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alphabetical by instructor
Registration for continuing students begins May 4th
Registration after June 9th will result in a $15 late fee for all ongoing students.
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Rachel Brownstein
ENGL 91000
Dissertation Workshop
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (0 credits)
The workshop is led by a professor with considerable experience in directing dissertations. Students prepare and read each others’ work (including drafts of the dissertation prospectus), as well as discuss the job market and the academic profession. If you are a Level 2 student writing your prospectus, or a Level 3 student at any stage in the process, you are welcome to register for the class.
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Sarah Chinn
ENGL 75200
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: Corporeal Representation in the United States 1860-1910
Tuesday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits)
This course will deal with representations of bodies in literary texts produced in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The years after the Civil War were characterized by an intense interest in the meanings of the human body: the disabled bodies of returning soldiers, the laboring bodies of the new working classes, the freed bodies of former slaves, the athletic bodies of the "New Woman," spiritual bodies, gendered bodies, and, of course, the body politic. New advances in surgery and forensic science combined with increasing stringencies of Jim Crow, the one-drop rule, and lynch-law. A variety of literary texts explored the ways in which Americans used their bodies for work, leisure, material consumption, exercise, and war, among other applications. WeÕll be reading a wide array of texts for this course, including but not limited to Sister Carrie, Contending Forces, The Octopus, Life in the Iron Mills, Who Would Have Thought It?, and looking at images by Lewis Hine, John Singer Sargeant, and Jacob Riis.
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Jim DeJongh
ENGL 85500
African American Drama
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits)
Instructor: Dr. James de Jongh is a distinguished playwright as well as scholar of African American and Africana 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. Until he passed away recently, August Wilson, an African American man who wrote about black themes, was arguably the most prolific and celebrated playwright in the American Theatre, and Suzan Lori Parks is the first African American women, and the forth African American, to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Course Description: The focus of this seminar will be dramatic literature by African Americans since 1916. The period from 1916-1959 encompasses the black theatre of the Harlem Renaissance, the Little Theatre Movement, and the Harlem Unit of the Federal Theatre Project. The period from 1959-present, 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 play Top Dog, Underdog (2001)by Suzan-Lori Parks. However, discussion will be designed to address the history and development of African American drama in the United States from its origins. We will explore the roots of African American Drama, 1751-1916 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 and the brief flourishing of black musical theatre at the end of the 19th century.
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Morris Dickstein
ENGL 87400
Comedy: Method and Meaning
Tuesday 6:30pm-9:30pm (2/4 credits)
This course will take a historical, critical, and theoretical approach to the evolution of film comedy. It will begin with short films and longer works by Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, showing how film comedy develops from slapstick, sight gags, pantomime, farce, and other vaudeville routines to more complex forms of drama, pathos, and characterization. We will examine some of the major comic performers of the 1930s, including the Marx brothers, W. C. Fields, and Mae West, in the context of their times, and explore works of screwball comedy by directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Gregory La Cava, as well as a parallel tradition of sophisticated or cynical romantic comedy by Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder. Along the way we’ll compare the work of American directors to European counterparts like Jean Vigo, (Zero for Conduct), Rene Clair (Le Million, A Nous la Liberte), and Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved from Drowning, Rules of the Game). Later material may include the work of TV comedians like Ernie Kovacs, Lucille Ball, and Sid Caesar and feature films such as Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964), M*A*S*H (Altman,1970), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), and My Favorite Year (Richard Benjamin, 1982). There will be readings of works of comic literature from Aristophanes and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh, along with critical and theoretical writings on comedy by Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, James Agee, Gerald Mast and others. Besides regular attendance, requirements of the course will include an oral report and a 15-page term paper.
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Mario DiGangi
ENGL 81400
Shakespearean Economics
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits)
This course will examine the representation of economics in the drama of Shakespeare, and a few of his contemporaries, from 1590-1610, when London theater was flourishing as a business and England was beginning to emerge as an international economic power. Economics will be broadly defined to encompass the financial, social, and sexual dynamics of the household, the city, and the international market. We will explore the dramatic representation of property (including stage properties and the notion of the self as property), money, capitalism, mercantilism, class conflict, nationalism, credit, debt, urban space, and questions of worth, value, and ownership. We will read the work of Marxist, materialist, and feminist critics such as Douglas Bruster, Walter Cohen, Richard Halpern, Jonathan Gil Harris, David Hawkes, Jean Howard, Natasha Korda, Lorna Hutson, and Theodore Leinwand. Shakespeare plays might include 2 Henry VI (1591), The Taming of the Shrew (1592), The Comedy of Errors (1592-94), The Merchant of Venice (1596-97), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Measure for Measure (1603), King Lear (1604-5), Timon of Athens (1607-8). Non-Shakespearean plays might include Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589), Dekker’s The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Heywood’s Edward IV (1599) and The Fair Maid of the West (1600-1604), Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), and perhaps some civic pageants by Middleton.
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Martin Elsky
ENGL 81100
Early Modern Disseminations: Encounters with European Culture East and West
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits)
This course will explore the impact of contact between European and non-European cultures in the Renaissance and Early Modern period, an age of exploration and expansion. It will concentrate on the transformations that occur when cultural forms originally associated with the Italian city state move across borders via national states and empires to the New World and the eastern Mediterranean, to Tenochtitlan and the Ottoman Empire. We will begin by considering cartography as the European mapping of its own internally dynamic geographical space and its relation to geographies beyond its borders in the major English and Spanish cartographic projects. We will then consider both the reciprocal effects of encounters between European and non-European cultures on each other and the resulting hybrid forms expressing a range from resistance, absorption, and synthesis. Themes will include culture as forms in geographic motion, as well as issues of authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and mimicry. Emphasis will be placed on Italian English, French, and Spanish encounters with the New World and the Ottoman Empire. Examples will be drawn from the historical, literary and visual traditions, including case histories and the theory of the state and empire; lyric, epic, travel narrative, and ethnographic description; prints, drawings, architecture, and cartography. Emphasis will be placed on critical approaches and research problems as illustrated in readings from political and cultural history, literary criticism, and art history as applied so such figures as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Cervantes, Garsilaso, Thevet, Lery.
This course satisfies a requirement for the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program, but all students are welcome. Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home discipline for discussion and assignments.
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Shelly Eversley
ENGL 80100
Theory Coloquium
Tuesday 2pm-4pm (2/4 credits)
We will explore current themes and issues in literary and cultural studies via contemporary critical theory, focusing on themes such as gender, race and privacy; the role of the visual in literary studies; the sexual body; memory; culture; and intention. Some critics we will study include: Judith Butler, Jonathan Crary, Sigmund Freud, Paul Gilroy, Walter Benn Michaels, and Hortense Spillers. In addition to the readings and an in-class presentation, students will be required to write four short papers.
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N. John Hall
ENGL 84300.
The Victorian Novel
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits)
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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Tom Hayes
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Friday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94200]
One of the most important issues haunting the field of literary studies in the wake of poststructuralism is that of identity and the definition of subjectivity. Writers as various as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva have argued the autonomous subject of the humanist tradition was a utopian dream of the Enlightenment. This view of subjectivity had to be abandoned in a period that recognized the existence of an unconscious mind, the opacity of language, and the role of discursive practices in the dissemination of social power. Based on the assumption that this revision of subjectivity has had important reverberations in the field of literary studies, in this course we will explore the ways in which the new approaches to interpretation such as gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies, black studies and postcolonialism subvert previously established knowledge claims.
We will read theoretical texts such as those David H. Richter’s Falling into Theory, Eduardo Cadava’s Who Comes After the Subject, and Catherine Belsey’s Culture and the Real in conjunction with such literary works as Shakespeare’s Othello and Morrison’s Beloved.
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Peter Hitchcock
ENGL 86600
Postcolonial Theory: Core and Periphery
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm. (2/4 credits)
This course has two major aims: first, to introduce some of the key contributions to the emergence of postcolonial theory in the writings of Fanon, Cesaire, James, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha; second, to register and explore thought that both extends and deepens this rich tradition and to come to terms with contemporary theory that in some measure breaks with the founding principles of postcolonial knowledge in the work of Mbembe, Young, Djebar, Cheah, San Juan Jr., Lazarus, Hardt and Negri. The idea is to present both a survey of essential postcolonial theoretical texts and to provide some research avenues into the ways in which postcolonial analysis is being reconceptualized. In a sense, it is the limits of the core/periphery model (borrowed from world systems theory) that reveals an alternative matrix for inquiry. It is not too fanciful to suggest that postcolonial theory has been marked not by evolution but by involution, a process that finds the far away a good deal closer than traditional mapping would permit. This is the challenge of thinking postcolonial theory in relation to history and politics, but it also underlines new hermeneutic possibilities in the face of gestural "endism" (the end of history, the end of colonialism, the end of communism, etc.). How is postcolonialism defined by the fate of nation as a concept? Does postcolonialism linger because colonialism haunts? What elements of criticism define a postcolonial methodology? Do these influence other critical approaches? In literary studies can we speak of postcolonial genres? Does world literature supercede what we understand of postcolonial writing? These and other questions will set the scene for our discussions. We will also take up some specific literary examples to help ground our dialogue. A class presentation is expected and it is hoped that this will provide the groundwork for the required term paper.
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Anne Humpherys
ENGL 84500
Province, Nation, Empire in Victorian Britain
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm. (2/4 credits)
This course will trace the construction of the British nation in the nineteenth-century literature of English provincial life. We will follow the idea of nation based on provincial ideals as it is integrated into the imperial project and finally reified in literature depicting empire. Texts will be selected from poetry (i.e Tennyson, Maud, the English Idylls, especially Enoch Arden, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh); fiction (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne or The Way We Live Now; Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native; Ryder Haggard, She; Joseph Conrad, Outcast of the Islands; Rudyard Kipling, selected poems, "The Man Who Would be King" and Kim; Bram Stoker, Dracula); travel writing (Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle; David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in South Africa; Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life: Present and Past; Florence Nightengale, Letters from Egypt, 1849-1850, or Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa), as well as some theatrical productions and articles from the periodical press. On the reification of this idea of nation, texts might include E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; Jean Rys, Wide Sargasso Sea, or Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown.
Requirements: An oral report, a short paper based on the oral report, and a final paper.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 86200
Flow Charts: Adventures in Postmodern Poetics
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits)
In this seminar, we will read book-length modern and contemporary poems (some in prose) that practice the arts of flow, accretion, spill, and spread. These experiments approach logorrhea but largely avoid it through strategies of measurement and episode. Voice, however tattered and splayed, remains the lifeboat for these utopic excursions into lyric (or post-lyric) time, where ÒbookÓ behaves as storage space, as box, as tunnel, as brain, as liquid, as crystal, as diagram, as briefcase, as dump, as archive, as soap, as weather report, and as failure. Possibilities for the syllabus are Vicente Huidobros Altazor, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, Edmond Jabs’s The Book of Questions, Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, Francis Ponge’s Soap, John Wieners’s 707 Scott Street, Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Kevin Young’s Black Maria, and Myung Mi Kim’'s Dura. All these books attempt, in the words of Henri Michaux, to engage in "the constant widening of the thinkable." (Works in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish will be read in English translation, in bilingual editions if available.) Requirements: a final essay or poetic project.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 87300
Stars
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits)
"Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness--these are what make a star," writes Susan Sontag in her final novel, In America. This seminar will examine the phenomenon of screen embodiment by reading star-struck texts and by closely watching the works of several great performers. Our reading matter may include Edgar Morin's The Stars, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, James Baldwin's The Devil Finds Work, Jean-Jacques Schul's Ingrid Caven, Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, Stanley Cavell's Contesting Tears, D.W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality, Roland Barthes's "The Third Meaning," Freud's Totem and Taboo, essays by Mary Ann Doane and Patricia White, and the epic poem Phoebe 2000 (a 600-page exegesis-in-verse of All About Eve, composed collaboratively by Jeffrey Conway, Lynn Crosbie, and David Trinidad). Our roster of movie stars will begin with Setsuko Hara (in Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story) and Toshiro Mifune (in Akira Kurosawa's High and Low). We will then enjoy Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ensemble of actors, especially Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Brigitte Mira, and El Hedi ben Salem. (We will probably see AliÑFear Eats the Soul, Fear of Fear and The Merchant of Four Seasons.) Next, we will discuss Jeanne Moreau, probably in Tony RichardsonÕs Mademoiselle (screenplay by Jean Genet) and Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels. For classic Hollywood melodrama, we will watch Bette Davis (Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager) and Joan Crawford (Robert Aldrich's Autumn Leaves). We will conclude with the Marx Brothers. Students will write three essays (eight pages each), the more idiosyncratic and detailed the better, due at appropriate intervals during the semester.
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- Nancy Miller
ENGL 87500
Experimental Selves: Modernism to Transnationalism
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94156]
"I do not know how far I differ from other people," Virginia Woolf declares in "A Sketch of the Past." Woolf's perplexity summarizes the memoirist's dilemma. In this course we will explore the process of self-discovery undertaken by writers and intellectuals for whom questions of identity and difference have required experiments in form. In addition to memoirs and essays, seminar readings will include contemporary autobiography theory and criticism. Gloria Anzaldœa, Roland Barthes, Samuel Delany, Leslie Feinberg, Maxine Hong Kinsgton, Mary McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Gertrude Stein, John Wideman, Virginia Woolf.
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Rebecca Mlynarczyck
ENGL 79010
Composition Studies: Prospect and Retrospect
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits)
Beginning with Kathleen Blake Yancey's 2004 address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key," we will look back (and ahead) to examine (and anticipate) the dominant trends that have shaped composition pedagogy since 1970. In the seminar, we will investigate such competing theories in composition studies as the process movement, expressivism, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy among others. Readings will include articles in two anthologies, Landmark Essays on Writing Process (1994) and A Guide to Composition Pedagogies (2001), as well as other key texts reflecting various pedagogies and practices such as Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers, Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations, and Ira Shor's Empowering Education. Several authors of works on our reading list will visit the seminar to discuss their current work and articulate their pedagogies in response to student questions. As we examine the different approaches to composition, we will explore the following questions: What is the epistemological foundation of each of the theories? What are the values underlying the different pedagogies? How do these theories play out in actual classrooms with actual students? What are the potential benefits and pitfalls of the competing theories? Should the nature of the student population influence the choice of composition pedagogy? How can each of these pedagogical theories be adapted for use in twenty-first century classrooms? Blackboard will be used to facilitate discussion between class sessions. Each week students will be expected to post their responses to readings at least 3 days before the weekly seminar. They will then be asked to read through the responses of their classmates and respond on the BB discussion board. Before class, students will print out a comment that raises an important question, and these questions will become the basis for discussion in the seminar. The final project will be shaped by studentsÕ needs and interests but may take the form of a reflective essay that closely examines and critiques one of the pedagogies studied.
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- Blanford Parker
ENGL 83500
Modes of Restoration in Literature
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits)
In the period of reconciliation following the greatest crisis in British history, what were the reparable and irreparable riffs between the major ideologies (Protestant, Monarchist nationalist, Enlightened, and the cult of sentiment)? With the examples of Milton and Bunyan we consider radical Protestant narrative and the difficulties of Biblical mythology in the age of Charles II. Dryden, Butler, and Rochester show a variety of strategies, which range from Monarchist typlogies to Enlightened skepticism. The course will also consider the origins of the rhetoric of modern science in Cowley and Sprat and the uses of science for established and radical interests. We will conclude with a close consideration of a selection of Behn's narratives and the origins of sentimental fiction.
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David S. Reynolds
ENGL 75000
Colonial and Early Federal American Literature
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits)
This course covers the formative phase of American literature, from early writings of exploration through Puritanism to the American Enlightenment. Among the topics considered are encounters between European settlers and ethnic "others"; the culture and aesthetics of Puritanism; the evolution of American religion; African Americans and slavery; women's writings; shifting definitions of America; literary self-fashioning in journals and autobiographies; revolutionary writings that fueled separation from England; and the rise of American poetry and fiction. We examine the entire range of early American writings, canonical and noncanonical, with full ethnic and gender representation. Active participation in class discussion is encouraged. A 15-page term paper is required.
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Joan Richardson
ENGL 85000
American Aesthetics: Notes on the Mind, Angels and the Jameses
Thursday 11:45pm-1:45pm (2/4 credits)
American literary experience began, and in many cases continues to be practiced today, as a variety of religious experience. Beginning with selections from Jonathan Edwards's Religious Affections and "Notes on the Mind," following his stated method of "giving attention to the mind in thinking," we will investigate the ways in which the desire of Puritan ministers "to make the invisible visible" becomes the method of William James's Principles of Psychology, the subject of The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the art of Henry James's fiction, using The Ambassadors as an exemplary instance. We will at the same time consider these texts in the light of current work in cognitive science, neuroscience, consciousness studies, and neuro-aesthetics that they prefigure: the research and findings of Andy Clark, Francis Crick and Kristof Koch, Gerald Edeman, and Semir Zeki, for example. In tracing this trajectory we will take account of the important contributions made by the work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Jameses' thinking about thinking and to the naturalization of religious affections. Readings will, therefore, include- in addition to what has been indicated above, which will constitute our primary texts- significant selections from Swedenborg and Emerson as well as from Henry James Sr.'s The Secret of Swedenborg. Our discussions will, of course, also take account of 18th and 19th developments in natural history/science and of Emerson's and William James's familiarity with sacred texts of the East.
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Michael Sargent
ENGL 70500
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits)
In this course, we will use a variety of approaches to unpack The Canterbury Tales as a collection. We will consider such issues as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction of the authority of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts, the base-texts of all modern editions, the modernist and postmodern treatments of the place of The Canterbury Tales within the tradition of frame-tale collections of narratives, and of the "shape", "end" and "purpose" of Chaucer's magnum opus, and the postmodern discussion of the fifteenth-century construction of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Father of English Poetry, by his scribes and readers. Our text will be The Canterbury Tales itself/themselves, as well as sections of others of Chaucer's poems, and the works of his contemporaries, that reflect upon The Canterbury Tales - or are reflected by it. We will also be looking at facsimiles of some of the original manuscripts of these works. Although everyone taking this course will probably have read some part of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English at some point in the past, we will begin with at least a brief discussion of Chaucer's language. The course will also include work in late Middle English vernacular paleography and codicology (the amount will depend on the interest of the individual students). Students will each prepare a seminar presentation and a research paper. Text: The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edition. Eds. Larry D. Benson, et at. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
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Ira Shor
ENGL 89010
Literacy and Conquests: Guns, Germs and Texts
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [96235]
Description: In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-prize study of why Europe conquered the world, writing and texts share the stage with the three weighty items named in the title. In fact, this immensely popular book calls writing "possibly the most important single invention of the last few thousand years."(p. 30) Given the influence of Diamond's arguments, his remarks on texts invite further reflection on how writing and books enable power relations. Certainly, we can speculate that without textual tools, Europe's conquest of every continent may not have happened or have been so hugely successful. Without the weapon of writing, European societies may not have amassed such vast wealth from world domination. However, textuality does not confer uniform or universal powers. Its effect is conditional. For example, the Cherokees' extraordinary invention of their own literate system, a unique syllabary used to publish books and newspapers in their tongue, did not save them from the Trail of Tears in 1837, their turn in an American Holocaust visited generally on Indian tribes. Elsewhere, a century later, the intense textuality of European Jews prior to World War II did not save them from the ovens of the German Holocaust. What conditions, then, make textuality consequential in the social relations of power? Further complicating the matter, while Diamond establishes the crucial role of writing and book-learning for European conquest, these same tools have been represented as instruments of liberation in diverse settings, as potent means to resist conquest. Antonio Gramsci designated "the desertion of the intelligentsia" from the status quo as a turning point in revolution. Michel Foucault identified "disqualified discourses" and "subjugated knowledges" as crucial resources for scholars to circulate in questioning authorities. Paulo Freire developed an adult literacy process which enfranchised peasants and workers in Brazil, making him the target for repression in the Washington-supported coup of April, 1964. At that same time, Ivan Illich called for informal learning networks to deschool society. In antebelleum America, the South made it illegal to teach reading and writing to slaves, so fearful were plantation barons of these implements. While literacy campaigns typically accompany revolutions in modern times, literacy crises typically attend hegemonic campaigns from the Right. In contradictory ways, then, writing and texts have simultaneously been sites and instruments of domination as well as resistance. These diverging and conditional roles of textuality will preoccupy this seminar. Once carefully restricted to a royalist elite of scribes and scholars, writing and book-learning have been in mass circulation for only two centuries, with high stakes for all classes, races, and genders. Consider the ongoing efforts of the Chinese Government, Google and Microsoft to censor the emerging Internet in China and the high stakes of textuality become plain. In this course, we will explore the politics of writing and texts across groups, times, places, and conditions, reading Foucault, Bourdieau, Gramsci, Scholes, Ohmann, Graff, Lankshear, Pratt and others for background.
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Alan Vardy
ENGL 74000
Romantic Poetry
Monday 4:15-6:15pm. (2/4 credits) [94169]
The Romantic period is marked by a complex generational divide. This seminar will consider the career and influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, radical pamphleteer and convinced Unitarian turned Tory sage, through the eyes of two very different poets in the succeeding generation: Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Clare. Shelley's relationship with Coleridge is particularly complex, encompassing political, aesthetic and religious disputes. We will spend time considering Shelley's efforts to create a secular sublime, and his radicalism in an age of political reaction-a milieu given intellectual legitimacy by Coleridge's social prose. We will also read Byron's "Manfred" as a supplemental text in this section. The course will finally turn to John Clare, on the surface a writer who has little to do with Coleridge given the dramatic disparity in their class status (Clare was a landless agricultural laborer turned "natural genius"). However, Coleridge's famous critique of Wordsworth in his Biographia Literaria established the contemporary terms for the aesthetic value of "rustics." In fighting against confining, imposed definitions Clare produced a critique of the first generation Romantic poetics of Coleridge and Wordsworth. We will discuss the dynamics of canon formation in relation to Clare. The course will be divided into three sections: Coleridge, Shelley, Clare. The grade will be determined by frequent short papers and a research paper of 15-20 pages. Depending on the size of the seminar, we will hold a "conference panel" in which research will be presented.
REQUIRED TEXTS Clare, John I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Coleridge, S.T. Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton), Shelley, Percy Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton) and any edition of Byron's "Manfred"
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Michelle Wallace
ENGL 85000
Zora Neale Hurston in her Times
Tuesday 2pm-4pm (2/4 credits)
This course will look at the traditions of African American literature, folklore and music and, in particular, their impact on the ethnographic and literary production of the great black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston. Her works provide an ideal opportunity for salvaging the largely unrecovered, often inscrutable, and too frequently neglected cultural and philosophical traditions that are the legacy of the African American population's passage through slavery and segregation in the South. As an exemplary native-born Modernist, Hurston's approach to the black condition and black folklore was always celebratory. Nevertheless, since she was always signifying, her work can also be used to provide a first-rate map guiding us nimbly through a range of perspectives on the black experience. Through reading a selection of her writings, autobiographical, ethnographic and fictional, we will reconstruct her path, supplementing her observations with substantial infusions from other collections of, and observations about the folk tradition, including the efforts of prior folklorists and novelists, including Joel Chandler Harris, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt.
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Gordon Whatley
ENGL 70300
Introduction to old English Language and Literature
Friday 2-4pm (2/4 credits)
"Old English" (OE) constitutes the first documented phase of the English language (ca. 700-1150), and OE literature, preserved in manuscripts of the 9th-12th centuries, is the most plentiful and diverse of the surviving vernacular literatures of early Europe. While some knowledge of OE is fundamental to understanding (or teaching) the History of the English Language, as well as for serious work in all Middle English and Scots literature, OE is of abiding interest in itself. The language at first glance looks "foreign" but motivated students routinely succeed in acquiring a reading knowledge in a 14-week course such as this one. After a few weeks of elementary grammar and short translation exercises, the focus shifts to reading more extensive passages of secular and religious prose in OE and translation, including the legend of an early Christian "cross-dresser," Saint Eugenia. Also to be studied are some classic pieces from the surviving manuscripts of poetry (Dream of the Rood, Judith, Wanderer or Seafarer, Genesis B, The Wife's Lament, riddles, etc.). In addition to working on the weekly texts, students will occasionally report briefly on criticism and/or theorizings of the readings (with some attention to the development of Anglo-Saxon studies, "philology," "English," and the Academy). Also required is a modest paper (12-15 pp) on any text or topic in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. A "Blackboard" website will be used for posting handouts and sharing materials; elsewhere on the Web there are excellent sites to help with learning the language and researching the literature and culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Contact me with any queries, and please register early if you want to take the course: E.Whatley@QC.cuny.edu.
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Under ASCP
Ammiel Alcalay
Introduction to American Studies
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm
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 shaman, geographer, anthropologist, historian, biographer, novelist, poet, etc.). These defining moments include crucial periods of narrative consolidation and reinterpretation: indigenous creation stories; King Philip's War and Indian Removal; the Civil War and the abolitionist movement; the Cold War and beat culture; the American War in Vietnam and decolonization; and U.S. involvement in the Middle East in the context of identity politics. We will look at the circumstances through which uniquely American forms emerge (such as the Indian captivity tale or jazz), 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, reinscribed, or obscured in new versions of history and identity. A major concern will be the differences between institutionalized forms of knowledge and a poetics of experience that engages history and culture outside traditional "disciplinary" categories. Throughout, we will place ourselves in regional frameworks whose scope is international; for example, how can early forms of American identity be seen as the result of the competing forces of French, Spanish, and Anglo colonizing practices and projections? How does the creation of racial categories obscure class allegiances and economic imperatives? How is identity performed in the historical conditions of individual, communal, and national memory transmission? What is the process of cultural consumption through which utopian forms of creative consciousness become politically neutralized? These and other questions will be explored through a diverse range of sources, using materials from different strata of scholarly and creative work.
Although an introductory course, we will structure the semester around intensive reading; while the class will read a set of common texts, students will be asked to pursue further readings in selected areas of research. A detailed bibliography will be sent out to registered and interested students sometime in June. The aim of this structure will be to allow students to consider, even at early stages of their graduate work, taking up research topics within the rich terrain of explored and unexplored possibilities that exist in American Studies. Required work for the course can take different forms for different students; some may want to embark upon an original research project in an area of interest, while others may want to read as much as possible across a wider range of topics. In one case, a series of seemingly disparate notes might lead to a dissertation topic; in another, research on a historical period or subject that involves unearthing obscured or difficult to get at sources may spark interest in pursuing very different areas of scholarship than one might have thought when beginning graduate work. In this sense, the course is envisioned more as a workshop of ideas and research approaches than a survey. Inquiries can be directed to Ammiel Alcalay: aaka@earthlink.net
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Under IDS
Jane Marcus and Sandi Cooper
History IDS
World War I and Modernist Culture
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm
Beginning with a review of current historical scholarship analyzing World War I from all aspects - political, military, socio-economic, psychological, cultural - we will then explore specific texts that address the formation of modernist consciousness, the effect of the change of warfare into an anti-civilian activity and the impact of the war on literary and cultural production. If World War I was the beginning of the Thirty Years' War of the 20th century - a growing commonplace among historians - then what is the permanent role of the war narrative in contemporary culture? The importance of the global memory of the war in fiction, memoir and historical writing will address this question. Email: jcmarcus@earthlink.net
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Under IDS
Janet Ng Dudley, Prof. Kate Crehan
Gender in Contemporary China: Lives and Literary Visions
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm
Increasingly, the 21st Century is claimed to be China's century as China expands its global economic and political influence. However, China's rapid economic change is linked to immense stress on its existing fabric of life, from physical infrastructure, to the environment and to human relationships. This interdisciplinary course examines change in China over recent decades from a feminist perspective. It begins with a mapping of state discourse and practice on gender issues, going on to examine the lived experience of individuals, families and various minority groups. Throughout the course we continually move between literary imaginings and anthropological case studies. Our explorations of gender discourse and practice focus on key tensions within the society, especially those between the state and the individual, the family and the individual, as well as those between the state's global ambitions and local social realities.
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