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FALL 2001 COURSES
- 70200
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Renaissance Geographies
Prof. Martin Elsky
This course is an introduction to the various ways Renaissance and Early Modern culture has been mapped in geographic space--from the local, the national, and the imperial, with special emphasis on the trans-Atlantic. Our starting point will be the current debates over the kinds of borders in which culture is both produced and received. We begin with the claims for the authenticity of local communities and the counter-claims for large cross-cultural geographic space. Using recent work in humanist and post-humanist geography as a framework, we will examine how scholarship in several disciplines defines the places in which identity is formed and agency is enacted in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. Readings will be drawn from cultural and political history, literature, chorography, cartography, and landscape painting. The themes of the course will include the processes by which cultural borders are imagined, projected, and crossed. Attention will also be paid to the assumptions made by critics and historians concerning the "natural" locations of Renaissance and Early Modern culture. Because this is an interdisciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home disciplines.
- 70300
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Introduction to Old English
Prof. Gordon Whatley
"Old English" (OE) constitutes the first documented phase of the English language (ca. 700-1150), and OE literature is by far the most plentiful and diverse of the surviving vernacular literatures of Europe prior to the 12th century. While some knowledge of OE forms and sounds is essential for serious work in Middle English and Scots, OE literature is of deep and abiding interest in itself. Although the language at first glance looks difficult, students routinely find it is possible to acquire a basic working knowledge in a 14-week course such as this one. After six weeks on shorter translation exercises and some grammar, the focus shifts to reading, in the original and in translation, more extensive passages of secular and religious prose, including a 10th century life of the "transvestite" saint Eugenia, followed by some classic pieces from the surviving poetry manuscripts (Dream of the Rood, Judith, Wanderer or Seafarer, the fall of Satan and temptation of Adam and Eve from Genesis B, and The Wife's Lament or one of the riddles). In addition to working on the weekly texts, each student will occasionally report briefly on selected critical studies interpreting or theorizing the readings. Also required is a modest paper (12-15 pp) on any topic in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. Students with some prior experience and enjoyment of learning a modern or ancient European language should have little difficulty handling the work. A useful, elementary computer program for learning OE is available, and more sophisticated aids are now being developed on the Web. Contact me with queries re. books, etc., and please register early if you plan to take the course: gwhatley@att.net
- 70800
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Medieval Survey
Prof. Michael Sargent
One of the best ways to survey medieval literature is in the manuscript context in which its original readers would have known it - texts of variable shape and contents, juxtaposed by the hand(s) and intentions of their compiler(s). This course will explore late Middle English literature through an examination of one of the largest and best-known of such manuscript compilations: the Vernon manuscript, a 50-pound folio behemoth originally complied, probably, for a community of Cistercian nuns in the east Midlands, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. In the time of King Alfred, this area was the center of English literary culture, but by the later middle ages, as Chaucer's London grew in importance, it was almost a backwater - yet still capable of producing treasurers - or, in this case, entire treasuries - of literature.
The manuscript was entitled "Sowlehele" - The Soul's Health - by the scribe who provided it with a table of contents; and it contains a virtual library of the writings that would have been thought necessary to the edification of a later medieval women's religious community: a unique translation of Aelred of Rievaulx's letter of spiritual instruction to his sister, the De Institutione Inclusarum; a collection of saints' lives and readings for movable feasts arranged according to the ecclesiastical year, the "South English Legendary"; a translation of the Estorie del Euangelie; a collection of "Miracles of Our Lady"; the "Northern Homily Cycle"; translations of Edmund of Abingdon's Speculum Ecclesie and of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Stimulus Amoris, "The Prick of Love"; a version of the Ancrene Riwle, the A-text of Piers Plowman and several works of Walter Hilton, including the earliest version of Book I of The Scale of Perfection, and other pieces in verse and prose.
Our approach to these writings will be through modern critical editions that attempt, in various ways, to recreate an ideal "authorial" text (few if any of the texts in Vernon are autographs), through diplomatic editions that represent the Vernon version of a particular texts, and through the manuscript itself, which we will examine in facsimile. Previous exposure to Middle English (e.g. an undergraduate Chaucer class) would be helpful, but is not necessary.
- 71600
M, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Shakespeare & His Contemporaries
Prof. Mario DiGangi
Long considered the preeminent dramatist of early modern England, Shakespeare was in his own time one among many talented and admired playwrights working within a vibrant professional theater industry. This course provides an opportunity to read Shakespeare's plays alongside those of his lesser-known contemporaries. We will explore how these dramatists addressed various social, economic, and political issues; how they worked within and beyond the generic conventions of comedy, tragedy, and history; and how they contributed (as rivals, imitators, and collaborators) to the growth of the professional theater and to the cultural life of early modern London. We will focus on less frequently read plays of Shakespeare; therefore, some familiarity with his more popular works-The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth-while not necessary, will be useful. Shakespeare plays will include 2 Henry VI, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Anthony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline. Plays by other dramatists will include Marlowe, Edward II; Arden of Faversham; Heywood, Edward IV; Dekker, The Shoremaker's Holiday; Fletcher, Philaster; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi.
Requirements include either two shorter papers or one long (20-25 pp.) paper; three brief response papers; and one class presentation.
- 74100
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Shelley and His Contexts
Prof. Alan Vardy
This seminar will offer a comprehensive study of the literary works of Percy Shelley within the context of the social and political concerns of his age. To many critics Shelley appears to be two different writers: the dreamy neo-Platonist on the one hand, and the committed radical propagandist on the other. The course will attempt to put these two Shelleys back together by asking the question: can we understand Shelley's idealist poetics as an emergent politics? We will read through most of the literary works, including his play The Cenci, and the verse drama Prometheus Unbound. Equally careful attention will be paid to his political pamphlets.
Shelley's political influence took interesting and disparate forms after his death. For example, his notes for 'Queen Mab' were circulated independently as a Chartist pamphlet throughout the 19th century, and 'The Mask of Anarchy' provided inspiration for Gandhi in formulating the strategies of non-violent revolution. We will consider these posthumous effects as part of Shelley's legacy. Students interested in contemporary theoretical questions will be encouraged to investigate how Shelley might contribute to ongoing critiques of ideology, or the development of eco-criticism. Thus, while the general approach of the seminar might be termed 'historicist,' we will not limit ourselves to a single critical perspective.
The primary goal of the seminar remains a comprehensive understanding of Shelley's work, but students will be given plenty of scope to pursue the interests and perspectives that they bring to the work.
REQUIRED TEXTS: Shelley, Percy, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, Norton; 'Course Packet' (including a selection of Shelley's political prose, and contextual materials).
RECOMMENDED TEXTS: Peacock, Thomas Love, Nightmare Abbey, Penguin; Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 1818 edition, Oxford ; The Last Man, Broadview.
ON RESERVE: Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit (the standard biography), Dutton; Shelley, Percy The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oxford.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Term paper of about 20 pages (due at the last seminar meeting), 70%. Seminar participation including bi-weekly response papers and a presentation, 30%.
For further information, email: avardy@hunter.cuny.edu
- 74200
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Representative Victorians: Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, James
Prof. Fred Kaplan
This course highlights the special conditions of artistry and vision of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Henry James, from Carlyle's essays in 1832 to Henry James's Wings of the Dove in 1902, defining a period roughly synchronous with Queen Victoria's reign. It will also serve as an introduction to Victorian literature and culture. Other Victorian writers, British and American, may be points of reference and discussion. The "representative" in the title is both the conventional use that means typical of a time and place but also the use that emphasizes representation, the act of making/depicting through language and structure. Vision for these writers and for the British and American Victorians in general was political, social, religious (though not for Dickens or James), and ethnocentric as well as literary. Each of these writers is very much of his place and time (all five lived most of their lives in Victorian Britain); but each contributes substantially to how in the twenty-first century we represent the period and the Victorian canon. For Carlyle and Dickens revolution was an issue and an attraction; for Browning, religious and psychological considerations were compelling; for James, money class, and Anglo-American culture were firmly in place and the artistic vision needed to apply itself to social and psychological nuances. Each believed that he lived in times of rapid, radical change which needed to be encouraged, discouraged, redirected. Mechanism/materialism, church-state relations, social equality, individual transcendence and the artist are key issues for Carlyle and Tennyson; materialism, property, money for Dickens; ethnocentrism, relativism, epistemology, and human psychology for Browning; class, gender, and art/epistemology for James. Of Carlyle's works, we will read selected essays, selections from Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, and Past & Present; of Dickens', Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities; of Tennyson's, In Memoriam and selected poems; of Browning's, selected poem from, among other volumes, Men & Women and Dramatis Personae and selections from The Ring and the Book; of James's, Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, and Wings of the Dove, and Henry James on Browning. Each student will deliver an oral report and write a term essay.
- 74400
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Victorian Novel
Prof. John Hall
A course based on the titles often considered (with one possible exception) "high points" from the period many see as the high point of the English novel. Plenty of reading, but enjoyable reading-for the most part. Along with the novels we shall investigate various approaches and connected issues, as in parentheses. Dickens: David Copperfield and Great Expectations (the autobiographical novel; Victorian publishing practices; the middle or so-called early vs later Dickens novel; textual problems and the novel).
Thackeray: Vanity Fair (the comic novel; the realistic novel; narrative strategies); Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (the erotic[?] novel; narrative strategies); Charlotte Bronte: Villette (the feminist novel; the "interior" novel); Trollope: The Warden and Barchester Towers (the novel of purpose; the comic novel; narrative strategies); Eliot: The Mill on the Floss (the flawed novel; the autobiographical novel); Hardy: The Way of All Flesh (the autobiographical novel; the comic/satiric novel)
The seminar will hold one of its sessions in the Berg Collection of the NYPL, where manuscripts, letters, and first editions will further discussion of the writing habits and publishing practices of these novelists.
- 74900
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
American Transcendentalism and Its Contexts
Prof. David Reynolds
The richest and most aesthetically challenging philosophical movement America has produced, Transcendentalism produced landmark works by Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and a number of other New England writers. This course will probe many aspects of Transcendentalism and its contexts, with attention to both American and European backgrounds. We will explore the ways in which Transcendentalism occupied a vibrant middle ground between bygone Puritanism and such later currents as pragmatism and existentialism. We will consider such forerunners of Transcendentalism as American antinomianism and European Romanticism. A broad-ranging analysis of the works of Emerson and Thoreau will set the stage for a consideration of other writers influenced by them, including Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Theodore Parker. Besides evaluating the literary and philosophical themes of Transcendentalism, we will probe its social implications, particularly for the history of American radicalism. Civil disobedience, anarchism, and, antislavery activity were among the progressive strands with direct roots in Transcendentalism. A 15-page term paper is required of each student.
- 75100
W, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Art and Thought of the 1970s
Prof. Louis Menand
An interdiscplinary look at the 1970s, with emphasis on the origins in art and thought of developments associated with American postmodernism. The class will try to situate philosophical and theoretical texts in their cultural settings by reading them side by side with novels, movies, art works, and so on. We will also try to keep in view the histororical circumstances of the period, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Students will be asked to make a short presentation to the class and to submit a final 15-20 page paper, which may be on the topic of their presentation. Works include: Jacques Derrida, "Difference"; Paul de Man, "The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism" and "The Rhetoric of Temporality"; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow; Lucy Lippard, The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party"; Paul Mazursky, An Unmarried Woman; John Ashbery, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"; The Sex Pistols, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols"; Robert Venturi, et al., Learning from Las Vegas; Christopher Jencks , The Language of Postmodern Architecture; Edward Said, Orientalism; Toni Morrison, "What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib" and Song of Solomon; Michael Cimino, The Deer Hunter; Michel Foucault, Language/Counter-Memory/Practice; Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song; Richard Rorty, Philosopophy and the Mirror of Nature; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project."
No auditors and all students must be enrolled in a doctoral program.
- 75200
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
African American Survey: From Reconstruction to Renaissance
Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs
One of four sequential courses in African American literary historical discourse, this semester's offering investigates the development of African American prose fiction and non-fiction from the last resistance narrative of the antebellum period to the onset of the Harlem Renaissance. We will be interested in the forces that shape African American narrative: religion, law, Romanticism, Realism, and the first stirrings of American modernism. We will look at music, theatre, and early film in our survey and reexamine narratives of slavery and the African American essay. Each student will be graded on a mid-term essay and a final paper on a topic of her own choosing after consultation with me. Students are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as a site for work in African American literary history. To this end, one trip will be made by the class to the Center to meet staff and be introduced to the general and archival holdings of the Center. I expect each student will have an active e-mail account and World Wide Web access.
- 75200
Th, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Late 20th Century African American Fiction
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr
In this seminar we will pay particular attention to the manner in which Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and James Baldwin worked to make sense of the changing status of the Black American in the mid twentieth century. In particular, we will address questions of 1) travel and migration, 2) technological advance (particularly the remarkable advances in communications technologies during the twentieth century) and 3) changing conceptions of race in regard to questions of biology and caste. In addition to a set of critical works we will read Ellison's Juneteenth, Invisible Man, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory; Wright's Native Son, The Long Dream, The Outsider and Savage Holiday; and Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Just Above My Head.
- 78300
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
The Ethnic I: Asian American and Jewish American Postwar Literature
Prof. Nancy K. Miller
Twentieth-century memoirs and first-person novels about ethnic experience often follow the lines of a familiar plot: the story of becoming American. The styles of Jewish immigration provided a template for minority experience in the first half of the twentieth century. The successive waves of Asian immigrations have been consolidated as those of a "model minority." Writers from these two groups thus share the pattern and the burden of the paradigmatic "success story." From assimilation narrative to diasporic experiment, Asian American and Jewish American writers record the pressures of this experience in ways that display a peculiar set of interethnic affinities. What happens, for instance, when a second-generation Chinese daughter decides to become Jewish? The course will examine how problems of cultural translation inflect autobiographical and literary forms--and how questions of gender, language, and place shape these narratives of longing and belonging. Readings will include theoretical discussions of autobiography, in particular the ethnographic imperative (Cheung, Gay, Lim, Lowe, Sommer). Works by: Antin, Hoffman, Jen, Kingston, Kogawa, Lee, Paley, Roth, Spiegelman, Wong.
One term-paper due at the end of the semester; one oral presentation.
- 79001
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Critical Whiteness: Gender, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy in "Whiteness Studies"
Prof. Ira Shor
A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois published THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, an extraordinary book for which no equal exists vis a vis "the souls of white folk." Why has "blackness" been so much more examined than "whiteness"? Does the under-explored condition of whiteness help play down white advantage in school and society? Does the dominant position of whiteness confer protection from scrutiny as well as license to observe and define others? As it happens, the under-examined profile of whiteness has been changing. For over a decade now, a critical discourse on whiteness has been evolving in several areas. Growing out of multiculturalism, feminism, cultural studies, and critical legal studies, this new "whiteness" field is controversial. Some see it as narcissistically re-centering the white position in the face of multicultural efforts to dismantle racism. Others see it as a needed inquiry into an "invisible whiteness" which privileges white people.
As an intellectual project, "critical whiteness" asks why white privilege continues even though racial segregation is illegal and equality is the law of the land. Laws that once required segregation and the subordination of dark-skinned peoples have been vacated for decades, yet racial inequality remains pervasive. Why does white supremacy persist in a society legally "color-blind"? To make sense of this dilemma, "critical whiteness" looks at institutions as well as representations of "whiteness" in social, visual, and literary texts, to read them as cultural pedagogies that teach racial identity. For example, common parlance uses the label "people of color" to describe minorities, not the white majority, as if only those with dark skin have a color. Is white then not a color? How is the racial identity of white people socially constructed? How does whiteness remain peculiarly unmarked at the same time that it dominates education and society? How is whiteness taught and learned through curricula and media that have no apparent racial agenda? How does color cross paths with social class and gender? These are questions undertaken in this seminar through the lens of rhetorical study that treats discourse as a material force in the making of people and society.
If discourse is a material force that socially constructs us, rhetoric is sometimes thought of as the deep structure of rules and values which enable and limit discourse. Rhetoric can be defined as implicit and explicit rules for making discourse that teach us what subjects can be spoken about and how we should speak about them. From this starting point, then, "critical whiteness" is a discourse whose rhetoric challenges white privilege. Can the rhetoric of "critical whiteness" reinvent pedagogy, research methods, as well as our gender and class identities?
Writings
1. Informed journals on weekly readings.
2. Final paper.
Reading list available in the English office.
- 79500
T, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Theory & Practice of Literary Scholarship & Criticism
Prof. Tom Hayes
We will explore feminist, marxist, new historicist, post-colonialist, and psychoanalytic approaches to literary scholarship. We will also discuss how these approaches inform queer theory and African-American criticism as well as more traditional fields such as Renaissance drama and the eighteenth-century novel. We will read selections from Carolyn J. Dean's The Self and Its Pleasures (Cornell 1992), Gayatri Spivak's Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge 1993), Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford 1997), Christopher Lane's The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia 1998), Michele Wallace's Invisibility Blues (Verso 1990), Christopher Pye's The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Duke 2000), and Tamise Van Pelt's The Other Side of Desire (SUNY 2000).
We will explore the latest aids to research made available on the internet and the World Wide Web, and in response to the most recent issue of PMLA 116.1 (January 2001), we will discuss the impact of globalization on literary scholarship. We will also make use of Beasley's Guide to Library Research (Toronto 2000).
Participation in class discussions and a twenty-five page term essay are required.
- 80200
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Victorian Textures
Prof. Eve Sedgwick
This seminar will undertake to analyze textures in British Victorian material and literary culture. Our first and continuing project will be to arrive at some working definitions of "texture," including its relation to sight and touch, to scale, to structure and organization, to changing means and materials of production, to ornamentation, to sound, to affects and sexualities, and to changing perceptual technologies.
The readings of fiction, prose, and poetry in the seminar will be aimed at developing a rich thematic sense of the textures of the material world of the Victorians, but simultaneously at understanding how the authors themselves use texture as a tool for gaining theoretical leverage on issues of history, class, imperial relations, spirituality, science and technology, gender and sexuality, labor and pleasure, and representation. At the same time, the class will work on developing a vocabulary for the formal and phenomenological analysis of writerly texture itself.
Authors read may include Ruskin, Eliot, Tennyson, Dickens, Morris, Thackeray, and Somerville and Ross.
- 80200
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
On Visual Culture
Prof. Mary Ann Caws
How does textuality relate to visibility? What kinds of seeing are talkable about and writable about? How best to approach this vexed topic? Among the many approaches currently ongoing, we will investigate several, using points of view and language that seem most available and fitting. Our objects of concern will include art, text, film; and, to the extent possible, video games and the like and our considerations will include those of gender, culture, and the history of visuality.
- 80400
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Minor Moderns: Poets, Novelists, Musicians
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
This course focuses on some American, British, and European figures of the first half of the twentieth century; a few are canonical, while most are not. We will explore the antimonumental, broken, quiet tradition in poetry, fiction, and music; our pleasure will be to analyze and relish the tiny oeuvre, the stunted career, the overlooked offering.
We will begin by listening to some late work by Gabriel Fauré, a romantic 19th century French composer who modernized himself at the end of his career; in conjunction with Fauré (and, possibly, with the aphoristic music of the Viennese modernist Anton Webern), we will read the enigmatic short fiction of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who entered an insane asylum in 1933--where he remained until his death in 1956--and quit writing. We will end the course by reading poems of the forgotten David Schubert (1913-1946), whose mother committed suicide when he was 12, and who spent his last years undergoing electroshock in a hospital, and whose poems John Ashbery describes as follows: "The typical Schubert poem has the appearance of something smashed, not too painstakingly put back together again, and finally contemplated with both remorse and amusement." Alongside Schubert's poems we will listen to Morton Feldman's nearly inaudible music (perhaps his chamber piece, "For Frank O'Hara").
Between the bookends of Fauré/Walser and Schubert/Feldman, we will entertain other odd couplings. We will read the cranky poetry and fiction of Laura Riding (who renounced verse-writing in 1938, although she lived until 1991); against Riding we may listen to the sentimental, nervous music of the American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (including "The White Peacock"), and the more gauntly modernist music of Ruth Crawford. Against the music of a variety of jazz singers and instrumentalists from the 1920s and 1930s (including Cab Calloway, Teddy Wilson, and Ethel Waters), we will read Jean Toomer's prose-poem Cane, as well as the "Harlem Renaissance" poet Countee Cullen's first book, Color. Against the "furniture music" of Erik Satie, and the musical portraits of Virgil Thomson, we will read fictions of failure, indifference, and reclusiveness, a minor tradition I call "hotel prose": novels of Sylvia Townsend-Warner (Lolly Willowes), Jean Rhys (After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie), and Jane Bowles (Two Serious Ladies). We will follow Jane with her husband Paul Bowles's fiction and music, and will read the "Objectivist" poets George Oppen (whose mother committed suicide when he was four, and who stopped writing poetry in 1935 and resumed only in 1960), and Lorine Niedecker (who, in her twilight years, supported herself by scrubbing floors at Atkinson Memorial Hospital).
No musical background is required: we will not be studying scores, merely listening. Instead of a final paper, students will write weekly responses--"lyric essays"--to the reading and the listening. In these brief discursive excursions, an unusual degree of rhetorical inventiveness will be encouraged.
- 80500
M, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Theory Colloquium
Prof. Steven Kruger
This course provides a space for considering where "theory" stands currently in relation to the discipline of "English" and, more generally, literary and cultural studies. What counts as theory? What is gained, and lost, through the maintenance of a distinction between theory and practice? How do we bring theory to the reading of literary and cultural texts? What would it mean, as some have claimed, to be at a point post-theory?
In addressing these, and other, questions, we will consider some of the major theoretical positions and movements of the past several decades-feminism, queer theory, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, materialism/ Marxism, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, psychoanalysis-looking at how these stand in relation to each other, at where they differ and where they intersect. Course readings will include both shorter essays that represent particular theoretical stances and books that bring together in interesting, quirky ways different strands of theoretical inquiry. Several guest theorists from within and outside the discipline of English will visit the class to discuss their own approaches to "doing theory." And each member of the class will be responsible for presenting, once in the semester, her/his understanding of a particular theoretical position.
Final essays for the course can address students' individual areas of interest, presenting, for instance, a theoretically-informed reading of texts representing a particular period, genre, author, etc.
- 80700
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Introduction to Medieval Irish
Prof. Catherine McKenna
This course introduces the student to medieval - Old and Middle - Irish and its literature, that is, to the language and literature of pre-Norman Ireland from the seventh to the twelfth century. We begin, of necessity, by focusing on the grammar of Old Irish which establishes the basis of medieval Irish, and gradually explore the various ways in which Middle Irish transformed standard Old Irish from the ninth century on. Although the language has earned its reputation for difficulty, we are able to refresh ourselves in the midst of the linguistic labors by reading of selections from early Irish lyric poetry, hagiography, and saga, both in Irish and in translation. We also survey the history of Irish literature, Europe's earliest vernacular literature, from the seventh century to the twelfth, and students are encouraged to read additional texts in translation. In addition to weekly translation assignments, there will be a midterm and a final examination.
- 81000
Dissertation Workshop
Time, Day, and Instructor TBA
Designed to help students write the prospectus (which should not take all term) and/or the dissertation, this writing workshop will respond to the needs and the size of the group. There may or may not be assigned readings and exercises, at the beginning. One certain thing is that everyone will read, and respond in writing to everyone else's work, and that the pages to be discussed will be circulated among members of the workshop at least a week ahead of time.
- 81500
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Miltonic Romanticism: Milton's Epics and Romantic Prophecies
Prof. Joseph Wittreich
We will read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, alongside such Romantic revisionary efforts as Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as part of our own attempt to give definition to what Christopher Caudwell calls "Miltonic Romanticism" and to review (and revise?) the extent to which Milton anticipates the ideology that Jerome McGann thinks the major works of Romanticism instantiate. Over the semester, we will trace the progressing understanding of Romantic prophecy from the classic study by M. H. Abrams in the 1960s to the recently published studies involving both poetry and painting by Morton D. Paley.
Requirements: an oral presentation or two, plus a final paper of at least 20 pages.
- 83100
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Intellectual Backgrounds of 18th Century Literature
Prof. Blanford Parker
The course will be a review of 17th and 18th century philosophical prose. Beginning with Bacon's Organon and Hobbes' Leviathan we will trace the epistemological skepticism and political revisionism which was the intellectual basis for the establishment of enlightened thought and politics. The texts will be treated both as rhetorical documents (where issues of proto-modern discourse and transformation of prose style will be considered) and as philosophical arguments in a contemporary debate. We will investigate the grounds for the modern mixed parliamentary government, the origins of positivism and satirical critique of Euro-English cultural tradition. Texts also include Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Swift, Hume and Adam Smith.
Schedule of Classes
1. Introduction
2. Bacon, NOVUM ORGANUM
3. Hobbes, LEVIATHAN (2 weeks)
4. Selections of Shaftesbury's CHARACTERISTICS
5. Berkeley, DIALOGUE OF HYLAS TO PHILONOUS
6. Swift, A Tale of a Tub
7. Locke, from the ESSAY ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (2 or 3 weeks)
8. Locke, TREATISE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT
9. Pope, AN ESSAY ON MAN
10.Hume, from first TREATISE and "On Miracles"
11.Smith, Adam, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (2 weeks)
- 84800
Th, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
The Feeling of Fact: American Aesthetics
Prof. Joan Richardson
The discussions of this seminar will continue and deepen those continuing over the last two years in my ongoing American Aesthetics seminars, but it is not necessary to have participated in those to join this one. The concern currently is to outline distinctive features of an "American" aesthetic, linked as it is by the accidents of time and place to the emergence of "science" from natural history and natural philosophy. The feature linking the American writers we shall read is their ongoing reading in the "science" of their moments. We shall, then, read together with Jonathan Edwards's own writing, Newton's Opticks and sections of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding; together with Emerson, John Herschel's works on astronomy and natural philosophy, from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, Alexander von Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, and portions of Cosmos; together with Charles Sanders Peirce, from Darwin's On the Origin of Species and from his Notebooks; together with Henry James, from William James, as well as from Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincare; together with Gertrude Stein, her work on mapping brain-tracts, as well as selections from Einstein; together with Stevens, from Heisenberg and Bohr on quantum mechanics; together with Danielewski, technologies of filmic representation. These above indications are to be considered "frontier instances" of what we shall explore.
Instead of seminar reports, participants will be asked to submit written responses in the form of critical meditations concerning the evolving features of an American aesthetic as it emerges from the weekly readings. These responses will serve to focus discussion. A seminar paper of 15-20 pages will be due at the end of the term.
- 84800
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
American Modernism and the Market
Prof. Marc Dolan
This course will examine the domestication (and, to a certain extent, the naturalization) of modernism in America. Reading fictional, nonfictional, poetic, and dramatic texts, we will spend much of our time exploring how aesthetic techniques that seemed jarringly modernist in the years following the First World War became barely noticeable--and to some extent even conventional--to many American readers by the arrival of the Second World War. Class discussions will be historicist as well as formalist, and will consider the impact of associationalism, isolationism, nativism, the increased interest in folk culture, the rise of celebrity, the new mass culture, and the development of non-literary arts (e.g., journalism, advertising, painting, comic strips, motion pictures, radio, and recorded music) on the practice of writing American prose, poetry, and drama.
Course requirements include active participation in class discussions, a relatively brief presentation summarizing relevant scholarship on a text under study, and a longer presentation and seminar paper drawing upon original scholarship in the field.
Required texts may include: Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922); Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922); Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925); Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925); Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926); Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933); John Dos Passos, U. S. A. (1930/1932/1935/1938); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935); Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Golden Boy (1937); Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (1938);James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
- 85500
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Naturalism and Aestheticism
Prof. Norman Kelvin
It is the contention of this course that the dashing of radical political hopes in France after the 1848 Revolution, and the further disillusion with government that resulted from France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, created a climate in which allegedly non-political movements in the arts could thrive. Naturalism and aestheticism were two such movements. Both will be regarded in this course as movements that try to substitute impersonal "science" for politics as a basis for the writing of fiction. Naturalism, as developed by Zola, does this openly. His essay "The Experimental Novel" is a treatise on what he regards as scientific method as the moral obligation of the writer. The association of the aesthetic movement with a similar stance is only implicit, but real nevertheless. The effort to see the art object as autonomous, as existing for its own sake, to see it at a distance, where form can be observed, parallels Zola's admonition that the artist must be a detached observer of "human nature," must see it, at a critical distance, as the embodiment of deterministic forces, in order to represent it "accurately" in the novel.
We begin with Zola, Flaubert, Huysmans, and the French decadents -- as writers whose work, "naturalist" or "aestheticist," embodies the cultural moment I have described. We then move across the Channel to see what happens to the two movements when they are appropriated (and transformed) by British writers and artists. Pater, George Moore, Wilde, Violet Paget, Ella D'Arcy, and selections from The Yellow Book will be central to our reading of late-nineteenth century England. Finally, we view the acculturation in America of all that was done in France and England. We will see that in the period in which aestheticism characterized avante garde literature and visual art in France and England, naturalism was the ground-breaking movement among novelists in America, and we'll ask why this should be so. We'll see, too, that aestheticism in the visual arts makes the transition to America with much greater ease than does aestheticism in literature. As we move into the early 20th century we will see that the "encounter" of aestheticism with naturalism, already present in Flaubert, becomes an embrace: in which one is inseparable from the other: becomes the foundation of what has come to be known as "modern realism." We'll take up one more matter. During the period of political disillusion in France a Marxist undercurrent was gathering strength. Who represented it in literature, and how did it relate to naturalism; and in America, did naturalism become the retheorized ground for the proletarian novel that began in the 1920's? Readings will be selected from works by Zola, Flaubert, Huysmans, the French Decadents, George Moore, Wilde, Ella D'Arcy, Violet Paget, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton And through the availability of modern media, there will a great deal of looking at early modern painting and the decorative arts in both Europe and in America. A term paper and one class presentation.
- 86000
T, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Theory, Literature, and the Machine
Prof. Gerhard Joseph/Prof. Peter Hitchcock
Through an interweaving of theoretical, fictional, and visual texts, this course will explore the links during the past fifty years among systems analysis and information theory, biotechnology, virtual thought, chaos theory, cyberfiction, televisual/cinematic culture, and hypertext. To periodize, have we moved from "modernity," not so much into "postmodernity," as into the "posthuman" and "postpersonal"? What does one now mean by a subject-i.e, how does a subject's will/desire/agency survive and express itself in a cybernetic age, within the global empire of the digital and the simulacral? How are the new technologies transforming the human sciences (not to mention the humanities more narrowly) fromwhose disciplinary perspectives we belatedly describe consciousness and the world? Given the advanced state of Artificial Intelligence research, what new forms of embodiment, if any, will mind take? And if we buy the thesis of radical transformation, are we inclined to indulge a plangent nostalgia for what is passing and a dystopic anxiety about what is emerging, or do we welcome a new evolutionary stage for the species, embrace a "reinvention of nature" (to cite Donna Haraway's utopic language in her "Cyborg Manifesto")? Theoretical texts selected from the works of Thomas Kuhn, Avital Ronnell, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jean Baudrillard, Roger Penrose, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Patricia Clough, James Gleick, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Mark Dery, Geroge Landow, and J. David Bolter. Fictional texts chosen from among Don DeLillo's White Noise, J.G. Ballard's Crash, Samuel Delaney's Trouble on Triton, Phillip K. Dick's Ubik, William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net or Schismatrix, Richard Power's Galatea 2.2, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Pat Cadigan's Synners, and Octavia Butler's Dawn. Some videos (Bill Viola, Laurie Anderson, Mona Hartoum, Nam June Paik) and films: 2001, Blade Runner, the two Terminator films, the Alien trilogy, Crash, Videodrome, The Fly, Robocop, Paris Texas, Total Recall, The Matrix) as visual context.
- 86000
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Translated Lives: Postcolonial Texts, Anglophone/Francophone
Prof. Meena Alexander/Prof. Francesca Sautman
We will explore questions of cultural translation, migratory memory and aesthetic self-fashioning in Anglophone and Francophone texts drawn both from the early era of decolonization and the late twentieth century. How does language bind one to place? And what of the materiality of language that serves to fashion a migratory, diasporic existence? And how might we critically evaluate what some have read as an evolving cosmopolitanism? We will consider the tensions that come into play within transnational narratives that fashion selves and refigure identities, even as they focus on traumatic memory, migratory homes and multiple exiles. These tensions are further complicated by matters of gender and sexual identities that cross national and cultural borders. The course will devote careful attention to these complementary, sometimes competing, forms of identity and their interplay. In the course of exploring these and related questions of territory, text and self-identity we will attempt to chart the interface between Anglophone and Francophone cultural production. The French texts that we have selected are available also in English translation. Students who read French can do all their Francophone readings in French, and also use supplementary works in French not translated into English by the authors on the syllabus.
Our texts will include:
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands
Amadou Hampaté Bâ, The Fortunes of Wangrin [L'etrange destin de Wangrin]
Nicole Brossard, Under Tongue [Sous la langue]
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Driss Chraibi, Flutes of Death [Une Enquête au pays]
Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind
Edwidge Danticat, Breath Eyes Memory
Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment [Femmes d' Alger dans leur appartement] and A Sister to Sheherazade [Ombre sultane]
Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here
M.K. Gandhi, Autobiography, Story of My Experiments with Truth
Ahmadou Kourouma, Monnèw [Monnè, Outrages et Défis]
Audre Lorde, Our Dead Behind Us
Claude MCKay, Banjo
V.S.Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
Anna Deveare Smith, Fires in the Mirror
Werewere-Liking, Um and A New Earth: African Ritual Theatre [Puissance de Um; Nouvelle terre]; It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral [Elle sera de jaspe et de corail]
With additional readings from: Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Talal Asad, Marc Augé, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Timothy Brennan, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, James Clifford, Edouard Glissant, Jarrod Hayes, Edmund Husserl, Françoise Lionnet, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward Soja, Gayatri Spivak.
Course requirements: The course will be run as a seminar with weekly student participation, assigned readings and detailed discussion. One midterm written paper and one final research paper 15-30 pages.
- 86100
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Black Feminist Thought
Prof. Michele Wallace
This class will consider issues intersecting visual culture and images of peoples of color at the turn-of-the-century and during the early 20th century up to and including the 20s and the 30s and the period of Nancy Cunard's infamous and fascinating Negro Anthology, a massive private publication which still hasn't been republished in its entirety. A particular focus of the course will be on the potential for black feminist interpretations of anthropological photography of Native Americans, Africans and the indigenous populations of Oceania and the Pacific at the turn-of-the-century. We will also consider the philosophical implications for Modernism in Western art and culture of the prolific displays of colonial populations of color at the many world's fair, parks, zoos, museums of natural history, expositions and colonial fairs throughout Europe and the U.S.
Also, a further point of comparison will be provided by the particular case of photography of Afro-Americans as recently freed persons at such educational institutions as Hampton University and Tuskeegee at the turn-of-century and in the early 20th century. It seems no accident that some of the most notable photographers of the period and of the subsequent FSA collections were women, such as Frances Johnston Benjamin, Doris Ullman and Dorothea Lange.
RECOMMENDED: James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Harvard UP, 1988. Richard Dyer, White. Routledge, 1998. The Darkness and the Light: Photographs by Doris Ullman. Aperture 1974. P.H. Polk, Through These Eyes: The Photographs of P.H. Polk. Univ. of Delaware, 1998. Godfrey Frankel, In the Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol. Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995. John W. Ravage, Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier. Univ. of Utah Press, 1997. Raymond Bachollet et al. NegriPub: L'Image des Noirs dans la Publicite. Paris, France: Editions Somogy, 1992. MM Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Virginia UP 1998.William Rubin, ed. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern. Museum of Modern Art, 1984.
- 86200
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Stars: Film Personalities and the Writing of Fandom
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
This seminar will provide an introduction to the practice of closely interpreting a star's work, life, and image as a hybrid "text." We will read some basic theoretical prose, including some or all of the following: Richard Dyer's Stars and Heavenly Bodies, Patrick Horrigan's Widescreen Dreams, Richard De Cordova's Picture Personalities, Christine Gledhill's Stardom: Industry of Desire, as well as essays by Roland Barthes and others. We will also study the literature of fandom: it is likely that we will read Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, the journals of Candy Darling and Joseph Cornell, a chronicle by Andy Warhol, the poems of Frank O'Hara and Edward Field, a memoir by playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and Joyce Carol Oates's novel Blonde. (In our attempt to study the literature of adoration more generally, we may also read selections from Marcel Proust and Michel Leiris.) We will read thespian autobiographies, to understand the poetics of star self-construction (perhaps Joan Crawford's My Way of Life or Marilyn Monroe's My Story). Above all, we will analyze one star per seminar meeting: for example, one week we will read Richard Dyer's essay on Judy Garland, screen I Could Go On Singing, and discuss the Garland "star-text." Our film personalities will be relics (or casualties) of the great era of the Hollywood machine (possibilities include Monroe, Garbo, Garland, Crawford, as well as Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift). The queer subcultural investment in star culture is one of this course's foundations.
Students will be required to write an essay about a star--not necessarily one of the stars we are analyzing in seminar--and to present a portion of the paper, as a work in progress, to the class.
- 86400
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Psychoanalysis and Modern Aesthetics
Prof. John Brenkman
This seminar will investigate the uneasy relation between modern aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis by revisiting the concept of creativity. Even where aesthetic and literary theorists disparage the concept of creativity as a leftover of romanticism, they tend to assume that the reception of artworks recapitulates in reverse the production of artworks. Does this assumption hold up? Can the creative process of the artist or writer be approached without romantic conceptions of subjectivity? Where do modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis dovetail, and where do they diverge, on these questions? Psychoanalysis has proposed various, frequently incommensurate models of creativity: dreaming, jokes, day-dreaming, "fundamental fantasies," play, and melancholia. Where do such unconscious "sources" of art stand in relation to the expressive means of art (technique, tradition, form, and so on)? Our readings in modern aesthetics will concentrate on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Psychoanalytic theorists will include Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan as well as theorists in the Lacanian tradition, principally Maud Manonni, Julia Kristeva, and Marie-Claude Lambotte. Literary works will include novels by Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Dale Peck.
- 86700
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The Literature and Culture of WWI
Prof. Jane Marcus
Classic war novels, films and poetry will be covered. But the emphasis will be on the Other World War I, in the work of women, South Asians, gays, the Irish and blacks. The body in pain and constructions of masculinity will be studied in painting, monuments and historical narratives as well as fiction. The question of the remembrance of the war as it is represented by contemporary fiction and Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy. All Quiet on the Western Front will be read along with Not So Quiet..., a women's novel, and Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters. Margaret Higonnet's Lines of Fire anthology reprints work by women from all over the world. Pacifist and feminist critiques of the war will be read, along with the classic historical works on this very literary war, Gertrude Stein's Wars I have Seen and a collection of women's plays about the war.
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