Nineteenth-Century British Novel (lecture)
A survey of the major authors and topics of the nineteenth-century British novel: the country , the city, and
the colonies; morality, money, and the middle class; history, science, and crime; childhood and
education; serial publication and popular art; aestheticism, naturalism, and the fin de siecle. Authors
include Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and
Joseph Conrad.
Foundations of American Literature, 1865-1945 (lecture)
A survey of the postbellum novel and the various genres of modernism, lyric and drama, as well as
narrative. Particular attention will be paid to changes in the literary world, from the rise of the realist novel
to a position of cultural centrality, through the attacks made on it by the naturalists, to the ultimate
fragmenting of the literary world through modernist experimentation. Authors include HD, John Dos
Passos, Theodore Dresiser, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Jack
London, Eugene O'Neill, Sophie Treadwell, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and William Carlos Williams.
Dickens and Melville (undergraduate seminar)
A study of literary careers. Charles Dickens and Herman Melville began their careers as enormously
popular writers and then lost their audiences, to varying degrees, as they began to write more formally
challenging works. The course begins with the early popular pieces (Sketches by Boz, "Bartleby, the
Scrivener") and concludes with their elliptical late style (Great Expectations, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd),
paying particular attention to the encyclopedic novels of their middle periods: Bleak House and Moby-
Dick.
Eliot and Howells (undergraduate seminar)
A study of literature and history. In addition to being the most successful novelists of their day, George
Eliot and William Dean Howells were also the most influential critics. This course focuses on their
championing of literary realism and on their experiments in narration and novelistic form, as well as their
involvement in contemporary events, such as the suffrage campaign, the Zionist movement, and the
Haymarket Affair. Novels include Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas
Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Hawthorne and James (undergraduate seminar)
A study of literary influence. The first book-length critical work on a US author was Henry James's book
about Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James would go on to rewrite Hawthorne throughout his carer. This
seminar will focus on these re-writings: The Marble Faun and The Portrait of a Lady; The Blithedale
Romance and The Bostonians; and The Scarlet Letter and The Golden Bowl.
The Urban Novel: London and New York (undergraduate seminar)
A study of cultural history and literary form. Topics to include the city streets and urban modes of
perception (Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and William M. Thackeray); crime,
conspiracy, and the plotting of city life (Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Joseph Conrad); and
the relation between the novel and new urban phenomena, such as apartment buildings, settlement
houses, and department stores (William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith
Wharton).
American Renaissance (undergraduate seminar)
A study of literary genre. Explores the emergence of a distinctively US literary tradition across a number of
genres: essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau); poetry (Emily Dickinson and Walt
Whitman); novels (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Herman Melville); and slave narratives
(Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs).
Poetry, Drama, Narrative (undergraduate seminar)
A study of literary mode. We will consider the particular demands that poetry, drama, and narrative
respectively make on literary analysis, and we will also consider how to place our analyses of particular
works in broader contexts: within the history of a genre; within a critical debate; within an historical period.
Readings to include sonnets by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Keats,
George Meredith, W. B. Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop; plays by Euripides, Shakespeare,
Bertholt Brecht, and Peter Weiss; a novella by Herman Melville and a novel by William Faulkner.
Literature Humanities (undergraduate seminar in the core curriculum)
A survey of the western canon from Homer to Virginia Woolf.
The Novel and Narrative Theory (graduate seminar)
An introduction to the novel as both a formal genre and an historical formation, and an introduction to
narrative theory through its fundamental categories, such as plot, character, and narration.
Literature of War and Reconstruction (graduate seminar)
The legacy of the Civil War and the consequences of Reconstruction were the most important issues of
the postbellum era, and this seminar will focus on the literary responses to each. Topics include: the
trauma of witnessing the war and the trauma of missing it, radical abolitionism and the promise of
miscegenation; the great American novel, dialect fiction, and the plantation romance; the Old South and
the New South; carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan; Plessy v. Ferguson and the Haymarket Affair; and
the meaning of New Orleans. Authors include Lydia Maria Child, John De Forest, George Washington
Cable, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mary Chesnut, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James,
Frances E. W. Harper, Stephen Crane, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt.
Introduction to Scholarly Writing (grad seminar)
An introduction to the most exciting scholarship of recent years, with an attention to form as well as to
content. We will consider the conventions of various genres (monographs, dissertations, journal
articles, and reviews), as well as modes of evidence and argument and forms of rhetoric and style.
Topics to include close and distant reading, empirical forms of literary study, print culture and the history
of the book, the politics of identity, the fate of high theory and the persistence of historicism. Authors to
include Amanda Anderson, James English, Diana Fuss, Martin Harries, Walter Benn Michaels, D. A.
Miller, Franco Moretti, Kent Puckett, Leah Price, Henry S. Turner, and Matthew Smith.
Realism and Naturalism (grad seminar)
An introduction to the two central modes of the nineteenth-century novel, realism and naturalism, as well
as a workshop in the writing of scholarly articles. We will begin by reading the defining works of each
mode (Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, and A Hazard of New Fortunes; Germinal, New Grub Street, and
Sister Carrie), as well as the landmark works of twentieth-century criticism, from Eric Auerbach and Ian
Watt to Walter Benn Michaels and Amy Kaplan. During the final third of the course, students will pursue
directed research projects, which will result in drafts of articles that we will workshop in class. Intended
for advanced graduate students.
US Novel, 1865-1914 (lecture course)
A survey of the postbellum novel with a focus on its three defining modes: realism, naturalism,
and "local color" writing. Topics to include rising and falling, choice and chance, consciousness and
embodiment, as well as the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction. Authors include: John W. De
Forest, George Washington Cable, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne
Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton.
Amanda Claybaugh teaches courses on US literature from the American Renaissance to World War II, on Victorian literature, and on trans-Atlantic literary relations; she also teaches graduate courses on narrative theory and scholarly writing. In 2004, she was one of five faculty members to be awarded Columbia's Presidential Teaching Award.