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course descriptions follow this list (where all course titles are in bold; each course is designated as a lecture or seminar before the description) Note: seminars require applications, submitted the week before registration, with admit lists posted the first day of registration (Monday, November 13, 2006). courses in brief MEDIEVAL
RENAISSANCE
18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM
19th CENTURY
20th CENTURY
AMERICAN
SPECIAL TOPICS
OF RELATED INTEREST
 course descriptions  MEDIEVAL ENGL W3261y English Literature to 1500 (Susan Crane) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. A survey of early English writing in its cultural contexts, from Beowulf to Malory. Medieval English literature comes primarily from aristocratic households, but we will also attend to literatures of religion and dissent. We will read Anglo-Saxon works in translation and most Middle English works in their original language. See past syllabus for the course plan, though some details may change. A required one-hour weekly discussion section will assist students in learning to read Middle English and preparing to write papers. RENAISSANCE ENGL W3336y Shakespeare (Alan Stewart) MW 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Shakespeare II concentrates on the second half of Shakespeare's theatrical career. Plays to be studied include Hamlet, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. ENGL W3338y Shakespeare: Poet/Playwright (Edward Tayler) R 2:10-4. Seminar. Reading the poet in his own terms (his words, his meanings), with due attention to action, character-and the heft and swing of the iambic line. Emphasis on the so-called problem plays and the mature tragedies. One brief (ten-minute) class presentation, several short (three-paragraph) essays. ENGL W3930y Christopher Marlowe and his Contemporaries (Mario DiGangi) W 11-12:50. Seminar. This seminar examines the work of Christopher Marlowe in its theatrical, literary, social, and political contexts. We will read all seven of Marlowe's plays-1 & 2 Tamburlaine; Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Massacre at Paris; The Jew of Malta; Dr. Faustus; and Edward II-and his major poems, including Hero and Leander and the translation of Ovid's Amores. We will examine these works in the context of comparable works from the 1590s by Shakespeare (e.g., 1 Henry VI, Richard II, Venus and Adonis) and by lesser known contemporaries such as Barnfield, Greene, and Peele. ENGL W3819y Metaphysical Poetry: Donne, Herbert, Marvell (Molly Murray) M 6:10-8. Seminar. This seminar will focus on three practitioners of the imaginatively extreme 17th century lyric poetry sometimes designated "metaphysical." We will read the poems closely, attending also to cultural context and critical reception. CLEN W4122y Wit and Humor in the Renaissance (Anne Prescott) MW 4:10-5:25. Lecture. What did Renaissance writers find funny? What was their theory of the risible? How does laughter help the body and cure neurosis? Should Christians write satire? Focusing on prose satire, we will read classical works by Petronius and Lucian and then Renaissance texts by such writers as Aretino, Alberti, Rabelais, Labe, More, Nashe, Hall, Harington, and Donne. 18th CENTURY & ROMANTICISM ENGL W3950y Satire and Sensibility (Marianne Giordani) M 4:10-6. Seminar. 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. (Note: students who took ENGL W3950x are eligible to take this course: though both courses share the same general rubric -- 18th-century Studies -- they are quite distinct courses.) ENGL W4703y Restoration & 18th-century Drama (Jenny Davidson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture. A survey of the English theater from 1660-1800, with attention to a wide range of social, historical and formal questions; we will consider performance history and theories of acting as well as topics including gender, class, empire, power, satire. Students with a practical interest in theater are encouraged to enroll. CLEN G4321y Reformation to Romanticism: Literary and Scientific Revolutions (Ross Hamilton) W 6:10-8. Lecture/discussion. This course will attempt a synthetic literary analysis of the "long Reformation" through an examination of the shift from natural philosophy to the rise of modern science. Recent exciting work in the history of science will provide the basis for an exploration of literary analogues. Our work deliberately avoids the division of knowledge into literary periods. Accordingly, the reading list includes literary texts written between 1600 and 1820, (selections from Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Cavendish, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley); scientific works (selections from Galen, Paracelsus, Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Newton) and essays by contemporary historians (Kuhn, Feingold, Jones, Miller and others). Please reread Hamlet for the first class, and look at Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory. 19th CENTURY ENGL W3225y Virginia Woolf (Edward Mendelson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture. All Virginia Woolf, all the time. A lecture course on Virginia Woolf's major novels and non-fictional prose. The reading list will include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas, and probably other novels, stories, reviews, and essays. CLEN W3942y The African Novel (Joseph Slaughter) W 6:10-8. Seminar. What happens to the nationalism and individualism of the novel in the African context? This course provides a formalist, socio-historical, and theoretical overview of the "rise of the African novel." We will consider its generic development in relation to colonialism, post-colonialism and recent theories of the globalization of literary forms and as a distinctly "African" phenomenon. CLEN W3938y Comparative Postcolonialisms (Joseph Slaughter) T 2:10-4. Seminar. This course studies the postcolonial (broadly construed) condition of literary production in twentieth-century Latin American and African fiction and cultural theory. Beyond the literary texts, readings will include historical, theoretical, social, cultural and political materials to help us contextualize and compare the generic representational strategies and problematics of the novels we will read. CLEN W3970y Gertrude Stein & the European Avant-Garde (Maiken Derno) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This seminar will serve as a broad introduction to the experimental thrust of Gertrud Stein's work as it relates to the wider project of the European avant-garde in the first three decades of the 20th century. We will trace Stein's subversive engagement with a plethora of genres--from literary autobiography, over portraits, poetry, novelistic prose, to plays and poetological reflections. Tentative syllabus. ENTA W3920y Studies in Drama and the Novel: The Performance of Narrative (Matthew Laufer) T 6:10-8. Seminar. This course lays bare both literary mode and the very experience of reading by examining two strange hybrids: the "novelistic" drama and the "dramatistic" novel. By studying plays that partake of novelistic techniques, forms, and effects, as well as novels that mobilize drama (by, for example, internally embedding dramatic interludes), we will destabilize various assumptions about form and explore the aesthetic, social, and political stakes of such innovative literary works. Readings in various theories-of drama, the novel, genre and mode; as well as performance, reception, and narrative-will provide the vocabulary to discuss these challenging works. Possible writers to be studied include: O'Neill, Brecht, Beckett, Shaw, Boswell, Woolf, Nabokov, Toomer, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Henry James, Joyce, Vonnegut, Melville, McEwan. Theoretical writers may include: Bakhtin, Watt, Lukacs, Frye, Carlson, Schechner, Brecht, Puchner, and Iser. ENTA W3945y Irish Drama: Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge (Jill Muller) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This course will explore the work of four Dublin-born dramatists who were responsible for revolutionary changes in English and Irish theatre during the period 1890-1914. We will begin by reading plays written for the London stage by Wilde and Shaw, playwrights who employed very different strategies and effects to tackle some similar questions, breaking open the moribund conventions of Victorian melodrama and the "well-made play" to satirize English attitudes to class, money, marriage, gender, and sexuality. In the second half of the semester we will examine the sometimes controversial efforts of Yeats and Synge to mine Irish folklore and folkways to create a national and nationalist drama for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In addition to reading major plays by the four dramatists, this course will make use of journalism, letters, prefaces, and autobiography to further investigate the playwrights' attitudes to Ireland and Irishness, along with their responses to each other's work and that of their European contemporaries. ENTA W3970y Major 20th-century Playwrights: Harold Pinter (Austin Quigley) W 2:10-4. Seminar. The course will trace the pattern of the evolving theatrical career of Harold Pinter and explore the nature of and relationships among key features of an emerging aesthetic. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the trajectories of modernism and postmodernism, and examining the characteristic use of confined spaces; the intense scrutiny of families, friendships, and disruptive intruders; the alternating rejection of and insistence upon political implications; the experiments with temporality, multi-linearity, reverse chronology, and split staging; the emblematic use of stage sets and tableaux; the problematics of performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays' potential as instruments of cultural intervention. ENGL W3938y Writing the Black Atlantic (Saidiya Hartman) W 11-12:50. Seminar. This course examines representations of the African diaspora in contemporary novels and non-fiction by writers in the U.S., Canada, Britain, the Caribbean, and Africa. Narratives of dispersal and return, histories of slavery and colonialism, and the constituents of black modernity are the themes to be explored. Some of the questions to be considered are: What is the relation between dispossession and self-making in the diasporic imagination? What are the cultural and political practices that connect the diaspora? What is the place of memory in mobilizing political movements? What is the role of literary and cultural production in redressing historical injury? CLEN W4785y Global English Literature (David Damrosch) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. A survey of the explosion of English literatures around the globe in the course of the twentieth century. Issues to be discussed will include exile and migration, dialect and creolization, postcoloniality and the politics of literary form, in Kipling, Eliot, Wodehouse, Barnes, Rhys, Desani, Rushdie, Walcott, Coetzee, Gordimer, Tutuola, Kelman, Brooke-Rose, Jamyang Norbu, and Shahid Ali. Tentative syllabus. ENTA W4724y Modern Drama II (Martin Puchner) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. This course explores European and U.S. drama from the early twentieth century to the sixties, including the avant-garde theaters of futurism, the political theaters of Brecht and Odets, and classics of modern tragedy such as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Attention is also paid to the relation between the theater and the other arts, including architecture, cinema, and music. AMERICAN ENGL W3268y Foundations of American Literature II (Amanda Claybaugh) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. A survey of the major literary developments of the period. Topics and authors likely to include realism (Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain), naturalism (Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton), and modernism (Hart Crane, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Jean Toomer, Sophie Treadwell, William Carlos Williams), as well as the emergence of African-American poetry and fiction (Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar). ENGL W3875y The Concept of a National Literature (Ezra Tawil) R 4:10-6. Seminar. Explores the emergence of the idea of a "national literature" in America, from its first stirrings after the Revolution, through the burgeoning cultural nationalism of the 1820s, and culminating in the full blown literary nationalism of the "Young America" movement in the 1840s and the solidification of a national literature in the 1850s. Readings likely to include Kant, Staël, Freneau, Brown, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman. ENGL W3711y American Literature Seminar: The Big Ambitious Novel in Contemporary America (Bruce Robbins) W 2:10-4. Seminar. Critic James Wood has cast doubt on the accomplishment of those contemporary American novelists, like Jonathan Franzen, Don De Lillo, and Richard Powers, who have tried to carry what Wood calls the "Dickensian" ambition of nineteenth-century realism to the higher scale and greater complexity of society today. This seminar will try to assess both their ambition and their success, paying equal attention to the new social circumstances that these novelists attempt to integrate (for example, an unprecedented consciousness of global interconnectedness) and to the question of whether their formal literary innovations (for example, "postmodern" playfulness with plot and character) should be understood as successfully rising to the challenge their story-telling faces. ENGL W3733y The City in American Literature (Charles Walls) M 11-12:50. Seminar. Through novels, drama, poetry, and film, this course explores how the city figures in the geography of modern American life, as a place of individual and national reinvention, of international exchange, and of, paradoxically in the "era of crowds," alienation and anonymity. We will encounter a wide cast of characters: social scientists, dandies, flaneurs, small town girls, migrants and immigrants, and the city itself in gritty urban noir. ENGL W3985y Film Noir (Ann Douglas) W 6:10-8. Seminar. 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. ENGL W3715y Major American Authors: Roth / Ellison / Bellow (Ross Posnock) M 4:10-6. Seminar. This course will read works by three major postwar novelists who each in his own way refused the burden of ethnic or racial uplift and instead explored their birthright as cosmopolitan modernists. We will explore the aesthetic and culture consequences of this choice for each of them. Questions of influence will also be pursued, since Bellow and Ellison were good friends and Roth deeply admires Ellison. ENGL W3934y The Harlem Renaissance (Marcellus Blount) R 2:10-4. Topics include the construction of the male subject, the search for poetic form, and gay and lesbian representation. Writers include Mae Cowdery, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer. ENGL W4593y American Novel 1789-1865 (Ezra Tawil) TR 10:35-11:50. Lecture. History and theory of the novel form in America, 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: Rowson, Foster, C.B. Brown, Cooper, Sedgwick, Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville. ENGL W4632y Asian American Literature and Culture (Wen Jin) TR 9:10-10:25. Lecture. No auditing. This course offers an overview of "Asian American literature" while interrogating the political and formal underpinnings of this very category. We will examine important prose narratives, poetry, and plays written by Asians in America from the mid-nineteenth century onward, with a focus on two questions in particular: 1) How do these texts figure the relationship among U.S. racial formation, transpacific migration, and U.S.-Asian relations? 2) How do they contribute to and complicate familiar literary genres and modes of writing (autobiography, the short story, social realism, magical realism, modernist and experimental poetry, etc.)? Course readings include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Amitav Ghosh, Aimee Phan, Gary Pak, Sucheng Chan, as well as selected stories, poetry, and essays. THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS ENGL W3770y Children's Literature: How Imagination Grows (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25. Lecture. Analysis of classics of children's literature to identify what literary imagining is, how it matures, and what may be its specific personal and social value in present-day culture. NOTE: students interested in applying for admission should read the course description, requirements, and syllabus, and then email Professor Kroeber (kk17@columbia.edu) explaining why they are interested in exploring, through close study of fictional stories rewarding to both mature and immature readers, how the faculty of imagining develops. Further note: Those admitted do NOT register for the course (registration is blocked); rather, the department will enroll admitted students at the end of the registration period. CLEN W3721y Literature and Politics (Richard Braverman) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture. Readings in the political novel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Addresses the ways that literary works represent and challenge political thought and practice. Topics to include revolution and reform; exiles and intellectuals; the formation of ideologies; gender and class; alternative histories. Works by Turgenev, Conrad, Koestler, Camus, Doctorow, DeLillo, Kundera, Naipaul, Coetzee, Atwood, Dai Sijie, and others. ENGL W3690y Deep Sea Thought (Robert Ferguson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture. Living on the edge with Jonah, Solomon, Ishmael, Lily Briscoe, and those who "fear death by water." The course will explore the power, the dangers, and the rewards of thought in the literature of ideas. The emphasis will be on reading closely with special attention given to the philosophical problem of the human condition in major works. Texts will include The Book of Jonah, Ecclesiastes, Moby-Dick, To The Lighthouse, The Wasteland, and the odes of John Keats. NOTE: This class will be held at the Law School building of William and June Warren in room 107, which is the basement lecture hall. The address is 1125 Amsterdam Avenue (a quarter of a block south of 116th Street). ENGL W3890y Archaeologies of Language: From Ancient Gloss to Postmodern Database (David Yerkes) T 4:10-6. Seminar. Within the framework of a history of dictionaries of the English language, the course will engage in a deep study of virtually all aspects of both the form and the meaning of words. The students' papers will be read extremely closely, for both thought and clarity. ENTA W3702y Drama, Theatre, Theory (Zander Brietzke) R 11-12:50. Seminar. This course examines the principles of Aristotelian drama throughout theater history and the diverse reactions against them in the twentieth century. On the one hand, Artaud argued for a theater of sight and sound independent of any text, while Brecht's epic theater, on the other hand, advocated political awareness and social change with tightly wrought texts in an age of scientific understanding. In fact, though, the best drama in any age has never exactly followed the rules and the writing of Václav Havel pinpoints the struggle for freedom, whether political or artistic, as an inspiration for creativity and original expression. Comedy often functions as a rebellion against the norm, and plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, and O'Neill, in addition to texts by the authors above, will show how great art defies and transcends tendentiousness. ENGL W3840y Satiric Poetry from Rochester to Koch (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8. Seminar. This course will focus on the major--and funniest--satirical poetry written from the Restoration to recent times. The weaponry in the arsenals of the genre's most adroit practitioners--Rochester, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Byron, Cummings, Koch, etc.--will be examined in relation to their favorite targets: the social, political, religious, philosophical, or artistic concerns of their day and ours. Syllabus. ENGL W3409y Form in Poetry (Richard Sacks) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This seminar will focus on the extremely close reading of poetic texts in English, especially their formal elements and the resulting relationships between form and meaning. The poems to be examined will come from as broad a range as possible of periods and places in the English speaking world. Tentative syllabus. CLEN W3791y Promiscuity and the Novel (David Kurnick) T 2:10-4. The novel is frequently described as embodying or resisting the "marriage plot," but the form might equally be seen as reflecting on the fact of multiple emotional and sexual partnerships. This course will examine fictions where serial entanglements are the norm in order to ask why the novel has been so interested in the fact of faithlessness. We'll begin with the early modern novel of erotic intrigue, move through French courtesan fiction and the English courtship novel, and arrive at modernist explorations of the sexual demi-monde and more recent depictions of gay urban life. Questions to be explored: the historical mutations in the cultural meanings of promiscuity; the association of promiscuity with sexual minorities, women, working-class people and aristocrats; the relation of the novel's erotically compromised origins to its institutionalization as high art; the relations between love and commerce, and between friendship and sex; the connections between serial publication and serial forms of sexuality. Possible writers to be covered include Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, the Marquis de Sade, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Djuna Barnes, Anita Loos, Marcel Proust, and Alan Hollinghurst. CLEN W4560y Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory (Bruce Robbins) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. What are the intellectual antecedents of contemporary critical, cultural, and social theory? Where do the vocabularies and problematics that occupy us most urgently today, or that we occupy-- history, the subject, the other, the aesthetic, culture, society, discourse, and so on--come from, and how does this history illuminate their current challenges and relations? Beginning with Judith Butler's argument about the French appropriations of Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic and its place in her later theorizing of gender and the body, this course will look back at certain thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber) who offer indispensable continuities with and counterpoints to it. Though some knowledge of recent feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory would be helpful, only minimal acquaintance will be presumed; selected 20th-century readings that illustrate lines of connection will be provided. ENGL W4901y History of the English Language (David Yerkes) TR 6:10-7:25. Lecture. A language, not a literature, course. Overview of the development of the English language from pre-history, through Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and modern. OF RELATED INTEREST AMST W1010y Introduction to American Studies (Andrew Delbanco
and Maura Spiegel) MW 1:10-2:25. An introduction to fundamental
themes and debates that span four centuries of American culture.
Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,
we will explore themes such as the question of national character;
immigration, assimilation and the color line; opportunity and the
pursuit of property; self-making, meritocracy, consumerism; Americans
at work and leisure, American religion and spiritual life, educational
ideals, and Americans at war. A partial list of authors includes:
John Winthrop, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson,
Frederick Douglass, R. W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln,
W.E. B. DuBois, Andrew Carnegie, Horatio Alger, Theodore Roosevelt,
John Dewey, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis,
Thorstein Veblen, Nella Larsen and Gish Jen. Conducted as a lecture/discussion,
with weekly sections. Note to English Majors and Concentrators:
this course satisfies the American geographical distribution
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