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Fall 2002 Courses
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70700
M, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Medieval Literature in Britain/England
Prof. Gordon Whatley
A survey of representative works from medieval Britain (8th-15th centuries), structured in roughly chronological order, but with readings clustered thematically to exemplify various literary genres and cultural topics, such as:- Christian conversion, anti-Judaism, and the Devil (Dream of the Rood, Old English Genesis, Cynewulf's Elene; selections from Bede and Ælfric); anchoritic spirituality and the body (Ancrene Wisse and early 13th c. lives of SS. Margaret, Catherine, and Lawrence); Arthurian secularism and romance (selections from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Marie de France, Morte Darthur, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight); "Nature" and (hetero)sexuality (Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles and the anonymous Cleanness); the Franciscan phenomenon (legend of Francis in the South English Legendary; Chaucer's Summoner's Tale); salvation of the heathen (Saint Erkenwald and selections from Langland's Piers Plowman). Many of the readings will be in translation or normalized, but some (e.g. Chaucer) will be in Middle English. Medievalist specialists will have the opportunity to work with the original versions. Course requirements will involve frequent brief oral/written reports and a short analytical paper.
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71000
M, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Humanism and the Idea of A Perfect Language
Prof. Martin Elsky
This course will examine the central role of language in Renaissance Humanism. It will examine a paradigm shift in early modern language theory, its institutionalization in the curriculum, and its practical, social impact through the centralization of the state. The focal point of the course will be the Humanist attempt to replace logic with rhetoric as the master intellectual and social discourse. We will begin with the Humanist reaction against Scholastic philosophical language, and the Humanists' preference for a probability-based literary language; we will further consider the social and historical nature of this language, and its uses to negotiate the uncertainties of personal, social, and political life. We will move to the Humanists' use of rhetoric to reorganize the encyclopedia of knowledge, and then to the practical ways in which Humanists sought to disseminate rhetorically based education through print and the university. Finally, we will examine problems and contradictions in the actual impact of Humanist, rhetorical education on its social beneficiaries in the emergent early modern state. The course will center around three major Renaissance writers, Valla, More, and Vives, to be supplemented with other primary and secondary sources.
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72400
Th, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Beyond New Historicism: An Introduction to Early Modern Cultural Studies
Prof. Will Fisher
This course will provide students with a survey of seventeenth-century English literature, including authors such as John Milton, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Phillips. It will also provide an introduction to some of the new methodologies in early modern studies that have appeared over the last two decades. Whereas most methods or theory classes end with New Historicism, this class will begin with it, considering how recent scholarship has attempted to move beyond it. Much of the secondary work that we will be reading could ultimately be labelled "early modern cultural studies".
The following are some of the new methods that we will cover in this course. First, we will discuss recent developments in textual scholarship (or "the history of the book" as it is sometimes called), including the groundbreaking work of Roger Chartier and Randy McCleod. We will also look at studies that focus on the cultural production and valuation of literary texts from the period. These studies often draw (either implicitly or explicitly) on the insights of writers like Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory. We will then consider the emergence of research on "everyday life" during the early modern period. Theoretical texts here will include Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, Norbert Elias' History of Manners, and Henri Lefebvre's Everyday Life in the Modern World. We will also discuss one of the most lively subfields of "everyday" history--research on objects or material culture. This work on cultural artifacts draws heavily upon the writings of historians like Fernand Braudel and anthropologists like Arjun Appadurai. Finally, we will examine the impact that post-colonial theory has had on early modern studies. In addition to the usual suspects such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, we will read the work of scholars like Ania Loomba and Kim Hall. We will end with a consideration of hybrid methodologies such as recent research on the cultural history of foods like sugar and tea (which combines a focus on material culture with a post-colonial perspective).
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73100
T, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Restoration Poetry and Prose
Prof. Blanford Parker
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75000
W, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Colonial American Literature
Prof. David Reynolds
An exploration of the origins and early development of American literature. This course investigates the Puritan world view and its influence on American literature; the interactions between white society and the cultures of Native Americans and African Americans; the decline of Puritanism and the emergence of the American Enlightenment; and the political and social writings that led to the American Revolution. We will study representative colonial genres, including sermons, histories, journals, captivity narratives, religious and secular poetry, and political tracts. Among the authors considered are Anne Bradstreet, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, St. Jean de Crevecouer, Thomas Jefferson, and Phillis Wheatley. Active participation in class discussions is encouraged. A 15-page term paper is required.
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75100
T, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
The Literature of the American Civil War
Prof. Fred Kaplan
Readings in fiction, poetry, and non-fictional prose centering around the American Civil War experience. The touchstone text for this course will be the two-volume Library of America edition of Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832-1865. The course readings will radiate outward from Lincoln's words to considerations of, among others, Stowe, Whitman, Twain, Grant, James, and Crane. To some extent, we will be focusing on Lincoln as a writer and on literary discourse in America in regard to language, vision, and national trauma. We will be reading memoirs and autobiography as well as fiction and poetry. For example, the two Henry James works that we will discuss are his novel, The Bostonians, and Notes of a Son and Brother, his early twentieth-century autobiographical consideration of how the Civil War affected the James family and their world. The other works we will discuss are Mark Twain, "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, & Pudd'nhead Wilson; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Mary Chestnut, The Private Diary of Mary Chestnut & Mary Chestnut's Civil War; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), Drum Taps, & "Memories of President Lincoln," & Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832-1865. Each student will be required to present an oral report and to write one essay for the course.
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75300
Th, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
American Proletarian Literature, Text and Theory, 1922-40
Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs
Few American literary phenomena are as little understood as is American Proletarian Literature. This fact has not prevented the publication of shelves full of pronouncements about it. In an attempt to re-view the phenomenon itself, this course will ignore most of the critical exegesis of American literary "proletarianism" produced after 1940 and will instead concentrate on the primary documents of its formative and its most productive periods, 1922 to 1928 and 1929 to 1940.
The purposes of the course include recovery of the theoretical backgrounds of American proletarian literary criticism, attempts at recontextualising and reevaluating the actual practice of that criticism, including racializing and gendering the critical contexts of American literary "proletarianism," and rereadings of the major texts of American proletarian fiction, poetry, and drama of the period in question. Further goals of the course are subsets of those listed above, such as establishing a base in genre theory for reading proletarian fiction and attempting to understand the dialogic problematic of class-based literature in American culture.
Texts will include primary materials reproduced from the instructor's collection, several novels and plays, and selections of representative poetry. Some work with archived primary materials will be required, each student or team of students will make one class presentation and the semester will conclude with a major paper from each student on a topic of her choice, after consultation with the instructor. Students interested in seeing early versions of the reading list for the course can contact me at jcsjj@sprintmail.com in late June, 2002.
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75600
M, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
African-America Literature: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond
Prof. James deJongh
This seminar attempts to present a coherent and comprehensive overview of the discourse of African American literature in the first half of the twentieth century, from the flowering of new literary talents of the Harlem Renaissance after World War I to the continuing spirit of cultural renewal of the literary generations that emerged in subsequent decades. We will study the literary project of the African American generation of the 1920s and 1930s, popularly identified with the sign "Harlem Renaissance" but known also as the "New Negro Movement." We will attempt to establish the dialogic relationships of New Negro literature to broad modernist concerns of western culture and to the parallel Africana literary movements outside the United States as well as to the traditions of American and African American literature.
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76000
Th, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Modernisms
Prof. Mary Ann Caws
A sideways investigation of some different, relatively brief varieties of the experiences and experiments loosely-termed modernism -- not the Big Novels, but rather a few movements: Cubism, futurism, vorticism, surrealism; a few genres: manifestos, travel writing, letters, essays, prose poems, art criticism, short stories, novellas; a few places: rooms, salons, galleries, trains. And a few ongoing questions: What does a modernist autobiography look like? What does/can feminism do with and about modernism(s)? What relations work best between visual and verbal modernisms? How does Gothic American Southern relate to modernism?
Readings in Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, John Berger, Carrington, H.D., T.S.Eliot, William Faulkner, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, Henry James, Mina Loy, Mary McCarthy, James/Jan Morris, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Adrian Stokes, Eudora Welty, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Wharton , William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf.
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79010
W, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Whiteness Meets English: Literacy/Literature and A Critical Pedagogy of Whiteness
Prof. Ira Shor
A century ago, W.E.B. DuBois published THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, where he declared that the problem of 20th Century America was the color line. That problem remains in 2002. Dubois's extraordinary book has no equal or companion vis a vis "the souls of white folk." Why has "blackness" been so much more marked and examined than "whiteness"? In her famous 1988 essay, Peggy McIntosh characterized whiteness as an "invisible knapsack of unearned privileges." Does the unmarked and under-explored condition of whiteness play down white privilege? Does the dominant position of whiteness confer protection from scrutiny as well as license to mark and define others?
The under-examined profile of whiteness has been changing. Since the late 1980s, critical discourses on whiteness have evolved in multicultural education, feminism, cultural studies, sociology, critical legal studies, labor history, American studies, and racial identity theory. This cross-disciplinary field of "whiteness" is controversial. Some see it potentially re-centering the white position in the face of multicultural efforts to dismantle racism. Others see it as an overdue inquiry into "invisible whiteness."
"Critical whiteness" asks why white privilege continues even though racial segregation is now illegal. Laws that once required segregation, prohibited miscegenation, and enforced the subordination of dark-skinned peoples have been vacated for decades, yet racial inequality remains pervasive in virtually every social indicator, from health care to housing to school achievement to college degrees to family income to digital access to incarceration rates. Why does white supremacy persist in a society legally "color-blind"? To make sense of this pervasive inequality, "critical whiteness" looks at history, everyday practices, and institutional processes as well as at representations of race in social, visual, and literary texts. Consider that an Oscar for best actress was finally awarded in 2002 to the first woman of color. Yet, why does common parlance use the label "people of color" to describe only minorities and not the white majority, as if only those with dark skin have a color? Is white then not a color? Are all white people colorless? Are all whites the same color? Does color trump class or gender in the hierarchy of identity privileges?
Whiteness, then, is apparently hegemonic and invisible at the same time. This peculiar situation has led Beverly Tatum, Richard Dyer, David Roediger, Michelle Fine, Toni Morrison and others to discuss how racial identity is socially constructed. Following their lead, this seminar will ask how whiteness is taught and learned through curricula and media that have no apparent racial agenda. Further, we will explore how color identity crosses paths with the identities of class and gender. These questions will be undertaken through 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 can be defined as a deep structure of rules, frameworks, and values which simultaneously enable and restrict discourse. A rhetoric can be understood as a set of orientations and methods which guide the making of specific discourses, teaching us what can be spoken about to whom and how we should speak. From this standpoint, then, "critical whiteness" is a discourse whose rhetoric reveals and questions white privilege. Can the rhetoric of "critical whiteness" produce critical pedagogies for classrooms as well as research methods we can apply to social and literary texts?
Writings:
1. Weekly journals on the readings.
2. Final synthesis paper (10 pages).
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80100
W, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
"After Theory": A Program Colloquium
Prof. Gerhard Joseph
The course title, taken from an upcoming conference at the University of Nottingham, puns on the thesis 1) that literary studies, after the dominance of race/class/gender issues during the last quarter of the 20th century, are in search of fresh theoretical contexts and 2) that "Theory" as such has had its day, that we have entered a new "post-theoretical" moment. In the latter case what, if anything, has filled the vacuum? We will examine such matters through a series of presentations by members of the English faculty with expertise about or interest in the present status of the usual suspects (structuralism/poststructualism, feminism, queer theory, reader-response theory, neo-marxism, neo-psychoanalysis, new historicism, post-colonialism, narratology, biographical approaches, cybertheory, etc.). By exposing students to theoretical presentations from a large number of program faculty, the course should, by implication if nothing else, suggest whatever coherence (or lack thereof) exists today within discipline of English studies at large and within the our specific program.
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80200
T, 11:45 - 1:45 p.m.
American Aesthetics
Prof. Joan Richardson
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80600
W, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
The Arcades Project
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
This seminar attempts to find a use for Walter Benjamin's monumental and unfinished masterwork, The Arcades Project, a dense, nearly 1000-page compendium of quotations, speculations, fragments, and ghostly indications. (The book's topic is the arcades of 19th century Paris, a subject that leads him to fashion, boredom, photography, advertising, collecting, lighting, prostitution, gambling, sales clerks, and Baudelaire.) Our main task will be to read the entire Arcades Project in English translation: one hundred pages per week. Our second task will be to read other Benjamin essays and fragments (from the Harvard University Press translation of his Selected Writings), Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, and, possibly, other works on the poetics of cities (perhaps Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life). Finally, we will engage in local historical reconstruction: each student will undertake a research project on an aspect of New York City's past, present, or future, and will write, by the semester's end, an imaginative essay on his or her archaeological (clairvoyant?) dig. Though Walter Benjamin is our medium, the seminar's overarching purpose is to discuss idiosyncratic, visionary ways to read cities and to write history.
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80700
W, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Studies in Medieval Literature in Britain: Piers Plowman and Late Medieval Culture
Prof. Steven Kruger
"Glutton had put down more than a gallon of ale, and his guts were beginning to rumble like a couple of greedy sows. Then, before you had time to say the Our Father, he had pissed a couple of quarts, and blown such a blast on the round horn of his rump, that all who heard it had to hold their noses."
"Many hundreds of angels harped and sang.... Then Peace played on her pipe, singing this song ...
After the sharpest showers the sun shines brightest
No weather is warmer than after the blackest clouds,
Nor any love fresher nor friendship fonder
Than after strife and struggle, when Love and Peace have conquered."
Tracing the dream adventures of Will as he searches for the meaning of his life, William Langland's Piers Plowman traverses the whole range of human experience as medieval thought conceived it, bringing us from Glutton, pissing and farting, to the gentle heavenly abstractions of Peace and Mercy. Langland's poem is-alongside the work of Chaucer, Dante, and Boccaccio-one of the great narrative achievements of medieval culture. A dream allegory that is also autobiographical; religiously pious and yet theologically daring; traditional in its politics even as it is taken up as a rallying cry by those participating in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381-Piers Plowman arises out of its complex historical moment to give that moment a complex, ambivalent, sometimes self-contradictory voice.
In this course, we will read Piers Plowman with particular attention to what it might tell us about late-medieval (fourteenth-century) English culture. In doing so, we will follow four interrelated lines of investigation. (1) We will read the text(s) of Langland's poem with care, attentive to moves between the socially-engaged and the theological, the "personal" and the "political," dream and the everyday world of English rural and urban life. (2) We will consider the poem's intertexts: how it takes up and transforms such influential models as the Romance of the Rose, and how it relates to such contemporary poetry as Chaucer's. (3) We will look at recent critical work on the poem, particularly writing that considers the poem's politics and its relation to the developing Lollard heresy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (4) We will consider how theoretical work in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, feminism, and queer theory might be brought to bear on a premodern text like Piers.
The course will run as a seminar, with students responsible once or twice during the semester for presentations that begin in-class discussion. Students will write a 15- to 20-page seminar paper focused on either Piers Plowman or on connections between Piers Plowman and their own areas of research interest.
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81400
W, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Shakespeare and Sexuality
Prof. Mario DiGangi
In this course we will examine the representation of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays and poems. "Sexuality" will be broadly construed to encompass the following issues: ideologies of romantic love and sexual morality; discourses of erotic desire; concepts of masculinity and femininity; same-sex relationships; marriage and the family; virginity and chastity; rape and sexual violence; the imbrication of the sexual and the social. Readings will include: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1 Henry VI, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece. We will also examine feminist, historicist, and queer critical accounts of gender and sexuality in early modern England. Requirements include one (20-25 pp.) research paper; three brief response papers; an annotated bibliography; and one class presentation.
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84100
W, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Wordsworth and Keats
Prof. Morris Dickstein
With a mixture of close reading, biographical approaches, and historical understanding, this course will explore the lyric, narrative, and autobiographical poetry of Wordsworth and Keats against the background of their times, from the revolutionary ferment and disillusionment of the 1790s to the peacetime turbulence and repression of the Regency era from 1814 to 1820. It will revisit Wordsworth's much-discussed revolution in poetic diction, his controversial turn towards humble characters and rural life, and his construction of self through memory, time, and loss, first in shorter poems that virtually invented the poetic language of the 19th century, then in interiorized narrative encounters combining meditation and myth, and finally in large Miltonic autobiographical works. The course will explore how Keats's poetry, under the influence of Spenser and then Shakespeare, restored the sensuous Elizabethan plenitude that Wordsworth's spare, almost prosaic manner had pared away. We will examine how Keats's odes revise Wordsworth's crisis-poems and will study Keats's narrative poems as versions of romance, as deflections of autobiography, and as implied political allegories in a period of social conflict. Finally, the course will look at their conflicting theories of poetry and take account of why their work was received with such hostility, even vituperation, by early reviewers and readers - who mocked the writers' language, their politics, and their social origins - only to be enshrined with reverence later in the century, when their poems became universally influential.
Course requirements include an oral report and a term paper.
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84200
M, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Romantic Autobiography
Prof. Joshua Wilner
Though this course will take the Romantic period as its center of gravity, we will also range backwards and forwards in considering the emergence of autobiographical writing as an increasingly salient and contested mode of cultural performance. An introductory part of the course will focus on Augustine's Confessions, with briefer attention to autobiographical texts by Petrarch, St. Theresa and Montaigne. We will then turn, in the main portion of the course, to Rousseau's Confessions and number of other Romantic autobiographical texts, including William Wordsworth's Prelude (probably the two-part Prelude of 1799), selections from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, and Mme. de Staël's Ten Years of Exile. We will conclude this section with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: An Autobiography as an occasion for reflecting on the relationship between autobiography and first-person fictional narrative. In the last part of the course, we will look at selections from Proust, Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as landmarks in the twentieth century history of autobiography. Throughout, we will be concerned with the ways in which autobiography articulates, enacts and problematizes possibilities of relationship between subjectivity, language and history. While a variety of theoretical texts and perspectives will be introduced along the way, discussion will focus on the close reading of primary texts.
Requirements: for all registrants, including auditors, active class participation. For four credits: a reading journal and a final paper of approximately fifteen pages; for two credits: a reading journal or a short paper (five to seven pages).
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84300
Th, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
The Victorian Novel
Prof. N. 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: Great Expectations (the autobiographical novel; Victorian publishing practices; the middle or so-called early vs later Dickens novel; textual problems and the novel) We shall also read brief selections of David Copperfield by way of introducing Dickens. 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 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (the ideological novel) Butler: 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.
Research paper; one oral report; no exam.
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84500
F, 11:45 - 1:45 p.m.
The Construction of the Self in 19th Century Literature
Prof. Felicia Bonaparte
The nineteenth century was an age in which nearly every creed, every assumption, every premise on which the conceptual world had rested was undermined by a series of crises in science, religion and philosophy. The universe had to be reconceived; everything in it reconstructed. This was especially true of the self, not only because to define oneself is a primary human instinct but because, in the view of many, only through a subjective eye could the objective world be grasped. Our purpose in this course will be to explore the ways in which the self, in the Victorian period, deconstructs and reconstructs; to examine the religious, philosophic, and psychological currents of thought that these constructions both engender and reflect; and to consider how these constructions depend on and in turn create social, political, economic, as well as personal realities. Above all, we will want to study how the constructed self inscribes itself on the pages of a narrative, and since our readings will consist of works both of fiction and of fact (actual autobiographies as well as first-person narratives intended to simulate the genre), we will also want to ask where and whether the line can be drawn between factual history and the literary shape, hence the fictional form, it is given. Readings will include William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua; Charlotte Brontë, Villette; J.S. Mill, Autobiography; John Ruskin, Praeterita; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh; Anthony Trollope, Autobiography. There will be no final exam. Every member of the seminar will, however, be required to submit a final paper at the end of the semester on a topic to be agreed on in an individual conference and, on the day we begin that discussion, to present one oral report on a topic of his/her choosing in connection with a work included on our reading list.
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85000
Th, 11:45 - 1:45 p.m.
The American Language from Whitman to Mencken
Prof. Marc Dolan
From Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century Italy to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's twentieth-century Kenya, one of the most formative phases of any nation's cultural history is the quest for a distinctively national literary language. This seminar will examine the central phases of that quest in the United States: the search for an appropriately "American language" in the expansive years between the Civil War and World War I. As the union turned more and more into a nation, the seemingly formalist questions generated by this search inevitably became embroiled in the omnipresent concerns of racial equality and subcultural incorporation. Should American oral culture and American written culture obey different rules? Can there ever be such a thing as proper American speech? If so, who speaks it? Beyond speech, might consciousness itself necessarily vary from culture to culture, or even subculture to subculture?
No theoretical background is assumed for this course, but some theory (e.g, Gramsci, Bakhtin, Ong) may be introduced along the way. Ideally, the seminar will draw on any number of theoretical approaches (historicist, Marxist, sociological, postcolonial, deconstructionist, linguistic, rhetorical, pragmatic), so that we can approach our questions from a number of mutually illuminating angles. 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 essay reflecting original scholarship in the field.
Required texts may include:
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860 edition) John W. DeForest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877) George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes (1880) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884-85) Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) Abraham Cahan, Yekl (1896) Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903) Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909) Sui-Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) H.L. Mencken, selections from The American Language (1919-1948)
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85500
Th, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Zora Neal Hurston and African American Folk Culture
Prof. Michele Wallace
This course will look at the oral traditions of African American folklore and music and, in particular, its impact on the ethnographic and literary production of the great black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston. Her works provide an ideal opportunity for salvaging the largely unrecovered, often inscrutable, and too frequently neglected cultural and philosophical traditions that are the legacy of the African American population's passage through slavery and segregation in the South. As an exemplary native-born Modernist, Hurston's approach to the black condition and black folklore was always celebratory. Nevertheless, since she was always signifying, her work can also be used to provide a first-rate map guiding us nimbly through a range of perspectives on the black experience. Through reading a selection of her writings, autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional, we will reconstruct her path, supplementing her observations with substantial infusions from other collections of, and observations about the folk tradition, including the efforts of prior folklorists-Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt.
POTENTIAL BOOKLIST
Zora Neale Hurston, Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States. (1929) 2001.
---. Jonah's Gourdvine.
---. Mules and Men.1935.
---. Their Eyes Were Watching God.1937.
---. Tell My Horse. 1938.
---. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942.
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus Tales; Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Assorted short stories.
Charles Chesnutt, Uncle Julius stories.
Daryl Cumber Dance, From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore. Norton, 2002.
Lee D. Baker, From Savage To Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954. University of California, 1998.
Patricia Jones-Jackson, When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands, 1987. William H. Chafe, et al., eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New Press, 2002.
POTENTIAL MUSIC LIST
Berneice Johnson Reagan, ed. Wade in the Water: Vol 1: "African American Spirituals: The Concert Tradition," Smithsonian Folkways CD SF40076; Vol 2: "Congregational Singing: Nineteenth Century Roots," Smithsonian Folkways CD SF40073; Vol 3: "African American Gospel: The Pioneering Composers," Smithsonian Folkways CD SF40074
The Gospel Tradition: The Roots and The Branches, Vol. 1. Columbia/Sony Music 1991 CK 47333.The Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir: Shakin' The Rafters. Columbia/Sony Music 1991.CK 47335 Mahalia Jackson in Concert, Easter Sunday, 1967. Columbia LP 1967. Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace. Atlantic LP 1972. Nina Simone: Jazz Masters 17, Verve CD Compilation 1994. Feel So Bad: The Essential Recordings of Lightnin' Hopkins. Indigo Records CD Compilation 2000. Chicago Blues Masters: Volume One: Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim. Capital CD Compilation 1995.
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86001
M, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
World War II and its Literature
Prof. Norman Kelvin
Is popular culture generating the myth of World War II? If so, does the War's actual history counter the process? As history, the War is open ended: reevaluated and reassessed continuously. Antecedents and consequences change with the subjectivity of whoever writes about the War. As for the myth now being shaped, can we ask the same questions of it that we ask about ancient myth; say, The Iliad? We can inquire whether The Iliad is about good and evil or about honor, friendship, revenge and fate. Can we interrogate the emerging myth of World War II with such terms?
We'll take up these queries and observations as we discuss novels and poems that situate themselves in the War. Possible readings are Ian McEwen, Atonement; Graham Greene, The End of the Affair; H.D. The Walls Do Not Fall; J.D. Salinger, "For Esmé,with Love and Squalor"; Louis Simpson, Poems of War, Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum; Gertrude Stein, "A Picture of Occupied France" and "The Coming of the Americans"; Primo Levi, If Not Now, When? Vladimir Voinovich, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Voinovich; Yevtuchenko, Babi Yar; Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means; Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; Msuji Ibuse, Black Rain; and Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.
Some will be read for our class discussions; others for 15 minute reports.
In addition to asking the questions with which we begin (and possibly end) we'll observe that in World War II the technology of documentation was vastly different from that available in WW1. Movie and still cameras were much more mobile; and because of faster film, able to record infantry battles at close range and bombing attacks on cities as well. The raw film however was edited, put in narrative order; and provided with a soundtrack, all this done by the best directorial talent in Hollywood, England, Russia and Germany. We'll watch some of these films and discuss them from the perspective of documentary film theory.
Finally, we'll compare the work of writers who experienced the war as combatants or incarcerated civilians with the work of those who came later. The first wrote out of traumatic memory. Is their writing "memory-without- history"? By contrast, what to say about Atonement, by Ian McEwen; and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow? McEwen and Pynchon were too young to experience the War firsthand. Does their reliance on documents become "history-without-memory"? If so, does it allow them greater experimental range than was possible for those who wrote under the burden of memory? These are examples of further questions to be asked in attempting to theorize the often intractable literature the War produced.
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86002
T, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
Trauma, Testimony, Mourning: Twentieth-Century Literatures of Witness
Prof. Nancy K. Miller
In this course we will examine the work of writers who have borne witness to the traumatic events of a century fractured by war and atrocity. In addition to autobiographical narratives (and some poetry) that deal with extreme experience, readings will include critical studies in trauma and gender theory. The Holocaust and its aftermath will be a central though not exclusive focus of the seminar. We will end with a unit on Sept. 11. and the role of visual documents and monuments in the process of memorialization.
Writers include: Barthes, Beauvoir, Butler, Caruth, Cha, Delbo, Duras, Ernaux, Felman and Laub, Ginsberg, Freud, Levi, Monette, Roth, Sontag, Steedman. The work for the course includes the traditional seminar report and 20-page
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87100
T, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Proust I
Prof. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
This is a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire and Oedipalized psychology; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls - to name but a few. Seminar participants are free to read Proust in English, French, or some convenient combination of both. We will be interested in the differences made by different translations.
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87200
T, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Perversity and Contemporary American Poetry
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
All verse is perverse, but this seminar makes special claims for the place of perversity in the contemporary American poetic scene. "Perversity" implies sexual errancy but also points to other "wrong" turns, including aesthetic felicities we could not live without. We will emphasize the role of objects--Things--in the work of consciousness, whether sublime or everyday. Sometimes these objects are inanimate, material; sometimes they are phantasmal fetishes. Indeed, the course could be subtitled, after an Amy Gerstler poem, "The Sexuality of Objects."
We will read one volume of poetry per week. The syllabus in no way represents the entire field of contemporary American poetry; the quixotic list reflects, instead, my allegiances. Many of these poets are queer; all are living and refractory, and practice refusal. Some of the following will appear on the syllabus: Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Eileen Myles, Thom Gunn, Myung Mi Kim, John Ashbery, Ha Jin, Louise Glück, Harryette Mullen, Reginald Shepherd, Anne Carson, Wanda Coleman, Frank Bidart, Richard Howard, David Trinidad. And more... (We will start with Adrienne Rich, and probably devote two weeks to her poems.) Some of these names may be obscure to you: part of contemporary poetry's perversity is its sectarian hiddenness. Requirements: a final essay, and a class presentation (which will take the form of a two-page position paper).
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88000
M, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m.
African Women Writers
Prof. Tuzyline Allan
Novels by Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba, Zoe Wicomb, Flora Nwapa, Lauretta Ngcobo, Tisitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera, Lindsey Collen, and Nawal el Saadawi - to name a few of Africa's writing women - make for compelling reading for students interested in the history and cultures of the African world and current cultural and theoretical trends in literary studies. This course examines simultaneously African women's unique contribution to the development of modern literature in Africa and the impact of this artistic intervention on a range of issues, including cultural and gender politics, transnational feminism, and diaspora. Some of the books to be studied in the course include A Question of Power, So Long a Letter, Changes, And They Didn't Die, Kehinde, Nervous Conditions, and The Rape of Sita. Readings will also include critical analyses by African and international scholars.
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