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Distribution Lists linked at UG Index sidebar |
GRADUATE COURSES—SPRING 2010 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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COURSES
IN
BRIEF SEMINARS LISTED IN BOLD MASTERS COURSES
MEDIEVAL
RENAISSANCE
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM
19th CENTURY
20th CENTURY
AMERICAN
THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS
 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS MEDIEVAL CLEN W4015y Textual Analysis: Vernacular Paleography (Chris Baswell) MW 9-10:50 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Lecture). This 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. ENGL G4092y Beowulf (Patricia Dailey) T 4:10-6 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Lecture). Prerequisite: One semester of Old English required, as this course demands a solid knowledge of Old English. This course will involve close reading in the original language of this very well known Anglo-Saxon epic. Each student will work through his or her own individual translations from Old English to Modern English over the course of the semester and will post them collectively on a site we will use for our collective revisions, comments, and questions. Preference given to those who already have a working knowledge of the language. 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, contemporary scholarship, and literary sources. Requirements involve a steady dose of translation each week, two presentations, as well as a final paper. CLEN G6028y Topics in medieval literature: Medieval Animals (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). The intellectual and political turbulence around the animal question in our own time provides new vantage points from which to consider how animals figure in medieval writing. This course organizes medieval readings around theoretical readings stemming from three major arenas of contemporary thought on animals. First, in philosophical critiques, the inadequacy of defining humanness as difference from animality is argued in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Adam’s naming of the animals, and in wider critiques of the compulsion to differentiate when conceiving human-animal relations. Second, environmental studies urge the pervasive importance of animals (their labor, skills, skins, and protein) in a wide range of technologies such as warmaking, bookmaking, hunting, and fashion. Third, philosophers take contending positions on ethical responsibility in the utilitarian tradition, in the differently oriented traditions of duties and contracts, and in recent emphasis on the neighbor: do humans have ethical relationships to other animals, or is the conjunction unthinkable? Medieval theologians align themselves with the latter position, while medieval vernacular writing sometimes anticipates contemporary thought in its awareness of animal suffering and its location of animals inside the ethical circle. Medieval literary texts may include beast fables, bestiaries, lives of St. Cuthbert and St. Francis, and romances of the Knight of the Lion and Knight of the Swan. Theoretical readings may include works of Augustine, Aquinas, Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Singer, and Eco. In conjunction, the readings will inform our discussion of how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. Course requirements include weekly postings on the seminar’s shared readings, a workshop presentation of a research project, and a research paper of about 25 pages. CLEN G6537y Embodiment: Ancient, Medieval, Postmodern (Patricia Dailey) M 4:10-6 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course explores how the body, the senses, interiority, and materiality are constructed in ancient and medieval literary, philosophical, and religious texts and how they are connected with hermeneutic and cognitive practices. Texts from antiquity include Aristotle, Paul, Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Theodore of Mopsuestia; texts from the Middle Ages include the Old English Body and Soul and The Ruin, Old English riddles, William of St. Thierry, Rudolf von Biberach, Guigo II, Marguerite d'Oingt, Hadewijch, Ida of Louvain, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. The course will also look at how medieval readings of embodiment dialogue with, are commesurate to, or differ from readings of materiality and embodiment in Hegel, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard, Negri, Agamben, and Butler. What kind of "radical" materialities do we find in the post-Marxist thinkers like Negri, or of Agamben? Given the tendency in the wave of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) to think of embodiment as a kind of radical interpentetration of world and body, what differences do we find in the revision to phenomenology evidenced by thinkers such as Lyotard, Derrida, and Nancy? How do the "materialities" in medieval mystical texts and their theological counterparts compare? RENAISSANCE ENGL W4101y English Literature of the 1590s (Alan Stewart) R 11-12:50 3 pts. (Lecture). This course examines the literature of the turbulent final years of the sixteenth century in England from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. The course draws on drama, verse and prose, often in the context of other historical documents. Topics will include debates about the succession; the perceived threats from Spain and Catholicism; economic hardships of the 1590s; England and immigration; the challenge posed by the earl of Essex; and concerns about Ireland and the Irish. Texts include plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Dekker; pamphlet literature by Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene; and poetry and prose by Edmund Spenser. ENGL G6128y Textual
Scholarship for Early Modern Literary Studies (Alan Stewart) W 11-12:50 3 pts. (Seminar). This course is
designed to introduce students to the important current critical
debates involved in studying the early modern period through the
history of the book, manuscript studies, textual bibliography,
paleography, and textual editing. Students will be expected to
undertake a good amount of reading in the theoretical literature on
these subjects. Seminars will combine discussion of this critical
literature with hands-on engagement with a series of case studies in
early modern text studies, featuring both printed book and manuscript
sources.
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM No courses offered this
semester
19th CENTURY ENGL W4404y Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 10:30-11:50 3 pts. (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 W4405y The Fin de Siècle: Sensation and Degeneration, 1880-1900 (Victoria Rosner) TR 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (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. CLEN W4822y The Novel in Europe II (Monica Cohen) TR 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). A survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels, this class will explore the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams's phrase "knowable communities," how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism? Readings include Balzac's Père Goriot, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Austen's Persuasion, Dickens' Oliver Twist, Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. ENGL G6402y Eliot and Trollope (Nicholas Dames) R 11-12:50 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Two major practitioners of the novel in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, presented with an eye to undoing, or rethinking, their presumed differences. The great novelist of the moral imagination versus the novelist of moral compromise and accommodation; the cosmopolitan novelist of ideas versus the nativist, even xenophobic English gentleman; the all-knowing, all-forgiving Mother versus the distant, genial Father; profundity versus prolixity: by thinking these myths relationally, even dialectically, we might achieve a better understanding of the horizon of the Novel in its most culturally dominant period in Britain. We will attend most strenuously to challenges of form faced by both writers, such as: beginnings and endings (or origins and purposes), sequentiality (and thus causality and consequence), scales of space and time, the balancing of dialogue and description, the evocation of consciousness in narrative, and generating ethical lessons out of contingent events. Selected major novels of both, read in alternation, along with important non-fiction (Trollope's Autobiography, numerous essays of Eliot's), pivotal critical pieces of recent years, and samples of Victorian and modern moral philosophy from J. S. Mill to Bernard Williams.
20th CENTURY ENTA W4724y Modern Drama: Theatricality on the God-forsaken Stage (Zander Brietzke) TR 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This course explores melodrama, metadrama, epic, and lyric drama as theatrical forms designed to fill the void of meaning created by a suddenly godless universe in the nineteenth century. Readings embrace a wide variety of theatrical styles, predominantly from the twentieth century, and include works from diverse playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Susan Glaspell, Sam Shepard, Brecht, Genet, Mamet, Beckett, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill. Assignments include two short papers (5-7 pages), question sets on individual plays, regular attendance and classroom participation, and a comprehensive final exam.ENGL G6506y Modernism and Imperial Imagination (Sarah Cole) T 2:10-4 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). What was the relationship between British modernist literature and the British Empire? Modernism has been construed in nearly oppositional terms-as deeply collusive with imperial thinking, or, alternatively, as hostile to empire. In this course, we will attempt to theorize this relationship in our own terms, reading a variety of writers and texts from the first half of the twentieth century. The bulk of our readings will be English, but we will also read material from Ireland, India and Africa. ENGL G6740y Early 20th Century British Drama (Edward Mendelson) T 4:10-6 3 pts. (Seminar). Modern British drama was the focus of every contentious literary and cultural question in the early twentieth century: coterie audience versus mass audience, visionary versus realist theory and practice, cultural and linguistic versus political and economic nationalism, eternal archetypal sexual roles versus evolving constructed gender identity, cyclical versus linear ideas of history and time, epic theater versus dramatic theater, among many other issues. Because the dramatists all knew and responded to each other, the issues and arguments tend to be more starkly and clearly defined than in other periods. This seminar will pursue these questions through plays by Wilde, Yeats, O'Casey, Shaw, Granville-Barker, Woolf, Eliot, Auden, Priestley, Beckett, Wesker. CLEN G6920y Perspectives on the Modern: Modernity, Terminable and Interminable (Stathis Gourgouris) R 2:10-4 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). Description pending. AMERICAN ENGL W4632y Introduction to Asian American Literature and Culture (Wen Jin) MW 6:10-7:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This course provides an introduction to Asian American literature since the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on the most recent few decades. What does it mean to be Asian or partly Asian in America? Are there historical experiences, cultural expressions, or political positions that give Asian Americans a collective identity, as it is often assumed to be the case? How does the knowledge of their experiences and perspectives enrich our understandings of American culture and U.S.-Asian relations? We will examine these questions through the lens of literature, prose narratives and poetry in particular. In other words, we will discuss a selected group of literary works so as to uncover the ways in which some the most interesting minds among Asian Americans comment on the meanings of race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as their relations to other social issues, in both American and transnational contexts. The fiction writers and poets we will read include Maxine Hong Kingston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Lawson Inada, Nam Le, Michael Ondaatje, Aravind Adiga, May-Lee Chai, and Ken Chen. The syllabus will also include a small number of historical and critical readings.ENGL G6613y American Studies: American Intellectuals (Ross Posnock) R 4:10-6 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course will explore a range of influential thinkers--Emerson to Sontag by way of Margaret Fuller, William James, Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Hannah Arendt, Robert Oppenheimer--all of whom address and enact the political responsibility of the intellectual--particularly what does it mean to think and judge,especially in times of crisis. ENGL G6631y American Higher Education: History and Prospects (Andrew Delbanco) M 6:10-8 3 pts. Prerequisites: permission of the instructors. (Seminar). This is a course in American intellectual and cultural history focused on issues in higher education. The aim of the course is to deepen historical understanding of the institutions to which today's graduate students plan to devote their professional lives as faculty members and academic citizens. Topics include the origins of the American college and university in the colonial period, the rise of the research university in the 19th century, the invention and evolution of the "Humanities," the principles and practice of admission and financial aid since World War II, the risks and opportunities of today's "on-line" entrepreneurial university, the "pre-history" of the so-called culture wars, and the effects of the current financial crisis on higher education. From time to time, visiting speakers will join us for discussion of these and other issues. Interested students should email Professor Delbanco at ad19@columbia.edu for more information. THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS CLEN
G6550y Trauma, Terror, and Performance (Marianne Hirsch)
W
4:10-6:30 3 pts.
Prerequisites:
Permission of the instructors. (Seminar). This course explores the
interconnections between trauma, terror, memory, and performance
through three major 20th and 21st c. events - the Holocaust,
Argentina's 'Dirty War,' and the United States's post 9/11 "war on
terror " - and the theoretical questions they raise. Do they each have
their own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual
and collective trauma through a trans-local, cosmopolitan lens? Topics
include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the
individual and collective nature of trauma; the effects of gender, race
and power on trauma and memory; embodied practices such as testimony
and witnessing, their use in literature, museums, pedagogy, and
performance, and their archivization; the relation of torture and
truth; the social role of sites of memory and memorialization
(Auschwitz, Club Atlético, Ground Zero, Guantanamo, etc.);
theaters of justice such as trials, tribunals and truth commissions;
performances of protest and resistance. This course draws from classic
and recent readings at the juncture of trauma, memory, and performance
studies. To build on the paradigms suggested by the Holocaust,
Argentina's 'Dirty War,' and the U.S. after 9/11, students will be
encouraged to extend the topics explored in class to other sites.
Please note that this is a consortium course which will alternate
meetings at Columbia and NYU. Students need to figure travel time into
their plans. We plan to meet on Wednesdays from 4 -6:30. During the
semester, several evening talks and seminars will be organized in
conjunction with the course, both at Columbia and NYU. Application Instructions: To apply for the seminar, please send a paragraph stating your interest and preparation to Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by November 15. CLEN G6566y Theory, Religion and Culture (Gauri Viswanathan) W 4:10-6 3 pts. (Seminar). This course will explore various theoretical approaches to religion in modernity and include readings on topics such as: religious subjectivity and the politics of belief; the place of imagination in the evolution of religions; theories of secularism; religion, postcolonialism, and postmodernism; world religions, heterodoxy, and alternative spiritual movements. CLEN G6706y Media Studies (Katherine Biers) W 2:10-4 3 pts. (Seminar). Can theater be described as a medium? What is the relationship between theater and mechanically reproducible media? What is, or should be, the role of theater in an age of mass culture? European and American plays and films from the twentieth century, including works by Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Susan Glaspell, Jerzy Grotowski, D.W. Griffith, Clifford Odets, and The Wooster Group. Theoretical readings by Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks, Jürgen Habermas, Siefried Kracauer, Richard Sennett, and Samuel Weber. Article-length seminar paper and presentation required. Students will also be required to submit drafts of their final papers to workshop with the group during the final weeks of class. ENTA G6725y
Performance
Theory (William Worthen) T
2:10-4 3
pts. (Seminar). "Performance" is a term widely--and
surprisingly--invoked in the humanities today, especially considering
how recently "performance" was derogated as a kind of unconstrained,
wild semiology in many traditional humanities fields. In many ways, of
course, conventional approaches to dramatic literature and theatre
history have long considered performance--the dialectical relationship
between dramatic texts and stage production, the history of theatre
institutions and performance practices, theoretical accounts of the
form and purpose of drama as a genre of writing. Yet such approaches to
performance were circumscribed by their view of the priority of
literary meanings, the sense that the authority of performance is
fundamentally citational, sustained by its evocation of "the text."
Performance theory since the 1950s has attempted to resituate the
cultural work of performance, away from a sense that performance
replays a script to a sense of performance--nontheatrical as well as
theatrical performance--as a distinct, constitutive form of cultural
production. This course will survey a range of approaches to the
problematic of performance, as they are practiced now in the
overlapping disciplines of theatre, literary, and performance studies.
The course will both introduce major theoretical models--performative
discourse, restored behavior, liminoid genres, surrogation,
textuality--of performance, and provide the opportunity to engage with
the analysis of performances. It will also pay some attention to the
development of disciplinary critique in the period, and its
consequences for the contemporary mapping of "the field(s)."
Requirements: Each student will write one article-length paper, and
lead one discussion of a written theoretical text or of a performance
piece.
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