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alphabetical by instructor
Registration for continuing matriculated students begins May 10th at 10 a.m.
Registration for non matriculated students begins on Wednesday, August 25th from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. All non-matriculants should contact Marilyn Weber, at English@gc.cuny.edu by August 1. The first day of classes is Friday, August 27th.
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Ammiel Alcalay
ENGL 85000
Introduction to American Studies
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81000) [47330]
Room 3207
After an overview of the development of American Studies as a discipline, the course will focus on the interpretation and transmission of defining moments in North American life through a diverse range of sources. Beginning with the peopling of the continent itself, we will consider ways the narrative of the continent until and following European contact has been told (using the tools of the geographer, anthropologist, historian, biographer, novelist, poet, etc.). These defining moments include crucial periods of narrative consolidation and reinterpretation: King Philip's War; Indian Removal; the Civil War; imperial policies in Cuba and the Philippines; the Cold War; the American War in Vietnam; and U.S. involvement in the Middle East. We will look at uniquely American forms (captivity and slave narratives; the western; noir novels; blues, jazz, country, rock), and trace their transformation as key elements mobilized in the creation of new identities and allegiances. We will pay close attention to the relationship between social and political struggles, and how those struggles have been inscribed or obscured in new versions of history and identity. Throughout, a major concern will be the differences between institutionalized forms of knowledge and a poetics of experience that engages history and culture outside traditional academic categories, exemplified through texts such as The Souls of Black Folk or John Brown by W.E.B. DuBois; Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser; Call Me Ishmael by Charles Olson, or My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. Throughout, we will place ourselves in a regional framework whose scope is international (the African diaspora seen, for instance, through Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy). We will examine how the U. S. has been interpreted from elsewhere, as well as by immigrants or refugees (Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature; The Letters of Sacco & Vanzetti; Jose Marti, Cesare Pavese, or Hannah Arendt; Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic). While the reading list has not been finalized, the sources mentioned above should give some sense of the scope of the course; it will be run as a seminar with a semester project and class presentations. Inquiries can be directed to Ammiel Alcalay: aaka@earthlink.net (registered students will get a full bibliography several months before the semester)
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Moustafa Bayoumi
ENGL 76200
Settlers and Natives: A Survey of Postcolonial and Imperial Cultures
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [47186]
Room 8203
The colonial world is a Manichean world, writes Frantz Fanon, a world divided between settlers and natives. Yet even within this stark division, other realities exist. Settling on exactly what "native" culture is or should be in the wake of settler colonialism has been a fundamental task of colonial resistance movements, as Fanon warns us in The Wretched of the Earth. And settlers too have historically problematic identifications. Stuck between a metropolitan world that doesn't understand them and a native world that hates them, settler cultures frequently adopt their own kind of "nativisms" that have also often led to the birth of new nations (think of Simón Bolívar or even the United States).
Is there a way to think of "settlers" and "natives" not as sacred figures but as secular categories, that is, as political and cultural realities that are contested and that reveal much about colonial and postcolonial experiences? What constitutes settler identity? How is native consciousness produced? Do these identities change over time (from the moment of conquest to the elaboration of settlement and eventually to independence)? How does the management of space and sexuality, which is so much a part of the colonial experience, get expressed in postcolonial nations, or in novels such as Coetzee's Disgrace?
In this survey course, we will be investigating many of the major issues raised by postcolonial theory: race and representation, Orientalism and the production of knowledge, empire and exoticism, the politics of language, gender and postcoloniality, and hybridity and the question of identity. Our focus, however, will be on the particular dynamic between settlers and natives though three case studies: Algeria, South Africa, and the United States. By framing the course though this question, we will be aiming to achieve not only fluency with postcolonial theory and literature in general but also a more rigorous definition of imperialism in particular. Are settlers needed for an empire to exist?
I have yet to finalize the syllabus, but readings will be drawn from both theoretical and literary works. In the realm of theory, we will likely draw on the work of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, Mahmoud Mamdani, Ann McClintock, Albert Memmi, Ann Stoler, and Homi Bhabha. Works of literature will probably include short fiction by Albert Camus, Fantasia (Assia Djebar), The Story of an African Farm (Olive Shreiner), Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee), The Squatter and the Don (Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton), and Edgar Huntly (Charles Brockden Brown).
Auditors allowed. Requirements include a class presentation and a term paper.
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- Felicia Bonaparte
ENGL 86300
Modern Drama
Friday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as THEA 85400, CL 85500) [47201]
Room 6421
The last one hundred and fifty years has been one of the most intense and varied in the history of drama. Responding to countless revolutions in art, philosophy, science, technology, economics, society, politics, and any number of other aspects of a rapidly changing world, drama has taken new directions in a thousand different ways both in subject and in form. Our purpose in this course will be to explore this evolution through some representative works. Our focus will be on Western drama, which makes a coherent body of works, but within that limitation, we will look at works that cross the span of the period and the tradition. Where appropriate, we will also look at staging, styles of acting, scenery, and a variety of other theatrical concerns. And finally we will also make small forays into different kinds of drama, as in opera and film. Those familiar with other languages will be encouraged to read the works, where they can, in the original.
Our reading list will consist of the following: Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, Strindberg, Miss Julie, Strauss, Salome (from the play by Oscar Wilde), Shaw, Man and Superman, Checkhov, The Cherry Orchard, Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, Hauptmann, The Weavers, Odets, Awake and Sing, Brecht, Mother Courage, Miller, Death of a Salesman, Wilson, Fences, Kennedy, A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, Kushner, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, O'Neill, Desire Under the Elms, Lorca, Blood Wedding, Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman, Camus, Caligula, Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, Beckett, Endgame, Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Albee, Tiny Alice, Bergman, Persona (film), Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead.
Course Requirements: a class presentation exploring an aspect of a play on our common reading list and a term paper focused on a work we are not discussing in class.
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Glenn Burger
ENGL 80700
Identity Matters: Self and Nation in Medieval Britain
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as MSCP 80500) [47190]
Room 3308
In this course we will examine constructions of race and ethnicity, community and nation, gender and identity at three charged moments in medieval British history. First, we will consider the effects of Christian conversion, Saxon invasion, and the resulting social and ethnic diversity in pre-Conquest Britain. We will examine a variety of Irish and Anglo-Saxon texts imagining community and identity in this ethnically and religiously divided terrain--Adomnan of Iona's Life of St. Columba, Bede's History of the English People, Beowulf, and the Táin Bó Cuailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley). Second, we will consider the effects of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, focusing in particular on how twelfth-century texts dealing with the Celtic boundaries of the Anglo-Norman empire, British history (especially the story of Arthur), or the demonization of Jews (through the invention of the blood libel) might attempt to address the ruptures in national life caused by the ascendancy of a French-speaking Anglo-Norman ruling class over native Saxon and Celtic populations in England and the British Isles. Third, we will consider the revival of English as dominant vernacular language and the dynastic ambitions of the English crown during the Hundred Years War with France in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in such texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, the Canterbury Tales, and the Book of Margery Kempe, as well as early fifteenth-century English and Scottish uses of a native Chaucerian English tradition.
Students will be expected to contribute two short, informal seminar presentations and one essay of approximately 15 pages.
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Mary Ann Caws
ENGL 87300
Professions, Power and Portraits
Tuesday 6:30pm-9:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as THEA 81500 and WSCP 81000,) [47203]
Room C419
A study of the ways in which various professions and the worlds they represent are portrayed, with the kinds of power that work within their realm, and the types of personalities within them, in film, with a few sallies into a television series. The broadly or finely etched portraits and the actors who present them are of especial interest, as are the ways in which certain professions seem to summon certain kinds of beings, and how they change -- or not. What kind of development can arise and be powerful in itself. An additional complication is the sort of actor as he or she determines the representation (e.g., William Hurt in Broadcast News and The Doctor).
If it is a question of series (Rocky I, II, etc., or the Forsyte Saga, to take 2 different types) or The West Wing, the issue of development will be a thorny one, or less so, depending on the creators.
A few biographies, if there is time, or scenes from them (The Young Mr. Lincoln, Francis Bacon, etc.) Among the films and the careers represented, in whatever order will seem to work best -- this is only an indicative sampling, clearly, for there are many more possibilities, depending on the epoch, and some examples may not be available. Whenever the "straight representation" and then a parody are available (for example, a Jesus film like The Passion of the Christ and The Life of Brian), we may think of both. NB. Not necessarily these films: this is just an indication. Depending on the interests of the seminar participants, others may be added.
On Point -- the world of the ballerina, and a more recent one
Broadcast News; Up Close and Personal; Front Page -- desk stuff and news reporting
Stevie; Sylvia; Tom and Viv -- the poetic world
The Quiet American; The Third Man -- the espionage world; M. Poirot, etc. -- detective world
Bringing up Baby; world of collecting and museums
Is There a Doctor in the House? Dodsworth; Dark Victory; Magnificent Obsession; The Doctor --the world of medicine
Priest; True Confessions; the Night of the Iguana; the priest's world
Blackboard Jungle, Dead Poets Society; The Affair -- the world of education
Shakespeare in Love -- biography, and the world of the dramatic writer
Days of Heaven -- world of the farmer
Legal Eagles, To Kill a Mockingbird ; Philadelphia -- the world of law
Old Man and the Sea; Moby Dick' Mutiny on the Bounty; Master and Commander; the sea and sailors
Joan of Arc; The Passion of the Christ; The Life of Brian -- victims in the service of an ideal
The Front Line -- the point of view of the bodyguard; Upstairs Downstairs; The Servant -- of domestic service
The Notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach; Clara and Robert Schumann; Hilary and Jackie; etc. -- the world of music
The West Wing; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; the Maltese Falcon; All the President's Men -- the world of politics and government
Parody: Wag the Dog; Dr. Strangelove
Rocky, etc. -- the world of prizefighting
Parody: Movie Movie
The Last Emperor; I Claudius, etc. -- royalty
Readings from such writers as John Berger, Krakauer, Roland Barthes, Eisenstein, Tom Gunning, the Mast and Cohen reader, James Monaco, Bordwell, Bluestone, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and the French cubist Blaise Cendrars, the surrealist Robert Desnos, etc. etc.
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Mario DiGangi
ENGL 71600
Shakespeare and Marlowe: Theatre and Culture in the 1590s CANCELLED
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [47180]
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Jacqueline diSalvo
ENGL 82300
Milton and the Reinvention of Gender, Psyche, and Society
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [47193]
Room 4422
In Paradise Lost, Milton depicts numerous beginnings, of angels, devils, hell, paradise, both the universe and humanity, language, poetry, marriage, sex, sin, psychic disorder, politics, tyranny, etc. Milton wrote in revolutionary times and was himself one of the only active revolutionaries who were also great English poets. We will read Paradise Lost , as well as Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, within the context of both the English revolution and the cultural revolution of the Early Modern era. Within this context, the imagined beginnings of the epic express Milton's crucial role in this transformation and his influential invention and representation of new forms of politics, religion, gender, subjectivity and other seminal ideologies, discourses and institutions of an emerging bourgeois society. In particular we will be concerned with the relationship between external and internal change, with psycho-history, the development of new modes of masculine and feminine subjectivity, and gendered representations of the conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois society. Given this inter-disciplinary approach students will be responsible not only for close readings of the poems, but also secondary readings in both the criticism and relevant history. Some of this material will be presented in students' reports which, along with a final paper will be required.
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Marc Dolan
ENGL 85000
American Pulp
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81500) [47197]
Room 3309
In a society like the United States (which at least aspires to cultural democracy), how far apart are elite and popular writing? Are the well-wrought symbols of the avant garde all that different from the seemingly serendipitous myths of the most popular potboilers? And which of these parallel impulses gives us the greatest insight into the times that produce their texts? Is there a productive way for us to read works from both camps side by side?
This course will explore the blurred line between elite and popular writing in the United States from the antebellum period to the recent past by reading a series of paired texts from the dawn of the American mass market down to the golden age of paperback sales. These pairings may include:
Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans (1842) w/ George Lippard, The Quaker City (1844)
E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand (1859) w/ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-1903) w/ Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)
Valerie Taylor, The Girls in 3-B (1959) w/ Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959) w/ Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977)
We will probably also spend a week dipping into H. P. Lovecraft's tales of the Chthlhu mythos, which may very well fall into their own separate category.
Brief theoretical readings (from such writers as Freud, Barthes, Brook, Levi-Strauss, Jameson, and Eco) will also be assigned in order to provide us with a series of theoretical prisms through which to approach our readings. All methodologies are, however, more than welcome in the course. In fact, if we are very lucky, the aggregate methodology of our discussions will be as unruly as the plots of the novels we are reading.
There are five course requirements: (1) active participation in discussions; (2) a brief presentation with descriptive bibliography summarizing scholarship on a text and author that we are reading in common; (3) a descriptive bibliography in preparation for the final presentation and essay, (4) a final presentation of original scholarship on a relevant American text or texts that we are not reading in common; and (5) a 20‑25‑page final essay that treats your original scholarship in greater detail.
[Please note: Although this syllabus is tentative, registered students should probably try to start reading The Quaker City and The Hidden Hand over the summer in advance of the course. These initially serialized texts are quite long in book form; their authors were paid by the word.]
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Martin Elsky
ENGL 81100
Palace and Home: Early Modern Literature and Architectural Interiors
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as RSCP 72100) [47321]
Room 3307
Team taught with art historian Professor Beth Holman (Bard Graduate School, NYC), this interdisciplinary course will examine public and private spaces, especially the home, as sites of cultural production and the performance of social identity through the literary and visual arts of the Early Modern Period. Drawing on social history, architectural history, the material record, and literary theory, we will discuss the definition and decoration of architectural spaces for both public and private life, for commercial/social transactions as well as for introspection and intimacy. We will consider how architectural spaces and objects are embedded in Renaissance literary works, including lyric, drama, and prose. Among the issues that will be considered are: the development of the domestic spaces in relation to medieval city palaces and housing, Renaissance theories of display, familial identity, the classical revival, and the relationship between a new sense of the public realm in human affairs and the articulation of privacy. Questions posed to the literary texts will include: how does the work encode the space in which it takes place, and how does this spatial coding help us understand the work? Readings will include primary sources, literary works, and critical texts. Course materials will range from fifteenth-seventeenth century, mostly in Italy and England.
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N. John Hall
ENGL 84500
The Victorian Novel
Thursday 4:00pm-6:00pm 2/4 credits [47196]
Room 4433
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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Fred Kaplan
ENGL 74300
Representative Victorians
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [47182]
Room 3305
This course highlights the special conditions of artistry and vision of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and Henry James, from Carlyle's essays in 1832 to Henry James's Wings of the Dove in 1902, defining a period roughly synchronous with Queen Victoria's reign. It will also serve as an introduction to Victorian literature and culture. Other Victorian writers, British & American, may be points of reference & discussion. The "representative" in the title is both the conventional use that means typical of a time and place but also the use that emphasizes representation, the act of making/depicting through language and structure. Vision for these writers & for the British and American Victorians in general was political, social, religious, aesthetic, and ethnocentric. Each is very much of his place & time (all lived most of their lives in Victorian Britain); each contributes substantially to how in the twenty-first century we represent the period & the Victorian canon.
For Carlyle & Dickens. revolution was an issue & an attraction; for Browning & Tennyson religious & psychological considerations were compelling; for James, money, class, and Anglo-American culture were firmly in view. Each believed that he lived in a time of radical change which needed to be encouraged or discouraged or re-directed. Mechanism/materialism, church-state relations, social equality, individual transcendence & the artist are key issues for Carlyle & Tennyson; materialism, property, money for Dickens; ethnocentrism, relativism, epistemology, & human psychology for Browning; class, gender, & art/epistemology for James. We will read selected essays by Carlyle, selections from Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, & Past & Present; Dickens' Oliver Twist, Hard Times, & A Tale of Two Cities; Tennyson, selected poems & In Memoriam; Browning poems from, among other volumes, Men & Women & Dramatis Personae & selections from The Ring & the Book; James's, Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, & Wings of the Dove, & Henry James on Browning. Each student will present an oral report and write a term essay.
Recommended texts:
Carlyle: Preferably A Carlyle Reader, Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G. B. Tennyson. Cambridge University Press paperback. As a backup, Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston. Penguin Classics. Some individual Carlyle titles are in paperback (such as the World's Classics paperback of The French Revolution). Edited scholarly volumes are in the University of California Press series, The Essential Carlyle. The best edition of Past and Present, ed. by R. D. Altick, was published by Houghton Mifflin in its Riverside Editions series.
Tennyson: Norton Critical Edition (NCE) In Memoriam &/or NCE Tennyson's Poems; or Christopher Ricks's Longman edition or U. of California Press Selected Poems.
Dickens: NCE editions of OT, HT; Penguin or Everyman TTC. .
Browning: NCE edition or the Browning volume in the Longman Annotated English Poets series or the Yale English Poets series or the Oxford Authors series (all in paperback). For The Ring & the Book, the Yale English Poets volume, ed. R. D. Altick (paperback 1981).
James: Library of America or any paperback editions in which the text is based on the first edition & not the New York Edition. This is particularly important for Portrait.
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David Kazanjian
ENGL 80100
Theory Colloquium
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [47188]
Room 6493
How does "theory" become the name for the interpretation of language and power in contemporary literary studies? This course will examine the symbolic, allegorical, and performative dimensions of language by reading key rhetorical and philosophical texts from the modern period with contemporary interpretations of those texts. This will allow us to examine a number of contemporary critical theories of interpretation, and in particular to consider the following questions. What does it mean to interpret in the wake of the grand theoretical enterprises of the modern period? What are some of the historical and rhetorical conditions of emergence for contemporary critical theories of interpretation? How do conceptions of power and authority in literature and culture change as symbolic accounts of language give way to allegorical and performative accounts? How do critical theory and continental philosophy generate anti-foundationalist theories? Each student will be able to focus on a particular theoretical question by offering an in-class presentation and by writing a final term paper..
We will begin the seminar with several weeks on the emergence of semiotics, with readings from some of the following: Saussure, Peirce, Benveniste, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Austin, Searle, and Derrida. In the remaining weeks, we will cover some, though probably not all, of the following units: Hegel's subject of desire, and Kojeve and Butler's readings of that subject; Nietzsche's conception of genealogy, and Deleuze, Foucault, and Fanon's readings of that conception; Marx's historical materialist method, and elaborations of that method by Negri, Brown, and Spivak; and the Freudian critique of the subject, elaborated by Lacan and Klein.
IMPORTANT: Students are asked to read the following texts over the summer, so that we may have a full discussion during our first meeting: Plato's Gorgias, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, and Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Language. I would also recommend reading Kaja Silverman's Subject of Semiotics.
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Norman Kelvin
ENGL 86000
"World War II as Myth, Trauma, and the Client of Modernism"
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [47199]
Room 3305
The Iliad is a great mythic work. We can ask, is it about good and evil or about honor, loyalty, heroism, and fate? It's not as easy to ask questions about the myth of World War II. Loyalty and courage were part of reality. The combat soldier was a member of an infantry company, and mutual support within the company was essential to survival. Wallace Stevens, in "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War," wrote that the hero is a "feeling," but the more complex parts of the poem, in which the very idea of hero is questioned and subverted, correspond to tacit refusal by both soldiers and cultural historians to seek heroes. What then, is the myth of World War II? That the War was about good and evil? Yes, but the topic "good and evil" in World War II is many layered, mythic and non-mythic, and the effort to separate the layers will concern us. Essential, too, is to ask how the current situation, with America at war again, inflects our reading of the literature of World War II. As for "trauma and the client of Modernism," they go together. Novelists and poets who experienced World War II in combat, or as civilians under bombardment or incarcerated in concentration camps, felt obliged to use the techniques of literary Modernism; wrote with self-imposed dependence upon them. Traumatic memory and a felt need to use Modernist techniques resulted in tension. How different writers, in different nations engaged in the War, resolved it will be explored. And the tension, we'll see, gives way to pure experiment by writers too young to have known the War first-hand. Trauma is memory-without-history; later writers are shaped by history-without-memory.
Finally, there are layers of meaning in the War as an entity. One is language. Class, propaganda, media coverage and the soldier's own idiom cancel each other's effort to get at an ineluctable meaning. Another is racism, from segregation in the American armies to Nazi policies, to the energy racism brought to the American fight against the Japanese. The role of women is a third: there are exclusions and inclusions (often forced, as in the case of Korean "comfort women"). Still another is that most U.S. combats troops were high school graduates of the classes of 1942 and '43. They were children of the Depression, in battle before they were twenty; and had imposed on their youth culture the culture of death. In many works we read, these facts create their own forceful presence. Finally, some people see the War as a consumer site on which international cartels sold their products. In this view, was Nazism simply an agent, a client of international industrial power? We can debate this, but we will note that defeat of the Nazis was so far from a certainty, so far from being a theatrical event staged by capitalist power, that Hitler's blunders were probably the only reason the outcome did not go the other way. It won't be in our province to conjecture what the world would be like today had the Nazis won, but the question shadows much of what we read.
Our readings will include Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum; Ian McEwan, Atonement; Greene, The End of the Affair; H.D., "The Walls Do Not Fall"; Elizabeth Bowen, "Oh, Madam"; Salinger, "For Esme, with Love and Squalor"; Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow; Bondarev, The Hot Snow; Poets of World War II (Library of America); Chaos of the Night (poems by women who lived through the London Blitz); Imre Kertesz, Fateless; Gertrude Stein, ""A Picture of Occupied France"; Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain; and Camus, The Fall.
A term paper and one 15-minute class presentation.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 86200
Organized Sound: Poetry, Music, and Modernity
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [47200]
Room 5383
This seminar is an unsystematic exploration of relations between words and music in the 20th century, with an emphasis on matters of method, organization, procedure: what systems, faux-systems, or anti-systems did poets and musicians invent to chart time, sound, and sense? What intersections and collisions did practitioners propose between verbal and vocal manners? Why must words alter when music touches them? The phrase "organized sound" is composer Edgard Varèse's: he preferred it to "music" as a term to describe timed, scripted, patterned relations between sounds. In the seminar, we will pay particular attention to musical settings of poetry, to musical metaphors within poetry, and to poetry's musical devices (especially to modernity's new-fangled approaches to conventional versification). Questions of background (ambient, elevator) music, electronic music, sound art, noise, chance, movies, and memory may tangentially arise. The course will give students a chance to think and write about the place of music in their lives. The syllabus may include poetry of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, H.D., Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Federico García Lorca, Paul Eluard, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara. Musical figures may include Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker, Francis Poulenc, John Cage, George Crumb, Elliott Carter, Alvin Lucier, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, and György Kurtág. We may study one opera. Though the poetry and music the course considers will be mostly North American or European, much of it rather mainstream (a.k.a. "art music" or "concert music"), students are welcome to explore, for their presentations and papers, non-Western traditions and contexts, or alternative musical/poetic practices. Requirements: in-class presentation, final essay (20-25 pages, due at end of semester). Musical background not required: we will not read scores, we will "merely" listen. Auditors and non-Ph.D. students admitted at discretion of instructor.
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- Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 86400
Lyric Essay III
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [47202]
Room 3207
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, and trespasses on the territory of other genres.
The seminar's format and orientation are the same as in the two previous years, though the assigned texts will be different. Some possibilities for the syllabus include Thomas Bernhard's Concrete, Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever, Lydia Davis's Almost No Memory, Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death, Lyn Heijinian's The Language of Inquiry, Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother, David Markson's Vanishing Point, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, Roland Barthes' Sade, Fourier, Loyola, book reviews by Marianne Moore, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and more. No auditors.
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Steven Kruger
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm 4 credits [47187]
Room 3309
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.
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Richard McCoy
ENGL 71600
Shakespeare, Early Modern Theater, and Contemporary Performance
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [47180]
Room 5383
The course will cover a broad range of Shakespearean plays, including comedies such as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, histories such as Richard II and Henry V, at least one late romance, The Winter's Tale, and several major tragedies including Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. We will focus on different aspects of early modern stage history - the transition from religious drama and ceremonial pageantry to popular entertainment, connections between patronage and commercial enterprise, the publication and marketing of "plays" as "works," and the tension between elite and popular traditions. We will also probe material, historical and esthetic reasons for Shakespeare's enduring preeminence in contemporary culture, aiming to move beyond both reflexive bardolatry and deconstructive skepticism. A short class presentation, 2 or 3 brief response papers, and a 20 page research paper will be required.
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Catherine McKenna
ENGL 80900
The Literature and Language of Medieval Wales
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as MSCP 80700) [47191]
Room 6300
A rare opportunity for students of the Middle Ages to explore the literature of one of the principal languages of Britain in its cultural, historical and linguistic contexts. Each week, we will devote half of our class time to discussion of a medieval Welsh text in English translation, and half to the study of the Middle Welsh language. In the first week or two, we'll make our way through a few lines of our text in the original Welsh, and as the term proceeds, we'll be able to read more extensive passages, although we won't give up our translations. I propose to choose texts that are in some sense in conversation with the literature, culture, and political power of medieval Britain's other linguistic traditions -- English, Norman French, Latin, and Gaelic -- but welcome suggestions from students who are particularly eager to read particular texts. Among those that I would propose to read are Branwen ferch Llyr (the Second Branch of the Mabinogi), Ystoria Gereint fab Erbin (the Romance of Geraint and Enid), Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (The Dream of Rhonabwy), selections from Trioedd Ynys Prydein (the Welsh Triads), Hanes Taliesin (the story of the legendary poet Taliesin), the elegiac poetry associated with Llywarch Hen, and poetry of the historical bard Taliesin, Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch, and Dafydd ap Gwilym. We'll use The Mabinogion translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, and published by Everyman (ISBN 0460872974 ) and Medieval Welsh Poems, translated by Joseph Clancy and published by Four Courts Press in Dublin (ISBN 1851827838 , available through Amazon, etc.), as well as other texts to be distributed in photocopy and placed on reserve. For our study of the language, our principal text will be D. Simon Evans' Grammar of Middle Welsh (published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and available from them at www.celt.dias.ie, or secondhand through Amazon, etc.. If you have any questions, please contact cmckenna@gc.cuny.edu.
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Nancy Miller
ENGL 88000
Women Writers and Intellectuals
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [47204]
Room 3309
Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts was published posthumously in 1941. Beginning here, with the death of this author, we will proceed to examine the work of women writers who produced essays, novels, and poetry from the war years through the advent of second-wave feminism. Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil. These prolific and brilliant women are not only major writers. As cultural figures and icons, they also have played an important role in public debate. Of special interest to the seminar will be the relations among these women, who sometimes admired, sometimes detested one another.
Work for the course: one oral presentation, one short paper, and one term paper, due at the end of the semester.
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Blanford Parker
ENGL 83500
Classical and Enlightened Theories of Literature
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [47194]
Room 3307
This course will explore the chief theories of literature and literary production--modes of mimesis and expression from Aristotle to Nietzsche. Beginning with Plato's critique of poetry and painting in the REPUBLIC and ION we will attempt to examine the origins of literary theory and its development in Aristotle and the later Ancient texts of Longinus, Quintillian and Augustine. We will then observe the many currents of Neo-classical and Humanist reaction from the Renaissance to the era of Lessing and Johnson observing the reconstitution of classical imitation and its decline. In the final phase we will see the growth of an anti-classical and Enlightened theory of literature and the imagination in the major aesthetic works of Kant, Schiller, and Nietzsche. The course will try to give an outline of the large and continuing debate among major thinkers in several eras concerning art, writing, tradition, imagination, and cultural production.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
ENGL 75700
The Afro-American Abroad
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000 & ASCP 81500) [47185]
Room 7314
There are three primary goals for this seminar. First, students will be introduced to the works of major and minor 20th Century Black American novelists who spent significant portions of their careers abroad. Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Charlene Hatcher Polite, Claude McKay and others will be considered. Second, we will ask how Black American intellectuals have conceptualized both travel and exile in their writing. Here we will be particularly concerned with the manner in which the writing of U.S. blacks dovetails the work of writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Finally, with a heavy does of secondary readings to aid them, students will be asked to place Black American writing in the context of new developments in literary and cultural studies that center around the concepts of globalism and transnationalism. One class presentation, a short paper and a long research paper are required.
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David Reynolds
ENGL 75100
The American Renaissance
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000) [47184]
Room 4422
The three decades between 1835 and 1865 are arguably the richest period in American literary history. This period saw the dazzling innovations in philosophy, literary style, and social criticism brought about by Emerson and Thoreau; the metaphysical depth and cultural breadth represented by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne; the breathtaking poetic experimentation of Whitman and Dickinson; and the psychological and artistic achievement of Edgar Allan Poe. The issues of race and chattel slavery were powerfully depicted by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Class conflict was dramatized in popular novels by George Lippard and George Thompson, and women's issues in the fiction of Sara Parton and others. In addition to reading these authors, we shall discuss key theoretical and critical approaches to their writings. An oral report and a 15-page term paper are required.
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Eve Sedgwick
ENGL 80400
Non-Oedipal Psychologies: Psychoanalytic Approach to Queer Theory
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [47189]
Room 3309
"Non-Oedipal Psychologies" is a seminar that will explore historical and contemporary alternatives to the psychological models that have the most currency in present literary studies. The dominant, Lacan-inflected reading of Freudian psychoanalysis embodies many assumptions that have been questioned, whether from within or outside of psychoanalytic thought. Among them are the interpretive isolation of the mother-father-child triad; the determinative nature of childhood experience and the teleology toward a sharply distinct state of maturity; the primacy of genital morphology and desire; the centrality of dualistic gender difference; and the emphasis on linguistic models of mental functioning. In this seminar we will look for interesting alternative currents of psychological thought in writers who may include Freud, Ferenczi, Klein, Tomkins, Deleuze, Balint, and others.
Books:
Michael Balint, THE BASIC FAULT, Northwestern UP, ISBN 0-8101-1025-3
Judith Dupont, ed., THE CLINICAL DIARIES OF SANDOR FERENCZI, Harvard UP, ISBN 0-6741-3527-X
Adam Frank and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, SHAME AND ITS SISTERS: A SILVAN TOMKINS READER, Duke UP, ISBN 0-8223-1694-3
Peter Gay, ed., THE FREUD READER, W. W. Norton, ISBN 0-3933-1403-0
R. D. Hinshelwood, A DICTIONARY OF KLEINIAN THOUGHT, Free Association Books, ISBN 0-9469-60836
Adam Phillips, WINNICOTT, Harvard UP, ISBN 0-6749-5361-4
Andrew Solomon, THE NOONDAY DEMON: AN ATLAS OF DEPRESSION, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-85467-8
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Ira Shor
ENGL 89000
Writing Whiteness: Researching Color in Composition and Rhetoric
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [47205]
Room 4406.11
In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois declared in THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK that the color line was the problem of the 20th century. That problem remains in the 21st century. Dubois's extraordinary book has no equal vis a vis "the souls of white folk." Why has "blackness" been so much more examined than "whiteness"? In her famous 1988 essay, Peggy McIntosh characterized whiteness as an "invisible knapsack of unearned privileges." 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, composition/rhetoric, and racial identity theory. "Critical whiteness" asks why white privilege continues even though racial segregation is now illegal. Why does white supremacy persist in a society legally "color-blind"? Why does common parlance use "people of color" to describe only minorities and not the white majority, as if only those with dark skin have a color? Are white people colorless? Are all whites the same color? Does color trump class or gender in the hierarchy of identity privileges? To find out, "critical whiteness" looks at history, everyday practices, and institutional processes as well as at representations of race in social, visual, and literary texts
This seminar will ask how whiteness is written into everyday practices as well as how race is written about. Through rhetorical study, we will treat 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 is a set of orientations and methods which guide the making of specific discourses, teaching us what can be said, written, or performed in any circumstance or location. "Critical whiteness," then, is a discourse whose rhetoric questions the practices and places where white privilege is written.
PARTIAL READING LIST:
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK(1994[1903]), W.E.B. Dubois, Dover
THE WAGES OF WHITENESS(1999, rev. ed), David Roediger, Verso
WHITE(1997), Richard Dyer, Routledge PLAYING IN THE DARK(1992), Toni Morrison, Vintage
HOW JEWS BECAME WHITE FOLKS(1998), Karen Brodkin, Rutgers UP
WHITE WOMEN, RACE MATTERS(1993), Ruth Frankenberg, U of Minn. Press
"Whiteness as Property," Cheryl Harris, HARV LAW REV., 106.8, June 1993, 1709-1791.
"White Privilege and Male Privilege," Peggy McIntosh, Wellesley Center for Research on Women, 1988.
"Race: The Absent Presence in Composition Studies," Catherine Prendergast, CCC, 50.1, Sept. 1998, 36-53.
"Reading Whiteness in English Studies," Timothy Barnett, CE, 63.1, Sept. 2000, 9-37.
"Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond 'Mistakes,' 'Bad English,' and 'Wrong Language,'" Peter Elbow, JAC, 19.3, 1999, 359-388.
"Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English," Arthur Palacas, CE, 63.1, Jan. 2001, 326-352.
"Ebonics: Theorizing in Public Our Attitudes Toward Literacy," Richard Marback, CCCC, 53.1, Sept. 2001, 11-32.
"Nothing Mean More to Me Than You and The Life of Willie Jordan," June Jordan
"Whiteness in the Black Imagination," bell hooks
WRITINGS:
1. Weekly journals on the readings.
2. Final paper.
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Jon-Christian Suggs
ENGL 85500
19th Century African-American Essay as a Genre
Wednesday 6:30 -- 8:30 pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [47198]
Room 8202
The emergence of an African American literary canon requires scholarly and theoretical attention to as many genres as we can identify. This course undertakes to describe and perhaps define the nineteenth-century origins of African American non-fiction prose. In a search for influences, texts, and critiques we will in fact start in the eighteenth century but it is the multiplicity of non-fiction forms through which African Americans of the antebellum, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction periods explained and imagined the world that will capture most of our attention. The course will end as Black America begins to encounter High Cultural Modernism at the advent of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s.
The work of the course will involve three kinds of activity--
1) research: in the absence of any adequate collection of texts of generic non-fiction from these periods, we will have to uncover our own by haunting the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; I will make arrangements for an introduction to the library and its resources and we will set up a research agenda among us.
2) criticism: we will read and critique what we find, bringing to bear what ever interpretive frameworks seem applicable to the task.
3) Theorizing: we will attempt to develop a theory of the African American non-fiction text as a genre.
Each of you will be responsible for identifying a text that has not yet been discussed in print. Exceptions will be made on petition. E.g., previously critiqued texts that have been neglected for a long period can be acceptable. You will present the text to the class in an oral report and will submit a written version of that presentation as well as an annotated "critical" edition of the text to me. Finally, we will produce a draft of an essay of our own that theorizes what we have seen and that we would want to be included as an introduction to an anthology of the kinds of texts we have been looking at.
If this seems like a lot of work, it could be. But I don't mean to overwhelm you with unrealizable assignments. The three activities are essential but the scope of each of our personal inquiries is negotiable in every case. After some introductory meetings and some practice reading and talking about what this genre seems to be at this point in the history of African American canonical enterprises, you will decide with me the scope and direction of the rest of the semester for you. There's not a lot of time, so we will have to be reasonable. At the end of the semester we will work collectively on theorizing from our experience.
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Scott Westrem
ENGL 70500
The Canterbury Tales
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [47179]
Room 6114
"Chaucer's Ends: The Book of the Tales of Canterbury and The Book of the Duchess"
It is a well-known literary fact that when Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, he left unfinished, and quite possibly inconclusively arranged, a collection of oral presentations representing a good variety of literary genres supposedly delivered by a group of some thirty English men and women of all walks of life while traveling the road to Canterbury Cathedral in order to "seeke" St. Thomas ˆ Becket in his shrine there, the most popular pilgrimage site in later medieval Britain. The resulting collection of what might be called shards of narrative groups (and some of the narratives themselves lack a conventional "sense of an ending"), which the earliest manuscripts entitle "the book of the tales of Caunterbury," has guaranteed Chaucer his place with Shakespeare as a towering literary figure in English. Modern reception of Dante's Divine Comedy or Boccaccio's Decameron would be very different were one or the other similarly incomplete, and thus one explanation for Chaucer's enduring status may be that, as Harold Bloom observes in The Western Canon, the Tales "consists of giant fragments" that leave the reader with "little impression of something unfinished." Although there are times when the "impression of unfinished[ness]" is quite powerful, Bloom's sense of the work's paradoxical aesthetic coherence may also indicate why almost every modern edition of Chaucer's collected works, in which they are presented more-or-less chronologically (so far as this is possible), nevertheless begins with the Tales, even though almost all scholars believe he was writing it in his last years; it is conventionally followed by the Book of the Duchess, a poem he did in fact complete, perhaps as many as two decades before he began seriously to assemble his pilgrimage "compaignye" in his imagination.
In this seminar, we will read the Book of the Duchess and most of the Tales, asking many questions, only two of which will be: What is Chaucer doing and where is he going? In other words, what is his end? Answering--or at least replying to--the question will lead us in several directions, such as examining his themes, range of genres, subtlety of characterization, flexibility of narrative voice, quality of languages, and adaptability to a remarkable array of critical approaches during the past 125 years. We will also pay attention to crucial--if apparently fusty--matters such as codicology, since manuscript evidence may be crucial in coming to sound conclusions about the text. We will also of necessity pay attention to Chaucer's indebtedness to the international literature of his day, particularly to the Italian and French writers of preceding generations (and his own), whose work he used and transformed in stunning ways, so that he may justly be called an originator of the very idea of comparative literature. We will also take into serious account pertinent criticism (with an attempt to grasp something of its history), including work by David Aers, Glenn Burger, Mary Carruthers, Carolyn Dinshaw, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Donald Howard, V. A. Kolve, Steve Kruger, Seth Lerer, Jill Mann, Lee Patterson, and D. W. Robertson.
Knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for this seminar, although a desire to learn it is; we will spend a fair amount of time in early sessions acquiring an ability to read Chaucer in the original. I pay a great deal of attention to student writing, making assignments throughout the semester: three informal "reaction" papers, one 6-to-8-page paper requiring work with a manuscript (original or facsimile) or some other medieval artifact, and a lengthier (15-page) research paper. If successful, this seminar will never finish.
Required Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), and Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York: Oxford U P, 1989, rpt. 1991).
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Joseph Wittreich
ENGL 84100
Seminar in Romanticism: Imaginary Conversations
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [47195]
Room 3309
Seminar in Romanticism: Imaginary Conversations. If the Romantics did not know one another, nevertheless they often read one another. We will place male and female voices against one another, and then read the emerging dialogues between Mary Woolstonecraft and William Blake, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Visions of the Daughters of Albion; Austen's Persuasion and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimmage, Prometheus, Prophecy of Dante and Marino Faliero; Mary Shelley's The Last Man (with a glance back at Byron) and Shelley's The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound. Requirements: one oral presentation and a final paper (20-25 pages).
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Nancy Yousef
ENGL 74000
Romantic Intimacies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Trouble with Others
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [47181]
Room 5382
When and in what ways are the emotions to be understood as philosophically and politically significant? What are the relations among philosophy and literature -in general, and in the crucial period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This course explores the recurrent Romantic preoccupation with a set of related issues: the possibility of trust, the necessity of fellow-feeling, the aspirations of sympathy, and the disappointments of intimacy. Important historical events and cultural developments that upset established forms of domestic, communal, sexual, and political relations will be touched on, but our main concern will be the evident conceptual imperative to establish the bases ("natural," "conventional," "contractual") of relationships between individuals manifested in a range of imaginative, theoretical, and political writing.
The course is divided into three units, beginning with a study of key pre romantic formulations of the epistemic, ethical and psychological challenges of intersubjectivity (in Hume, Rousseau, and Kant). The second part of the course considers responses to the French Revolution as representative, or symptomatic, of the complex, convulsive revaluation of terms such as "sympathy," "fellowship," "fraternity," "community" (readings include Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Hegel). The third section of the course is devoted to case studies in the core of the Romantic canon, focusing on Wordsworth (particularly his poems treating the challenge of knowing and responding to strangers in pain) and Austen (especially her treatment of the difficulties of achieving and dwelling in intimacy).
At once comparative and interdisciplinary, the course offers an opportunity to explore methodological and historical approaches to the relationship
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