NOTE ABOUT SEMINAR APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS
For all graduate seminars, unless otherwise noted, students should email the instructor giving year of study and a short paragraph expressing interest in the course. Admit lists will be posted by Friday, April 25 this year in response to student requests to facilitate course selection in the second round of registration, which will be from Tuesday, August 26 to Thursday, August 28.

COURSE  DESCRIPTIONS

MASTERS SEMINARS

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

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

MEDIEVAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

back to top

EARLY MODERN

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

back to top

18th - 19TH CENTURY

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

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

ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 2:40-3:55.  Lecture.  An introduction to the works of the great poets of the Romantic period (1789-1824), especially Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron Shelley, and Keats. In addition to closely considering their poems, we will also read prose works that complement and illuminate the poetry, including essays by Wordsworth, Shelley, and William Hazlitt, and letters by Keats. Syllabus.
 
CLEN  W4822x The 19th-century European Novel (Nicholas Dames) MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture.  The European novel in the era of its cultural dominance. Key concerns: the modern metropolis (London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois narrative (the parvenu, the adulterer, the adolescent, the consumer) and bourgeois consciousness (nostalgia, ressentiment, sentimentalism, ennui); subjectivity and its relation to class tactics, labor, money, and social upheaval; the impact of journalism, science, economics.  Works by Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

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

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

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

back to top

20th CENTURY

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

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

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

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

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

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

THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

OF RELATED INTEREST

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

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

back to top