MEDIEVAL

ENGL G6002y  Troilus, Gawain and the Court Culture (Paul Strohm) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. Questions to be investigated in this seminar include: the extent to which Chaucer and the Gawain poet may be considered ‘court’ poets; current theories and our own new inferences about the audiences of these poems; the requirements of conduct in a ‘courtly’ milieu; the ‘scopic’ court and paranoia; ideas of gender, station, and duty as ‘court-produced.’  We will do some reading on the Ricardian court (with at least brief looks at Chaucer’s ‘Complaint unto Pity’ and House of Fame), as well court culture more generally, but these two fabulous poems will be, and provide, our main material.  Please contact the instructor, by email [ps2143] prior to enrollment, with a short description of your relevant academic experience and reason for wishing to enroll in the course.

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EARLY MODERN

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.

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.

CLEN G6128y  The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Kathy Eden) W 11-12:50. Seminar. Taking as its point of departure the recovery by Renaissance humanists of key ancient texts, including letter collections, rhetorical manuals and school exercises, this seminar will explore early modern reading and writing practices for a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy. Writers featured will range from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian to Petrarch, Erasmus and Montaigne.

18th - 19TH CENTURY

ENGL W4302y  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 Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and 1984. Syllabus.

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.

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.

ENGL W4603y  The 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 Recon-struction. Authors to include: John W. De Forest, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton.

ENGL G6326y The Oriental Tale  (Nicole Horejsi)  R 11-12:50.  Seminar. At the beginning of the 18th century, the French translator and Orientalist Antoine Galland brought the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to Europe. Soon translated into English, the Nights continued to enthrall audiences throughout the century, competing even with the epics of Homer and Vergil: indeed, Horace Walpole exhorted a female correspondent, “read Sindbad the Sailor’s voyages, and you will be sick of Aeneas’s.”  This seminar will examine the powerful vogue for Oriental tales in 18th-century British literature, beginning with the Arabian Nights and tracing its influence especially through drama (Dryden, Manley, Inchbald) and the developing novel (Haywood, Johnson, Sheridan, Beckford), on to the birth of “Romantic” Orientalism marked by the publication of Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir.  What does the Orient—or rather Orients—come to symbolize and evoke for writers and audiences in the long 18th century?  How might we begin to explain its popularity and appeal?  Questions of gender and alterity will also take center-stage as we consider how British writers used the Orient to engage with various cultural “others” in the popular imagination.

ENGL G6871y Scholarly Editing: Texts, Contexts, and Paratexts of David Copperfield (Eileen Gillooly) R 4:10-6.  Seminar. This course is conceived as part literary criticism, part literary history, part editorial practicum.  Although we will focus closely on mid-nineteenth-century England, the editorial skills that we'll develop will be of use to students working in other centuries.  We will begin by constructing a working literary-intellectual-cultural history of England (focusing on London) in the years 1847-1850 in order to contextualize our production of a scholarly edition of David Copperfield (for Norton), complete with bibliographies, scholarly apparatus, and ancillary materials.  We'll read Dickens biographies, his letters and journalism, contemporary newspapers (e.g., The Times, The Morning Chronicle), journals (e.g., the Illustrated London News, Household Words), contemporary histories (e.g., Macauley), Hansard's, and other things we know to have been part of Dickens's own memorable reading in those years, as well as the full range of essays on and reviews of David Copperfield since its publication.

20th CENTURY

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.

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 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. Reading list.

ENTA G4600y Theatre and Theory: Theatre of the Body (John Robinson-Appels) R 6:10-8.  Lecture. Theatre of the body and its expression framed by 20th century language philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty). Gesture in Artaud and Grotowski, feminist playwrights Stein, De Beauvoir, Cixous, and Churchill, gay playwrights (and AIDS plays) of the last few decades, as well as Pinter, Boal, Soyinka, Baldwin, tanz-theater, movement theatre, abstract dance. Reading list.

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 G6851y  Virginia Woolf  (Edward Mendelson) Mon 11-12:50.  Seminar. COURSE CANCELED.

CLEN G6300y Black Radicalism and the Archive (Brent Edwards) Wed 2:10-4.  Seminar. This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of radical knowledge production among African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read key works of African, Caribbean, and African American cultural and political movements, with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and the ways that the exigencies of anticolonialism, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism have provoked methodological innovation in interdisciplinary work.
      We will focus especially on the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive; to this end, we will not only read current scholarship on the issue, but also take advantage of recent acquisitions of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, including the papers of C.L.R. James, Hubert Harrison, and Amiri Baraka. Participants will be expected to pursue original archival research in their work for the seminar.
      Readings may include work W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and Sylvia Wynter; and secondary scholarship by Cedric Robinson, David Scott, Robert Hill, Nikhil Pal Singh, Stuart Hall, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, and Joy James.

ENGL G6623y  20th-century Epic Poems: Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson  (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8. Seminar. Four major 20th century poetic productions with epic pretensions: The Cantos of Ezra Pound; Louis Zukofsky’s “A”; William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. This is a reading intensive course, designed to give students the opportunity to gain a broad familiarity with these texts. We will read each poem in its entirety; students will maintain an ongoing reading journal. 

ENGL G6502y Contemporary Black Writers: The Poetics of Dispossession (Saidiya Hartman) W 11-12:50.  This course examines the relation between dispossession and literary form by focusing on the novels and non-fiction of contemporary black writers.   In exploring the varieties of dispossession, which include enslavement, colonialism, abjection and exile, the class will attend to issues of injury and identity, violence and narrative fragmentation, silence and the historical archive, and trauma and repetition.

THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W4917y  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. 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.

CLEN G6910y  Theater and Philosophy (Martin Puchner) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course focuses on philosophical reflections on the theater, as well as dramatic dialogues, the theater of ideas, and theatricality in philosophical works. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Shaw, Burke, Stoppard, Murdoch, Badiou.

OF RELATED INTEREST

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.

WMST G4000y Genealogies of Feminism: Politics in the Wake of the Human (Saidiya Hartman and Neferti Tadiar) T 11-12:50. This seminar is directed toward students with previous work in feminist scholarship. 3pts. This course examines the formation of the human in the discourses of modernity.  The discourse of man, according to Aimé Césaire, has generated a great heap of corpses and established a hierarchy of life in which the well-being of Man is based on the sacrifice of his subordinates and the creation of disposable persons.   By looking at political and juridical conceptions of the human in documents like the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Dred Scott vs. Sandford, the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and The Congress of Racial Equality’s We Charge Genocide, we will trace the discourse of the human from the Age of Revolution to anti-colonial movements to feminist struggles to establish women’s rights as human rights in international law.  The course will also examine contemporary theories of the human and the post-human, conceptions of life and sociality beyond the discourse of man, as well as the practices of freedom intent upon re-describing the human and engendering new terms of order.  Lastly, we will consider the ways in which anti-racist, anti-colonial, and feminist movements have tried to unsettle the discourse of Man while remaining yoked by it. 
        The course reading will focus on issues of slavery, coloniality, and disposable life in interrogating the question of the human and attending to the excluded figures and forms of abject existence considered external to or outside of the embrace of Man. 
        Required Texts: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Veena Das, Life and Words, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human, George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother, Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human?, Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, Achille Mbembe, The Postcolony, Fred Moten, In the Break, Yambo Ologuem, Bound to Violence, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
        In addition to these books we will read essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Sellers, Bruno Latour, Joy James, Sharon Holland, Michel Foucault, Samera Esmeir, Colin Joan Dayan, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Judith Butler, Alan Badiou, and Theodor Adorno. This graduate seminar fulfills one of the requirements of the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies.

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