evolutionary psychology (indebted to sociobiology) that invokes a biological human nature to account for and vindicate human difference, particularly between the sexes.

19th CENTURY

ENGL W4405x Victorian Theatre (Jill Muller) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Until the emergence of the self-consciously literary dramas of Wilde and Shaw, few Victorian plays achieved the canonical status of high art. Until the arrival of these two Irish innovators, so the familiar narrative goes, the Victorian stage was given over first to crude melodrama and then to the bourgeois self-affirmations of the well-made play. Yet the plays and genres so airily dismissed by Modernist critics had enormous popular appeal. Perhaps that appeal has something to do with Nina Auerbach's contention, in Private Theatricals, that the essence of Victorian theatricality was a visual display of the self. For Victorian theatre-goers, visual codes of gesture, costume, even facial expression, were as important as words, as evidenced by the popularity of melodrama and pantomime. This course will approach Victorian plays not only as texts but as performances, examining stagecraft and techniques of acting, the relationship between actor and audience, and the connection between the theatre and the world outside. Readings will include melodrama, comedy, farce and problem plays by playwrights such as Boucicault, Robertson, Bulwer Lytton, G.H. Lewes, Wilkie Collins, Jones, and Pinero, as well as an operetta by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. In addition we will explore accounts of music hall performances and Dickens's wildly popular dramatic readings of his excerpts from his novels.

ENGL G6404x Victorian Genres (Sharon Marcus) T 2:10-4. Seminar. This course will explore the concept of genre and provide an intensive survey of three major Victorian genres: poetry, the novel, and non-fiction prose. We will ask what distinguishes each genre, how each genre borrows from others, and what, if anything, defines "Victorian literature" as a category that cuts across generic differences. Authors will include Tennyson, R. Browning, M. Arnold, D.G. Rossetti, C. Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde.

20th CENTURY

CLEN W4540x Postmodern Texts and Theory: Introduction to Cosmpolitanism (Wen Jin) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. For the past fifteen years or so, the idea of cosmopolitanism has fascinated, as well as troubled, literary and cultural critics as a updated version of ancient beliefs in human beings' ability to free themselves from their own cultural limitations. How is cosmopolitanism defined now and what does literature have to do with it? We will explore, in particular, three facets of cosmopolitanism, including conceptions of non-conventional forms of sociality and identity, theories of suprastate political institutions, and religious thought that projects a certain kind of universalism. We will read theories about these topics along with selected literary texts from the 20th- and 21st-century that embody cosmopolitanism not only on a thematic level, but through narrative form also. Primary readings: Kerri Sakamoto (One Hundred Million Hearts), Monique Truong (The Book of Salt), Meena Alexander (Manhattan Music), Chang-Rae Lee (A Gesture Life), Lin Yutang (Between Tears and Laughter), Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost), Amitav Ghosh (The Calcutta Chromosome), and Don DeLillo (Mao II). Theoretical readings: on average, 25 pages per week, more in some weeks.

ENGL W4501x Embattled Modernism (Georgette Fleischer) TR 2:40-3:55 Class cancelled.

CLEN G4625x Poetry of the African Diaspora (Brent Edwards) M 4:10-6. Limited enrollment. This course 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, Aimé Césaire'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. We will use the readings to consider approaches to the theorization of a diasporic poetics, as well as to discuss the key issues including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique at stake in the tradition. Other authors covered may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Nicolás Guillén, Christopher Okigbo, Amiri Baraka, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen.

CLEN G6568x Double Identities and Border Crossings (David Damrosch and Orhan Pamuk) T 4:10-6. Seminar. Across the course of the past century, novelists have often probed the limits of many sorts of borders - between cultures, nations, regions, classes, genders, fiction and reality. This course will explore these issues in a range of novels whose protagonists take on double identities as they cross various borders. The readings will consist of three novels by Orhan Pamuk and a range of related earlier and contemporary works, together with selected critical and theoretical essays. NOTE: The seminar will be conducted principally by David Damrosch; Orhan Pamuk will come to the three sessions on his novels and perhaps one or two more as his schedule permits. Tentative syllabus. Application procedure: Prof. Damrosch asks that students interested in taking this seminar email him (at dnd2@columbia.edu) by May 11; in their message, they should indicate their department and year of study, say something about their background, such as relevant courses they have taken, and include a brief statement about their reasons for wanting to take this seminar.

CLEN G6566x Transnational Culture (Bruce Robbins) M 11-12:50. An introduction to cultural theories and literary texts that assert, test, qualify, or respond to the double proposition that 1) in an era of so-called "globalization," culture has now expanded beyond the scale of the nation-state, and 2) it can no longer be made proper sense of within a critical vocabulary that assumes the centrality of the nation. Reference will be made to interdisciplinary topics like the rhetoric of the anti-sweatshop movement, humanitarian intervention, genocide, and "world literature." Authors to be discussed include George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Immanuel Wallerstein, Noam Chomsky, Arjun Appadurai, Mahmood Mamdani, W.G. Sebald, Pascale Casanova, and Michael Ondaatje. Requirements: Students will have a choice between 2 short papers (6-8 pages) and one long paper (12-16 pages).

AMERICAN

ENGL W4670x American Film Genres (Maura Spiegel) MW 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 scene,. 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." Two Screenings per week.

ENGL G6608x The James Family (Ross Posnock) W 2:10-4. Seminar. "He is a native of the James family and has no other country" said William James of his younger brother Henry. The remark captures the unique power of the family—crackpot philosopher father, self-abnegating mother, two genius sons, two non-genius sons, one neurasthenic near genius daughter—to create its own world. In this "queer educative air" as Henry called it, the only imperative was to "convert!" The command at once nurtured and injured all of the children. We will enter this laboratory of peripatetic, cosmopolitan but supremely American intellectual life and turn the Jameses into a lens through which to view a number of major developments in 19th c literary, cultural history. We will read Alice James's diary, several Henry James novels—Washington square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors—and his cultural criticism (The American Scene), William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, and a Pluralistic Universe, plus collateral biographical, critical materials. Application procedure: Please email Prof. Posnock (rp2045@columbia.edu) by June 1, briefly stating the basis of your interest in the course and what relevant previous courses you have taken.

THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

CLEN G6531x Gramsci (Gayatri Spivak) M 2:10-4. Seminar. Students interested in applying for admission to this seminar should please respond to the questions below in an email message to Prof. Spivak (at gcspivak@gmail.com) by 5 pm on Sunday, September 2:

— What year of graduate work are you in?
— Have you taken any Gramsci before? (If yes, describe briefly the course level and coverage.)
— Have you taken classes in Literary, Philosophical, or Political theory?
— Do you have any Italian? (If yes, describe the level and years of institutional instruction if applicable.)

CLEN G6510x Latina Feminist Theory (Frances Negrón-Muntaner) W 11-12:50. Seminar. This course will focus on a body of works, written and visual, on the question of how Latinas are produced as specifically sexualized, gendered, and racialized subjects in and across the United States. Writers and theorists likely to be studied include Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Julia de Burgos, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Donna Haraway, Patricia Gherovici, Walter Mignolo, and Cherríe Moraga. The work of filmmakers Lourdes Portillo and Ana María García, and artists Frida Kahlo and Ana Mendieta will also be included.

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