Courses listed alphabetically by instructor

Registration for continuing students begins December 5. Registration after January 7 will result in a $25 late fee for all ongoing students.

Register on Record: CRN 91600

Weighted Instructional Units: CRN 9160X (the last digit should be the value of credits you need to bring you up to 7 credits).

ENGL 86200 “T.S. Eliot,” John Brenkman. 2/4 credits. Intersession (meetings as below)  [CRN: 91732] (cross-listed with ASCP 82000)

For much of the 20th century no poet or critic had as great an impact on poetry and criticism as T.S. Eliot. Recent decades of course have seen his reputation waver. His anti-Semitism overshadowed his philosophy of culture; his political conservatism outweighed his poetic innovations; his personal cruelties eclipsed his aesthetic impersonality. The enigma, though, is there from the beginning in the work and mind of this poet-critic: experiment and tradition, modernity and hierarchy, humanism and reaction. Eliot’s turn to religion, beginning with “Ash Wednesday,” baffled many of his ardent followers and advocates. The relation of the secular and the sacred in the symbolic fabric of literature became the central preoccupation of his writing and thought. Today Eliot’s work poses in the most acute form the question of modernism, nihilism, and belief.
This seminar is intended to use that question to explore anew Eliot’s poetry and criticism in the hope not so much of “straightening things out” as following the “crooked timber of humanity” in search of the resources of Eliot’s poetic creativity and critical acumen. Primary texts: T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays; Selected Prose; Christianity and Culture. All the sessions of the seminar will be conducted on an intensive schedule
January 3-24, M W Th, 2:00-4:45. Papers will be due at the end of Spring term in May.

ENGL 80200 “Wordsworth, Whitman, & Prose Revolution in Modern Poetry,” Morris Dickstein.  2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91723] (cross-listed with ASCP 82000)

When Ezra Pound argued in 1914 that “poetry should be at least as well written as prose,” he was not only creating an axiom for one wing of the modern movement but also renewing an argument Wordsworth had made in his attacks on “poetic diction” more than a century earlier in his prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads. The course will explore facets of what Pound called “the prose tradition in verse,” focusing especially on the complex careers of Wordsworth and Whitman, their innovations and their wide influence. We’ll examine how this tradition paralleled the rise of democratic movements, the increasing fascination with the typical and the ordinary (rather than the sublime or heroic), and the growth of realism in the 19th-century novel. Along the way the course will touch on prose poetry, such as Baudelaire’s Little Poems in Prose, narrative poetry (Crabbe, Browning), and finally the deployment of the plain style and the bare encounter by poets as different as Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.
            Course requirements will include strictly regular attendance, an oral report, and a 15-page term paper.

 ENGL 85000 “America in the 1920s,” Marc Dolan. 2/4 credits. Monday 11:45 am – 1:45 pm  [CRN: 91730] (cross-listed with ASCP 82000)

In the United States, the 1920s was a decade that was labeled, almost from its inception, as “modern”—but what did that mean?  The artistic movements we now think of as “modernist” were strictly fringe movements for most Americans during the 1920s, avant garde in the true sense that they occupied a space where many Americans would be comfortable in some years’ time but not necessarily right now.  And yet the United States was undeniably “modern,” its industrial design and popular music suddenly reference points for many cutting-edge artists throughout the world, its industrial organization and advertising strategies seemingly the naturalized, devouring endpoint toward which global capitalism had been tending for decades.  In a way, to be fringe—to resist the presumed standardizing maw of late industrial culture—was to be most modern.  In the newspapers and magazines of the decade, Americans could read about a whole range of cultural subgroups whose visible difference or self-styled resistance set them off from the presumptively faceless mass: recent immigrants and the reborn KKK; jittery jazz devotees and aggressively traditional fans of “hillbilly” music and the country blues; associationalist boosters and railroaded anarchists.  In the age of the modern, no one felt as if they belonged, and everyone felt they deserved a little of the spotlight.

This course will examine some, but obviously not all, of these phenomena and will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program based in the Ph. D. Programs in Art History, English, History, Music, and Theatre.  In addition, we may consider:  the causes of the Crash of 1929; the two or three waves of the Harlem Renaissance; Eugene O’Neill and the Americanization of expressionism; the idea of the college student in popular culture; suffrage, flappers, and the “New Woman”; prohibition and the cult of the gangster; Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic and its trail of cultural traces; how late silent films reconstructed the grammar of sexuality in the U.S.; radio’s journey from crystal sets to network programming.  If we’re very lucky, we may even get around to crossword puzzles, miniature golf, and mah johngg. 

Course requirements include class participation, a bibliography of secondary sources on a particular aspect of U.S. life during the decade, an oral presentation of original scholarship within that field, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.

ENGL 75400 “Post-World War II American Culture, 1945-1960,” Gary Giddins. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm. [CRN: 91741] (cross-listed with HIST 75700 & ASCP 82000)

One of the memorable lines ground between the teeth of Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, is a faux-axiom: “Bad news sells best ‘cause good news is no news.” But in 1951, when that film was released to critical brickbats, Americans could recall when good news sold better than anything: From the summer of 1942, as the Allies began to turn the tide, through September 1945, when Japan surrendered unconditionally, good news was rampant. Yet the ultimate victory party, emblemized by strangers kissing in the streets, was amazingly short-lived.

Within a year, a psychological depression took up where the economic one left off, as the military looked for a new war to fight, Churchill pointed his finger at an iron curtain, atomic bombs blasted Bikini, communist-hunters haunted the shadows, and Hollywood produced a deluge of relentlessly mordant movies questioning the most vaunted principles of American life. These films and much art of the late `40s depicted a national overcast characterized by ennui, hysteria, and guilt. By the mid-1950s, the old conflict between popular art and high art was, in part, supplanted by the conflict between a complacent and an angry art.

At the same time that swing fractured itself into bebop, painting into dribbles and color fields, and literature into howls and Jeremiads, banal novelties consumed pop music, Hollywood rediscovered piety as fool-proof spectacle, the doorstop novel of perfidy in the suburbs reached its peak, and television created a comprehensive, numbing vision of American tranquility.

This course will explore the contradictions in American culture as they played out in the arts in the 1950s, a period considered timid at the time, especially when compared to the 1960s, and now often viewed as adventurous and inspired. It will focus on the way artists approached historical, political, and social issues in an indirect manner that reflecting fears of political and cultural censorship—in movies, music, literature, comic books, and television. Much of the work we will examine appeared to say one thing while saying something else entirely, raising a question for us: Is the subversion we now read between the lines revisionist or was it always there for anyone with eyes to see?

The artists and works we will look at will be drawn from a list including, from the movies, They Were Expendable, war hero turned film star Audie Murphy, Pitfall, Ace in the Hole, Biblical epics, director Anthony Mann, Anatomy of a Murder, and Shadows; from music, the Jolson revival, the introduction of bebop, the transformation of r&b into early rock and roll, Doris Day, Third Stream and avant-garde jazz; in books, Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, Malamud’s The Assistant, Himes’s The Real Cool Killers, as well as comics, television shows, and an analysis of bestselling book lists of 1944-60. The course requirements include class participation, an oral report, and a 15-page essay on some aspect of the cultural life of the period in question.

ENGL 79500 “Theory & Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism,” David Greetham.  4 credits. Thursday 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm. Intersession (meetings as below) [CRN: 91721]

This special intersession course being given in January takes up questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of "English," Theoretically, we consider what it means to study a national language and literature that has become global in its reach; we examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields (and thus the concept of "disciplinarity" itself); we consider how varied theories of language, text, narrative, poetics, author, gender, race, psyche, society, culture, history, identity, politics (etc.) define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline as it has emerged (and changed) since its first being added to the university curriculum as a "vernacular" version of "classical" studies. Practically, we take up the question of how we define objects of inquiry within "English" studies, how we research such topics, how we identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how we develop new knowledge—in sum, we consider nitty-gritty questions crucial to pursuing graduate and professional work in literary scholarship. The course follows four main lines of inquiry, examining 1) the historical, institutional context of the discipline, 2) archival and bibliographical work, 3) concepts of textuality, and 4) theoretical approaches.

Requirements: Preparations for all class discussions and several in-class presentations. The final paper is similarly flexible: students may produce one of three possibilities–a scholarly “edition” of  a short work embodying the textual principles discussed in the course; an introduction to such an edition or collection of works, focusing on the archival and other cultural issues involved; a critical essay founded on the archival, bibliographical, and textual approaches explored. I am also open to other methods of integrating the “scholarly” and “critical” components of the course.

Organization: I will be teaching the “intensive” intersession version of this course during the month of January 2008, and the usual semester-long version will be given in the Spring by Professor Humpherys. The alternatives present obvious advantages and disadvantages: in the intersession version we complete the course before the semester proper has begun, thus freeing up students to take a full roster of “regular” courses during the Spring, and because the intersession course is officially a “Spring” offering, students have the whole of the Spring semester to complete the final paper. Moreover, January is “bibliography” month in New York, and I have usually managed to get some of the leading visiting archivists, bibliographers, editors, and textuists to participate in the intersession class (as well as presentations of their final projects by former students of the course): students will thus be able to interrogate some of those authors they have read.  And, because we meet often and for extended periods, students have usually found that there is a greater narrative impetus to the intersession version, and a greater sense of “group” interaction. The main challenge is, of course, that we have to devote pretty much the whole of January to completing this required course: that has usually meant meeting twice a week (normally Tuesdays and Fridays) for at least three hours, with an introductory organizational meeting held at the end of the Fall semester. The balance in the intersession version is therefore more toward reading and preparation for discussion than in actual archival work in local libraries, which can be done with more leisure and lead time in the conventional semester-long version. As usual, there will be an organizational meeting in December to discuss scheduling.

ENGL 81400 “All about Hamlet,” Tom Hayes. 2/4 credits. Friday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91725]

In this course we will study the texts of Hamlet, including the so-called Ur-Hamlet, the two Quartos, and the First Folio.  We will then examine the critical history of Hamlet as it is represented in Susanne L. Wofford's edition, which contains examples of psychoanalytic, new historicist, marxist, and feminist criticisms. Of course it is impossible to keep up with the vast number of essays on Hamlet published every year. We will read classic commentaries on the play by Ernest Jones, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Lacan, G. Wilson Knight, and Harry Levin, as well as such influential recent interpretations as those by Jacqueline Rose, Harold Bloom, Janet Adelman, Marjorie Garber, Catherine Belsey, Margreta de Grazia, and Steven Greenblatt.  We will also discuss film versions of Hamlet by Olivier, Burton, Branugh, and Mel Gibson.
At least one in-class presentation and a term paper are required.

ENGL 79500 “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship,” Anne Humpherys. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30 – 8:30 pm [CRN: 91722]

This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be a part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century. Theoretically, we will examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and how various theories define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline of “English” studies. Practically, we will discuss how to define objects of inquiry (“texts” and “contexts”) within “English” studies, how to research such objects, how to identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how to develop new knowledge. The course follows four main lines in inquiry, examining: 1) archival and bibliographical work, 2) concepts of text and textuality, 3) theoretical approaches, and 4) the historical, institutional context of the discipline.

Requirements: The work for the course has two parts: 1) readings in common that will be discussed in class, and 2) an individual project pursued throughout the semester and designed to put into practice the more general issues taken up in the course. Students will periodically report in class on their progress in the individual project. The course grade will be based on the final project, on the work done in stages on that project throughout the semester, and on general participation throughout the semester. 

ENGL 84400 “Victorian Poetry and the Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Gerhard Joseph. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91729]

“The function of criticism at the [ever?] present time,” says Matthew Arnold in an essay of that name is “to see the object as in itself is really is.” Concentrating upon the themes, forms, and figural strategies of some major Victorian poets (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hopkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti), we will examine the shifting relationship of “subject” and “object,” of consciousness and the objects of consciousness as their constructions move from the Victorian period to the present. We will, that is, consider the different epistemological/aesthetic implications of “seeing” involved in a German (via Coleridgean) organicism behind Arnold’s dictum as it prepares for New Critical formalism; in Pater and Wilde’s impressionsm as it anticipates Harold Bloom’s “antithetical criticism,” Stanley Fish’s “affective stylistics,” and reader-response criticism more generally; in the Geneva School’s phenomenology as it generates some Anglo-American approaches in the late 20th century; in structuralist/poststructuralist  substitutions of “text” and “intertext” for the Arnoldian “object”; in Lacanian and feminist theories of the “gaze”; and in attempts in two recent issues of the journal Victorian Poetry to formulate “what’s new” these days in the criticism of nineteenth-century poetry. Course requirements: one short oral presentation and a term paper.

ENGL 80600 “Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes,” Wayne Koestenbaum. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm [CRN: 91724]

Two kooks.  Two serious men.  Two secretive men.  Two lyric philosophers.  Two Parisians.  Two elegists.  Two stalkers of the untranslatable.  Two stylistic deviants.  Two novelists who never wrote novels.  Two critics smitten with photography.  Two encyclopedists.  Two organizers.  Two collectors.  Two writers who absorbed and avoided Marxism.  Two aesthetes. Two aphorists.  Two death-haunted essayists.  Two queers, in a manner of speaking.  Two devotees of the fragment.  Two autobiographers.  Two almost-mystics.  Two demystifiers.  Two surrealists.  Two loners.  Two cruisers.  Two browsers.  Two in shock.  Two in search of lost time.  Two losers.  Two revolutionaries.  Two zeroes.  We will encounter their works in English translation.  (This time around, we will not attempt The Arcades Project.)  Requirement:  one class presentation, one final essay.

ENGL 78100 “Literature, Gender, and Sexuality,” Steven Kruger. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 11:45 am – 1:45 pm [CRN: 91720] (cross-listed with WSCP 81000)

This course will survey the broad field (fields?) of “literature, gender, and sexuality,” focusing attention both on the historical development of this area as a subject of interest and on the current status of gender and sexuality as categories of inquiry within literary/ cultural studies. The course will thus consider and negotiate a set of overlapping fields – women’s studies, gender studies, queer theory, feminist theory, “English,” cultural studies – not in order to stabilize a “discipline” but instead to map and explore some of the ways in which past work in gender/sexuality might be understood, and some of the future possibilities the field(s) might enable. In taking on this work, we will read a variety of different kinds of texts: theoretical, historical, polemical/political, and literary/cultural. The syllabus will be partly constructed around students’ particular interests. One or two in-class presentations and a final seminar paper will be required.

ENGL 88000 “Heroines of Disaster: Novels & Feminist Literacy Theory,” Nancy K. Miller (with Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University). 2/4 credits. Thursday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91739] (cross-listed with WSCP 81000)

The fate of heroines captured the imagination of second-wave feminist critics and theorists who saw in the novel a template ripe for cultural analysis. Initially, feminist literary theory focused on the sexual politics of fictional plots and, at the same time, the resistance on the part of women writers to stories of victimization. We will consider the transformation of the heroine’s plot from its nineteenth-century avatars to twentieth and twenty-first century fictional and theoretical texts, in which female protagonists become subjects as well as objects, acting in the political field. The seminar will revisit feminist classics in literature and criticism, grappling with contemporary debates about the crossings of gender, race, colonization, and sexuality. What kinds of new theoretical imaginings are emerging from the gendered plots of the last decades?
Readings include: Brontë, Cixous, Coetzee, Feinberg, Flaubert, Freud, Julavits, Kincaid, Larsen, Morrison, Rhys, Shields, Walker and Woolf; as well as Butler, Gilbert and Gubar, Johnson, McDowell, Millett, Prosser, and Spivak. 
Nb: Classes at Columbia begin January 22 and January 31 at the Graduate Center. Students from the GraduateCenter are encouraged to attend the January 22 meeting. All students interested in this course should contact me about their interest as soon as possible.
Classes will be held BOTH at the Graduate Center and at Columbia

ENGL 87500 “Composing Memoir,” Sondra Perl. 2/4 credits. Monday 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm. [CRN: 91738]

Two quotes frame this inquiry. The first is from Vivian Gornick: “The impulse—to tell a tale rich in context, alive to situation, shot through with event and perspective—is as strong in human beings as the need to eat food or breathe air: it may be suppressed but it can never be destroyed.” The second comes from Robert Stone, writing in the New York Times Magazine soon after 9/11: “The power of narrative is shattering, overwhelming. We are the stories we believe we are. All the reasoning in the world cannot set us free from our mythic systems.” In this seminar, we will explore narrative impulses and mythic systems—our own and others’—with a desire to discover how we’ve been shaped by the stories we have been told and how we use language in the service of our own story-telling. Another way to say this is that we will be examining notions of truth and falsity and of memory and imagination while reading and writing memoir. The reading list, to be developed collaboratively over the fall semester, will focus on several themes: faith, trauma, and teaching. Current texts under consideration include Lauren Slater’s Lying, John Hall’s Belief, Nancy Miller’s But Enough about Me, Judith Greenberg’s Trauma at Home: After 9/11, and Sondra Perl’s On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate. Theoretical readings will be drawn from Proust, Barthes, Morrison, hooks, Gornick, and Caruth, but as of this writing, the booklist is negotiable and will depend upon student interest and timely response. The course will make use of Blackboard, posting responses to readings and to issues that arise in class, but the bulk of our time will be devoted to drafting, responding to and revising autobiographical work written by class members. If you plan on registering for the seminar, you are welcome to email me with suggestions for the reading list at Sondra.Perl@lehman.cuny.edu

ENGL  85500 “Octavia Butler in Her Times,” Robert Reid-Pharr. 2/4 credits. Thursday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91731] (cross-listed with ASCP 82000 & WSCP 81000)

In this course we will treat much of the most prominent work that has been produced by the late speculative fiction writer, Octavia Butler. In particular, we will read all of her three novel series: Patternist, Xenogenesis, and the Parable Series; her short stories collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories; and her "stand alone" novels: Kindred and Fledgling.  We will also read a fair amount of criticism of Butler and her oeuvre.  All the while we will pay particular attention to Butler's own methods of critique and self-critique. Most specifically we will attempt to make sense of why Butler returned so often to the themes of motherhood, merging of "alien" and "non-alien" identity, and forced choice during her career.  Finally, we will ask throughout the course how Butler does or does not fit within established traditions of Afro-American and feminist literature.  Students will be asked to prepare annotated bibliographies of the criticism surrounding Butler and to produce a final seminar paper.

ENGL 91000 “Dissertation Workshop,” Robert Reid-Pharr. 0 credits. Tuesday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91740]

Open to level 2 and 3 students only. Intended for students writing dissertation prospectuses and drafting chapters of their dissertations.

ENGL 87100 “Rise of the Novel,” David Richter. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15 – 6:15 pm [CRN: 91734]

During the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1830), most of the major innovations in both subject matter and narrative technique take shape. At its beginning the art of fiction often involves the close imitation of true narratives, while at its end fictional narrative both competes with and contributes to the writing of historical narrative. Throughout the period, form (in the sense of aesthetic ideology) exerts intense pressure upon content, while content (the social and sexual conflicts of the period, along with the growing force of nationality) exerts a counterpressure upon literary form. We shall read some of these most important canonical texts within and against the culture that formed them, a culture that took its own  shape, at least in part, from the rise of the novel. In addition to exploring the narratives of the eighteenth century, we will also explore another set of narratives, the works of literary history in which scholars from the past fifty years have attempted to explain the origins of the English novel. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) was the master narrative against which recent literary historiographers have staged their own histories, including Michael McKeon, Ralph Rader, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, Nancy Armstrong, and Margaret Doody. We shall also be examining essays from The Rise of the Novel Revisited, the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

TENTATIVE READING LIST:
PRIMARY TEXTS:

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, 1688.
Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, etc., 1722.
Eliza Haywood, Fantomina, or Love in a Maze, 1725
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, 1740.
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., 1760-67.
Frances Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, 1777.
William Godwin, Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams, 1794.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 1800.
Walter Scott, Waverley or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, 1814.
Jane Austen, MansfieldPark, 1815.
The Mystery Novel: One additional novel, possibly Smollett's Humphry Clinker, or a gothic, will be added at the organizational meeting.

ENGL 87400 “How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials,” Eve Sedgwick. 2/4credits. Tuesday 6:30 – 8:30 pm [CRN: 91735] or Wednesday 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm [CRN: 91736] (by permission of instructor).

"How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials" is an experimental seminar/studio workshop in which participants will think about and practice a variety of ways of combining written text with other visual media. Roughly speaking, the "artist's book" will be our subject, but we will also consider comics and graphic novels, mail art, graffiti, broadsides, playing cards, and other genres that make unconventional use of the materiality of both the written word and its support. In parallel with historical and theoretical discussions, participants will work on creating a portfolio of works in various formats and materials, each exploring different aspects of the complex relations among language, materiality, and visuality.
Some notes: (1) This is not a class in fine printing or bookbinding. (2) While students are free to use digital techniques, the class will not broach the area of electronic media. (3) Participants must be interested in doing art as well as looking at and thinking about it, but need not be experienced in the use of materials. This is a good class for novices.
The required text is Keith Smith's Structure of the Visual Book.
Because the Graduate Center does not house an art studio, meetings will take place at the professor's Chelsea studio, with a wide variety of art and craft materials available. Studio size limitations dictate that there be two separate classes, each with no more than six students.
            Meeting times: One class will meet Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 (with an option for students to work until 9:30). The other will meet at the same times on Wednesdays.
Registration: By permission of the professor only. Applications, due in Prof. Sedgwick's mailbox by 30 November, should include, along with your name and email address, (1) a statement of interest; (2) an indication of preference for Tuesday and/or Wednesday; and (3) if possible, a sample of your work (returnable). All applicants will be notified before registration begins on 5 December.

ENGL 84300 “The Victorian Domestic Novel: Gaskell, Yonge, Oliphant,” Talia Schaffer. 2/4 credits. Monday 11:45 pm – 1:45 pm [CRN: 91728]

This course focuses on the construction of domesticity, gender, sexuality, and narrative structure in the work of three exciting and underread mid-Victorian women writers. Starting with Elizabeth Gaskell will allow us to discuss provincial and urban identity, the material effects of industrialism, the process of canonization, and the possibility of writing women's lives outside the marriage plot. We will read Gaskell's North and South, Cranford, Wives and Daughters, possibly Ruth, and The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte Yonge's enormously popular fiction will help us interrogate what kinds of queer affiliations and alternative familial structures might be imagined in the work of a religious novelist; we will read The Heir of Redclyffe, The Daisy Chain, The Clever Woman of the Family, and Womankind. Finally, the much more self-critical and ironic novelist Margaret Oliphant will suggest ambivalence about powerful female figures, fascination with changing financial and aesthetic practices, and new ideas about marriage in Phoebe Junior, Miss Marjoribanks, and Hester, along with her Autobiography. The three novelists together will give us a way to explore nineteenth-century publishing practices, including serial publication, tracts, series fiction, and journalism. By comparing three nonfiction texts that describe the development of a female author, too, we will be able to see how this figure could and could not be constructed at midcentury. Moreover, we will be accompanying these readings with nineteenth-century reviews, modern criticism, biographies, and feminist and domestic-fiction criticism, foregrounding the question of how 'Gaskell,' 'Yonge,' and 'Oliphant' have come to mean (or not mean) to twenty-first century readers.

ENGL 87400 “Race & The Photoessay,” Michele Wallace. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm [CRN: 91737] (cross-listed with ASCP 81500 & WSCP 81000)

This course proposes to examine a largely neglected photographic archive as a source of historical and literary re-evaluations of key events and personalities of the century, as well as providing a handy and creative way to think about and revise the presentation of black history and culture (and/or blacks in American history and culture).  A major focus in the course will be upon women photographers and photographs of women, and to further push the already flexible interpretive approaches to the photograph. 
The course begins with a re-examination of the collection of photographs on African American life assembled by W.E.B. Du Bois for the Paris Exposition in 1900 with a particular focus on the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston's The Hampton Album.  These photographs will be considered in relation to the texts of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois.  In the 20s, we are looking at James Van Der Zee and Robert S. Roberts.  In the 30s, we move on to James Agee's and Walker Evan's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as other famous works coming out of the WPA, in particular Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces.  In the 40s, our focus switches to Chicago, Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, St. Clair Drake's Black Metropolis: a Study of Negro Life in a Northern City and Maren Stange's Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943.  In the 50s, we look at Roy De Carava and Langston Hughes The Sweet Flypaper of Life.  If there is time, and interest, we will proceed on to Edward Steichen's The Family of Man and the various contemporary re-readings of this crucial MOMA exhibition.

ENGL 86500 “Postcolonial African Narratives,” Barbara Webb. 2/4credits. Tuesday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm [CRN: 91733] (cross-listed with WSCP 81000)

A study of the narratives of Anglophone African writers since the period of decolonization. We will examine their attempts to transform the political and cultural legacies of colonialism in their representations of African history, politics, and culture.  Of particular interest will be their engagements with nationalist, pan-Africanist, and postcolonial discourse.  We will discuss how these writers address problems of language and literary form, and how they see their roles as artists and social critics.  Our readings will include novels, short stories and essays by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Zoe Wicomb.  In addition to literary texts, we will read selected writings by cultural critics and postcolonial theorists such as Gikandi, Appiah,and Said.  Requirements:  Regular attendance and class participation.  An oral presentation and a research paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussion of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.

ENGL 84100 “Wordsworth’s Prelude: Origins and Afterlife,” Joshua Wilner. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 11:45 pm – 1:45 pm [CRN: 91727]

The  Prelude: Or,  Growth of a Poet’s Mind occupies a central but anomalous position within the body of Wordsworth’s work and indeed within the history of Romanticism. For us it is a canonical text, a paradigmatic Romantic autobiography. But by Wordsworth’s own account he only undertook to “record, in verse, the origin and progress of [his] powers,” in order to see if he was qualified to write “a literary work that might live” – by which he meant not The Prelude but The Recluse, a three-part “philosophical poem containing views of man, of nature, and society.” On the one hand, that larger poemwas never completed, part of the reason why The Prelude was never published during Wordsworth’s lifetime. (As he wrote in a letter, “[I]t seems a frightful deal to say about one’s self, and of course will never be published (during my lifetime, I mean), till another work has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world.”) On the other hand, by a strange temporal logic, in its afterlife The Prelude has revealed itself as the legacy to posterity for which it was only meant to prepare the way. At the same time, while Wordsworth held The Prelude in reserve until his death, he returned again and again to its elaboration and revision.
This complex textual situation raises questions on many levels. What is the significance – psychological, historical, and structural – of the fact that Wordsworth left The Recluse largely incomplete? Does The Prelude resist, at the same time that it is conceived as subsidiary to, the totalizing project represented by The Recluse? How does the complex recursive temporality operating between the writing of The Prelude and its “afterlife” already inform for Wordsworth the relationship of the poem to the past it recalls, as well as the relationship among its multiple textual states?
In this course, we will explore these questions by tracking the growth of the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” from its beginnings in some fragmentary entries in a 1798 notebook (“Manuscript JJ”) through its successive elaborations in the “Two-Part Prelude” of 1799, the “Five-Book Prelude” of 1804, the “Thirteen-Book Prelude” of 1805 and, finally, the “Fourteen-Book Prelude” of 1850. We will give some preliminary consideration to Lyrical Ballads, whose 1798 publication immediately preceded Wordsworth’s earliest work on what was to become The Prelude; and we will also give some consideration to The Excursion, the one part of The Recluse that was completed. Finally we will look at the reception of The Prelude, and in particular at the process by which The Prelude came to displace The Excursion as Wordsworth’s magnum opus. Throughout, our fundamental concern will be with the recursive nature of Wordsworth’s writing process and the possibilities it discovers.
Primary text: either The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (Norton Critical Editions); or The Prelude: Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Penguin Classics)
Requirements: Two short response papers and a term paper

ENGL 75600 “Color-Struck: African American Theatre and Performance in the Early Twentieth Century,” James Wilson. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm [CRN: 91742] (cross-listed with THEA 85300 & ASCP 82000)

Theatre and performance played an essential role in articulating and reflecting the political, social, and artistic struggles of African Americans in the first part of the twentieth century. Black leaders and intelligentsia of the era, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Alain Locke, were in agreement over the importance of black theatre, but they were at odds over its propagandistic and aesthetic functions. Thus, the inter- and intra-racial tensions about an "authentic" black art provoked (and continue to provoke) theoretical disputes around modernism, primitivism, and pluralism in the early twentieth-century. In this seminar, we will pursue these issues through plays and performance texts from the early 1900s through the 1930s. Titles will include, but will not be limited to, Shipp and Dunbar’s In Dahomey, Du Bois’s Star of Ethiopia, Grimké’s Rachel, Burrill’s Aftermath, Thurman’s Harlem, and Hughes and Hurston’s Mule Bone. While historically contextualizing the works, class discussions will focus on the texts as they represent a range of dramatic genres, such as the folk play, anti-lynching drama, satirical comedy, and Broadway melodrama. We will also examine black pageants, diasporic folk dance concerts, and musical revues. The course will conclude with a look at how these works influenced playwrights and performers of later decades of the twentieth century. Contemporaneous criticism and theoretical treatises will provide the tools for interpreting and historicizing the texts, and students will be asked to weigh these against recent multidisciplinary scholarship and theory in African American studies (including the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Houston Baker Jr., Cheryl Wall, Hazel Carby, Michael North, and others).
Writing assignments for the course will consist of responses to the reading and an original 15-20 page research paper (which will be preceded by a prospectus, annotated bibliography, and an optional first draft). Students will share their research in a short presentation.

ENGL 82300 “Epic Milton,” Joseph Wittreich. 2/4 credits. Monday 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm [CRN: 91726]

Claudio Guillén once proposed that there are two great periods of generic transformation:  one is the early modern period, and the other the age we call Romanticism.  The focus of this seminar will be on the epic Milton, his early gestures toward epic in Lycidas and his later encounters with the same genre in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The size of this project is evident when we remember that epic poetry was placed at the apex of the genres during the early modern period in part because, subsuming all other genres, it also transcended them.  Once we have examined Milton’s transformations of epic tradition, itself an anthology of literary forms, we will turn at the end of the semester to several Romantic encounters with Miltonic epic:  Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Requirements: one oral presentation, and a final term paper (15 to 20 pages in length).

PhD Program in English
The Graduate Center City University of New York
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