ENGL W3011y Critical Reading, Critical Writing Seminar:

Section 1: R 11-12:50
Section 2: R 4:10-6
Section 3: F 11-12:50
Section 4: M 6:10-8

ENGL W3034y  Chaucer: Canterbury Tales (Paul Strohm)  MW 4:10-5:25.  Lecture.  We will read most of Chaucer’s Tales in their original Middle English, organizing our inquiry around the senses in which ‘experimental Chaucer’ engages in ceaseless and restless experimentation with language, style, narrative technique, generic expectation, and, above all, the status of the art object as a frankly ‘made’ or ‘created’ thing.’  In-class modernizations and commentaries and several papers.     

CLEN W3925y Topics in Medieval Literature: Medieval Animals (Susan Crane) R 11-12:50.  Seminar. Medieval writers often turn to (other) animals when commenting on human culture. Beast fables critique human social behavior; stories of metamorphosis explore humanity’s kinship and difference from animals; and bestiaries present the natural world as a moral instruction book. Besides this emphasis on the human, medieval writing argues about the nature of animals: do they reason? can they sin? how do they learn, and how express themselves? Medieval thought about animals contrasts intriguingly with our contemporary ideas. The goal of the seminar is to refine our understanding of what medieval animal literature says about human culture, what it says about the difference between humans and animals, and what it says about the identity and mentality of animals. The reading list sets a range of later medieval writing about animals in dialogue with emerging theoretical discourses on animals in philosophy and cultural studies.
       Medieval texts may include the lays and beast fables of Marie de France, Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis, Edward of York’s Master of Game, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and romances of the Knight of the Lion and Knight of the Swan. Critical writing on animals by Augustine, Aquinas, Agamben, Foucault,  Derrida, Eco, Singer, and others will prepare us to think about how the animal question might be theorized in medieval studies. To further link medieval and contemporary understandings of animals, each seminar participant will report to the class on an influential contemporary work such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan), The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman), The Lion King (Walt Disney Productions), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick), Dominion (Matthew Scully), Animals in Translation (Grandin), and The Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway). 
       A few of the many possibilities for the research paper are metamorphosis and body hopping; the hermeneutics of beast fables; animal language and communication; exemplary and helpful animals; totemism (descent from animals, self-representation through animals, animals in heraldry); theological and philosophical views of animals in medieval and modern traditions; animal-human alliances in warfare and hunting; Adam’s naming of the animals (Genesis 2:18-20 and its commentaries); and scientific thought about animals in the bestiaries.   

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ENGL W3336y  Shakespeare I: Early Shakespeare  (James Shapiro) MW 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Limited to 70; priority to seniors and juniors. No Continuing Education students or Lifelong Learners admitted to this undergraduate lecture. Shakespeare's drama from "Titus Andronicus" to "Hamlet." There will be no graduate student sectioning. All term papers will be graded by the professor.

ENGL W3262y  English Literature 1500-1600: Literature for a new England (Alan Stewart) MW 1:10-2:25.  Lecture. This lecture course examines sixteenth-century English literature in the light of the new religious, social and political challenges of the period.  Texts, primarily poetry and prose, include lyric poetry by Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and John Donne; sonnet sequences by Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare; early narrative works by George Gascoigne and Thomas Nashe; works of early English literary criticism; travel writings by Walter Ralegh and Thomas Harriot; as well as longer texts including More’s Utopia, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

ENGL W3338y Shakespeare’s Poetry (James Shapiro) T 9-10:50.  Seminar. Enrollment limited to 15. Priority given to seniors. Prerequisite: the instructor's permission. Shakespeare's sonnets and longer poems.

ENGL W3340y Literature and Science in Early Modern England (Alan Stewart) W 6:10-8.  Seminar. This seminar course explores the relationship between literature and science in the period immediately before and during the so-called “Scientific Revolution”.  It examines representation of inquiry into the unknown; the relationship between magic and science; the central role of alchemy; the emergence of the virtuosi; the formation of the Royal Society, and challenges to it.  Throughout, attention will be paid to the active contribution of the “literary” to this supposedly “scientific” realm. Texts will range from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus to scientific writings by Isaac Newton, via works by John Dee, Francis Bacon, William Harvey,Thomas Browne, Margaret Cavendish, Henry More, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke.

ENGL W4211y  Milton   (Julie Crawford)  MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. This course will look at the major works of John Milton in the context of 17th-century English religious, political and social events. In addition to reading Milton’s poems, major prose (including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth), and the full texts of Paradise Lost and Sampson Agonistes (the course text will be Orgel and Goldberg, eds. John Milton), we will look at the authors and radicals whose activities and writings helped to provide the contexts for Milton’s own: poets and polemicists, sectarians and prophets, revolutionaries and regicides, Diggers and Levelers. Requirements for this course include two short primary research papers (3 pp.) and an exam. Graduate students will also be required to write a seminar paper. Syllabus.

CLEN W4122y  Renaissance in Europe II: Figuring Eros (Anne Prescott) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. This course studies a few Renaissance writers who exploit, express, or explore how Eros relates to language in a variety of human situations and dilemmas. Eros himself is a complex and contradictory god and Renaissance writers tend to be complex and contradictory when allowing him to influence what they think and say. Eros, moreover, is not really (in spite of what some say) the enemy of other gods or God, so we will also consider how a couple of writers have treated his relation to the religious imagination. Eros even, from time to time, if not often, supports what some politicians now call “family values,” so we will also take a look at how he might energize hopes to marry and procreate. I am fairly mellow about methodologies and theories, so feel free to apply or experiment with approaches that intrigue you. I have no books on reserve but will make suggestions as we go along. Authors studies to include Ovid, Petrarch, Rabelais, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Nash, among others. Tentative syllabus.

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ENGL W3265y  Romanticism: William Blake (Karl Kroeber) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Limited to 30 students; application (and interview) required for admission. Through intensive analysis of lyrics and shorter prophecies of William Blake the course explores the significance of his emergence from obscurity in the 19th   and early 20th centuries to become a major focus of interest in postmodern culture.  Through use of the Internet Website, The William Blake Archive, both the verbal and graphic dimensions of Blake’s art will be examined, along with a few relevant examples of  poems by his contemporaries, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats 

ENGL W3950y  Fictions of Pilgrimage, Exile, Captivity (Marianne Giordani) T 6:10-8. Seminar. We shall study in depth and in context the three most popular and enduring of English-language prose-fictions produced between 1660 and 1740: The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels. Those shall dominate our course of study, but one or more of the following shall also be considered for inclusion in the syllabus: Milton’s Paradise Regained, Behn’s Oroonoko,and Johnson’s Rasselas. Remarkably, though the above mentioned works by Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift stand quite apart from one another in nearly every other way, each is an original vision and modern prototype of exodus, wilderness, and deliverance: The mortal protagonist embarks upon a estranging journey that discloses his essential nature. Laying bare his limitations and straining his capacities, the journey resolves in patterns of faith and doubt, humiliation and exaltation, alienation and community, home being the increasingly elusive disposition of a purpose not itself to be transcended. Our materials comprise a rich and fascinating intersection of genres, modes, and styles—allegorical, naturalistic, didactic, fantastical, and satirical.  We shall examine carefully the literary and rhetorical elements of our texts and learn about the religious, intellectual, and social discourses in which they participated. Above all, we shall relish their imaginative forays into the wilderness within.

CLEN W3792y  The 18th-Century  Comparative  Novel (Jenny Davidson) T 2:10-4. Seminar. Readings in the eighteenth-century European novel.  Style, narratology, the “rise” of realism and the history of novel criticism will all figure in our discussions.  Readings by Defoe, Richardson, Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Austen and others. Syllabus.

ENGL W4302y  18th-Century Satire (Jenny Davidson) MW 2:40-3:55. Lecture. The 18th century is the last time when most of Britain's major writers chose to work in the genre of satire. In this course, we will read both verse and prose satires, paying special attention to the relationship between politics and language and to the role of gender. Is satire more conducive to conservative or progressive political impulses? How does satire as a genre allow poets to challenge the authority of their precursors? Readings include Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, satires on women and responses by women writers ("lady's dressing room" poems), 18th-century adaptations of Horace and Juvenal, romantic-period satire (Byron, Shelley, Austen); the course will end with George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and 1984. Syllabus.

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CLEN W3390y  Hardy and Zola (Monica Cohen) W 11-12:50. Seminar. In stating that “men are but phenomena and the conditions of phenomena,” Emile Zola began the manifesto by which French naturalism would break away from what had until then been thought of as novelistic realism.  Writing in England at the same time, Thomas Hardy similarly crafted a fictional world in which a man’s – or a woman’s – interaction with the physical environment would form the novel’s primary source of meaning and regenerative – or degenerative – value.  In the twenty urban novels that constitute Zola’s Rougon-Maquart family saga and in the imagined rural geography of Hardy’s Wessex novels, the difficulties of representing work shift the late 19th c novel’s attention away from courtship and domestic relations and toward formal principles of determinism and tragedy.  Readings include L’Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

ENGL W3451y  Literature of Empire (Gauri Viswanathan) T 4:10-6. Seminar. This course looks at plots of empire in the British novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines not only how empire was represented but also how the novel form gave visibility to the strategies of empire and also showed the tacit purposes, contradictions, and anxieties of British imperialism. Among the themes this seminar will explore are: the culture of secrecy; criminality and detection; insurgency, surveillance, and colonial control; circulation and exchange of commodities; messianism and political violence. Readings include works by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Philip Meadows Taylor, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, among others.

ENGL  W4802y The History of the Novel II (Sharon Marcus) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Why do we take novels seriously?  Realism.  Realist novels are self-contained fictional universes that also represent an external world of historical events and social forces.  Accordingly, this course will approach the realist novel with a dual focus on literary form and social history.  Topics to be covered include: the Gothic, sensation fiction, and melodrama; character system, plot structure, and narrative technique; the novel’s relationship to other forms, such as newspapers, diaries, and the theater; the invention of childhood; marriage, kinship, and friendship; work, vocation, and social institutions; city and country; religion, nation, and empire.  Readings: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda; and Bram Stoker, Dracula.  Two short papers and a final exam. Syllabus.

ENGL W4404y  Victorian Poetry (Erik Gray) MW 4:10-5:25.  Lecture. This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy. Syllabus.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3220y  Yeats, Eliot, Auden (Edward Mendelson) MW 9:10-10:25. Lecture.  Yeats, Eliot, Auden, possibly others. Syllabus.

CLEN W3208y Modern Comparative Fiction: New Literary Histories (Lejla Kucukalic) TR 1:10-2:25. Lecture.  This class will examine how modern writers from around the world make use of innovative literary elements and narrative methods in order to re-conceptualize "history" and personal identity. In their fictions and histories, our chosen authors reinvent traditional notions of linear time and the discrete self, rewriting in the process the conventions of realistic representation. Whether their characters transcend several lifetimes (Woolf, Eliade, and Grass), travel in time to kill their own predecessors (Barjavel), reach different realms of existence (Kundera, Karahasan, Jabra), or find dreams to be truer than life (Murakami and Dick), their narratives allow us a fresh approach to the ways we perceive and record history, personal and national identity, and our sense of the past, present, and future. Students will therefore examine the relationship between form and idea, and reason and emotion in these works of modern world literature. We will trace how, in the modern novel, literature serves as a means to reconstruct memory and identity, face loss, and negotiate the quasi-objectivity of the twentieth century. New Literary Histories will provide material for discussion of why these stories were written, a chance to discuss narrative theory and the structure of the novel, as well as consider issues relating to historiography and ontology. Tentative reading list includes: Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Gunter Grass, The Flounder; Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Dzevad Karahasan, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Journals of Sarab Affan; Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude;  Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children;  Rene Barjavel, Future Times Three; Philip K. Dick, Valis; and Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth. Syllabus.

* * * NEW SEMINAR ADDED LAST WEEK OF JANUARY * * *

ENGL W3940y Modern Fiction: VIRGINIA WOOLF (Edward Mendelson) M 11-12:50. Seminar. Virginia Woolf's novels and essays in their literary and historical context. Four weeks on "Mrs Dalloway", two weeks each on "To the Lighthouse", "The Waves," and "Between the Acts"; also "A Room of One's Own," "Three Guineas," and other works. SYLLABUS [tentative: dates to be adjusted]. TO APPLY/REGISTER: Because this seminar was added late, students need not formally apply; they should notify Prof Mendelson (em36@columbia.edu) and cc Michael Mallick (mgm3@columbia.edu) before the first class meeting February 2 that they intend to take the course, but may go ahead and register before the end of the ADD COURSE period, January 30. But please NOTE: Should an unmanageable number of students seek admission, then preference will be given to seniors and juniors. Further, if too many students turn up for the first class, some who have registered may have to be cut, so please have a back-up in place (or hold off on dropping any course you may have cut from your schedule in order to be able to enroll in this seminar).

ENGL W3829y  Studies in Narrative: Modern British Fiction (Stephen Massimilla) W 6:10-8. Seminar. In this course, we will read profoundly influential works of British novelists who—partly through their interactions with one another and partly through their confrontation with political and intellectual upheavals—managed to define what we mean by modernist fiction. In what respects did the formal and thematic innovations of certain modernists constitute a break with prior practices? How can we make sense of these new practices? We will also consider works by those who either were looked upon dismissively by the major modernists or who themselves resisted what they saw to be the modernist agenda. Themes will include colonialism, empire, myth, urbanization, war, sexuality and gender, psychology, narrative and linguistic experimentation, and theories of the novel. We will also explore the usefulness of the term “modernist” and ask whether we must discriminate among a variety of “modernisms.” Authors will likely include: Wilde, Conrad, H.G. Wells, Bennett, James, Ford, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and Joyce.

CLEN W3750y  The Originators and the Modernist Vortex (Paul Violi) R 6:10-8.  Seminar.  This course will concentrate on the development of the modernist vortex by American and British poets in the first quarter of the twentieth century.  The work of W. B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Ford Maddox Hueffer, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Hilda.Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, E.E.Cummings, et al, will be studied, along with their interaction with European, namely French and Italian, contemporaries and predecessors.  Readings will also include “The War Poets” (Owen, Sassoon, Thomas) and, for contrast, some of The Georgians.  However, the focus will be on close readings of representative poems that arose out of a seeming welter of artistic movements—Realism, Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, Dada, and new approaches to Classical and Asian poetry—and the revolutionary influence the authors had on poetry in general for the rest of the century.

CLEN W3940y  Kafka: The short fiction of Franz Kafka (Mark Strand)  M 11-12:50. Seminar.  Limited to 12 students. A close reading of the major stories and parables of Kafka.   Those wishing to be admitted should submit a short letter in which they state their reasons for wanting to take the class. Syllabus.

CLEN W3980y Topics in Comparative Literature: Narratives from Underground (Deborah Martinsen) T 9-10:50. Seminar. This seminar will study twentieth-century narratives whose authors adapt different strategies developed by Dostoevsky as he created the highly self-conscious, first-person paradoxalist narrator of his Notes from Underground.  Starting with a close reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes, we will examine narrative structures and frames, identify strategies that differentiate authors from their unreliable narrators, consider how the paradox of shame contributes to the dynamics of underground narratives, and explore how authors adapt different features of the original underground man to their characters’ background and psychology, as well as to their own narrative ends.  During the course of the semester, we will establish criteria that differentiate underground men from underground narrators.  Works will include Yuri Olesha’s Envy/Zavist’, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno/La Coscienza di Zeno, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl/Būf-e Kūr, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Albert Camus’s The Fall/La Chute.  Students will vote on the final work.  Students should read Notes from Underground before the first class.

CLEN W3970y  Modernism and the City (Victoria Rosner) W 2:10-4.  Seminar. For the Victorians, the city was a wellspring of iniquity, a cistern of crime, filth, disease, and poverty.  Its dark corners offered shelter to a catalogue of villains, while also concealing from the public gaze the innocent suffering of the young and the old. In the early years of twentieth century, however, the city metamorphosed for many from a den of evil to a space of change, a machine driving the nation into the future. Quite literally, as cars and airplanes were seen more frequently in and above the street, the potential for increased speed transformed the experience of time in city.  Yet many individuals found these emerging urban rhythms alienating and disturbing.  For some, the city threatened to warp the texture of life, and render reality ghostly and perplexing. Distinct illnesses of soul, mind, and body seemingly caused by city life were described by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers. For women in particular, city spaces opened up a new world of freedom and possibilities for movement, but at the same time they presented new dangers to personal safety. This course will examine visions of the modern European city, as seen through the eyes of its architects, painters, writers, filmmakers, and social critics in the period 1890-1930.  We will concentrate on London, with occasional side-trips to Paris, Vienna, Dublin, and Berlin. Though focused on literature, this course is interdisciplinary in its design, drawing on perspectives from architecture, literature, sociology, urban planning, and the visual arts. Selected writers: Arthur Conan Doyle, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Sophie Treadwell, and Virginia Woolf.           

ENTA W3920y British Drama Since World War Two (Jill Muller) T 11-12:50. Seminar. This course will explore a period of extraordinary creativity, energy, and radical experimentation in British theatre. Our readings will include plays by T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, John Osborne, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Joe Orton, Peter Schaffer, Martin Sherman, Caryl Churchill, and Sarah Kane. In addition to examining the plays as reflections of and responses to massive post-war social changes, loss of empire, and anxiety about class, sexual, and national identities, we will also approach them as performances, looking at contemporary theatre practice and changing theories and techniques of acting and staging. Our study of British theatre in the second half of the twentieth century will be enhanced by investigation of parallel developments in film, television, and the visual arts.
 
CLEN W3721y  The Novel and Global Capitalism (Wen Jin) R 4:10-6. Seminar. “Cowboy capitalism” is arguably the most powerful symbol America has created for itself.  For some, the rise of the American variant of corporate capitalism during the Great Depression of 1873-96 constituted “a far more effective and radical departure from the dominant British regime of market capitalism than the variant that emerged at about the same time in Germany” (Arrighi 287).  The transnational expansion of this new kind of capitalism after WWII ushered in an era of American dominance in global political economy.  To understand the unprecedented levels of criticism to which the American “cowboy capitalism” and its financial component have been subjected recently, it is important that we study its history.   This course charts a short history of cultural perceptions of American capitalism through an exploration of twentieth-century American novels and other narratives.  We will discuss how these novels comment on the various issues surrounding “cowboy capitalism,” including upward mobility, social inequality, the circulation of money on national and global scales, etc.  The list of primary readings will include Frank Norris’s The Pit, L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Aryn Rand’s essays on capitalism, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, William Gaddis’ JR, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion, and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.  We will read these texts in conjunction with introductions to the history of American capitalism in the twentieth-century and selected criticisms of the cultural logic of American/transnational capitalism.  

CLEN W4935y Transnational Modernisms (Victoria Rosner) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. This course surveys emerging approaches to thinking about the transnationalism of modernist literature.  Looking beyond a national-literature approach to modernism, we will explore transnational affiliations and imaginations in modernist literature, consider modernism's relation to imperialism and the project of decolonization, and think broadly about modernism's politics and political agency.  We will discuss works by writers whose modernist practices originate outside of the United States and western Europe as well as writers more traditionally associated with Anglo-American modernism.  Ours will be a "long modernism," expanding well past the traditional boundary of WWII; the implications and logic of this choice will be a matter for our discussion and debate.  We will consider a range of topics and issues, including the autonomy of the intellectual, resistance to war and fascism, the internationalism of the avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, and the home in the world.  Writers discussed will include Aimé Césaire, Tsetse Dangarembga,  T. S. Eliot, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Langston Hughes, Doris Lessing, Wyndham Lewis, V. S. Naipaul, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, Rabindranath Tagore, and Virginia Woolf.  Requirements for undergraduates: midterm exam, two papers, and a presentation.  Requirements for graduate students to be discussed in class. Syllabus.

CLEN W4640y   Caribbean Literature: Revolution in/on the Caribbean (Frances Negron-Muntaner) TR 2:40-3:55.  Lecture. 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. Syllabus.

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ENGL W3267y  Foundations of American Literature I  (Andrew Delbanco) MW 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. Introduction to American thought and expression from the first English settlements to the eve of the Civil War. Writers include the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville. Themes include the rise of an American national consciousness, the transformation of religion, ideas of nature and democracy, debates over immigration, race, and slavery. The course proceeds through a combination of lecture and discussion—with the aim of deepening our understanding of the origins and development of literature and culture in the United States. In addition to the two lectures, a weekly discussion section is an integral and required part of the course for all students.

ENGL W3272y  American Novel 1865-1914 (Amanda Claybaugh) MW 10:35-11:50. Lecture. Focuses on the three literary modes that flourished in the postbellum era: realism, naturalism, and "local color" fiction. Considers the following topics: rising and falling, choice and chance, consciousness and embodiment, as well as the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction. Authors to include: John W. De Forest, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton. Syllabus.

ENGL W3401y African American Literature II  (Farah Griffin) TR 9:10-10:25.  Lecture. Lecture. This lecture/discussion course is intended as the second half of the basic survey in African American literature. We will study the development of black writing since the Harlem Renaissance. Readings will include fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose by Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others. We will read essays, poems, novels and short stories. Assignments include several unannounced quizzes, one eight page paper, and one take home final.

ENGL W3723y  Cultural Critique:  The American Intellectual from Emerson to Sontag (Ross Posnock) M 4:10-6. Seminar. Juniors/seniors only. This course will examine the paradoxical role and status of intellectuals in a nation famous for what Richard Hofstadter called "anti-intellectualism in American life." The notion of "public intellectual" will be of particular concern, especially as it evolves in the career of Emerson, who begins extolling "the infinitude of the private man" and later became a strong voice against slavery, in the career of Margaret Fuller, confined in American but who becomes a leading figure in the Italian struggle for independence, in the career of William James, Harvard philosophy professor and psychologist who becomes the leading public intellectual of the late 19th century, and James's student W. E. B. Du Bois, professor, activist, editor, writer. Randolph Bourne wrote influential essays on the eve of WWI on the responsibility of the Intellectuals and these have had wide influence and currency. The scientist as public intellectual is examined in the tragic career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a father of the atomic bomb. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (originally in The New Yorker) catapulted her into the public arena in 1962, as, later in that decade, for very different reasons, did Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation." We will round out the course with a look at the work and careers of two influential public intellectuals: pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and English professor and activist Edward Said. Requirements: 2 short papers, one term paper, one class presentation.

ENGL W3740y  James Baldwin (Marcellus Blount) R 6:10-8.  Seminar. Major fiction and collections of essays, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Just Above My Head, as well as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time. Themes include problems of gender and genre. Requirements: attendance and participation in class discussion; one fifteen-page essay.

ENGL W3874y  American Borderlands: Literature of the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canadian Borders (Rachel Adams) T 2:10-4.  Seminar. In our contemporary moment of globalization, it is sometimes said that national boundaries are eroding.  However, a basic assumption of this course is that borders have become more, rather than less, important in our time.  This is particularly true of North America, where sometimes the best understanding of U.S. culture comes from those who live at and directly on the other side of its borders.  This course studies the United States’ two land borders as a scene of injustice and limitation, as well as the genesis of rich cultural expression.  In contrast to most courses on “the borderlands,” which typically focus exclusively the U.S.-Mexico border, we will take a comparative look at the Mexican and Canadian borderlands.  Each week we will read the work of one major border author accompanied by one or more critical articles that will introduce key concepts and contexts to help us frame our discussion.  The first half of the course will be devoted to materials from the U.S.-Mexican border; the second to the U.S.-Canadian border.  Comparative perspectives will be encouraged throughout.  Major assignments include an in-class presentation accompanied by a short position paper and a longer final paper.

ENGL W3710y American Lit and Culture: AIDS and the Politics of Literary Form (Marcellus Blount)  R 2:10-4. Seminar. This seminar examines the formal and thematic tendencies of the artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the United States.  Aside from the historical and political significance of that response, what does it tell us about questions of authorship, literary history, and artistic genre.  This course will ask the larger theoretical question of the importance of sexuality in understanding artistic reception and production.  Is it possible to argue that responses to the AIDS crisis help us to define some of the persisting characteristics of gay literature?  In part, this course will focus on the elegy as a literary form that has been particularly useful in expressing same-sex erotic fulfillment and desire.  By looking at how artists have represented the AIDS crisis, we may also get a sense of how gay men, especially, have turned to the elegy as a form of historical agency and political desire.  We will analyze the work of a range of artists, theorists, and activists, especially Raphael Campo, Michael Cunningham, Douglas Crimp, Melvin Dixon, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn, Essex Hemphill, Paul Monette, Sonia Sanchez, Eve Sedgwick, and Susan Sontag.

ENGL W4603y  American Literary Realism (Ross Posnock) MW 6:10-7:25. Lecture. Limited to 35 students. Open to graduate students to and to undergraduates of senior and junior standing only (in other words, not open to first-year students or sophomores). This course will look at the emergence of realism and naturalism-including novels by Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, W.E.B. DuBois, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton-as modes of literary representation that register tumultuous social and cultural changes in post-Civil War America: the rise of industrial technology, mass consumption, the impact of the urban metropolis on mental life, and the pervasive presence of the capitalist marketplace.

ENTA W4724y Modern Drama II: O’Neill, Williams, Miller (Zander Brietzke) MW  1:10-2:25. Lecture.  The inclusive dates for the three American masters of modern drama range from 1888 to 2005. Despite that span, all three produced their best plays on stage in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1945-1956): The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible. We will read these mature dramas as well as other works from the respective playwrights in order to trace the arc of their careers, paying particular attention to Williams’s social lament, O’Neill’s individualism and Miller’s moral vision. Frequent short essay assignments and one significant paper required.

CLEN W4930y  Transpacific Approaches American Literature (Wen Jin) MW 4:10-5:25.  Lecture. 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.”  His was not alone in harboring this sentiment.  This course is designed to explore the role of the Asia Pacific in the American literary and cultural imagination.     We will seek to generate new readings of some important texts in American literature since the mid-nineteenth century by placing them in the context of U.S. entanglements with the markets, peoples, and cultures lying across the Pacific.  We will also consider how transpacific approaches to American literature contribute to theories of translation and circulation, the capitalist world-system, and minority cultural production.  More importantly, by focusing on social, political, and cultural networks that link the U.S. with Asia, this course offers a preliminary survey of the emerging filed of Transpacific American Studies, which complements and complicates what has been conventionally known as Transatlanticism.  Literary readings include Herman Melville, Jack London, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Alex Kuo, Amitav Ghosh; theoretical readings include Said, Lye, Dirlik, Derrida, Benjamin, Arrighi, Liu, Wallerstein, Frank, etc. Syllabus.

ENGL W4503y  Race, Gender, and Poetic Form (Michael Golston) TR 2:40-3:55. Lecture. Intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets to include  Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Stein, H. D., Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, Zukofsky—read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.

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SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3960y 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 Tempest, Ecclesiastes, Book of Jonah, the odes of Keats, Moby-Dick, The Waste Land, and To the Lighthouse with a number of shorter lyric poems and philosophical excerpts from Pascal, Montaigne, Kant, W. James, Rawls, Tayler, etc. A note on location: this lecture will be held at the Law School in William June Warren 107 (or WJW 107 as it's familiarly known); WJW can be found at 1125 Amsterdam Avenue, less than half a block South of 116th Street. Room 107 is on the lower level available by stairs on the right and an elevator on the left after entering.

ENTA W3701y Drama, Theatre, Theory (Katherine Biers) R 2:10-4. 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.

ENGL W3995y  Studies in Poetry: Sonnets and Elegies (Erik Gray) F 11-12:50.  Seminar.This course examines two of the most important genres of Western lyric poetry.  We will begin our study of the elegiac tradition with classical pastoral elegies (Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, Virgil) before continuing with major English-language elegies from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including works by Milton, Shelley, Whitman, Hardy, and Auden.  The second half of the course will explore the tradition of the amatory sonnet sequence that begins with Petrarch; we will read works by Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The course concludes with Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which offers a combination of both genres.

CLEN W3977y  Seminar in Literature and Culture: Literature and Torture, From Athens to Abu Ghraib (Joseph Slaughter) W 11-12:50.  Seminar. Every decade or so, citizens of Western democracies re-discover that their governments torture in their name. Indeed, the current public debate about torture shows a surprising lack of familiarity with the history and literature of torture in the Western tradition—proceeding as if torture (and the ethical and political issues around its use) is something altogether new in a post-9/11 world. However, in the Anglo-European tradition, torture has been practiced, and the morality and efficacy of that practice challenged, since at least Aristotle; contemporary popular culture (in TV shows like 24) and legalistic arguments advocating the use of “coercive interrogation” have simplified the problem of torture by reducing it to a simple narrative device. Torture, practiced under the pretext of seeking confessions, is a profoundly anti-narrative activity; studying literary, filmic, and visual representations of torture--along with legal, polemical, governmental, and theoretical materials--this course will examine the narrative consequences and literary implications of torture. Likely authors: Arias, Aristophanes, Auden, Bandele, Coetzee, Danticat, Dorfman, Duras, Hama Tuma, Kafka, Lartegúy, Machiavelli, Mirbeau, Orphée, Pinter, Rivabella, Valenzuela.

ENGL W4917y  Topics in Literature and Society: Writing on Disability (Christopher Baswell) MW 2:40-3:55.   Lecture. Writings about disability and eccentric bodies, from Oedipus of the swollen foot to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Texts will cover a range of periods, including medieval narratives of miraculous cure, the hunchback king in Shakespeare's Richard III, and a powerfully immobile and sexually magnetic woman in Trollope's Barchester Towers.  While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety, students will be encouraged (and required) to seek out texts that address other issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental disability.  Critical readings will be drawn from the emerging field of Disability Studies.  Issues to be addressed will include the great historical shift from notions of the "ideal" or heroic, to the "normal" body; the social construction of disability; the cripple as icon or agent; disabled identity and the return of the memoire.  Two short papers and a take-home final. Syllabus.

ENGL G4905y Text and Culture: The History of the Book (Gerald Cloud) R 2:10-4. Seminar. This course studies the History of the Book, in its historical & cultural context, from the period when codex manuscripts gave way to the printed book, up to the industrial book of the 19th century.  We will look particularly at how the material aspects of books, their production, and their distribution changed over time and how those changes influenced the development of intellectual culture.  The course will be held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s seminar room, and draw heavily on the department’s rich collections of manuscripts, printed books, and printing realia. Our approach to the topic will introduce students to the history of the book through material examples of codex manuscripts, printed books, the materials of the press and letterpress printing, bibliographical methods, and recent scholarship. We will focus on how to recognize, describe, and analyze various aspects of book production, how books were read (signs of use, ownership, etc.), and circulated. Our examination of the physical book will prepare students to evaluate how the material and paratextual aspect of books contributed to their meaning, the formation of cultural and intellectual practices, and the way in which books were understood and valued. Though pitched at a graduate level, undergraduates who think they are qualified, may apply for admission. Syllabus.

CLEN G4995y  Reading Lacan (Maire Jaanus) T 2:10-4. Lecture/discussion. This semester we will study selections from the late Lacan: Seminar XX Encore (On feminine sexuality) and beyond to Seminars XXI The non-dupes err/The names of the father (Les non-dupes errent/Le nom-du-père), XX R.S.I. and XXIII Sinthome together with essays by Jacques-Alain Miller and Badiou and modern and postmodern novels and short stories. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan’s thought to literature and culture, and to questions of neuroscience, capitalism, democracy, and happiness. Undergraduates are welcome to enroll in the course; if they cannot do so automatically, they should see Michael Mallick in the Columbia English Dept. (602 Philosophy Hall) for an approval slip to take to the registrar.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

AMST W1010y Introduction to American Studies: Major Themes in the American Experience (Maura Spiegel and Casey Blake) MW 1:10-2:25. Conducted as a lecture/discussion, with weekly sections. A discussion section is required. Syllabus.

AMST W3931y Topics in American Studies Seminars:

Section 1: Food and American Life (Rachel Adams and Sarah Phillips) W 2:10-4. This course employs a cross-disciplinary perspective to blend examinations of food’s materiality (production and distribution) with its many meanings and functions (social, cultural, and aesthetic).  Using a place-based approach, it integrates these broader themes with class visits to New York locations and with a class project on food at Columbia University (where it comes from, who prepares it, where it goes).  Specific topics include early American foodways; farm industrialization and agribusiness externalities (environmental costs, labor issues); food processing and branding; gender and ethnicity; the supermarket; race, class, and inequities of access; health and nutrition; food stamps; organic shopping and dining; campus activism; and the overarching cultural significance of food (literary, visual, and filmic representations).  Enrolled students must be able to attend 3 or 4 field trips, the dates for which will not be known far in advance, and to attend the public talks of 2 prominent guest speakers.

Section 2: Equity in Higher Education (Andrew Delbanco and Roger Lehecka) M 4:10-6. In this seminar, we will examine the roles colleges and universities play in American society, the differential access to those institutions available to high school students based on family background and income, ethnicity, and other characteristics, the causes and consequences of this differential access, and some attempts to make the system more equitable. Readings and class meetings will include a study of the following subjects historically and in the 21st century: the wide variety of American institutions of higher education, financial aid policies (locally and nationally), affirmative action, and the role of the high school in helping students attend college.  Students in the seminar will be required to spend at least four hours each week as volunteers at the Double Discovery Center (DDC) in addition to completing assigned reading, participating in seminar discussions, and completing written assignments. DDC is an on-campus program that helps New York City high school students who lack many of the resources they need to attend college and to become more successful in gaining admission and finding financial aid.  The seminar will integrate its students' first-hand experiences with readings and class discussions. Note: An interview is required for admission to this course.

CPLS W3937y The Culture of Democracy (Stathis Gourgouris) M 11-1. Seminar. The point is to examine democracy not as political system, but as a historical phenomenon characterized by a specific culture: a corpus of ideas and values, stories and myths. This culture is not homogeneous; it has a variety of historical manifestations through the ages but remains nonetheless cohesive. The objective is twofold: 1) to determine which elements in democratic culture remain current, no matter what form they take in various historical instances; 2) to understand that the culture of democracy is indeed not abstract and transcendental but historical, with its central impetus being the self-interrogation and self-alteration of society. Syllabus.

JAZZ W4900y Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Brent Edwards) TR 10:35-11:50.  Lecture. This course will focus on the ways that jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures, from the blues poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary fiction. We will consider in detail the ways that writers have discovered or intuited formal models and political implications in black music. Rather than simply assume that influence only travels in one direction, we will also take up some literary efforts (including autobiography, poetry, historiography, and criticism) by musicians themselves. What are the links between musical form and literary innovation? How can terms of musical analysis (improvisation, rhythm, syncopation, harmony) be applied to the medium of writing? How does music suggest modes of social interaction or political potential to be articulated in language? How does one evaluate the performance of a poem (in an oral recitation or musical setting) in relation to its text? Materials may include writings and recordings by Jacques Attali, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Kurt Schwitters, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Ella Fitzgerald, William Melvin Kelley, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Gayl Jones, Michael Ondaatje, Joseph Jarman, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen, among others. Requirements: a 5-7 pg. midterm paper and a 9-12 pg. final paper. Syllabus.

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