This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL W3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration, starting with the Class of 2010. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

ENGL W3001y Literary Texts, Critical Methods Lecture (Erik Gray) T 6:10-7:25 4 pts. Prerequisites: University Writing (ENGL C1010 or F1010). Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL W3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the study of literature. Students will read works from the three major literary modes (lyric, drama, and narrative), drawn from the medieval period to the present day. They will learn the interpretative techniques required by each. They will also learn how to write scholarly papers on literature, as well as how to integrate secondary sources into their own critical writing.

ENGL W3011y Literary Texts, Critical Methods Seminar 4 pts. Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3011 must also register for ENGL W3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL 3001. Through discussion of specific works and through written exercises, the class will elaborate upon the topics taken up in the weekly lecture, training students in techniques of close reading and textual explication appropriate to the genres introduced in the lecture, and providing guided practice in literary-critical writing.

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20th CENTURY
ENGL W3220y Modern Poetry II (Stephen Massimilla) MW 2:40-3:55 3 pts. (Lecture). This semester, we will explore the works of major poets of the second half of the twentieth century: later Eliot, later Williams, later Auden, Roethke, Olson, Hayden, Kunitz, Jarrell, Berryman, Thomas, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, Larkin, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Ashbery, Wright, Rich, Hill, Walcott, Heaney, and others, including more contemporary figures. We may also consider the contributions of non-Anglophone poets such as Lorca, Akhmatova, Levi, Montale, Neruda and Milosz. The work of this period is naturally informed in complex ways by troubling historical events such as World War II, the Holocaust, and the Stalinist Terror. We will also consider formalist, deconstructive, biographical, psychological, feminist, and other approaches to the material. In the process, we will debate the merits of terms and categories such as postmodernism, Confessional poetry, the Beats, the New York School, and postcolonial poetry.

CLEN W3220y Science Fiction (Lejla Kucukalic) TR 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This course will offer a historical survey of canonical science fiction novels and short stories from the turn of the century, through the "pulp fiction" period of the 1920s-1940s, the Golden Age era of the 1950s, the New Wave works of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, to the current writings at the turn of the 21st century (probably best described as a hybrid between mainstream and science fiction literature). Science fiction has a broad reach in popular culture and is often considered a field that includes "Star Trek" as well as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." In this course, we will focus on literary science fiction, not the broader media output rooted in the genre. The authors to be studied include: H. G. Wells, A. E. Van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, James Blish, Thomas Disch, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The course will feature a comparison between Russian and American science fiction and an overview of theoretical approaches. Students will apply these critical approaches to the novels and stories read throughout the semester. The students' final grade will be based upon three short papers, a midterm, a final exam, participation, and a brief class presentation.

CLEN W3208y Comparative Modern Fiction (Bruce Robbins) TR 10:30-11:50

ENGL W3225y Virginia Woolf and Modernism (Sarah Cole) 3 pts. (Lecture). In this course, we will approach British modernism through the prism of Virginia Woolf's works. We will read a range of Woolf's fiction and non-fiction, interspersed with a small number of other modernist texts, creating a sense of dialogue and interaction. Other writers include Conrad, Eliot, Lawrence, Wells, and Mansfield.

ENGL W3933y Studies in the Novel: Modern Odysseys (Ondrea Ackerman) T 6:10-8 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course will examine modern revisions of Homer's Odyssey from classic interpretations by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett to contemporary retellings including Derek Walcott's Caribbean odyssey, Monica Ali's Bangladeshi inversion, James Kelman's working class perspective, and Margaret Atwood's feminist alternative. We will begin by reading Homer's Odyssey and end with a screening of the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? This is a course, moreover, that interrogates the aesthetics and politics of revision. Not only will we be reading Joyce's revision of Homer's text, but we will examine in turn Walcott's re-writing of Joyce's Ulysses. Alongside Conrad's revision of the Odyssey, we will examine Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Heart of Darkness as documented in the film Hearts of Darkness, which draws a parallel between the story of Apocalypse Now and Coppola's personal journey in the making of the classic film. 

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ackerman (oea2101@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Modern Odysseys seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W3792y Realism at the Global Scale (Bruce Robbins) R 2:10-4 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, objects to such features as "a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) ... a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time." "A parody," he says, "would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. "To be or not to be"-ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since." Wood is suggesting that large, multi-plotted, ambitious novels like Smith's are not realistic. One answer to him might go as follows: such novels are in fact trying to be realistic, but realistic at the global scale- realistic about a world in which much that happens in any one place is determined over the horizon, in some very different and distant place that the characters here may never visit or even know about and yet that the author does not have the luxury of ignoring. In short, they are attempting to follow E. M. Forster's advice, "only connect," and doing so in a new and strenuous way. This is the proposition that will guide the seminar. Readings will include works by Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Junot Diaz, and Orhan Pamuk, among others. Requirements: 1) weekly reading journal, 1 to 2 pages double-spaced, on the novel to be discussed that day, hard copy submitted in class; 2) a paper of 10-12 pages, topic to be negotiated, due after the end of classes; 3) regular attendance and oral participation.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robbins (bwr2001@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Realism at the Global Scale." In your message include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3950y The Plays of Caryl Churchill (Jean Howard) W 11-12:50 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This seminar will explore the full range of plays by Caryl Churchill, arguably the most inventive English playwright of the late 20th and early 21st century. A consistently political writer, Churchill has written over twenty-five theater pieces exploring such topics as the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century, the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the politics of cloning, Margaret Thatcher's destruction of the British post-war social contract, the relationship of the United States and Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, modern totalitarianism, environmental apocalypse, and the relations between Israel and Palestine. Among the first to employ cross-race and cross-gender casting, Churchill is an indefatigable experimentalist when it comes to theatrical form. In this seminar we will be reading approximately 15 or her plays, exploring both her dramaturgy and her ideas. I hope that productions of some of her plays will be on in the city during the course of the semester, and if so we will attend them. Participants will be expected to work in groups to explore aspects of Churchill's dramaturgy, the performance history of her plays, and the cultural contexts from which she drew inspiration when writing them. The class will culminate with a final ten to fifteen-page seminar paper.

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Jean Howard (jfh5@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "The Plays of Caryl Churchill." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3977y Novels of Ecological Catastrophe (John Gamber) T 4:10-6 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor (Seminar). This course will examine contemporary American novels dealing with severe environmental pollution, catastrophe, and apocalypse.

ENTA W4724y Modern Drama: Theatricality on the God-forsaken Stage (Zander Brietzke) TR 1:10-2:25 3 pts. (Lecture). This course explores melodrama, metadrama, epic, and lyric drama as theatrical forms designed to fill the void of meaning created by a suddenly godless universe in the nineteenth century. Readings embrace a wide variety of theatrical styles, predominantly from the twentieth century, and include works from diverse playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Susan Glaspell, Sam Shepard, Brecht, Genet, Mamet, Beckett, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill. Assignments include two short papers (5-7 pages), question sets on individual plays, regular attendance and classroom participation, and a comprehensive final exam.

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ENGL W3716y American Literary Traditions: American Humor (Robert O'Meally) T 2:10-4 4 pts. Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). Novels, essays, and poetry by American writers, in the comic mode: Twain, James, Joel Chandler Harris, Faulkner, Sterling Brown, Ellison, others. What makes us laugh? What does our laughter conceal, what does it reveal? What's American about "American humor" and "comedy, American-style"? How do race and gender figure here?

Application Instructions: E-mail Professor O'Meally (rgo1@columbia.edu with a cc to his assistant Yulanda Denoon ym189@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "American Humor seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

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SPECIAL TOPICSCLEN W3950y Topics in Theory: Subject of Desire -- Law, Literature, Film (Kevin Lamb) T 11-12:50 4 pts. Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course takes as its focus the emergence of new styles of sexual self-description and experience in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using literature, law, and film as points of entry to these historical shifts, we will consider how different forms of representation propagate and contest the frequently contradictory views of humans as inescapably subject to -- and yet articulate brokers and narrators of -- their own desires. Formal analysis of novels, short stories, plays, and films will be combined with an introduction to major theoretical, critical, and legal texts on sexuality. Possible writers, directors, and theorists whose works we will discuss include: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Herman Melville, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Musil, Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Lillian Hellman, Pedro Almodóvar, John Cameron Mitchell, John Greyson, Sigmund Freud, Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner.

Application Instructions: Email Professor Lamb (KML2104@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "SUBJECTS OF DESIRE." In your message include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

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OF RELATED INTEREST

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