ENGL W3261x  English Literature to 1500 (Susan Crane) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture.  A survey of early British writing in its cultural contexts. The course begins with Anglo-Saxon poetry, traces the changes brought to Britain by the Norman Conquest, focuses on the literature of aristocratic courts in the later Middle Ages, and ends as Caxton sets up London’s first printing press. We will read Anglo-Saxon works in translation and most Middle English works in their original language. The syllabus will include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Beasts, Saint Margaret, and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte Darthur.

ENGL W3920x  Medieval English Texts: Troilus and Gawain (Paul Strohm) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This seminar is designed for third and fourth-year undergraduate students  who have had experience reading Middle English literature in the original, such as a full semester Chaucer survey, or the first half of an English literature survey, or its equivalent.  The main motive is, quite simply, a ‘slow’ (but yet, I hope, enlivened) reading of these two medieval masterpieces in their original language.  The more particular emphasis, around which we will organize our discussions, will be each text’s description of the collision between its protagonist’s idealism and a more cynical or experienced ‘world.’  This emphasis will lead, in turn, to more particular discussions of medieval chivalric ideals, gender issues, the vexed relations between idealism and naivete, the question of medieval tragedy and the tragic view.  Five short papers; one ‘seminar paper’ on a subject to be agreed with the instructor.  Please contact the instructor by email [ps2143] prior to enrolling in this course (or arrange to see him in 604 philosophy on 2-4 Tuesday afternoon, to discuss your previous medieval experience and to forecast your preparedness for this course.

CLEN W4021x   European Literature in the Middle Ages: 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, destabilized, 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 of literary works and criticism 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 conque st. 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 we may consider are: 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.

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ENGL W3335x  Shakespeare (Julie Crawford) MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture.  Beginning with an introduction to Shakespeare’s career, focusing on the period after 1599, this class will cover Shakespeare’s later plays, including Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. While lectures will focus on close readings of the plays, they will also consider the society and culture in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, the theatres in which they were performed, and the publication and editorial practices by which they have come down to us. 

ENGL W3263x  English Literature 1600-1660 (Molly Murray) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Poetry and prose from the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, through the civil wars and  Cromwellian commonwealth, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  We will consider the linked revolutions in English politics, religion, science, philosophy, and social and erotic relations, and will ask how these cultural transformations influenced literary form.  Authors will include James I, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, as well as various Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and perhaps a Muggletonian or two. 

ENGL W3930x  Topics in Gender, Sexuality and Literature: Early Modern Women, Premodern Sexuality (Julie Crawford) W 2:10-4.  Seminar.  This class will focus on texts and theories about women and female sexuality in the period before the invention of the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” Primary texts will include Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly’s Gallatea, William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and Katherine Phillips. In addition, we will be reading a wide range of non-fiction, critical, and theoretical texts on the history of the body and reproduction, the history of sexuality, and the nature of women’s roles and relationships in premodern European and English literature and culture.

ENGL W3973x  Genre Theory: Sex and the City: Gender/Genre Negotiations in Early Modern City Comedy (Maiken Derno) T 11-12:50. Seminar. CANCELLED

CLEN W4121x   The Renaissance in Europe I  (Kathy Eden) MW 4:10-5:25.  Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.

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ENGL W3950x  Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century  (Jenny Davidson) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Six plays by Shakespeare, alongside their bizarre and often highly revealing reimaginings by eighteenth-century British theatrical adapters, novelists and so forth.  Plays will probably include Lear, Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale and at least one history play.  We’ll work in a number of different modes: at times, we’ll be delving very deeply into Shakespeare’s own language and dramatic choices, but we’ll also explore questions of literature in relation to more broadly cultural trends, the nature and usefulness of popular theatrical adaptations and updatings, the cultural work performed by Shakespeare editions in eighteenth-century Britain and so forth.  No prerequisites, but students with a practical interest in theater are strongly encour-aged to enroll.  Admission will be done by application the previous semester, as for most departmental undergraduate seminars. Syllabus.

ENGL W3706x  Poetry, Progress, and Religious Sentiment (Marianne Giordani) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. Beginning with the Restoration, a careful study of neoclassical and romantic poems with regard to religious ideas that came to bear in developing the modern criteria for poetry. Close attention to rhetorical and prosodic elements; to characteristic genres, such as the hybridized epic and georgic in the long philosophical poem, as well as epistle, epitaph, ode, psalm, hymn, and song, and, later, the sonnet and “conversational” poem. With a view to rhetorical devices, we shall look at important prose genres, such as the sermon, letter, and essay; and also at modes of satire, throughout, in which untenable social and economic disparities are targeted, as are the vices associated with them. Upon addressing in context various religious and anti-religious dispositions alike (deism, fideism, evangelism, enthusiasm, and atheism), we shall heed the intersection of spirituality, science, and natural description, and its expanded cosmology of social and spatio-temporal relations, which would draw variously from neo-Platonic metaphysics, biblical mythopoiesis, and the physiology of passion. Seventeenth-century influences (Bacon, Milton, Bunyan) are treated. Authors include Dennis, Watts, Pope, Parnell, Thomson, Akenside, Gray, Johnson, Young, Blake, Wesley, Collins, Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, others. Syllabus.

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 eighteenth-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 eighteenth century.  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 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 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 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. Syllabus.
 
ENGL G4305x   Swift and Burke (Jenny Davidson) M 11-12:50.  Seminar. An additional required discussion section for undergraduates on W 11-11:50.  Major works of two of eighteenth-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.

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ENGL W3962x  Austen, Bronte, Eliot (Nicholas Dames) W 2:10-4. Seminar. A detailed consideration of major novels by the three central female novelists of Regency and Victorian Britain.  Our focus: the female protagonist’s relation to manners, conjugal and familial norms, property; the grammars of interior experience and social negotiation; the impact of cognate fields, including landscape aesthetics, theories of perception and cognition, evolutionary science.  Supplementary reading to include major critical assessments from the authors' times to our own.  

ENGL W3960x  Nineteenth-Century Thrillers (Monica Cohen) R 11-12:50.  Seminar. How is nineteenth-century realism shaped by the forces of sensation? How does the melodramatic imagination probe --even construct-- the parameters of narrative realism? What kind of kinship is there between the great nineteenth-century monster stories and the social-problem novel? Looking at representative samples from the gothic novels of the Romantic period, the mid-century novels of female incarceration, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860's, and fin-de-siècle psychological thrillers, we will explore how we might make sense of sensation. Readings include: Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Austen's Northanger Abbey, C. Brontë's Villette, E. Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Collins' The Woman in White, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Du Maurier's Trilby, Stoker's Dracula, James' The Turn of the Screw.

ENGLW3707x   Nineteenth-Century Texts: Dickens (Jill Muller) T 11-12:50. Seminar. The novels of Charles Dickens undermine all facile distinctions between high art and popular culture.  Dickens was the most widely read novelist in Victorian England.  His obituary notice in the Spectator described him as “the greatest humorist England ever produced,” and Trollope, a close contemporary, mockingly dubbed him “Mr. Popular Sentiment.”  Yet many twentieth-century critics have focused on Dickens’s scathing social satire and the brooding sense of evil that pervades his work, comparing his moral vision with that of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.  This class will examine the social and cultural context of Dickens’s writings, and the rhetoric of representative novels including Oliver Twist, Hard Times, The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, to test the strengths and limitations of Dickens’s social criticism and to illuminate the unique ways in which he made use of the forms of popular entertainment—laughter, horror, and romance—to create fables that resonated through all levels of Victorian society. 

CLEN  W4822x  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. Syllabus.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3230x  James Joyce (Philip Kitcher) MW 2:40-3:55.  Lecture. This course will focus on Joyce’s prose fiction. In the first weeks, we shall read and discuss Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The greater part of the semester will be devoted to close reading of Ulysses. At the end, as time permits, we shall explore some selections from Finnegans Wake (I anticipate spending four or five classes on parts of Joyce’s final masterpiece). Although I suspect that most students will already have read Portrait, no previous knowledge of Joyce’s writing is required.

ENGL W3219x  Modern Poetry (Stephen Massimilla) MW 1:10-2:25.  Lecture. In this comparative literature course, we will explore the works of major twentieth-century poets (both Anglophone and non-English-speaking), with attention to significant intellectual, political, psychological and spiritual dimensions, as reflected in language and form. We will consider, for instance, Whitman's Transcendentalism, Hardy's determinism, Mallarme's symbolism, Tagore's approach to Shaktism and Hindu philosophy, Yeats's engagement with Platonism and the occult, Lawrence's vitalism, Eliot's and Auden's very different approaches to Christianity and other matters, and Stevens's claims for poetry as a new religion. We will reflect on Romantic, Hellenic, Hebraic, and far Eastern traditions in a new context, one informed by trends such as urbanization and major upheavals, such as the two World Wars, the Irish Troubles, and the Russian Revolution. We will also examine the later projects of poets from Neruda to Milosz, all of whom offer “postmodern” and/or postcolonial responses to the formal and ideological legacies of the Anglophone modernists. Authors will likely include: Hardy, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Lawrence, H.D., Pound, Eliot, the War poets, Williams, Stevens, Auden, as well as Tagore (India), Mallarme and Rimbaud (France), Rilke (Austria), Pasternak and Mayakovsky (Russia), Lorca (Spain), Neruda (Chile), Vallejo (Peru), Montale (Italy), Walcott (the Caribbean), Heaney (Ireland), Milosz (Poland), and possibly others.

CLEN W3370x  Literatures of the Black Atlantic (Brent Edwards)  TR 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. This course will consider the ways the literatures of the African diaspora have imagined the interconnections and points of correspondence between Africa and the New World. We will focus especially on writing that imagines the Atlantic as a vibrant and treacherous space of dispossession, encounter, and transformation, whether in relation to the European slave trade or to colonialism and globalization in the twentieth century. Readings may include some of the following: theoretical and historical scholarship by C.L.R. James, Paul Gilroy, Peter Linebaugh, and Sylvia Wynter; and autobiography, fiction, and poetry by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amos Tutuola, Maryse Condé, David Dabydeen, Charles Johnson, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, M. N. Philip. Requirements: a take-home midterm and a final paper. Syllabus.

CLEN W3220x   Science Fiction (Lejla Kucukalic) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. This course will offer a historical survey of canonical science fiction novels and short stories from the turn of the century, through the “pulp fiction” period of the 1920s-1940s, the Golden Age era of the 1950s, the New Wave works of the 1960s and the1970s, the Cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, to the current writings at the turn of the 21st century (probably best described as a hybrid between mainstream and science fiction literature). Science fiction has a broad reach in popular culture and is often considered a field that includes “Star Trek” as well as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In this course, we will focus on literary science fiction, not the broader media output rooted in the genre. The authors to be studied include: H. G. Wells, A. E. Van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, James Blish, Thomas Disch, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The course will feature a comparison between Russian and American science fiction and an overview of theoretical approaches. Students will apply these critical approaches to the novels and stories read throughout the semester.

ENGL W3966x  Gertrude Stein (Eric Haralson) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course will explore the life and work of the challenging and rewarding American author Gertrude Stein, while also taking up writings by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Dashiell Hammett, and others who crossed paths (and sometime crossed swords) with this major figure of modernism. Readings will include Stein’s early feminist story sequence Three Lives (which Fitzgerald called “utterly real . .  . a punctuation mark in literary history”); her playful evocation of domestic and erotic life, Tender Buttons (“prose poetry stretching the gamut of the imagination,” in the view of many of today’s writers); excerpts from her novel of immigrant family experience, The Making of Americans (which Hemingway deemed “one of the very greatest books I’ve ever read”); the charming tribute to her adoptive “hometown” Paris France; and her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), about American soldiers contemplating their return to the postwar United States. We will pay particular attention to Stein’s popular masterpiece The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, at once a forceful meditation on the emergence of modern art (Picasso, Matisse, and company), an engaging narrative experiment, and a shrewd commentary on the gender and sexual politics of her period. Our discussions will branch out to encompass the modernist avant-garde in painting, sculpture, music, and photography. The seminar will conclude with contemporary works that enter into dialogue with Stein’s writings, including poetry by Harryette Mullen (Recyclopedia) and Lyn Hejinian (Happily) and Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt, which re-imagines Stein and Toklas’s Parisian salon from the perspective of the couple’s Vietnamese servant.  Course requirements will include short response papers for each reading and a final research paper on a reading of your choice. We may also undertake a creative/analytical exercise modeled on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ("the story of my significant other that's all about me") and/or a group project such as the creation of a hypertext edition of Tender Buttons.

ENGL W3730x  Modern Texts: Literature, Culture, and War in the 20th Century (Sarah Cole) M 2:10-4.  Seminar. This is a course about war and culture, with a focus on twentieth-century England and America. Our primary concern is to consider how literary forms have developed to make sense of the twentieth century’s mass wars, how wars are remembered and forgotten, and how war has been adapted to the dominant aesthetic and cultural movements of the century. The bulk of our readings will center on the First World War, primarily from the British perspective, and on the Vietnam War, primarily from the American perspective, but we will also read material from the Second World War and from more recent conflicts such as the first Persian Gulf War and the current war in Iraq. We will read both combatant and civilian writers, and our readings will be drawn from a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, film, cultural studies, and theory. The course is organized thematically rather than chronologically. Each week we will explore a broad topic, including: conventions of leadership; the body in pain; the language(s) of protest; masculinity; commemoration and memory; the problem of mental disease (shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder); reporting, propaganda, and the press; experimental forms for representing war.  Syllabus.

CLEN W3740x   Coetzee and Ishiguro (Martin Puchner) T 2:10-4.  Seminar.  J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, contemporary masters of the novel in English, struggle with the most pressing problems of form, including the return of realism, the relation between novels and ideas, meta-fiction. At the same time, they examine central ethical challenges, such as the rights of animals, cloning, and the representation of war. The seminar combines minute literary analysis with a discussion of how literary style confronts the contemporary world.

CLEN W3935x   Narrative Texts and Theories: Multiculturalism and Narrative Form (Wen Jin) R 4:10-6. Seminar. What can narrative fiction teach us about how we should compare the different forms of multiculturalism that prevail in different nations?  How does the language of fiction embody and question the logic of analogy?  How does fiction do this by employing such figurative devices as metaphor and allegory and by translating between different cultures and histories?  These are the central questions we will explore in this course.  We will read recent English-language fiction that engages one or more of a cluster of interconnected geographical locations, including England, the West Indies, South Africa, Asia, as well as the United States.  The syllabus will include Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Michelle Cliff, Meena Alexander, J. M. Coetzee, and Alex Kuo, among others.  Discussion will focus on how these authors explore histories of racial and ethnic formation as well as the workings of personal and collective memory across multiple local or national contexts.  We will also look closely at selected readings in theories of narrative form, critical multiculturalism, and contemporary globalization. Syllabus.

CLEN W3791x   Aestheticism: Theory and Practice (Kevin Lamb) T 11-12:50. Seminar.  Oscar Wilde once remarked, “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” This course examines aestheticism as at once a theory of art, a literary movement, and a way of life. We will discuss, among other topics, the relationship of aestheticism to the so-called autonomy of the work of art, the motto of art for art’s sake, theories of beauty, cosmopolitanism, decadence, dandyism, perfectionism, perversion, and sexual and formal experimentation. Readings will combine fiction and poetry with works of criticism and philosophy, including several works that cross genres. Likely authors include: Stéphane Mallarmé, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Ronald Firbank, and Djuna Barnes. French and German texts may be read in the original or in English translation. Syllabus.

ENTA W4723x Modern Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov (Zander Brietzke) MW 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Intense reading of major works from the masters of modern drama. Course will focus on stylistic innovations, thematic concerns, and theatrical possibilities set forth by the three playwrights. Particular emphasis will be given to place of each on the contemporary stage and relevance to the 21st-century repertory. Syllabus (posted at Courseworks).

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 twentieth 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.

CLEN W4540x   Postmodernist Texts and Theory: 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.” Syllabus.

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ENGL W3283x  Post-1945 American Literature (Ross Posnock) TR 6:10-7:25.  Lecture. The innovative energy of post-war fiction and poetry-by Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison-will be read in the context of American modernity's post-war triumphalism. Under this proud exterior, these writers express the "bad conscience" of the American dream, exposing its contradictions while making vivid its seductions.

ENGL W3963x  American Poetry, Poe to Williams (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8.  Seminar. This course will focus mainly on poets whose innovative writing transformed American poetry: Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, etc. Readings will also include poems by their American and European contemporaries. Students will write two papers, short weekly responses to assigned readings, as well as imitations (required but not graded) of any two poets on the syllabus.

ENGL W3969x  Twentieth-century American Texts: American Modernism (Rachel Adams) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. This course focuses on American modernism, a phenomenon we will approach less as a movement or a set of specific aesthetic qualities than as a rather disparate series of response to the historical, technological, intellectual, and political conditions of modernity in the United States.  Spanning the period from the turn of the century to the 1950s, our reading will help us to consider the relationship between key events (U.S. imperialism, immigration, World Wars, the Jazz age, the Great Depression); intellectual and scientific developments (the theory of relativity, the popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis, the anthropological concept of culture, the spread of consumer culture, Fordism, the automobile, the birth of cinema, the skyscraper); and cultural production.  Assigned readings may include novels and short stories by authors such as Anzia Yezierska, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway.  Major assignments include an in-class presentation, a short paper and a longer final paper. Syllabus.

ENGL W3733x  The Black South (Farah Griffin)  T 9-10:50. Seminar. This course will consider works of fiction, history, anthropology and criticism in an effort to re-conceptualize  “The Black South” as a cultural landscape that includes sections of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. In so doing we will attempt to forge a dialogue between three separate but related critical discourses: Literatures of the Americas, the Black Diaspora and the Black Atlantic. Our readings focus on significant historical, literal and mythic landscapes including but not limited to Haiti, Jamaica, Louisiana and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.

ENGL W3967x  Twentieth-Century Poetry: Wallace Stevens (Mark Strand) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This is an upper level seminar in which we will do close readings of Stevens' shorter poems and two of his long poems - "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and "The Auroras of Autumn". The text we will use is The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. by Holly Stevens. Two short papers and participation in class discussion will be required.

ENGL W3710x  Seminar in American Lit and Culture: Studies in Sexuality: AIDS and the Politics of Literary Form (Marcellus Blount) R 2:10-4. Seminar. CANCELLED.

ENGL W3711x  American Literature Seminar: Family Fictions (Maura Spiegel) R 4:10-6.  Seminar. Looking closely at stories that center on the logic, dysfunction, romance, system, institution and curious maturation of American families. from Salinger’s Glass family to Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums.   We will explore renderings of “family cultures,“ family feeling, family values, the family as a narrative configuration, and home as a utopian space in the American landscape.  Authors include, Edward Albee, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Don DeLillo, Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen. Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates; films by Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Mike Nichols, Ang Lee and others.

ENGL W3985x  Masculinity and American Film (Marcellus Blount) F 2:10-4.  Seminar. This seminar explores how masculinity is defined in the work of a wide range of filmmakers from the 1950's to the present.  We will be particularly interested in how questions of race and sexuality complicate narratives of male identity.  Directors include Hitchcock, Lumet, Bill Condon, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, Issac Julien, and Spike Lee. Requirements: two 8-10 page papers.

ENGL W3732x  Postmodern Poetries (Michael Golston) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. American poetry after WWII is marked by increasingly radical experimentation as poets continue Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” We will examine writers from the last half-century who respond formally and thematically to the complicated theoretical, political, and social displacements of post-modernity. Poets will include John Ashbery, various Black Mountain poets, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Harreyette Mullen, Myung Mi Kim, and others.

ENGL W4628x  U.S. Latino Literature (Frances Negron-Muntaner)  TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course will focus on Latino literature in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present and provide a historical, literary, and theoretical context for this production. It will examine a wide range of genres, including poetry, memoir, essays, and fiction, with special emphasis on works by Cubans, Dominicans, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. Among the authors that the course will study are 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. Syllabus.

ENTA W4731x American Drama (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.

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SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3238x Religion, Literature, Modernity  (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. The course explores relationships between religious and literary imagining through scrutiny of causes for modern culture’s hostility to traditional spiritual beliefs. The main focus will be on texts of high artistic merit in which religious experience is primary feature. After identifying characteristics of modernist culture most salient to its anti-religious bias, we will evaluate William Blake’s argument, framed in response to the origin of the modernist-religious conflict, that imagination is the common source of religion and art. Analyses of important texts from polytheistic societies and representations of conversion experiences then will provide historical perspective for assessment of the emergence of Protestant Evangelicalism in the United States (illustrative of the contemporaneous surge of “fundamentalism” in other major religions). Focus here will be on the scientific apocalyptism underlying creationist/evolutionist debates, and the role of the modern charismatic evangelist.  After completing our term-long discussion of problems for 21st century readers of Paradise Lost (the most important religious text in the Anglophone literary tradition) we will conclude with an assessment of Crime and Punishment’s prescient dramatization of the consequences of conflict between modernism and religion, including is threat of emptying from contemporary art all moral significance and encouraging the popularity of torture as entertainment.

 CLEN W3851x Literature of Lost Lands (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course consists of readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. Often relegated to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost lands inspired a form of “occult ethnography”: one such example is Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), which drew on the popular fascination with buried land-masses to re-imagine alternative narratives in which the “imperial English” would be colonized by a new race of people rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. The unsettling of established and familiar conceptions of nation, history, and cultural identity through the exploration of lost or drifting lands reaches an apex in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft (1986), with which the course concludes. In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, and technology, as well as understanding the writing of history itself: i.e., what is included in mainstream accounts and what is left out.

ENTA W3976x  Seminar in Literary Genres: The Western (Paul Strohm) T 6:10-8.  Seminar. This seminar for third and fourth-year undergraduates will address questions of genre, both literary and cinematic.  We will get ourselves up to speed by reading several formative literary texts, including Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Twain’s Roughing It, several Bret Harte stories, and Wister’s The Virginian.  Attention will then shift to film, with Ford’s Straight Shooting and My Darling Clementine, possibly Hawks’s Red River, and, probably, Eastwood’s The Unforgiven.  Finally, we will turn to some works that interrogate or stretch the boundaries of the genre, including Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (milieu), Hawks’s Rio Lobo (age), Fonda’s The Hired Hand (masculinity, gender), Ford’s The Searchers (race).  We will read some classic genre essays, and will also pose some questions of our own: who ‘owns’ a genre, its producers or its audience?  where do new genres come from, and what can a genre ‘know’ about itself?  when does a western stop being a ‘western’ and become simply a ‘film set in the west’?  Members of the seminar will be asked to attend a Monday or Tuesday night screening (time and place to be   papers; one ‘seminar paper’ on a subject to be agreed with the instructor. 

ENGL W4917x  Writing on Disability (Christopher Baswell) MW 2:40-3:55.   Lecture. CANCELLED. BUT NOTE: This class WILL be offered in Spring 2009.

ENGL W4901x  History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25.  Lecture. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern English. There are two required books, both paperbacks: (1) Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin), and (2) Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker (Harper Perennial). There will be about half a dozen written assignments: hands-on research efforts, written up meticulously.

CLEN W4560x  Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Ross Hamilton)  MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture. What are the intellectual antecedents of contemporary critical, cultural, and social theory? Where do the vocabularies and questions that occupy us most urgently today, or that we occupy--history, the subject, the other, the aesthetic, culture, society, discourse, and so on – come from, and how does this history illuminate their current challenges and relations?  How do we interpret the tension between theory and the current aggressive return of “history”?  This course will look back at certain thinkers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries (Rousseau, Kleist, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Bakhtin, Freud, Weber) who offer indispensable continuities with and counterpoints to the methodologies of academic literary theory from the New Criticism to the more recent practices of cultural studies. Though some knowledge of feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory would be helpful, only minimal acquaintance will be presumed; selected 20th-century readings that illustrate lines of connection will be provided.

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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. NB: This is a GRADUATE seminar; but extraordinarily qualified undergraduates may petition the professor for admission.

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. NOTE: English majors and concentrators may use this course to satisfy their comparative geographical distribution requirement.

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