UNDERGRADUATE "INTRO TO MAJOR"
This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL W3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration, starting with the Class of 2010. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

ENGL W3001x Literary Texts, Critical Methods (Victoria Rosner) T 4:10-6:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: University Writing (ENGL C1010 or F1010). Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL W3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the study of literature. Students will read works from the three major literary modes (lyric, drama, and narrative), drawn from the medieval period to the present day. They will learn the interpretative techniques required by each. They will also learn how to write scholarly papers on literature, as well as how to integrate secondary sources into their own critical writing.

ENGL W3034x Chaucer: Canterbury Tales (Eleanor Johnson)  TR 4:10-5:25 3 pts. (Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.  We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention.  We will consider the conditions—both historical and aesthetic—that informed Chaucer’s motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period.  Our ultimate project will be the assessment of the Tales at once as a self-consciously “medieval” production, keen to explore and exploit the boundaries of literary convention, and as a ground-breaking literary event, which set the stage for renaissance literature.

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

ENGL W3262x English Literature 1500-1600: Literature for a New England (Kathy Eden) TR 4:10-5:25 3 pts. (Lecture). Humanism, Tudor poetry and prose, the Elizabethan lyric, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

ENGL W3280x Tudor-Stuart Drama (Alan Stewart) MW 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (Lecture). This course provides an introduction to the most productive half-century of English drama, from the building of London's first purpose-built theatre in 1576 to the closing of the theatres in 1642. The course will focus on non-Shakespearean commercial drama, from playwrights including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Philip Massinger and James Shirley. We will also consider the so-called "closet drama," the realities of theatrical performance, and the theater's encounter with print culture.

ENGL W3335x Shakespeare I: Early Shakespeare (James Shapiro) MW 9:10-10:25 3 pts. (Lecture). Shakespeare's early comedies, histories, tragedies, and poetry from Titus Andronicus to Hamlet. Limited enrollment (priority to seniors, then juniors; no LLL or auditors).

ENGL W3340x Studies in the English Renaissance: Renaissance London (Alan Stewart) W 6:10-8:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course examines representations of London, and artistic works emanating from London, in the period from the Henrician Reformation to the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666. We will be studying a range of London sites and characters, and topics important to London, including local communities, the guild system, plague, the theater, prostitution, and immigration. Texts studied will cover various genres, from city comedy to rogue pamphlets to chorography, by authors including John Stow, Isabella Whitney, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and John Marston.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Alan Stewart (ags2105@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Renaissance London." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3930x Renaissance Literature seminar (James Shapiro) T 9:00-10:50 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course explores the plays Shakespeare was writing in 1606-most notably King Lear and Macbeth-in relation to plays staged that year by Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and George Wilkins.

Application Instructions: E-mail (js73@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15th, with subject heading "Renaissance Literature." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

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

ENGL W3950x Satire and Sensibility (Marianne Giordani) R 4:10-6:00 4 pts. (Seminar). British verse, novels, and critical prose from early and mid-18th century, with a view to the satirical and the sentimental as related dispositions, a relationship of varied nuances and shifting resolutions, but reflecting in the main a tragicomic outlook of literary consequence. We shall study the continuum of savage ridicule to gentle mockery and the palimpsest of alternating invective and pathos; likewise, we shall examine the aesthetic, philosophical, and social perspectives that came to bear, and formal and stylistic innovations that emerged in adaptations of classical and biblical models to contemporary circumstances. Critical writings of the period argue the nature of fictional discourse in relation to such topics as liberty, religious enthusiasm, polite learning, the reform of manners, natural philosophy, moral sentiment, wit, and imagination: Dryden, Addison, Burke, others. Verse genres include ode, epistle, georgic, elegy, and mock emulations: Finch, Swift, Pope, Montagu, Gay, Johnson, Gray, the Wartons, Goldsmith, others. Novels and fictional prose include but might not be limited to Fielding's Tom Jones, Johnson's Rasselas, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. An aspect of the satirical and the sentimental combined obtains here not only in the rhetorical artistry and excess of characters' speeches, but in the way that lyric is incorporated into the fiction, and where characters in the novels themselves compose, recite, or criticize poetry.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor M. Giordani (mg2644@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Satire and Sensibility seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry (Erik Gray) TR 4:10-5:25 3 pts. (Lecture). An introduction to the works of the great poets of the Romantic period (1789-1824), especially William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. In addition to closely considering their poems, we will also read prose works that complement and illuminate the poetry, including essays by Wordsworth, Shelley, and William Hazlitt, and letters by Keats. Past Syllabus.

ENGL G4307x Richardson's Clarissa (Jenny Davidson) M 6:10-8:00 4 pts. (Seminar). Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa took eighteenth-century readers by storm, and has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the century. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel Pamela and a few of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through Clarissa in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading;topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. Note: This seminar is a joint undergraduate-graduate class. This spring, I will admit 8 undergraduates and a waiting list of 4 (if needed), reserving 6-8 spots for graduate students who may be interested; we will work out the final details of enrollment at the first seminar meeting in the fall semester.

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

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

ENGL W3253x Victorian Literature (James Adams) TR 9:10-10:25 3 pts. (Lecture). An introduction to British literature in the age of Victoria (1837-1901). The world's most powerful nation (and first industrial society) was mesmerized by multi-volume novels of domestic life, lyrics of frustrated desire and religious crisis, and an explosion of critical writing wrestling with (among other things) new forms of social mobility and economic volatility, reconstructions of gender and sexuality, imperial power, and the fear of "decadence." We'll be especially interested in a host of formal innovations-"sage writing," the dramatic monologue, the "novel in verse," melodrama, the short story-as they represent the interplay of personal identity and social life. The main thread we'll follow through this maze will be the profound impact of industrialism on British life and literature, particularly as it informs the idea of "culture," which would become a central rationale for "English" as an academic discipline. Authors include Tennyson, Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, E. Gaskell, C. Bronte, R. Browning, E.B. Browning, Ruskin, George Eliot, Morris, Arnold, Pater, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilde. Syllabus.

ENGL W3962x Nineteenth-Century Novel Seminar: Austen, Bronte, Gaskell (Monica Cohen) R 11-12:50 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell map much of the terrain for English nineteenth-century narrative. Writing within the tradition of the novel of education, these daughters of Protestant clergymen fashion a fictional discourse posed to explore the liabilities and liberties of a narrative realism that privileges the marriage plot, psychological portraiture, and vocation. Reading these books in two sets of triads (country versus city: Mansfield Park, Villette, North and South; the Governess's Story: Emma, Jane Eyre, Wives and Daughters), we will trace how these authors simultaneously invent and resist ideas about privacy, property, duty, subversion, gender identity and realism itself. The last few weeks will culminate in a reading of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as a powerful response to this literary heritage. Requirements: short midterm paper, long final paper, weekly response pages.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor M. Cohen (mlf1@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Austen, Bronte, Gaskell." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W4723x Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg (Zander Brietzke) TR 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). Intensive reading of major works from the early masters of modern drama. Course will focus on stylistic innovations, thematic concerns, and theatricality of the three playwrights. Particular emphasis will be given to the place of each on the contemporary stage, visual presentations of production histories, and relevance to the 21st-century theatrical repertory. Evaluation consists of question sets for each play, two short (5-7 page) papers, and a comprehensive final examination.

20th CENTURY

ENGL W3219x Modern Poetry I (Stephen Massimilla) MW 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (Lecture). Exploration of works of major poets of the first half of the twentieth century, with attention to significant intellectual, historical, psychological and spiritual dimensions, as reflected in language and form. We will consider, for instance, Whitman's Transcendentalism, Hardy's determinism, 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 events, such as the first World War. We will consider diverse ideas about the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical roles the poet can (or perhaps cannot) play in society. This course will also provide an opportunity for comparing the major Anglophone traditions, with an eye to their complex, often neglected interrelationship. After more briefly examining Hardy, Hopkins, Whitman and Dickinson, we will focus on Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, the War poets, McKay, Williams, Stevens, and early Auden, accompanied by some attention to H.D., Pound, Stein, Moore and Crane.

CLEN W3791x Modern Comparative Fiction: Dark Chronicles - Recent Nobel Prize Winners (Lejla Kucukalic) R 4:10-6:00 4 pts. (Seminar). In this course, we will read and discuss the fiction, non-fiction, and acceptance speeches of the most recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writers to be examined, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006), Harold Pinter (2005), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), V. S. Naipaul (2001), Gao Xingjian (2000), and Günter Grass (1999) record cultural shifts and social forces central to their societies as well as our civilization, addressing the world wars, immigration, postcolonialism, class inequities, gender oppression, and often, the fragility of identity. Although coming from vastly different backgrounds and countries, the recent Nobel laureates share a difficult and challenging view of human nature. We will analyze whether and how their art, potentially disturbing, challenges the traditional cultural understanding of narrative representation, evident in their experimentation with language and modes of representation. We will also explore the relationship between the authors' personal point of view and national concerns with global and universal themes and issues that they address. Finally, we will explore the tradition of prize-giving as a vehicle of literary canonization and the global recognition that Nobel brings to its winners. The assignments will include: a final essay, comprehensive take-home midterm exam, participation, and one short presentation on the writer of your choice from the list.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor L. Kucukalic (lk2380@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Nobel Prize Winners." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3274x British Literature 1900-1950 (Edward Mendelson) TR 9:10-10:25 3 pts. (Lecture) Hardy, Wilde, Shaw, Wells, Yeats, Woolf, Auden, and possibly others. Poetry, prose, drama.

CLEN W3740x Comparative Modern Texts: Competing Isms' Modernism and the Avant-Garde (Ondrea Ackerman) W 6:10-8 4 pts. Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course will explore the relation between Modernism, the various Isms of the Avant-Garde (Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism), and the variety of movements that arise in response (the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the Black Arts Movement, the Language poets). We will examine the authoritative culture of T.S. Eliot and the bohemia of F.T. Marinetti and André Breton; we will look at writers such as H.D. who return to myth and writers such as Gertrude Stein and who turninstead to the everyday; we will explore the mainstream culture of Ford Maddox Ford and the political alternatives of Amiri Baraka. This course, in short, will challenge the divisions between high art and low art, between the canonical and the popular, and will question just how far apart these groupings really are.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ackerman (oea2101@columbia.edu) by Friday, August 28 with the subject heading "Competing Isms." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Note: an admit list will be posted at the department's website the week before classes begin.

CLEN W3851x Decolonizing Fictions (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. (Seminar). We will read works by writers responding to decolonization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Ostensibly a gesture of resistance against imperial control, anti-colonialism also sparked debates about re-visioning gender relations, the place of minorities in the nation, religious difference and secularism, internationalism and models of world unity, among other issues. The course will explore, through fiction and historical accounts produced at the time of decolonization, the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor G. Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by noon, April 15, 2009, with the subject heading "Decolonizing Fictions." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3940x Finnegans Wake (Philip Kitcher) M 11:00-12:50 4 pts. (Seminar). This seminar will engage in a close study of James Joyce's final work Finnegans Wake. After an introductory session, considering the structure of the book, and strategies for approaching it, we'll read it together in manageable pieces. Each week, students will be expected to bring to the seminar a short paper (300-400 words), reflecting on a particular passage (typically only a sentence or two) from the material read that week. They will present their responses, and this will serve as a basis for joint exploration and discussion. No texts other than Finnegans Wake itself will be assigned, but two secondary sources are recommended: John Bishop Joyce's Book of the Dark and Philip Kitcher Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their response papers, their contributions to discussion, and a final essay. Prerequisites: English 3230 (Joyce) or Permission of the Instructor. (It is important that those in the seminar have read Joyce's earlier works of prose fiction, particularly Ulysses, and have done so thoroughly.) This course is crosslisted with a seminar in Philosophy, and students who want to treat Joyce "philosophically" may enroll through the Philosophy number. Those whose primary concerns are with Literature should enroll under the English designation. Syllabus.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor P. Kitcher (psk16@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Finnegans Wake." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W4200x Caribbean Diaspora Literature (Frances Negron) TR 10:30-11:50 3 pts. (Lecture). Texts by writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Dominica, and Jamaica. The impact of migration and transculturation on the texts, the articulation of new cultural subjects, the fostering of dialogue largely suppressed in the writers' home countries. Possible authors: Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, V.S. Naipaul, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, Oscar Hijuelos. Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major social and revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize through analysis and language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers and musicians such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Cliff, V.S. Naipaul, Bob Marley, Carlos Varela, and Calle 13, among others. Past Syllabus.

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

AMERICAN

ENGL W3271x Black Autobiography (Saidiya Hartman) MW 9:10-10:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This introductory survey examines eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century autobiographies written by black writers in the U.S., the Caribbean, Africa and Britain. Key questions to be examined are: How is the genre of autobiography adapted and refashioned in the context of slavery, imprisonment, exile, and war? How does the practice of life writing redefine the meaning of the human? Major Cultures Requirement: Latin American Civilization List C.

ENGL W3275x American Modernism: 1890-1930 (Ross Posnock) MW 6:10-7:25 3 pts. (Lecture) We will begin with William James's immensely generative PRAGMATISM, a book which helps brings American culture into the modern world, the "tramp and vagrant universe," as he calls it. We will also read works by his students W. E. B Du Bois and Gertrude Stein, as well as poetry by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens (two other James admirers) and William Carlos Williams. The novelists to be studied include Hemingway, Faulkner, and Willa Cather.

ENGL W3710x The Beat Generation (Ann Douglas) T 6:10-8:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). Limited to seniors; preference to those who have taken at least one course in 20th-century American culture, especially history, jazz, film, and literature. Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) and copy David Yerkes (dmy1@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "The Beat Generation." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3733x Ellison, Bellow, Roth (Ross Posnock) M 4:10-6:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course will focus on three major postwar novelists, each of whom negotiated the tensions in American culture between racial and ethnic responsibility on the one hand, and the freedom of cosmopolitan multiplicity of affiliations on the other. The turbulent 1960s proved a crucible in each of their careers; Ellison confronted angry voices from the literary and political Left; Bellow offered a sardonic, tragic assessment of the madness of modernity; Roth developed his gift for rude truth and outrage. We will begin with the literary Master they all have in common--Dostoevsky, whose Notes From Underground is the epochal rant that echoes in their later pages.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ross Posnock (rp2045@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Ellison, Bellow, Roth." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3975x Literature and Culture in the 1850s: America on the Eve of Civil War (Andrew Delbanco) M 11:00-12:50 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). In this seminar we will trace the growing crisis over slavery and disunion as the United States moved toward war against itself. Readings include fiction, poetry, memoirs, political discourse, and journalism by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Jacobs, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, and Herman Melville. We will consider the perspectives of slaves and slavemasters, North and South, men and women, committed partisans and neutral observers-- in an effort to understand what was at stake in the rising discord during the decade that preceded the Civil War. Application Instructions: Please stop by 415 Hamilton or visit American Studies website at www.columbia.edu/cu/amstudies for application form which is due by 5:00 P.M. on Monday, April 13.

ENGL W4612x Jazz and American Culture: Gender, Race and Jazz (Robert O'Meally) TR 10:35-11:50 3 pts. An introduction to theories of gender and race (in conjunction with other social categories such as class, nation, and sexuality) as lenses for studying how people have used jazz to struggle over ideas that mattered to them.SPECIAL TOPICS

ENTA W3701x Drama, Theatre, Theory (Katherine Biers) W 2:10-4:00 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course explores issues central to the study of theatre in its social and political context. We will read modern European and American dramatic texts alongside theories of text, actor and stage drawn from a broader, mainly European, philosophical and aesthetic tradition. What is dramatic unity and how does it reflect or project social and national unity? What is realistic acting and how does it relate to ideology? Where does theatre happen? Does it take place only in particular spaces and places or potentially everywhere--as in theatres? of war or the law? We will also pursue broader questions about the relationship between theatrical spectacle and political transformation, and the role of theatre and theatrical presence in an age of mass media. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Schiller, Benjamin, Derrida, Weber, Schechner. Plays from the late 19th century to today by Glaspell, Shaw, Odets, Brecht, Lori-Parks, Kushner, and others.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor K. Biers (klb2134@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Drama, Theatre, Theory." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W4560x Backgrounds To Contemporary Theory (Bruce Robbins) TR 10:30-11:50 3 pts. (Lecture). In chapter 4 of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, a story is told about a confrontation between a Lord (Herr) and a Bondsman (Knecht). The story conveys how consciousness is born. This story, subsequently better known as the confrontation between Master and Slave, has been appropriated and revised again and again in figures like Marx and Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Fanon, Freud and Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Schmitt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler. The premise of this course is that one can understand much of which is (and isn't) most significant and interesting in contemporary cultural theory by coming to an understanding of Hegel's argument, and tracing the paths by which thinkers revise and return to it as well as some of the arguments around it. This course is intended for both graduates and undergraduates. There are no prerequisites, but the material is strenuous, and students will clearly have an easier time if they start out with some idea of what the thinkers above are doing and why. Helpful preparatory readings might include Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy or Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Requirements: For undergraduates: two short papers (6-8 pages) and a final. For graduate students, either two short papers or one longer paper (12-15 pages), no final. Syllabus.

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

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

CLEN G4995x Special Topics in Modern Literature: Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) T 2:10-4:00 4 pts. (Lecture) Reading selections from Lacan's Seminar X: Anxiety; Seminar IX: Identification; Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, & Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality together with selected novels and short stories. Emphasis on Lacan's elaboration of the four discourses, jouissance, the formulas of sexuation, and the ethics of the real. Consideration of the relevance of his thought to literature and culture, to capitalism, politics, neuroscience, and the idea of humanity.OF RELATED INTEREST
WMST V3111x Feminist Texts I: Wollstonecraft to Beauvoir (Ezra Tawil) M  2:10-4 4 pts. The important contributions to the elaboration of feminist thought in the West, evaluated through critical discussion. Analysis of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, Anna Cooper, Radclyffe Hall, C. P. Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and others in an attempt to discover the roots of the contemporary feminist movement. Permission of instructor required. Enrollment limited to 20 students. This course may count as one of the ten required courses for the major, but it does not satisfy any distribution requirements.

AMST W3930x Topics in American Studies (section 2): Disability in American Life (Rachel Adams) W 2:10–4 4 pts. What historical, political, and social factors have given rise to the way we understand disability in contemporary American culture?  How have philosophers, policy makers, authors and artists framed the political and ethical debates surrounding the status of disability?  How have imaginative representations in literature, film, and the visual arts contributed to and/or challenged those understandings?  Given that nearly every one of us will be disabled at some point in life, these questions could not be more important.  This course seeks to address them by considering a broad array of texts, including philosophical debates about morality and ethics, history, and literary, filmic, and visual representations.  Note: this course may count toward the English major and fulfills the American geographical requirement.

WMST W4300x Advanced Topics in Women's and Gender Studies: Feminism and Diaspora: Rites and Rights of Return (Marianne Hirsch) W 2:10-4 4 pts. This course explores contemporary diasporic and transnational feminism from the perspective of the ethics and politics of return. The losses suffered in the last century, the atrocities that have dominated it, and the displacement of peoples across the globe continue to preoccupy our current imagination, calling for justice and acts of repair.  What accounts for the contemporary obsession with the recovery of roots?  How are gender and the body tropes and idioms of remembrance?  Through a cross-disciplinary analysis of new and old media of return to past places (memoir and fiction, ritual and performance, visual and digital media, tourism, museums and memorials, as well as DNA testing), we will focus on a number of sites where contested histories collide and lost stories are waiting to be recovered (the aftermath of the slavery in Africa and the new world; anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the Nakbah in Europe and Israel/Palestine; racism, poverty and Katrina in New Orleans; queer diaspora and transnational adoption; and the claims of indigenous peoples to restitution and redress). The personal, the familial, the affective, and the intimate have offered constitutive structures of thinking in feminist theory, trauma theory, and psychoanalysis. We will bring these same emphases to bear on the paradigms of diaspora, place and displacement. NOTE: this course may count toward the English major and fulfills the comparative/global geographical requirement.

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