SEMINAR APPLICATION PROCEDURES
Classes requiring applications are listed below,
alphabetically by instructor.
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.
MARCELLUS
BLOUNT
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
Beowulf (ENGL
G4092y)
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.
Application
Instructions: E-mail Professor Dailey (pd2132@columbia.edu) by Friday,
November 13, with the subject heading "Beowulf." 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 that a prior language
course in Old English is a prerequisite for this class; please indicate
such coursework in your application.
ANN DOUGLAS
Film Noir (ENGL
W3985y)
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
Novels of Ecological
Catastrophe (ENGL W3977y)
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.
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
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.
JEAN
HOWARD
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
Transpacific
Approaches
to
American
Literature (ENGL W3925y)
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.
Application Instructions:
E-mail Professor Jin (wj2130@columbia.edu)
by
noon
on
Friday,
November
13,
with
the
subject
heading
"Transpacific
Approaches
to
American
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.
ELEANOR JOHNSON
Medieval Stoic
Autobiography
(ENGL W3920y)
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
Topics
in
Theory:
Subjects
of
Desire
--
Law,
Literature,
Film (ENGL
W3940y)
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
American
Humor (ENGL
W3716y)
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.
BRUCE
ROBBINS
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
The
American Renaissance (ENGL
W3932y)
The Literature and Theory of the American
Renaissance
In this seminar, we will do two things at once: first, read a group
of
literary texts associated with the "American Renaissance." At the
same time, we will read and analyze some of the masterworks of
twentieth-century literary criticism that have produced,
defended, and contested this tradition. The course will proceed
by alternating week by week between a work of literature and a work of
criticism, and by
doing that will be able to establish an interesting reciprocal
dialogue between the two kinds of writing. Of the critical texts,
we will ask such questions as: What authors or works
(or features of texts) do different critics tend to value or devalue,
emphasize or forget in order to produce a “tradition”? What
happens when we focus on the narrative elements of criticism? For
example, when are literary histories themselves structured and
emplotted like
the literary texts they discuss? Of the literary works
themselves, we will ask: what features of form or content made these
works the
harbingers of a cultural “rebirth”? And is there any sense in which
these literary works do something like "criticism"—in
thinking, for example, about their own value as fulfilling the call
for a national aesthetic? Readings include literary works by
Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and critical
works by D.H. Lawrence, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, William
Spengemann, Richard Poirier, and Paul Giles.
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
American Poetry, Poe to Williams (ENGL
W3963y)
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.
Application
Instructions:
E-mail Paul Violi at (prv8@columbia.edu)
by
November
11.
Include
your
name,
school,
year of study, major,
relevant courses taken, and a short paragraph on your interest in the
subject.
GAURI VISWANATHAN
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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