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UNDERGRADUATE REGISTRATION PROCEDURES— for SPRING 2010 courses |
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SEMINAR APPLICATION PROCEDURES ONDREA ACKERMAN Modern Odysseys (ENGL W3933y) This course will examine modern revisions of Homer's Odyssey from classic interpretations by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett to contemporary retellings including Derek Walcott's Caribbean odyssey, Monica Ali's Bangladeshi inversion, James Kelman's working class perspective, and Margaret Atwood's feminist alternative. We will begin by reading Homer's Odyssey and end with a screening of the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? This is a course, moreover, that interrogates the aesthetics and politics of revision. Not only will we be reading Joyce's revision of Homer's text, but we will examine in turn Walcott's re-writing of Joyce's Ulysses. Alongside Conrad's revision of the Odyssey, we will examine Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Heart of Darkness as documented in the film Hearts of Darkness, which draws a parallel between the story of Apocalypse Now and Coppola's personal journey in the making of the classic film. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ackerman (oea2101@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Modern Odysseys 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. JAMES ADAMS Dickens (ENGL W3707y) An intensive study of the novels of Charles Dickens, focusing on Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Requirements include a weekly reading journal, a 4-5pp essay, and a final paper (10-12 pages) due during finals week, as well as regular attendance and participation. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Adams (jea2139@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Dickens 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. Secrecy and Scandal in Victorian Literature (ENGL W3952y) The "sensation" novels of Wilkie Collins, Henry James admiringly noted in 1865, "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors." This course aims to follow up on James's sense that English literature and society in the latter half of the nineteenth century had become newly preoccupied with secrecy, which nurtured habits of reading that we've come to call hermeneutics of suspicion. In this seminar we'll explore this preoccupation with secrecy and scandal in two major cultural developments, sensation fiction and the rise of aestheticism. Major authors will include Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Trollope, Pater, Stevenson, James, and Wilde. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Adams (jea2139@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Secrecy and Scandal in Victorian 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. Toni Morrison (ENGL W3740y) The works of Toni Morrison. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Marcellus Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Toni Morrison." 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. PATRICIA DAILEY Prerequisite: One semester of Old English required, as
this course demands a solid knowledge of Old English; also, computer
skills required as assignments will be required on class Wiki site.
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. ANN DOUGLAS Hollywood noir movies of the 1940s and '50s in the
context of "noir culture" more broadly speaking, looking at the noir
cinematic phenomenon as a marker of the founding enterprises of the
modern imperial West, from 19th-c. literary texts ("Heart of Darkness";
"Jekyll and Hyde") onto depictions of class conflict and the money
economy in selected cinematic examples. Films will include: Citizen
Kane, Out of the Past, The Killers, Scarlet Street, Double Indemnity,
Gilda, The Sweet Smell of Success, In a Lonely Place, Odds Against
Tomorrow, A Double Life, and Vertigo. Application
Instructions: E-mail Professor Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) by noon on
Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "FILM NOIR 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. JOHN GAMBER This course will examine contemporary American
novels dealing with severe environmental pollution, catastrophe, and
apocalypse. Application
Instructions: E-mail Professor Gamber (jbg2134@columbia.edu) by 5 pm
on Friday, November 13, with the subject heading "Novels of Ecological
Catastrophe." 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. The Gilded Age: Fictions of Property and Personhood (ENGL W3711y) Bank crises, volatile markets, racist violence, homosexual panics, celebrity scandals, insatiable consumers, naked imperialism, and anarchist revolt---welcome to the Gilded Age. This interdisciplinary seminar will examine U.S. politics and culture in the period between 1873, when Mark Twain coined the phrase "the Gilded Age," and 1900. Class materials will include literary, legal, sociological, and historical texts. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hartman (svh2102@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11,with the subject heading "Gilded Age 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. Plays of Caryl Churchill (ENTA W3950y) This seminar will explore the full range of plays by Caryl Churchill, arguably the most inventive English playwright of the late 20th and early 21st century. A consistently political writer, Churchill has written over twenty-five theater pieces exploring such topics as the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century, the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the politics of cloning, Margaret Thatcher's destruction of the British post-war social contract, the relationship of the United States and Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, modern totalitarianism, environmental apocalypse, and the relations between Israel and Palestine. Among the first to employ cross-race and cross-gender casting, Churchill is an indefatigable experimentalist when it comes to theatrical form. In this seminar we will be reading approximately 15 or her plays, exploring both her dramaturgy and her ideas. I hope that productions of some of her plays will be on in the city during the course of the semester, and if so we will attend them. Participants will be expected to work in groups to explore aspects of Churchill's dramaturgy, the performance history of her plays, and the cultural contexts from which she drew inspiration when writing them. The class will culminate with a final ten to fifteen-page seminar paper. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Jean Howard (jfh5@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "The Plays of Caryl Churchill." 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. WEN JIN Toward the end of the 19th-century, Robert Wilson
Shufeldt, who became
known as the opener of Korea in 1882, enthusiastically declared that
the Pacific was the “ocean bride of America.” Shufeldt was not
alone
in his belief that what lies across the Pacific is crucial for the
economic and cultural growth of the United States. Until very
recently, the U.S.-Asia connections had been under-estimated, but they
are frequently reflected and reflected upon in American literature,
including both its “canonical” and “minority” components. This
course
offers a survey of this literary history, starting from the early
twentieth-century. First, we will consider the ways in which Asia
and
Asians figure in the fiction of such canonical and popular writers as
Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, and Alex
Berenson, as well as a number of short poetic works. We will
discuss
these writers’ fascination with the cultures and people of Asia—what is
commonly known as “Orientalism”—in the contexts of various material and
political factors (transnational labor migration, global capitalism,
and the transnational cultural industry etc.). The second focus
of the
course is on literary works that interweave American and Asian
histories and cultures, including, mainly, the novels of Agnes Smedley,
WEB DuBois, Lin Yutang, Carlos Bulosan, and Alex Kuo. The course
will
end with theoretical readings since the early 1990s that seek to
explain the implications, for both the U.S. and Asia, of seeing the
Asia Pacific (or American Pacific) as an integrated region. Reading
List
and
Course
Requirements. This course explores the coalescence of the genre of autobiography, beginning with Augustine's Confessions and ending in the late Middle Ages, asking how autobiography straddles the line between fact and fiction, offering itself as documentary truth, while relying on literary tropes to achieve its narrative and expressive ends. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Johnson (ebj2117@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Autobiography seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, relevant courses taken, and previous experience with Middle and Early Modern English, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. KEVIN LAMB This course takes as its focus the emergence of new styles of sexual self-description and experience in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using literature, law, and film as points of entry to these historical shifts, we will consider how different forms of representation propagate and contest the frequently contradictory views of humans as inescapably subject to -- and yet articulate brokers and narrators of -- their own desires. Formal analysis of novels, short stories, plays, and films will be combined with an introduction to major theoretical, critical, and legal texts on sexuality. Possible writers, directors, and theorists whose works we will discuss include: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Herman Melville, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Musil, Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Lillian Hellman, Pedro Almodóvar, John Cameron Mitchell, John Greyson, Sigmund Freud, Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Lamb (kml2104@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "SUBJECTS OF DESIRE." 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. ROBERT O'MEALLY
Novels, essays, and poetry by
American writers, in the comic mode: Twain, James, Joel Chandler
Harris, Faulkner, Sterling Brown, Ellison, others. What makes us laugh?
What does our laughter conceal, what does it reveal? What's American
about "American humor" and "comedy, American-style"? How do race and
gender figure here? Application
Instructions: E-mail Professor O'Meally (rgo1@columbia.edu with a cc to his
assistant Yulanda Denoon ym189@columbia.edu)
by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "American
Humor 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. Realism at the Global Scale (CLEN W3792y) Critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, objects to such features as "a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) ... a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time." "A parody," he says, "would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. "To be or not to be"-ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since." Wood is suggesting that large, multi-plotted, ambitious novels like Smith's are not realistic. One answer to him might go as follows: such novels are in fact trying to be realistic, but realistic at the global scale- realistic about a world in which much that happens in any one place is determined over the horizon, in some very different and distant place that the characters here may never visit or even know about and yet that the author does not have the luxury of ignoring. In short, they are attempting to follow E. M. Forster's advice, "only connect," and doing so in a new and strenuous way. This is the proposition that will guide the seminar. Readings will include works by Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Junot Diaz, and Orhan Pamuk, among others. Requirements: 1) weekly reading journal, 1 to 2 pages double-spaced, on the novel to be discussed that day, hard copy submitted in class; 2) a paper of 10-12 pages, topic to be negotiated, due after the end of classes; 3) regular attendance and oral participation. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robbins (bwr2001@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Realism at the Global Scale." 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. EZRA
TAWIL Application Instructions: E-mail Ezra Tawil (eft2001@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "The American Renaissance." 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. The Novel: Text & Theories: The Emergence of the American Novel (ENGL W3935y) The Emergence of the American Novel History and theory of the novel form in America between 1789 and 1865, from its emergence after the Revolution, through its dominance at mid-century, up to the emergence of the African American novel in the years leading up to the Civil War. Readings will likely include works by Rowson, Foster, C.B. Brown, Cooper, Sedgwick, Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Webb. Application Instructions: E-mail Ezra Tawil (eft2001@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "The American Renaissance." 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. PAUL
VIOLI 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. Imperialism and the Cryptographic Imagination (ENGL W3451y) An examination of imperialism's use of codes, acrostics, maps, diagrams, and other forms of secret communication. The seminar will focus on how the culture of secrecy that accompanied imperial expansion defined the tools of literary imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While most studies of culture and imperialism examine the impact of colonial expansion on the geography of narrative forms, this seminar looks more closely at the language of indirection in English novels and traces metaphors and symbols to imperialism's culture of secrecy. Readings include works by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Philip Meadows Taylor, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, among others. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "CRYPTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION." 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.
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