|
alphabetical by instructor
The tentative first day of registration is May 5th. Enjoy!
-
Ammiel Alcalay
80600
Politics and Imagination: The Poetics of Crisis Thursday 6:30- 8:30 p.m. (Cross-listed as Comp Lit 85000) [45720]
You must get permission from Prof. Alacay to register. Please email him at aaka@earthlink.net and bring proof of permission to Marilyn Weber in the English Program Office. Thanks!
This course will examine differing roles poets/writers and intellectuals play at critical historical moments. We will concentrate on the period from 1945 to the present and explore a wide range of moments and controversies from differing perspectives as we try to read through diverse linguistic, generic, aesthetic, social and political filters. We will look at the idea of "engaged" writing in various forms, and trace some of the larger issues confronted globally during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Topics include colonialism, nationalism, East/West blocs, non-alignment, empire, and decolonization (through Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Vietnam, political dissent and the counterculture of the 1960s, the Gulf War, the break up of ex-Yugoslavia), and American exceptionalism (through different social, cultural and literary movements and moments, and through the practices, discourses and ideologies of translation). We will consider different responses to crisis, to see how poets/writers and intellectuals mobilize themselves locally and/or globally, and to trace the kinds of controversies that emerge from such mobilization. We will also consider the changing shapes of cultural space, and how both film and mass media impact upon intellectual options. The range of authors and contexts will be wide, allowing each student to accomodate their linguistic abilities and interests. Tentative ideas for texts we may consider include:
- What Is Literature? Jean-Paul Sartre
- The Poetry of Arab Women, ed. Nathalie Handal
- The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems, ed. H. Bruce Franklin
- The Portable Sixties Reader, ed. Ann Charters
- War After War, ed. Nancy J. Peters
- Prison Writing in 20th century America, ed. H. Bruce Franklin
- The Situationist International Anthology
- The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature
- This Prison Where I Live (PEN International anthology of writing by political prisoners)
Students will work on issues and authors of interest, depending on linguistic abilities and research focus: authors to be considered include: Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan, Emile Habiby, Sahar Khalifeh, Shimon Ballas, Ghassan Kanafani, Abdellatif Laabi, Etel Adnan, Jean Senac, Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, Kateb Yacine, Yusef Idris, Sunallah Ibrahim (Levant, North Africa, Egypt, Middle East); Dubravka Ugresic, Danilo Kis, Semezdin Mehmedinovic (ex-Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia); Pier Paolo Pasolini, Natalia Ginzberg, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese (Italy), Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Aime Cesaire (Martinique), Laura Riding, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, Paul Goodman, Tillie Olsen, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Wanda Coleman, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Harry Gamboa, Jr., Myung Mi Kim, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, etc. (North America), Cesar Vallejo, Roque Dalton, Alicia Partnoy, Eduardo Galeano, etc. (Central/South America).
[top]
-
Meena Alexander
84200
Wordsworth and Walcott: Traveling Texts
Wednesday 11:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. [45234]
We will examine questions of language and locality, history, race and memory focusing on two great autobiographical poems William Wordsworth's Prelude (1805) and Derek Walcott's Another Life (1973). We will also read Walcott's epic poem Omeros (1990). Using postcolonial theory we will examine the poem as a site for making sense of troubled history, fraught geography, a way to refashion language as it touches on public space. The ways in which Walcott draws on Wordsworth, as well as other canonical writers in the English tradition, is part of the complex rewriting that he subjects the past to. The question of poetic language becomes important here and its bond with an often bitter colonial history. While the past a poet makes is critical to the internal structures of feeling crystallized in the poem, how might such a past allow for the emergence of the self? The question takes on rich resonance as we move from Wordsworth to Walcott, paying particular attention to questions of self and other, national borders, trauma and desire. Questions of body and voice, gender and sexuality and the crossing of borders, will be critical to our explorations. After Wordsworth we will examine the writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister to the poet. After Walcott's Carribean epics, we will read the poetry of his North American contemporary, Adrienne Rich. Theoretical readings will draw on Adorno, Appadurai, Bhabha, Benjamin, Caruth, Clifford, Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant, Mehta, Spivak, Soja and others. Course Requirements: this course will be a seminar and as such will include weekly discussions. There will be a mid term paper and a final research paper, the latter due at the end of the semester.Texts will be on order at Labyrinth Books, 112 street between Broadway and Amsterdam, Tel: 212-865-1588. The texts will include William Wordsworth, Poems; William Wordsworth, The Prelude; Dorothy Wordsworth, Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals; Derek Walcott, Collected Poems;Derek Walcott, Omeros; Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says. Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe; Adrienne Rich,What is found there: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.
[top]
- John Brenkman
75200
The Late Novels of Henry James CANCELLED
Wednesday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45235]
Henry James's final published novels--The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)-continue his long-standing preoccupation with the differences between American and European wealth, sensibility, and tradition. As regards their place in the history of the novel, these three works take James's transformation of the English marriage novel to new extremes and at the same time test the stylistic limits of psychological realism. In light of these thematic and formal concerns, we will address the aesthetic question of the novels' principle of construction. What are the imperatives and motives that animate the composition of these novels? What do James's prefaces and notebooks reveal, and conceal, about the aesthetic problems that the writing of these novels posed? And what sorts of solutions do the novels themselves embody?
[top]
-
Glenn Burger
80800
Postcolonial Chaucer
Thursday 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45239]
When in 1700, John Dryden in his "Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern" designates Chaucer "the father of English poetry," he also posits a relationship between Chaucer's depiction of a universal human nature and the ability of his poetry to transmit the history of the English nation: Chaucer "has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. . . . 'Tis sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God's plenty. We have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer's days."
In this course we will consider, first, how "Chaucer" and a sense of "the literary" dependent upon the originary power of the great author played an important role in early modern construction and naturalization of a sense of "the English nation" and an incipient imperial identity. And we will examine how postcolonial theory can provide a useful means by which we might, from within the inheritance of modern discourses of nation and empire, challenge the tendencies of canonical literary history to assimilate the "great author" and his work to narratives of empire or nation and the harnessing of the literary to the formation of hegemonic bourgeois subjects.
In doing so, our historicization of the complexities of Chaucer's socio-cultural situation will emphasize its "in-betweenness"- for example, between established "medieval" imperial organizations of feudalism and Catholicism and those of the emergent "modern" nation state, or between the colonized and submerged status of a native English language and culture post-Conquest and a new importance of English (and the fiction of Chaucer's unique status in elevating it) for the early fifteenth-century Lancastrian state in its centralization of power and its colonialist project of conquest in France. Thus we will emphasize the hybridity of structures of social and generic identification represented in Chaucerian fictions, and the processes of creolization and métissage at work in Chaucer's attempts to "translate" dominant French and Italian cultural and social forms into the multilingual/multicultural mix that constitutes late medieval "English." We will also attend to the various medieval subaltern voices-Jewish, Muslim, heretical, peasant, and lay-as they are heard or not heard in Chaucerian texts.
We will range widely throughout Chaucer's works, paying particular attention to The Book of the Duchess, The Parlement of Fowles, Troilus and Criseyde, and selections from Canterbury Tales (including relevant French and Italian pre-texts for these works). We will also look at some of Chaucer's fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scottish "followers" as they use their Chaucerianism to create a place within a still to be defined English nation (Lydgate and Hoccleve) or to articulate an independent Scottish literary identity through a shared "Inglis" language and culture.
Although the course does not assume any previous course in Chaucer, students who have not had an undergraduate Chaucer course would be advised to read Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales in translation before September.
[top]
-
MaryAnn Caws
87400
Adaptation, Translation and Film
Thurs. 2 p.m. [45243]
The seminar will concentrate on three elements: 1) Poetic and other translations, from English into other languages and vice versa. As for the relatively boring discussions of literal/liberal: is that really where it still is now? 2) Some adaptations of older to newer forms in art and text, as in Roger Fry's invitation to other painters: How would you translate that painting now? 3) A novel or story and its filmic adptation: speaking of rhythm, pace, style, as well as plot and decor. NB the readings and viewings will depend on what is available: such examples as : Henry James' The Altar of the Dead (The Green Room); Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (tv adaptation); Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage and its film version; E.M. Forster's room with a view and the film.... ; D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love and the film; Gertrude Stein, one of the filmed plays; Carrington's Letters and Journal, and as she is depicted in the film from Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey, called, of course, Carrington, to sell it...Two papers on two different aspects of these issues
NB This seminar will continue, part II, in Comparative Literature and French in the spring semester, with appropriate texts [Proust (various versions); Dante (Tom Phillips, Peter Greenaway; Flaubert's Madame Bovary (versions), etc]
[top]
-
James de Jongh
85500
African American Drama
Wednesday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45250]
Instructor: Dr. James de Jongh is a distinguished playwright as well as scholar of African American literatures.
Context: Images of blacks have been standard fare on the American stage for the consumption of white audiences for as long as there has been theatre in the United States. Yet for much of American theatre history, blacks were excluded in every other way, as performers, playwrights, directors and producers. Today the most prolific and celebrated playwright in the American Theatre arguably is August Wilson, an African American man who writes about black themes, and the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Suzan-Lori Parks, a young African American woman.
Course Description: This seminar is designed to encompass the history and development of African American drama in the United States from its origins to the present moment. The course is divided into three moments. Part I will explore the roots of African American Drama, 1751-1890 with an examination of early stage images of blacks, the 19th Century stage stereotypes of Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the relatively unknown initial achievements of The African Grove Theatre, the stellar career of Ira Aldridge, and the first black playwrights. Part II the period from 1910-1950 will focus on the black theatre of the Harlem Renaissance, the Little Theatre Movement, and the Harlem Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. Part III, 1950-Present, which occupies the major portion of the semester, will be devoted to the study of major plays and playwrights from the watershed production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) to the recent Pulitzer Prize production of Suzan-Lori Parks Top Dog, Underdog (2001).
Play attendance requirement: Each member of the seminar will be expected to attend and report on a current play by an African American playwright in the course of the semester.
Required Texts: Black Theatre USA: Plays by Black Americans, the Recent Period 1935-Today, ed. James V. Hatch and Ted Shine. Revised and Expanded Edition. The Free Press, Simon & Schuster. ISBN # 0-68-82307-1 James de Jongh. Do Lord Remember Me. Samuel French, Inc. ASIN# 0573618992 August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Plume Books ISBN# 0452261139 Suzan-Lori Parks, Top Dog Underdog. Theatre Communications Group ISBN# 1559362014 On Line Resource: Black Drama Database: 1850-Present (Alexander Street Press) offers more than 500 hundred plays. This resource, to which City College subscribes, makes it possible to download most of the assigned plays without cost. Blackboard will be used as a repository of images, class documents, links, and other materials as well as a forum for the exchange of information and ideas.
[top]
-
Morris Dickstein
87400
Film Noir in Context: From Expressionism to Neo-Noir
Wednesday 6:30-8:30 p.m. (Cross-listed as Theater 81500) [45641]
This course will explore the style, sensibility, and historical context of film noir. After tracing its origins in German expressionism, French "poetic realism," American crime movies, the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, and the style and narrative structure of Citizen Kane, we will examine some of the key films noirs of the period between John Huston's The Maltese Falcon of 1941 and Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958. These will include such works as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Out of the Past, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt, In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy, The Killers, DOA, Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat, and Kiss Me Deadly. We'll explore the visual style of film noir, the role of the city and the portrayal of women, and the decisive impact or World War II and the cold war. We'll also examine the role played by French critics in defining and revaluing this style, and touch upon its influence on French directors like Melville (Second Breath), Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player), and Chabrol (La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher). Finally, we'll look at the post-1970s noir revival in America in such films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Body Heat, and Red Rock West. Readings will include materials on the historical background of this style, key critical and theoretical texts on film noir, and hard-boiled fiction by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Patricia Highsmith.
[top]
- Mario DiGangi
81400
Tragicomedy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Wednesday 2-4 p.m. [45247]
A notoriously elusive genre, "tragicomedy" was used in the Renaissance to describe plays ranging from pastoral romances to courtly satires: the title page of Jonson's 1616 Works places the figure of Tragicomedia between those of the Pastor and the Satyr. To further complicate the issue, the label of tragicomedy has served to distinguish Shakespeare's late plays (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) from his earlier comedies, "problem comedies," and tragedies; however, critics have preferred to categorize the late plays as "romances" in order to distinguish them from what they regard as the more conventional "tragicomedies" of Beaumont and Fletcher. In any case, neither "tragicomedy" nor "romance" appears as a generic category in the 1623 Folio, which places The Winter's Tale and The Tempest among the Comedies, Cymbeline among the Tragedies, and omits Pericles altogether. In this course, we will focus on the many forms that "tragicomedy" could take in seventeenth-century English theater. We will begin by considering attempts to define the genre by Renaissance writers - Sidney, Guarini, Fletcher - and by contemporary critics. We will identify the predominant formal and ideological concerns of tragicomedy by organizing the plays under the following rubrics: Pastoral Transformations; Nationalism and the Family; Exploration and Colonialism; Gender, Sexuality, and Social Order. However, a historicized approach to the construction of gender, sexual, and political ideologies in early modern England will inform our discussion of the plays and the criticism throughout the semester. We will read Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess and The Island Princess; Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster and A King and No King; Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen; Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Tempest; Webster's The Devil's Law Case; Middleton's The Witch; Ford, Dekker, and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton; and Ford's The Lover's Melancholy. Requirements include one (20-25 pp.) research paper, three brief response papers, and a class presentation.
[top]
-
Marc Dolan
85000
Jazz and American Writing
Thursday 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m. [45248]
"[A]s far as America is concerned [jazz] is our characteristic expression."--Gilbert Seldes
"I don't know how such extremes as now exist [in jazz] can be contained under one heading."--Duke Ellington
"Jazz is only what you are. . . . If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it."--Louis Armstrong
This course will ignore Armstrong's (perhaps apocryphal) injunction and mess with the connections between twentieth-century American jazz and twentieth-century American writing. More precisely, we will investigate the ways in which American writers have messed with jazz and American jazz performers have messed with writing. Starting with ragtime and the "pre-history" of jazz, we will read and listen our way through a series of such encounters from the 1910s until late in the century. Works by such recognized American litterateurs as James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Toni Morrison will be read alongside recordings by such influential jazz artists as Scott Joplin, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, Bunk Johnson, Artie Shaw, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, and Wynton Marsalis. The writings of these latter artists may also be assigned, as well as excerpts from the writings of Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Hoagy Carmichael, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey. The ever-changing nature of jazz performance will be a central feature of the course, as will the effect that American writers' perceptions of those changes may have had on parallel changes in American (and world) literature. No syllabus is available at this time, but registered students may wish to read Ted Gioia's History of Jazz (Oxford U P) for introductory historical background in preparation for the course.
[top]
-
Martin Elsky
71000
Early Modern Print Culture: The Dissemination of Writing and the Varieties of Authorial Personae
Tuesday 2-4 p.m. (Cross-listed as Renaissance Studies 72100) [45719]
This course will focus on manuscript and print as co-existing early modern technologies of reproduction. It will include scholarly and critical approaches from a variety of disciplines: history, literature, and art history. It will emphasize the effect of the mechanization of word and image on the social identity of those who produced them. Topics of reading and discussion will include: the impact of print on the prose of Renaissance humanists, and the emergence of the intellectual as a figure of authority; the interplay of manuscript and print in the composition and dissemination of lyric poetry, and the rise of the literary author; the transformation of the Renaissance pictorial print into art, and the advent of the printmaker as artist. We will end with a glance at communities of readers in the age of print, with emphasis on differences between print and manuscript communities. Requirements: oral report, and two shorter or one longer paper.
[top]
- Jack Hall
84300
The Victorian Novel
Thursday 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45249]
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.
[top]
-
Fred Kaplan
84500
Literature and Religion in 19th Century
Tuesday 2-4 p.m. [45251]
This course will deal with the centrality of religious belief and experience to British Romantic and Victorian literature. We will discuss, as background, nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of religion and some nineteenth-century religious movements and controversies, particularly natural theology, pantheism, evangelicism, Unitarianism, the Oxford Movement, Methodism, Christian socialism, biblical fundamentalism, Darwinism, and the Higher Criticism. The emphasis, though, will be on how varieties of religious experience and belief provide both fuel and spark for the literary imagination. Among the authors from whom selections will be read are Blake (Milton), Coleridge (Aids to Reflection, Church & State), Shelley (Prometheus), Carlyle (Sartor Resartus), Mill (Autobiography), Browning (selected monologues), Tennyson (In Memoriam), Dickens (Christmas Carol), Eliot (Adam Bede), Arnold (Literature & Dogma), Swinburne, and Hopkins. Hopkins' synthesis of religion and aestheticism is particularly important to the course. Students who want to engage with similar dynamics in American literature will be welcome to substitute or add Emerson or Stowe or Twain, especially, and to discuss American forms of religious belief and revival in the 19th century. Twain's satiric anti-religious views in the later works can serve as a powerful representation of the literary imagination gaining energy from anti-Christian biblical inversion. Milton himself, of course, dominates the deep background. But from the late twentieth-century perspective the overview includes, for example, voices as diverse as those of T. S. Eliot, William Buckley, Billy Graham, George W. Bush, and Joseph Lieberman. There will be additional optional readings and bibliographies for students preparing for comprehensives. One brief oral report and one paper are required.
[top]
-
Richard Kaye
76000
The Decadent Imagination
Wednesday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [46266]
Critics once viewed the cultural ferment known as the Decadent Movement as beginning and ending at the Victorian fin de siècle. Increasingly, however, scholars have noted how the fin outlasted the siècle, maintaining a "mauve afterlife" in the Anglo-American modernist writing of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Lawrence, James, Stein, and Faulkner. This course explores how modernist poets and novelists critiqued and refashioned Decadent figures, strategies, and attitudes. Examining literary texts, iconography, and film, we will begin with the turn of the century, a period of pervasive fears and fantasies dominated by such figures as the New Woman, the urban detective, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the self preening aesthete, the vampire, and the femme fatale. Writers navigated a world in which theories of "degeneration" preoccupied the popular imagination. The morbidity, subjectivism, sexual experimentalism, and excesses of technique and language characteristic of Nineties sensibility foment differing forms of experimentalism in the writing of twentieth-century writers. Among the texts we will consider: Huysmans, "Against Nature"; Wilde, "Picture of Dorian Gray," "Salome"; Stoker, "Dracula"; Hardy, "Jude the Obscure"; Freud, "Dora"; Conrad, "Heart of Darkness," Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; Olive Schreiner, "Story of an African Farm"; Yeats, "Selected Poems"; Eliot, "The Waste Land," Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as Young Man"; James, "The Wings of the Dove"; Stein, "Q.E.D.," Nabokov, "Lolita". Exploring the implications for literary theory of Decadent aesthetics, we will read relevant critical and theoretical texts, including Symonds, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," Bataille, "Literature and Evil," Ellmann, "The Uses of Decadence," Gilman, "Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet," Dowling, "The Decadent and the New Woman," and Bersani, "The Culture of Redemption." Oral reports, final paper.
[top]
-
Norman Kelvin
76000
Modernism: Multiple Beginnings
Tuesday 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45255]
The subtitle "multiple beginnings" is deliberately ambiguous. It refers to nineteenth-century literary and cultural changes that converge at the turn of the century; and it refers also to the twentieth-century divergence from each other of movements that began with the concept of the modern as their base. The main geographic site for our course is London and the focus will be on late nineteenth and early twentieth English literature and cultural history. Their nineteenth-century beginnings include the establishment in England of Marxist socialism in the 1880s; the persistence of Romanticism through the efforts of the Pre-Raphaelites; the embrace of French naturalism, aestheticism, and decadence; and the profound effect that the writing of Walter Pater had on the literature that followed, including the work of Wilde, Ella D'Arcy, Violet Paget, and Virginia Woolf. As for beginnings in the second sense, the first decades of the twentieth century witness experiments in technique and the radical transformation of tradition in order to preserve it. This movement we now call "high modernism." Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence are examples. In partial contrast, the popular novel becomes meticulous in rendering natural detail, mildly experimental in theme, but as in the past inhospitable to complex motivation; and it gravitates toward a vision of subjectivity as a rewarding adaptation to a given society. Also, though England is our site for modernist beginnings, we will look briefly at two American movements - the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian literature of the 1920s. As for feminist concerns, they remain problematic throughout. Many women writers are conflicted about their own feminist themes, and this can be seen in both aesthetic and popular fiction.
The colonial experience, though hermeneutically discoverable everywhere, is, within the high modernist canon, most profoundly witnessed by Conrad; and in popular literature is most explicit in Kipling, and to a lesser extent Robert Louis Stevenson. Class reading may include Karl Marx, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto; D.G. Rossetti, Hand and Soul; stories by J.K. Huysmans, Barbey D'Arevilly, Villiers de l'isle, and Rachilde -i.e., the decadent writers whom the hostile critic Max Nordau called "the school of Baudelaire"; Pater, "On Style" and selections from The Renaissance; Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest and De Profundis; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae; Kipling, Kim; George Moore, A Mummer's Wife; stories by Ella D'Arcyand Violet Paget; H.G. Wells, Tono Bungay; Conrad, The Secret Agent; RebeccaWest, The Judge; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; Henry James, In the Cage; and Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room. Our all-to-brief glance at the Harlem Renaissance and the Proletarian literature of the 1920's will figure in the course through class presentations (a long list of possible choices will be provided) and class discussion aimed at defining these modern movements against the background of both High Modernism and popular literature. We will also give our attention to the visual arts and music of the period; and to the political and social changes that constitute the protean site of all modernisms, from high to popular and to whatever forms we discover that are different from both. A term paper and a class presentation.
[top]
-
Wayne Koestenbaum
87200
Experiments in Contemporary Poetry
Tues 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45257]
The consoling chimera of "experiment has permitted American poetry to flourish for a century and to keep calling itself "contemporary." Without legislating what qualifies as experimental, we will read the works of recent poets who have attempted innovative subject or technique. Always we will be alert to questions of sound, muteness, brevity, length, disclosure, stammering, dailiness, difficulty, and accident. We will begin with a few predecessors, possibly including Kenneth Koch, Lorine Niedecker, or Carl Rakosi, and then will read recent work by some of the following: Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, David Antin, Elaine Equi, Michael Palmer, Lee Ann Brown, Reginald Shepherd, Barbara Guest, Marjorie Welish, Fanny Howe, Amy Gerstler, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, and Christian Bök. (The syllabus is not yet fixed: I would be pleased to receive suggestions from prospective students.) Requirements: oral presentation, and an essay (20-25 pages, due at the end of the semester). At least once in the term I will try to arrange for the poet we are discussing to visit the seminar.
[top]
-
Wayne Koestenbaum
86400
The Lyric Essay II
Wed. 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45258]
This seminar, an introduction to experimental critical writing, aims to help students develop their styles and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name "essay." (Experimenting with unusual forms may ease the later process of writing a dissertation, itself an exercise covertly incorporating play-acting, fictiveness, and lyricism.) In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page lyric essay. A lyric essay is a hybrid form, borrowing, as it pleases, from poem, story, drama, diary, and manifesto. Often autobiographical, a lyric essay reveals an idiosyncratic personality, obsessively attends to its own unfolding, obeys only its own impulses, and trespasses on the territory of other genres.
We will probably read selections from two anthologies, John D'Agata's The Next American Essay and Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay. Other possibilities for the syllabus include Avital Ronell, Crack Wars; Roland Barthes, Michelet; Chris Kraus, I Love Dick; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations; Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks; Hilton Als, The Women; prose of Proust, Nietzsche, Freud, and Stein.
[top]
-
Jane Marcus
86000
Virginia Woolf for the 21st Century
Wednesday 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45264]
How do we read Virginia Woolf in the 21st century? Taking in the whole body of her writing and her cultural work, as well as the cultural work her image has done, and her writing, for others' agendas, the seminar will try to explore this question and its answers for us at the moment. Woolf was especially aware of the reader in her writing. Have we learned to be the kind of readers she wanted?
We will begin with Three Guineas. This will begin our study with the writer's role as a public intellectual, especially as a pacifist. [Please try to find a copy with the photographs, which will be essential to our discussion.] Then we will discuss photographs of Virginia Woolf and her circle, paintings and dustjackets by Vanessa Bell, their aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, reading a new book on this topic by Maggie Humm (Rutgers UP). The discussion of Woolf as an icon and maker of icons will alternate through the semester with discussion of the novels, diaries, essays and letters. One of our questions throughout will be what kind of theory is useful to discussions of Woolf's writing now? Is feminism (hers and ours) still pertinent? How do we respond to her attitude toward race, for example?
Students will be expected to attend all classes, preparing to make presentations and write short papers for each class. A research paper will be due at the end of term.
[top]
-
Blanford Parker
83500
Modes of Satire in the 18th Century
Tues. 4:15-6:15 [45268]
We will read a variety of seventeenth and eighteenth-century satires including the very different pre-Civil War texts of Donne, Hall, and Marston. We will closely study the paradigmatic types of Augustan satire--Verronian (or general satire), the mock genres, lampoon, and Horatian satire and epistle. We will also consider the "character" as a genre and its satiric importance. Roman and French models will be explored as well as the competing theories of satire in the eighteenth century and now.
The key authors will be Butler, Swift, Garth, Rochester, Behn, Pope, Oldham and Churchill, with some consideration of Byron at the end of the course
[top]
-
Robert Reid-Pharr
80100
Theory Colloquium
Thursday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45269]
The conceit of this course is that the modern subject does exist; indeed that individuals and communities and not disembodied historical or metaphysical forces are the true agents of society and culture. The problem that this course confronts, however, is that successive theorizations of both subjectivity and society have demonstrated the near impossibility of distinguishing the subject from community, the historical agent from the very history that she produces. Thus the question with which we will wrestle during the semester is how it is that we can maintain focus on the individual subject while not falling back into outmoded notions of genius or exceptionality. This matter is particularly important in the study of artists and their art. That is to say, we will ask ourselves how the theoretically engaged critic might work through the knotty question of how to speak of the particular and the universal in one breath. In doing so, we will turn to the writings of a number of prominent twentieth century theorists, both inside and outside of literary criticism. With a heavy emphasis on neo-Marxist and Existentialist thought we will examine throughout the semester the matter of the individual's relation to modernity, literature, nation and race respectively. Participants in the seminar will be expected to write four short papers during the course of the semester and to do one class presentation.
Defining Modernity
Louis Althusser. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991). Materializing Literature Jean Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1949, 1977). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Rewriting America Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New American Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1996). Richard Rorty, Achieving Our America: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Rethinking Race Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1952, 1967). Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[top]
-
David Reynolds
88000
19th Century American Women Writers
Mon. 4:15-6:15 [45274]
Nineteenth-century America produced arguably the greatest woman poet, Emily Dickinson, as well as important literature by other writers reflecting all aspects of women's experience. This was a vital century of change for women, who saw new vistas of literary expression, employment, political involvement, and reform activity open before them, even as they wrestled with the conventional gender roles of the past. This course covers the various genres of women's writing produced by both canonical and noncanonical authors. Among the themes addressed are women's rights (Margaret Fuller, Lillie Devereux Blake), the cult of domesticity (Susan Warner), industrialism (Rebecca Harding Davis), slavery and the African-American experience (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson), religious and racial themes (Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick), and regionalism (Sarah Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin). The life and poetry of Emily Dickinson are held up against this vital cultural background. Gender theory and feminist criticism are brought into play, both in class discussion and in oral reports. A 15-page term paper is required.
[top]
-
Joan Richardson
75400
Wallace Stevens' Rude Aesthetic
Tuesday 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m. [45277]
In "The Comedian as the Letter C" Stevens's mock hero, Crispin, searches for the sources of his "rude aesthetic," "an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed/ Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,/ Green barbarism turning paradigm." In this seminar we shall search for the same, following Stevens's in his reading, in his "soil," in his time.
There will be a term paper and 12-15 minute seminar reports required.
[top]
-
David Richter
79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Thursday 2-4 p.m. [45260]
This course takes up questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of "English." Theoretically, we consider what it means to study a national language and literature that has become global in its reach; we examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields; we consider how varied theories of language, text, narrative, poetics, author, psyche, society, culture, history, identity, politics (etc.) define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline. Practically, we take up the question of how we define objects of inquiry within "English" studies, how we research such topics, how we identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how we develop new knowledge - in sum, we consider nitty-gritty questions crucial to pursuing graduate and professional work in literary scholarship. The course follows four main lines of inquiry, examining 1) the historical, institutional context of the discipline, 2) archival and bibliographical work, 3) concepts of textuality, and 4) and theoretical approaches.
Requirements: Students will make several brief in-class presentations and complete a final project that takes up textual, archival/bibliographical, historical/institutional, or theoretical questions. A significant aspect of the course will be a student's individual work toward that final project.
[top]
- Ira Shor
89000
What is English? Literacy and Literature in a Conflicted Field
Thursday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45280]
Not that long ago, English Departments didn't exist. Then, on a cold day in May, 1869, Harvard installed a new young President, Charles Norton Eliot. By the time Eliot retired 40 years later, he had invented the modern university with much of the foundation now familiar to us, including English Departments and first-year writing. Universities around the country followed Harvard's example. Freshman comp, which became the only required course at Harvard by 1897, spread like "kudzu" from coast to coast, according to Richard Ohmann and Donald Stewart. Notable holdouts against the new regime of literature above and composition below included heroic rhetorician Fred Newton Scott at Michigan, whose dissent from the Harvard model included leaving the MLA to help form the NCTE in 1911. Harvard under the dynamic Eliot not only modeled the modern university in America and produced the first freshman writing courses, but it also spawned the nation's first "literacy crisis" in 1893, when examiners worried over the sorry state of student writing on the Cambridge campus. By 1912, the local predicament had apparently become general in the English field, according to Edwin Hopkins, first President of the new NCTE, who declared that writing could not be taught under the present conditions. It was also at this time that John Dewey opined, "Think of the absurdity of teaching language as a thing by itself." With composition generating what Leonard Greenbaum called "a tradition of complaint" in the last century, and with literacy and literature bonded asymmetrically, it makes sense to re-examine the foundational question posed by Peter Elbow in his report on the Wye Conference of 1987, "What is 'English'?" In this seminar, we will "bookend" this question and its answers by reading into the early formation and recent re-formation of writing instruction into composition/rhetoric, the latest incarnation of a field driven Utopically and incessantly by its own contradictions.
Required Writings:
1. Weekly responses to the readings.
2. Final paper.
Readings:
Peter Elbow, What is English? Robert Connors, Composition-Rhetoric: Background, Theory, and Pedagogy Sharon Crowley, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays John Brereton, ed., The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925 Richard Ohmann, English in America James Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures Joseph Petraglia, ed., Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, The Origins of Literary Studies in America Plus selected articles.
[top]
-
Chris Suggs
75600
The African American Legal Novel
Wednesday 2-4 p.m. [45283]
While most African American novel-length fiction implicates the law to one degree or another in its argument, there are some fictions written by African Americans in which the substantial work of the text is to interrogate the law. This course will look at a cross-section of those texts, concentrating on the novel form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the diversity of African American literary production in prose is of such considerable variety that we will also examine short stories, essays, autobiography and slave narrative, and the use of the fable form. A preliminary text list for the course includes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Blake or, the Huts of America; Contending Forces; The Marrow of Tradition; Fire in the Flint; Native Son; The Lonely Crusade; Beloved; The Alchemy of Race and Rights; And We Are Not Saved; Free Enterprise and selected short readings provided or on reserve. The final alignment of the list may omit one or two of the titles above and/or may include others not named.
A final paper dealing with the intersection of law and African American literature will be the primary source of your final grade but each student will be responsible for one class presentation.
[top]
-
Scott Westrem
80700
Medieval Speculations
Monday 6:30-8:30 p.m. [45286]
Medieval European culture has an allure for some people today because they regard it as being both like and unlike our own. Studying its "texts"--broadly conceived to include both verbal and visual material--is like looking into a "distant mirror" where we may see both reflections and distortions of modern culture. Examining the records left by women and men six and more centuries ago may deepen our understanding of our own time, as we observe certain constants among society's concerns while also imagining lives and values quite different from our own. For others, the very word "medieval" is a synonym for simplemindedness, cruelty, religious piety coupled with intolerance, and a general monotony that they consider pretty much inevitable since they generally assume that the people who lived during those "dark" centuries were waiting for the Renaissance to come along and the idea of the "individual" to be discovered. In this seminar we will read literature written over a period of seven centuries in Europe with an aim to see both its specular qualities--how it reflects particular medieval times and how it may contribute to a deeper knowledge of our own age--and its speculative nature. Something remarkable, even dangerous, is unleashed in such fictional moments as when Chaucer describes a woman near a rocky seacoast addressing her prayers to a God she candidly suggests may be a malevolent being, or when virile Sir Gawain exchanges a promise with the lord of a castle to share with him everything he gets on each of three days when he is left alone with the lady of the house.
A modern historical work of fiction set in the Middle Ages--Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose--will underlie the group of readings in this seminar, the novel itself functioning as a kind of mirror. We will cover a wide variety of medieval works relating to themes that emerge the chapters of Eco's book, including crime and law, sexual and spiritual love, orthodoxy and heresy, good and bad government, and the trustworthiness and unreliability of the written word. We will read excerpts from historical writing by the Venerable Bede and the scholarly Layamon, religious and secular lyrics, narrative poems such as Sir Orfeo and King Horn, tales by Chaucer and the Gawain-poet, and a fifteenth-century play. This course is designed for students who have little or no background in medieval literature or in Middle English (the class will include instruction in the language). One of my central aims is to equip instructors-in-training to teach a literature survey class that includes medieval literature on its syllabus.
Assignments will include four short (two-page) essays on specific class readings and (in lieu of one lengthy term paper) two papers of around eight-to-ten pages in length that will cover a practical issue related to pedagogy, such as designing an undergraduate course with medieval content and gaining some acquaintance in reading a manuscript from before the age of printing. Many readings will come from a recent anthology of medieval literature, and seminar members will become aware of the range of textbooks available in the subject.
[top]
-
Gordon Whatley
79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Monday 4:15-6:15 p.m. [45288]
The course aims to help students (1) to develop some expertise and proficiency in literary research and the practice of literary and textual criticism by working in depth on a single short work of literature, and (2) to assess the evolution of modern critical methods and trends, and their changing theoretical assumptions, as evidenced in the work's public reception and critical/interpretive history. Aimed primarily at graduate students in the first or second year, the course is an opportunity to experience dissertation-type research on a small scale. The class meets as a workshop for the first eight or nine weeks: each student presents a weekly report on the evolving stages of a focused project to produce a mini-edition of his/her chosen work. These stages will include using traditional library research tools and on-line resources to compile a comprehensive bibliography of printed editions and other primary sources and an annotated bibliography of secondary sources (interpretive & textual criticism, biography, and intellectual and cultural history): in short, all the materials necessary for producing an annotated edition of the text with a critical introduction. The introduction is an extended essay, synthesizing, and perhaps going beyond, the contributions of previous scholars and critics, in order to "situate" the work as an artistic production in significant relation to its author's other works and its historical and cultural moment. The introduction will also describe the work's critical reception over time and developing or declining status in the modern literary canon. A self-contained short work in verse by a "major" author is ideal for the purposes of the course, but short plays or prose works, such as short stories, especially well-known ones, are also feasible (for obvious reasons, works composed very recently, and lacking a developed critical tradition, are impractical).
A general aim of the course is to help students to familiarize themselves with the character and scope of the discipline of literary scholarship, as reflected in their main field of interest, but the workshop structure of the course exposes students to tools and issues of the other fields and periods in which their colleagues are engaged.
Students should make every effort to select their semester projects before the first class, through prior consultation with the instructor, via email (gwhatley@att.net).
[top]
-
Joshua Wilner
84100
The Romantic Sublime
Monday 2-4 p.m. [45289]
This class is closed to non-matriculated students.
The notion or category of the sublime plays a pivotal role in situating Romanticism in relation to eighteenth century canons of taste on the one hand and current critical and theoretical discussions of representation and alterity on the other. In this course, we will begin by considering how a broad critical discourse on sublimity, set in motion by Boileau's translation of Longinus' treatise "On the Sublime," along with the specific poetic genre of the sublime ode together operate as a kind of fifth column within mid and late-eighteenth century poetry and poetics, providing a classification and a classical lineage for a dimension of literary experience characterized by the transgression of limits and modes of insight and affective which normative concepts of the beautiful are unable to accommodate. We will then consider the process by which the sublime becomes a crucial site of formal, affective, and epistemological exploration for such writers as Blake,Wordsworth, Shelley, De Quincey and Dickinson. Simultaneously we will be considering how and why the sublime has reemerged as a major problematic for contemporary literary theory with particular attention to the points of intersection and interference between post-Freudian and post-structuralist accounts.
In addition to those mentioned above, writers studied will include: Collins, Gray, Pope, Burke, Kant, Hertz, de Man, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard and Ferguson.
4 credits: one short and one long paper
2 credits: one short paper
-
TBA
91000
Dissertation Workshop
TBA [45292]
[top]
|
