M.A. COURSES

ENGL G5001x Masters Seminar. 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the department. This course (required for all first-year graduate students in the English Department) introduces students to scholarly methodologies in the study of literature and culture. The Masters Seminar operates in tandem with the Masters Colloquium [ENGL G5005], and requires short writing assignments over the course of the semester and extensive in-class participation.

Section 1: Approaches to Literary Theory and Practice (Maura Spiegel) W 6:10-8 We will read a range of foundational and influential current works of literary and social theory, with emphasis on theories of affect and emotion.  In works by Bakhtin, Barthes, Butler, Cavarero, Freud, Girard, Goffman, Huizinga, Ngai, Ricoeur, Sedgwick, Tomkins, White, Winnicott, Wittgenstein, as well as selected works of fiction and film, we will examine theories of shame (stigma) disgust, envy, paranoia, grief, complacency, compassion, excitement, etc., as they operate on the individual and national stage.  Ideas about authenticity, memory, subjecthood and relationality, will also come under scrutiny, as they pertain to narrative representation and literary practice.

Section 3: Evolution of the Literary Field (Gauri Viswanathan) W 4:10-6 This course offers an introduction to ways of thinking about the discipline of English in particular and disciplinary formations more broadly. We will focus on both the historical developments in the field, including the role of colonialism in the rise of English studies, and theoretical issues of canon formation, representations of gender, class, and race, religion and secularism, popular literature and heterodoxy, literary subjectivity, the problem of humanism, to name a few. This course does not aim to be comprehensive but rather seeks to introduce you to key arguments in the field, represented by several exemplary critical texts as well as selected articles.

MEDIEVAL

ENGL W4091x Introduction to Old English Language and Literature (Michael Matto) MW 6:10-7:25 3 pts. (Lecture). An introduction to the language and literature of England from the 8th to the 11th centuries. This class provides a general historical and literary introduction to the period as you learn the language of Anglo-Saxon England. 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 Anglo-Saxon folk psychologies of mind and embodiment as they are revealed in the language. We will look at how each work contextualizes (or recontextualizes) relationships between the body and soul, the soul and the mind, and the individual and society. Students will be expected to do assignments for each meeting. Requirements: The course will involve periodic quizzes, a mid-term paper, a final exam, and an oral presentation (to be turned in).

ENGL G6002x Middle English Texts: England's Antiquities. (Christopher Baswell) T 4:10-6 3 pts. (Seminar). This course will explore medieval English versions of the antique past, as well as their broader setting in ancient and continental medieval stories of disaster and refoundation. While the bulk of texts we read will be in Middle English, at each stage students can explore instead (or in addition) relevant works in the other languages of medieval Britain: Latin, French, or the Celtic tongues.

RENAISSANCE

CLEN G4121x The Renaissance in Europe: Sonnet Sequences (Anne Prescott) MW 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (Lecture). An exploration of religious and erotic lyric sequences in England. After a look at their precedents in Ovid's Amores, Petrarch, Renaissance readings of the psalms, and samples (in English) of such French poets as DuBellay, Ronsard, and Labé, and the Italian Stampa, we will focus on the Sidneys (Philip, Mary, and Robert), Daniel, Drayton, Spenser, Lodge, and Shakespeare with a glance at Anne Lok and a quick move forward to Mary Wroth. Matters to be considered include gender and the Petrarchan tradition, number symbolism, the translation of empire, imitatio, the relation of Eros to politics and subjectivity, crossovers between religious and amatory discourse, and the very concept of poetic sequence. Syllabus.

ENGL G6135x Renaissance Drama: The Making of Early Modern Tragedy. (Jean Howard) W 11-12:50 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This seminar will consider what the early modern stage understood tragedy to be and the various "inventions" that fueled its power and popularity as a theatrical genre. We will examine plays ranging from Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc to John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, including several by Shakespeare.

18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM

ENGL G4307x Richardson's Clarissa. (Jenny Davidson) M 6:10-8 4pts. (Seminar). Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa took eighteenth-century readers by storm, and has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the century. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel Pamela and a few of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through Clarissa in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading;topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. etc. Note: This seminar is a joint undergraduate-graduate class. I will admit 8 undergraduates and a waiting list of 4 (if needed), reserving 6-8 spots for graduate students who may be interested; we will work out the final details of enrollment at the first seminar meeting in the fall semester.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Jenny Davidson (jmd204@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Clarissa." In your message. include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking this course.

ENGL W4402x. Romantic Poetry (Erik Gray) TR 10:35-11:50 3 pts. (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. Past Syllabus.

ENGL W4801x History of the English Novel I. (Nicole Horejsi) MW 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). At the end of the eighteenth century, Clara Reeve argued, in her literary-critical dialog, The Progress of Romance (1785), that the “English” novel had a diverse and polyglot history, one that extended, geographically, as far as the East, and, temporally, to the ancient Heliodoran romance.  Inspired by Reeve, as well as more recent scholars of the form, this course will explore the relationship between gender and genre by considering one major strand of the novel’s complex lineage, the “romance,” a “feminine” genre much-maligned by eighteenth-century critics who were eager to legitimate their own authorship, and anxious to shape the cultural discourse surrounding literary production. 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 the likes of Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, and 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 complicated, often ambivalent satirical backlash against romance, the seeming conflict between romance and realism, and the cultural factors that helped to shape the novel in its various incarnations, from Haywood to Austen.  In addition to the texts already mentioned, readings will include (but are not necessarily limited to) Haywood’s Love in Excess, Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk.  Undergraduates: There will be a take-home midterm, in-class final exam, and two papers (1 three-page assignment explicating a specific passage and a longer 6- to 7-page final paper) as well as sporadic quizzes.

19th CENTURY

ENGL G6835x The Industrial Novel. (James Adams) M 11-12:50 3 pts. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). This course offers intensive study of "the industrial novel," a body of mid-Victorian fiction responding to the economic volatility and class conflict that accompanied the rise of industrial production. In little more than a decade, treatments of this broad concern by a number of major novelists converged in a set of distinctive formal strategies, yet the relatively brief prominence of the form underscores an unusually direct connection with contemporary political anxieties. As the industrial novel presses against the increasingly domestic preoccupations of mid-Victorian fiction, it throws those preoccupations into sharp relief, and more broadly illuminates the construction of Victorian domesticity itself. We'll be especially interested in the intersections of gender and class, the interplay of socio-economic history and narrative form, and the political dimensions of the mid-Victorian novel. Finally, the topic poses large questions about genre and literary history: does "the industrial novel" denote a genre, and why apply that tag to works that rarely depict industrial labor? Why not the "social problem" novel, the "domestic novel in Northern dress," or even "the novel of insurrection"? Major authors include Disraeli, Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, Dickens, and George Eliot; we'll also gather in some of the political economy of John Stuart Mill and Marx, as well as the social reporting of Engels and others.

20th CENTURY

CLEN W4200x Caribbean Diaspora Literature. (Frances Negron) TR 10:35-11:50  3 pts. (Lecture). Texts by writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Dominica, and Jamaica. The impact of migration and transculturation on the texts, the articulation of new cultural subjects, the fostering of dialogue largely suppressed in the writers' home countries. Possible authors: Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, V.S. Naipaul, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, Oscar Hijuelos. 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. Past Syllabus.

ENGL W4502x British Literature 1950 to the present. (Maura Spiegel) TR 4:10-5:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This course will trace English fiction (and a few films) from the post-WWII era, with emphasis on close reading, exploring formal innovation as ethical strategy, the status of liberal humanism, epistemology and historical representation, the evolution of the Upstairs/Downstairs story, UK-US relations, and generational takes on bad boys and prigs. Writers will include: Graham Greene, John Osborne, Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, V.S. Naipaul, W.G. Sebald, and films by Carol Reed, Michael Apted, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Frears, and Powell and Pressburger. Syllabus.

CLEN G6531x Issues in Contemporary Criticism: Intellectuals. (Bruce Robbins) R 2:10-4 3 pts. (Seminar). The category of "the intellectual," traditionally dated back to Emile Zola's "J'accuse!" in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair, has inspired some of the past century's most innovative forms of writing, action, and writing that makes a stronger than usual claim to be action. This course will examine theorists of the intellectual- Benda, Mannheim, Gramsci, Foucault, Bourdieu- as well as notable intellectuals, the social landscapes against which they emerged, and the shaping of their careers. Writers to be discussed will include Orwell, Sartre, Sontag, Chomsky, and Naomi Klein, among others. Recommended introductory reading: Stefan Collini, Absent Minds and/or Marcie Frank, How To Be an Intellectual in the Age of Television. Requirements: short (1 to 2 page) weekly journal entries, oral presentations, and one medium-sized (12-15 page) final paper. Syllabus.

AMERICAN

ENGL W4612x Jazz and American Culture: Gender, Race and Jazz. (Robert O'Meally) TR 10:35-11:50 3 pts. 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.

ENGL G6622x Contemporary American Fiction. (Rachel Adams) T 2:10-4 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Beyond historical coincidence, is there a set of broad thematic or formal concerns shared by contemporary fiction? How are we to think and
write about body of literature that belongs to an as-yet undefined cultural moment? This course will consider the problems and potential of studying "the contemporary" as well as covering a diverse range of prose fiction by North American authors from the early 1990s to the present. For our purposes, the contemporary period extends from the end of the Cold War through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Some authors, such as Philip Roth, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison are already subjects of extensive critical debate; others, such as Allison Bechdel, Junot Diaz, and Colson Whitehead have not yet received much scholarly attention. In addition to discussing the work of some of these authors, we will ask about the consequences of such critical excess or oversight on the experience of reading and interpretation. Weekly reading assignments will pair a work of fiction with one or more articles intended to locate each work in the context of critical debates.

THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

CLEN W4560x Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory. (Bruce Robbins) TR 10:35-11:50 3 pts. (Lecture). In chapter 4 of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, a story is told about a confrontation between a Lord (Herr) and a Bondsman (Knecht). The story conveys how consciousness is born. This story, subsequently better known as the confrontation between Master and Slave, has been appropriated and revised again and again in figures like Marx and Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Fanon, Freud and Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Schmitt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler. The premise of this course is that one can understand much of which is (and isn't) most significant and interesting in contemporary cultural theory by coming to an understanding Hegel's argument, and tracing the paths by which thinkers revise and return to it as well as some of the arguments around it. This course is intended for both graduates and undergraduates. There are no prerequisites, but the material is strenuous, and students will clearly have an easier time if they start out with some idea of what the thinkers above are doing and why. Helpful preparatory readings might include Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy or Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Requirements: For undergraduates: two short papers (6-8 pages) and a final. For graduate students, either two short papers or one longer paper (12-15 pages), no final. Syllabus.

ENGL W4810x Aspects of the Novel: On Style (Jenny Davidson) MW 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (Lecture). Our topic for the semester will be the inner workings of sentences and paragraphs as they function in the novel. We will probably read only four novels in their entirety (most likely Austen's Emma, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Henry James' The Golden Bowl and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty); we will also read a handful of essays and short stories, but the rest of the texts we'll work with will for the most part be brief extracts that we read closely together in class as we pursue a series of questions about voice, person, etc. with the help of theorists including Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum and D. A. Miller. Short assignments will include creative as well as critical options. The class is directed primarily towards undergraduates, but is appropriate for graduate students in GSAS and the Writing Division of the School of the Arts.

ENGL W4901x History of the English Language. (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25 3 pts. (Lecture). Lecture, but with lots of class discussion. This course applies knowledge of the English language and its history to issues of both law and literature. There are two required books, both paperbacks: (1) Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin), and (2) The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker (Harper). There will be about half a dozen short written assignments: hands-on research efforts.

CLEN G4995x Special Topics in Modern Literature: Reading Lacan. (Maire Jaanus) T 2:10-4 4 pts. (Seminar) Reading selections from the late Lacan: Seminars XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, XVIII Of a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance, XX Encore: On Feminine Sexuality XXI The Non-dupes Err/The Names of the Father together with selected novels and short stories. Emphasis on Lacan’s elaboration of the four discourses, jouissance, the formulas of sexuation, the sinthome, and the clinic of the real. Consideration of the relevance of his thought to literature and culture, to capitalism, politics, and neuroscience.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor M. Jaanus (mj35@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Reading Lacan." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL G6499x Poetics (Erik Gray) W 11-12:50 3 pts. (Seminar). This course will examine both contemporary theories of poetic form (primarily scansion) and the history of poetic theory, concentrating on classical (Aristotle, Horace, Longinus), Renaissance (Sidney, Boileau), and Romantic (Wordsworth, Shelley, Mill) treatises. It is intended both for those who seek an introduction to the theory and practice of poetic analysis and for those with a more specialized interest.

ENGL G8490x Advanced Research Seminar: Publishing a Scholarly Article. (Sharon Marcus) R 6:10-8 3 pts. (Seminar). What is the most important thing a graduate student can do to prepare for the job market in the years before applying for jobs? Publish an article. Other things matter, of course, such as writing an excellent dissertation and producing great job materials, but we already have many ways to help you do that. This seminar will be in workshop format and will guide you through the process of article-writing. We will discuss how to turn a seminar paper (or idea) into an article, how to determine where to send the article, and demystify the process of submitting work and responding to editorial comments. Participants commit to submitting an article to a scholarly journal by the end of the semester. The seminar is open to all graduate students in the English Ph.D. program, but priority will be given to students who have passed their qualifying exams and turned in a dissertation prospectus.

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