SEMINAR APPLICATION PROCEDURES
Classes requiring applications are listed below,
alphabetically by instructor.
KATHERINE BIERS
Drama, Theatre, Theory
(ENTA W3701x)
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.
MONICA
COHEN
Austen,
Brontë, Gaskell (ENGL
W3962x)
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 simultaneous 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.
JENNY DAVIDSON
Richardson's
Clarissa (ENGL G4307x)
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: E-mail 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.
ANDREW
DELBANCO
Literature and
Culture in the 1850s: America on the Eve of Civil War (ENGL
W3975x)
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.
ANN DOUGLAS
The Beat Generation (ENGL
W3710x)
Instructor's permission
required; 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.
MARIANNE
GIORDANI
Satire and Sensibility
(ENGL
W3950x)
Novels, poems, and prose from early and mid-18th century. Critical
writings
from the period argue the nature and purpose of poetry (broadly
speaking), the
emulation of narrative and lyrical models (classical, vernacular, and
biblical), and dispute religion, liberty, natural psychology, original
genius,
moral sentiment, and aesthetic imagination; verse genres include
epistle, ode,
and epic (mock, pastoral, and urban): Swift, Pope, Thomson, Gray,
Collins,
Goldsmith, others; novels include Fielding's Tom Jones, Richardson's
Clarissa,
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 excess of characters' speeches, but in the
way that
lyric poetry is incorporated into the fiction, where characters in the
novels
do themselves write or recite 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.
MATT HART
Black
British Writing (ENGL W3954x)
The novelist Caryl Phillips once
wrote: "For many British people, to accept the idea that their country
has a long and complex history of immigration would be to undermine
their basic understanding of what it means to be British." By focusing
on writing by British people of African and Caribbean origin, this
seminar asks what is "British" about British literary history. Unlike
in the United States, however, the term "Black" is in the United
Kingdom sometimes applied to non-Caucasian people in general. With this
situation in mind, we will investigate the cultural meanings of "Black"
as well as "British," asking how this seemingly racial label can have
transracial implications. Likewise, our approach throughout the seminar
will be to ask how Black British literature is a peculiarly national
product, while also focusing on the way old and new patterns of
immigration, economic life, and literary culture have made the Black
British experience a peculiarly transnational one. The syllabus will
include exemplary texts by some important first and second generation
of Black British writers - Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, and Buchi Emecheta
- as well as a broader focus on contemporary writers, including Linton
Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Caryl Phillips, and Zadie Smith. Written
requirements will involve a short seminar paper, a critical analysis
paper, and a bibliographic research project.
Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Matt Hart
(c/o dmy1@columbia.edu) by noon
on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Black British
Writing." 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: APPLICATION
DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED.
MAIRE JAANUS
Special Topics in Modern
Literature: Reading
Lacan (CLEN G4995x)
Reading selections from the late Lacan: Seminars
XVII The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, XVIII Of a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance, XX
Encore: On Feminine Sexuality XXI The Non-dupes Err/The Names of the
Father together with selected novels and short stories. Emphasis on
Lacan’s elaboration of the four discourses, jouissance, the formulas of
sexuation, the sinthome, and the clinic of the real. Consideration of
the relevance of his thought to literature and culture, to capitalism,
politics, and neuroscience.
Application
Instructions:
E-mail Professor M. Jaanus (mj35@columbia.edu) by noon on
Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Reading Lacan." 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.
PHILIP KITCHER
Finnegans
Wake (ENGL
W3940x)
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.
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.
LEJLA KUCUKALIC
Modern
Comparative Fiction: Dark
Chronicles - Recent Nobel Prize Winners (CLEN
W3208x)
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 for 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.
ROSS
POSNOCK
Ellison,
Bellow, Roth (ENGL
W3763x)
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.
JAMES
SHAPIRO
Renaissance
Literature seminar (ENGL
W3930x)
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
Professor James Shapiro (js73@columbia.edu)
by noon
on Wednesday, April 15th, with subject heading "Renaissance Literature
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.
ALAN
STEWART
Studies in the English Renaissance:
Renaissance London (ENGL
W3340x)
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.
GAURI VISWANATHAN
Decolonizing
Fictions (ENGL
W3851x)
ENGL W3851x
Decolonizing Fictions 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 on Wednesday, April
15, 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.
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