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alphabetical by instructor
This course will be framed by political and cultural events: on one end, by the almost total socialization of experience following the end of the American war in Indochina , and, on the other, by the aftermath of World War II and its effects on categorizations of disciplinary knowledge in the Cold War. Within this framework, we will look at the exploratory and radical culture of American writers whose impact on this period was pervasive. In particular, we will filter much of our reading through the thought and work of Charles Olson, However, rather than make this an “Olson” course, we will explore Olson’s work as an intersecting point through which we can explore paths taken or not taken by American society as a whole. Significant areas to be looked at will include segments of the Black Arts Movement, the writing of American veterans of the war in Vietnam, and cultural movements and clusters from the West Coast. Throughout, we will consider questions of subjectivity and experience, and their place within socializing processes, particularly disciplinary/educational structures and national narratives. Students enrolling in the course will get a more detailed syllabus and reading list. For further information, please write to Ammiel Alcalay at: aaka@earthlink.net
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- Meena Alexander
ENGL 87200
Poetics of Dislocation
2/4 credits. T 2:00-4:00pm. [CRN: 90485]
The complex interconnection of poetry and place is what we will consider – how poems evoke place, how identity is bound up with places and how the loss of place can allow for a poetics of dislocation. What happens to identity when the symbolic space of the poem opens up thresholds, in between spaces, perilious disjunctions between places? Through poem cycles and long poems we will explore how poetic language is used to evoke a migratory, diasporic existence, how gender and sexuality are refracted, how traumatic loss, whether of place or language works its way through poetry. We will explore the work of poets of our own time such as Agha Shahid Ali, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo , Myung Mi Kim, Li-Young Lee , Nathaniel Mackey and A.K.Ramanujan. We will read Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose journals; William Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and his Poems on the Naming of Places, as well as Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) a long poem that draws on the The Prelude. We will also read essays by the poets, where these are to be found as well as the work of postcolonial and other theorists – including Appadurai, Agamben, Bauman, Benjamin, Bhabha, Glissant, Merleau-Ponty, Soja . The course will be run as a seminar with weekly presentations on poetry and poetics, one mid term paper and one final research paper.
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- ENGL 84300
Felicia Bonaparte
The Fiction of the Bronte Sisters: A Community of Art”
2/4 credits. F 11:45-1:45pm.
[CRN: 90486]
The last few decades have seen an avalanche of writings on the Bronte sisters, much of it focused on their lives, on their histories, their characters, and their sense of their own place as women in the Victorian world. Much of their fiction has been considered as reflective of these questions.
This course will be concerned with their art and primarily their novels. Focusing on what Umberto Eco calls the intentio operas, the intention of the work, we will hope—by examining their language, structures, frames, and plots, their characters and characterizations, their images and intertextual importations of other works, and above all the ideas, those discussed and those implied, that make the conceptual worlds of their novels—to allow their works to tell us what it is they intend to say.
Our primary readings will consist of: Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Emily Bronte's WutheringHeights; and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Shirley, The Professor, Villette.
Course requirements will consist of a final critical paper on a topic to be agreed on.
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- ENGL 84000
Rachel Brownstein
The Progress of Romance
2/4 credits. T 4:15-6:15pm. [CRN: 90487]
Frequently set up as a foil to a truer, more modern, gritty and historical story, the idea of romance is arguably intrinsic to narrative “realism.” Self-consciously more sophisticated novels rely on deploying, more and less ironically, the elements and tropes of romance that readers will recognize. (And ironically, novels are read, in retrospect, as romances.) In this course we think again about the continuing presence of romance in fiction, and its debatable progress since the eighteenth century, giving special attention to passive protagonists for whom fate is character. We will begin with The Progress of Romance (1785), a work of literary criticism in the form of a philosophical conversation by the novelist Clara Reeve, looking briefly at a few examples of what she means by “romance.” Then we will go on to Northanger Abbey, Waverley, Byron’s Don Juan, MansfieldPark, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (and Henry James’s “conversation” about that novel). The last book on the syllabus is Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan’s “Jane Austen novel.”
Students will make at least one class presentation and write two essays as well as weekly brief “response” papers.
You would do well to read Daniel Deronda during the summer.
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- ENGL 80700
Glenn Burger
Performing Conjugality: The Medieval Heterosexual Marriage Debate
2/4 credits. W 2:00-4:00pm. [CRN: 90514]
From the twelth to the sixteenth century the married estate underwent a profound revaluation. The emphasis on marriage as a sacrament whose core was the consent of its two participants, and the conferring on this conjugal union of much of the signifying power previously reserved for friendship between two men, worked to elevate the lay married estate to a level on par with or even superior to that of the celibate clergy. The newly gendered and sexualized identities of self-controlled husband and good wife, conjoined in one flesh through sacrament and marital affection, not only founded a new household unit but also, to the extent that they showed how such marital relations could act as a systematic guide to a virtuous life, provided a model for civic society dramatically different from previous aristocratic or clerical ones. If by the Early Modern period, these changes had effectively ushered in a new sex/gender system—what we have come to know as modern heterosexuality—by selecting and controlling what and how marriage signified, the late medieval period’s engagement with conjugality remained much more open-ended and conflicted.
This course will consider some of the ways that attempts to represent late medieval conjugality as something “good to think with,” and thus useful in defining and authorizing selfhood for newly emergent groups in that culture, might also mark a certain experimentation with the real that is frequently difficult to align with traditionally normative clerical or chivalric gender roles organized around virginity or noble bloodline. We will begin by considering the legal, theological, and political discourses producing this new emphasis on the value of the married estate in relation to Chretien de Troyes’ romance Eric et Enide. We will consider the variety of conduct literature that developed to regulate and define this new gender system, particularly the wealth of literature related to “the good wife,” her carefully husbanded femininity, and the productive bourgeois household such conjugality makes possible. Here we will consider such works as Le Menagier de Paris and The Knight of La Tour Landry. In particular, we will focus on the enormously popular story of the absolutely patient wife, Griselda, as it travels across Europe. In addition to an important French play version of Griselda, we will consider the English Corpus Christi cycle plays’ depictions of Noah and his Wife, as well as Mary and Joseph. We will conclude with Early Modern assimilations of conjugality within an increasingly patriarchal and heterosexual social system, notably in an early seventeenth century play of Griselda as well as in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.
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The encounters aimed for in this course start from the premise that often the more peculiar confrontations we have in reading and viewing are the most gripping and memorable. The material will include some of the more obvious of these, such as the authors Henry Green, Ronald Firbank, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Antonin Artaud. It will also touch on some lesser-known eccentric writing and painting women, such as Suzanne Valadon, Judith Gautier, Carrington, Emily Carr, and Claude Cahun, as well as some of the more far-out artists such as Martin Ramirez, Adolf Woolfli, and Henry Darger – labeled as “outsider artists…”. It will investigate the strange sides of Hopkins, Ruskin, Vita Sackville-West, and others – to be to some extent determined by the interests of the participants in the experience of the course. To what extent does genius intersect with paranoia, with oddity, with downright madness? What about the boredom factor? How does extreme art break down into the everyday, and what systems have been employed to forestall that? One shorter paper, and one longer, as well as class presentations.
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This course will examine the flowering of Italian cinema after World War II and its transformation in the 1960s by focusing on the best work of five leading directors, Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, and Fellini. It will explore the historical, social, and theoretical roots of Neorealism and the different ways each of these directors participated in this movement and were in turn influenced by it. The course will begin with documentary-style films they made within the ambit of Neorealism, such as Rossellini’s Rome - Open City and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and then show some of the directions they took in their later work, which focused less on the harsh lives of the poor and more on the malaise of the middle class, and was often more personal, more psychological, more historical, more operatic, or more theatrical. There will be readings by theorists of Neorealism, such as Zavattini and Lizzani, and by sympathetic critics in other countries, including André Bazin and James Agee. The course will conclude by exploring the work of important younger directors who first emerged in the 1960s, including Pasolini, Olmi, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, and Scola.
Course requirements: Students will be expected to see the film(s) to be discussed between classes, to deliver an oral report, and to research and submit a term paper.
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Born in the same year as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe had achieved greater prominence than Shakespeare in the London theater world of the early 1590s with innovative plays like Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta. Before his mysterious death in 1593 at the age of 29, he had produced such brilliant and influential works as Dr. Faustus and Hero and Leander.
In this course we will read the plays and poems of Marlowe alongside those of Shakespeare. Although Marlowe and Shakespeare were clearly aware of and responsive to each other’s work, we will not place too much emphasis on matters of direct influence and rivalry. Instead, we will consider the complex convergences and divergences in their use of the theatrical and cultural resources available to them. We will examine Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s treatment of topics such as heroism; self-fashioning; imperialism and nationalism; violence and war; monarchy; gender ideology; homoeroticism; pastoral; racial difference; orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the religious and social realms. We will also examine Marlowe’s confrontation with classical authors (Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Musaeus) and with contemporary authors such as Spenser, Greene, and Kyd.
The organization of the course will avoid some of the more familiar Marlowe-Shakespeare connections (e.g., The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice) in favor of positing more oblique or subtle cross-fertilizations (such as between The Jew of Malta and Titus Andronicus). We will read all of Marlowe’s plays as well as his poem Hero and Leander and his translations of Ovid’s Amores and Lucan’s Civil Wars. Works of Shakespeare will include Titus Andronicus, 2 Henry VI, Richard III, Sonnets, and Venus and Adonis. Requirements will include a class presentation, a few short papers, and one longer paper.
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From the beginning, critics have instinctively considered Modernism to be an urban movement, a revolt against the provincialism of “the village”—but what are we to make of William Faulkner? Accepted as an oxymoronic rural modernist even in his own time, Faulkner represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overlooked role that regional literature, particularly Southern literature, played in the formation of American modernism. This course will examine a sampling of Faulkner’s novels, as well as novels by several other mid-twentieth-century writers from the American South, focusing on the ways in which they made a seemingly urban and European movement flourish on underdeveloped American soil. In so doing, we will also consider the simultaneously increasing interest in Southern culture throughout the United States during this period, possibly from the standpoints of both postcolonial studies and ethnic studies.
Course Requirements: Two presentations, a bibliography, and a final paper presenting original scholarship on a text or texts from the middle third of the twentieth century that either emerged from or treated the American South.
Tentative Booklist
William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940), in Novels, 1936-1940 [Library of America]
Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925) [Harvest/HBJ]
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) [Norton Critical Edition]
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) [Scribner]
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in Novels, 1936-1940
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) [FSG]
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932), in Novels, 1930-1935 [Library of America]
Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) [HarperCollins—currently out of print but widely available]
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1942), in Novels, 1942-1954 [Library of America]
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding (1946) [Harcourt]
William Faulkner, The Wild Palms [aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939), in Novels, 1936-1940
(It is recommended that, for the Faulkner novels, students purchase the relevant volumes of the Library of America set. Failing that, they should make sure that they purchase the corrected texts for the assigned novels that Vintage has issued in the wake of these volumes.)
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This is a cross-disciplinary course that investigates how the ideal of privacy and its artistic representation in the early modern period can be understood in relation to early modern material culture. The core theme of the course will be the historical differentiation between public and private realms and their material embodiment in interior architectural spaces, mostly domestic. The course will be a combination of social and material history, architectural history, visual representation, and literature. The course will be structured as follows: theory and methodology of investigating early modern material culture, including works by art historians, historians, and literary scholars; the emergence of privacy as a practice and ideal from the perspective of cultural and material history; the embodiment of the ideal of privacy in the new architecture and interior design of the period (readings will include primary sources—Alberti, Serlio, Wotton-- as well current scholarship on early modern architecture); visual (Italian and Dutch painting and prints) and literary (English, Italian, French) representation of private spaces.
Assignments will include an oral report and term project, either a paper or annotated bibliography. Because this is an interdisciplinary course with students from a variety of disciplines, students can work on topics related to their home discipline.
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Everyone agrees that there is no single "Victorian" era, that word is merely a useful way of indicating Victoria's long reign, 1837 to 1901, a stretch of time easily segmented into as many as five or more different "periods." What is here called "High Victorianism" is often thought of in terms of two decades, the 1850s and 1860s. The first has been referred to as "Victoria's Heyday"; the second (no longer the Queen's golden years because her adored Prince Albert had died) is sometimes likened to the 1960s, the time in which "the old order changeth"--or at least started to change. The plan is to immerse ourselves (through short samplings) in the work of the most influential writers and artists of the period. Overarching themes include: Vaunted British pride and its critics (with consideration given to the Great Exhibition of 1851, Florence Nightingale, the Governor Eyre case; the reform movement and the Second Reform Bill, the Victorian "cultural wars"). Religious doubt, the impact of science (with Darwin's On the Origin of Species, 1859 at the center). The "woman question," her role, her "disabilities." "Asceticism" and "art for art's sake," incipient "decadence."
We shall also devote time to artistic developments in painting (the Pre-Raphaelites), in "steel engraving" and "wood engraving" (chiefly in connection with book illustration), and the rise of photography (Julia Cameron).
One session will be held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, where we will be treated to a private showing of first editions of the books discussed in class, and where we shall also examine Victorian publishing practices.
With so much to cover, this seminar will be somewhat survey-like and will move quickly through various high points of the period, via often anthologized excerpts provided in photocopy. Only Strachey's Queen Victoria and Gosse's Father and Son (relatively short works) will be read in their entirety. Of course students may wish to devour on their own and according to taste the full text of various works excerpted here.
There will be one oral report, one paper
READINGS: Except for Strachey, Gosse, and Darwin (see below), these will be supplied gratis in photocopy; however, students are encouraged to supply themselves with anthologies and collections of Victorian prose and poetry.
Society and Its Critics
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Excerpts from "Southey's Colloquies" and "Lord Bacon"
Carlyle, Thomas. "Democracy," Chap XIII from Book III of Past and Present]; Part I of "Shooting Niaraga: And After?"
Thackeray "Continental Snobbery" from The Book of Snobs
Mayhew, Henry. Selections from London Labour and London Poor
Ruskin, John. "The Nature of Gothic" from The Stones of Venice; "The Roots of Honor" (Essay I of Unto this Last)
Mill, J.S. "On Liberty of Thought and Discussion." (Chapter II of On Liberty; selections tba from the final chapter (VII) "General View of the Remainder of My Life" from Autobiography
Dickens, Charles. "Podsnappery," Chapter XI of Our Mutual Friend; "The One Thing Needful" Chapter I of Hard Times; "In Chancery," Chapter I of Bleak House; "Containing the Whole Science of Government" [The Circumlocution Office], Chapter X of Little Dorrit
Trollope, Anthony. "Mount Olympus" and "Tom Towers, Dr. Anticant, and Mr. Sentiment," Chapters XIV and XV, of The Warden
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, excerpts tba.
Religion, Science, the Drift toward Unbelief
Tennyson "In Memoriam"
Browning Bishop Blougram's Apology"
Newman, J. H. excerpts from Apologia Pro Vita Sua--tba
Butler, Samuel. "The Musical Banks" Chapter xv from Erewhon
Eliot, George. "A variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet," Chapter I, Book Fourth,of The Mill on the Floss
Gosse, Edmund. Father and Son [Penguin]. The short autobiography of a boy brought up in the 1850s and 1860s by his scientist father, a religious fanatic and opponent of Lyell and Darwin.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Selections. The book went through many editions with countless changes in Darwin's lifetime. The chapters on "The Struggle for Existence" "Natural Selection" and "Recapitulation and Conclusion" are perhaps most important. Our discussions will be supplemented with very short excerpts of O. modern Darwinians--E. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and George Levine. Students are encouraged to obtain the updated Norton Critical Darwin.
Women and Society
Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House, selections (very few), tba
Bronte, Charlotte. Selections from her Letters, tba
Eliot, George. "Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft." Also, we will consider some aspects of George Eliot's life.
Nightingale, Florence. "Cassandra"; cf. Lytton Strachey, Florence Nightingale Chapter in Eminent Victorians
Mill, John Stuart. Chapter I of The Subjection of Women
Rossetti, Christina. "Goblin Market"
Ruskin "Of Queens' Gardens" Lecture II of Sesame and Lilies
"Paganism," Sensuality, and Art for Art's Sake
FitzGerald, Edward. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Swinburne, C A. from Poems and Ballads, "Anactoria," "Dolores", "Hymn to Proserpine," "Faustine," "The Garden of Proserpine"
Pater, Walter, "Conclusion" to Renaissance Studies.
We shall see screenings of Pre-Raphaelite painting, Victorian book illustration, and Julia Cameron's photographs.
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This course will consider three intersecting yet specific paradigms of border crossing in the current world system. Transnationalism is conventionally held to express the necessary supra-national agendas of the TNC, the trans-national corporation, an institutional cornerstone of capitalist globalization with a notable history within colonialism and imperialism, from the British East India Company to Halliburton. Postcolonialism announces and investigates a break with this history, yet it is clear that the logic of such globalization is not easily sublated. On one level, the course will investigate whether transnationalism can be creatively reaccentuated by postcolonialism without simply extending the former’s otherwise questionable genealogy within the longue durée of subjugation. The bulk of the course, however, will be dedicated to examining these political and theoretical symptoms in relation to the re-emergence of a global paradigm in literary study. World literature is much more than a comparatist’s nostalgia for Goethe’s famous pronouncement. In the current conjunction it offers to go beyond multiculturalism’s model of accretion and postcolonialism’s emphasis on imperial legacies and delinking from the same. Indeed, compared to the transnationalism of global capital, world literature appears studiously neutral and promises global circulation without all of that nasty extra-literary activity. Clearly, world literature is a much more contestable concept and practice. By discussing in detail the possibilities of its epistemological framework we will not only come to terms with its contemporary profile but also give new meaning to the other linked concepts. Thus, the course will not only serve as an introduction to three powerful examples of border crossing but also demonstrate the critical prescience of their imbrication.
Readings will be drawn from Goethe, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Said, Spivak among others. In the spirit of proposing postcolonial writing as world literature we will also explore some case studies, including works by Ngugi, el Saadawi, Djebar, Iweala, Ali, Farah, Condé, and Adichie.
Course requirements will include a class presentation and a term essay.
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This course will survey the English novel in the nineteenth-century from Jane Austen to Bram Stoker with attention to the manner in which the marginalized presence of the colonies and the empire shape the novels’ plots and themes. Novels will be selected from the following: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847); William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853) and Cousin Phillis (1865); Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862); Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868); George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872); Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875); H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885); Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
Requirements: An oral report, several short papers (4-6 pages), one of which can be derived from the oral report, and one of which can be expanded into a final paper.
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The course will explore a number of spirals represented in and formational to literature, visual art and philosophy across the twentieth century. By tracing various spiral movements (up and down, in and out and around) we will consider from a new vantage point such familiar questions as the spatio-temporal dimensions of modernism and postmodernism; historical teleology and cyclicality; perception, visibility and the body; and above or below all, emergent conceptions of globalization.
After a brief introduction setting out the history of spirals from Archimedes and Dante to Decartes, Hegel, and Flaubert, central figures to be discussed in the course include Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Beckett, Nabokov, Pynchon and Sebald; Boccioni, Tatlin, Corbusier, Duchamp, Hitchcock, Hesse, and Serra; and Bergson, Benjamin, Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida and Agamben. Requirements include one oral presentation and a final research paper of 6000-7500 words.
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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) theoretical approaches.
Requirements: Students will make several brief in-class presentations and complete a final project that takes up textual, archival/bibliographical, historical/institutional, and/or theoretical questions. A significant aspect of the course will be a student's sequential work toward that final project.
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This seminar will investigate a few crucial poets whose fracturings and extensions of the line gave liberties to verse and spawned full-blown philosophies of composition and experience. We will concentrate on Emily Dickinson’s quatrains, Stéphane Mallarmé’s balletic essays, Marianne Moore’s syllabics, Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic measures (especially his Cantos), Paul Celan’s compacted fragments, and Frank O’Hara’s improvisations. We might also read Gertrude Stein’s plays, Langston Hughes’s blues emulations, José Lezama Lima’s baroque indirections, and Hart Crane’s crisis-conscious lyrics. The course could well be titled “Crisis of Verse,” after Mallarmé’s essay, in which he observed that the Author was dead. (See also Dickinson’s “Crisis is a Hair / Toward which the forces creep...” Indeed, crisis will be our theme; for traversals of this topic, we may turn to poems by Georg Trakl and Ingeborg Bachmann.) To complete our study of stammering and ellipsis, we may see two films: probably Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kasper Hauser and Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. We aim to intensify the acuteness of our listening to the spasms, interruptions, and leaps of patterned, self-aware language. (Works in French, German, and Spanish will be read, in English translations, with close reference to the originals.) Requirement: a final essay, which you may treat as an experiment in prose poetics, involving stylistic deviations, extravagances, and constraints.
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The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) inspired a huge outpouring of
poetry and prose internationally as well as throughout Europe. Using
Valentine Cunningham's Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse and
The Spanish Front, the seminar will study English poetry and
translations of the international poets who fought and wrote against
fascism. W.H. Auden's poem "Spain" and his subsequent rejection of
it will be examined, as well as Nancy Cunard's "Authors take Sides
on the Spanish Civil War" (Published in the Left Review). Writers
include Auden, Spender, John Cornford, Sylvia Townsend Warner,
Valentine Acland, George Barker, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes,
Manuel Altolaguirre . As a project in Cultural Studies, the class
will study issues of gender, race and class in a war in which women
fought on the battlefield and the "Moors" were used by Franco's
troops. Competing historical narratives showing the roles played by
communists, anarchists, the church, etc., will be examined. The
immense output of posters and photographs and brilliant journalism,
as well as stunning bouts of propaganda, will give us a large
component of the course to be spent on the visual discourses of the
war.
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By 1910, foreign-born immigrants accounted for one third of the US
population, and by 1920, approximately one half of the nation’s
population was first- or second-generation immigrant. In addition, the
Great Migration of the early twentieth-century entailed the relocation
of as many as 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the
North. Cultural responses to these demographic changes can be found
everywhere in the texts of the era: in the racial pseudoscience of
writers such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, in the popular
fiction of mass circulation magazines, and in the literature of
Greenwich Village bohemians and avant gardists, Lower East Side
radicals, Harlem Renaissance writers, and mainstream modernists. In
this course, we will read examples of American modernism (Fitzgerald,
Larsen, Yezierska, Hemingway, etc.) in conjunction with key statements
on race and ethnicity (Stoddard, Grant, Boas, Locke). We will also
trace out constructions of race in the popular imagination by working closely with the Saturday Evening Post. A class presentation and term
paper are required.
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Contemporary memoir and first-person novels about ethnic identity tend to follow the lines of a familiar autobiographical plot: the story of becoming American. This course will examine the ways in which problems of self-reinvention and cultural translation inflect literary forms—and how questions of language, memory, gender and place shape these narratives of longing and belonging. From assimilation narrative to diasporic experiment, writers of ethnic literature negotiate with the myth of the American “success story” and document the pressures of representing an “I” that is also a “we.” The seminar will consider interethnic affinities and differences among Jewish American, Asian American, and Latino/Latina American authors of fiction and nonfiction.
Readings include works by: Alvarez, Anzaldúa, Antin, Fitzgerald, Jen, Kingston, Lee, Paley, Rodriguez, Roth, Wong, Yamamoto.
Seminar presentation and term paper.
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TBA
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In this seminar we will push beyond the now standard assumption that race, gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive social constructions and toward a more historically grounded understanding of the ways in which competing versions of black masculinity have been manipulated within American culture. In particular, seminar participants will be encouraged to explore the history of the black male image within film and other popular media. The idea is not simply to detail the ways that film and television have been used to denigrate black persons but instead to look as closely as possible at the ways that media images actually teach and enforce particular methods of seeing black men, methods that change over time and that have vexed relationships with concurrent changes in basic socioeconomic structures. Thus we will focus less on how media images obscure the reality of black male existence and more on how this so-called reality is produced–at least in part–by these same images. Each week a student or students will be responsible for preparing class presentations based on the week’s readings. They will read these in class. The rest of the class will then be asked to critique and generally to build upon this work. These in-class presentations can be the bases for the longer essays that will be turned into the instructor at the end of the semester.
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This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American literature and culture. Participants in the seminar will be asked consistently to wrestle with the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism. In relation to this question we will read a number of authors who seriously challenge our ability to utilize race as a critical category. We will also, however, be equally concerned with understanding how one might best define what has come to be known as the Black American literary tradition. Thus, the students who will be best served by this course are those who possess at least a basic knowledge of both nineteenth and twentieth century Black American writing. Questions of "black" corporeality, gender and sexuality will figure prominently in the course. In particular, participants will be asked to think through the manner in which developments in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies impact African American literary and cultural critique. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Authors whom we will examine include, among others: Paul Gilroy, Brent Edwards, Hazel Carby, Robert Reid-Pharr, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, Philip Brian Harper, Maurice Wallace, and Anthony Appiah.
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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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Using Perry Miller’s 1948 edition of Jonathan Edwards’s Images or Shadows of Divine Things to open discussion of the role of typology and, consequently, the habit of typological reading of experience in the New World situation, texts considered over the course of the term will demonstrate how this habit mutates through the 19th century and into the 20th as the idea of the “divine” changes from substantive to transitive for the “inquisitorial botanists” and others who took account of developments in natural history and science. Primary readings will include, in addition to Images, Edwards’s “Notes on the Mind”, selections from Emerson, from Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, Thoreau’s Walden, selections from Emily Dickinson, from William James, Wallace Stevens, and Susan Howe. The image of mind itself as one, if not the greatest, of “divine things” as it is revealed “more truly and more strange” in its evolving landscape will serve as the scrim against and through which the various linguistic performances staged in the texts are considered.
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In this course, we will look at one of the most remarkable forms of the material culture of spirituality in the later middle ages: the mapping of the passion of Christ and its sacramental simulacrum onto the body of the devout believer. Using theoretical/critical approaches drawing upon gender and film theory and the social sciences, we will talk about the cultural work that various "texts of the passion" performed. We will read and discuss works of guided meditation, narratives of mystical trance and ecstatic performance of the arrest, torture and crucifixion, and the public re-enactment of the passion in civic drama - as well as the parallel experience of public torture and execution.
The majority of the writings that we will be studying will be in Middle English, but most are available in modern English versions as well - as well as in the original continental languages in which some of them were composed. The texts that I am thinking of including are the lives of three Belgian beguine mystics (Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina mirabilis and Marie d'Oignies), the meditations on the passion and the eucharist from Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, selections from the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and from the late-medieval English Corpus Christi plays, as well as the abjected mirror-image of the passion in such blood-libel texts as Chaucer's "Prioress' Tale" and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.
A good time will be had by all.
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This seminar will practice close reading of a sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction in pursuit of “reading relations” in several senses, through several intertwined questions. What have been the implications of focusing realistic fiction so sharply on the desiring intensities of the bourgeois family? How have the familial “relations” of realistic fiction been both read by psychoanalytic thought and replicated within it? How do literacy and reading function as topic and as hermeneutic within these fictions? What forms of relationality get constructed in them--not only among characters, or between characters (or authors) and their own histories, but most importantly between the novels themselves and those who read them? We will look for alternatives to normative understandings of sexual, familial, and narrative relationality in a small group of works (two apiece) by Charles Dickens; Charlotte Bronte; the great experimental/reactionary, twentieth-century lesbian novelist, Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Penelope Fitzgerald, an exciting stylist whose work reopens in new ways many of the questions of the so-called realist novel of the nineteenth century.
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How is language a form of social action? How do words and discourses act to produce subjects in society? Do dominant groups also dominate rhetoric and the making of consciousness? If so, can we challenge the matrix, escape control, rethink and remake the world? Is the fate of democracy really a struggle over discourse and consciousness? Is resistance futile?
This seminar will probe how rhetoric and discourse form, circulate, contend, change, and flee. How does hegemony deploy rhetoric to shape everyday life as well as to dispel alternatives to itself? Is such control robust or vulnerable, obvious or obscure, supple or brittle, general or local, or all of the above? If, as Therborn proposed, all discourses encode ideological schema that teach us what is possible, what exists, and what is good, then where does critique come from and how can it have a career? In New York City and the U.S., in an urban area drowning in wealth and poverty, in a nation at war with itself and the world, how do we learn what is good, what is possible, and what exists? Can we map the matrix of power and a matrix of resistance? Across texts, discourses, space, place, and situations, how does hegemony work rhetorically? How do counter-hegemonic rhetorics succeed and fail in challenging the status quo?
Selected Readings: Foucault(Fearless Speech, The Order of Things), Bourdieu(Distinction), Ohmann(The Making and Selling of Culture), Scott(Domination and the Arts of Resistance), Giroux(America on the Edge), Anderson(Imagined Communities), Pratt(“Arts of the Contact Zone”), and others.
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ENGL 84200
Alan Vardy
Studies in Romanticism: Landscape, Aesthetics, Nature, Pedestrianism
2/4 credits. M 4:15-6:15pm. [CRN: 90503]
This seminar will examine the cultural and intellectual shifts in how we understand our relationship to the natural world over a fifty year period (1780-1830). We'll begin with notions of landscape and the pleasure of seeing. Theories of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque (a uniquely English aesthetic category) sought to understand, manage and reproduce our pleasure in nature. In this part of the course we'll discuss Burke, Kant, landscape architecture, theories of the picturesque, etc. to establish a cultural foundation from which to explore. As we move forward we'll read various reactions to the artificiality of landscape, and subsequent moves toward a celebration of nature in its apparent wildness. Whether or not this aesthetic shift produces its own artifice is an open question. In the second half of the seminar we'll discuss tourism via Wordsworth's 'Guide to the Lakes,' Natural History writing, 'Lyrical Ballads,' the aesthetics and politics of pedestrianism, John Clare's 'natural' poetics, etc. The seminar will offer an extensive introduction to Romantic poetics via a complex examination of the intellectual milieu in which they arose.
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The course selects works both “canonical” (the kind we are often required to teach in undergraduate surveys) and non-canonical, from the broad range of vernacular medieval British literature (not all of which is “English”), and will focus on the literary construction of idealized religious and secular human identities (with some attention to beasts, birds and monsters). Some attention will be given to manuscript contexts. Works from the Old English period will include the “heroic” verse narratives Beowulf, Genesis B (the fall of Lucifer, Adam & Eve), Judith (a biblical “apocryphon” featuring the Hebrew heroine’s decapitation of an Assyrian warlord, Holofernes); and Ælfric’s rhythmic prose legends of the virginal Saint Agnes and King Edmund. From the late 12th-early 13th century, when England’s dominant literary language was French, we will encounter a group of texts written by or about women and ostensibly for women: Old French lais by the mysterious Marie de France (Guigemar, Lanval, Bisclavret, Yonec), the Barking nun Clemence’s Anglo-Norman “Life of Saint Katherine,” alongside the early Middle English treatise on Holy Maidenhood (“Letter on Virginity”) and the martyr’s legend of Seinte Margarete. Two further groups of texts from the later Middle English period emphasize male, if not always “masculine,” identities. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (both late 14th century), well-known today, will be read in relation to one another and against more marginal romances such as Sir Orfeo and Amis and Amiloun (early 14th c.). These secular productions will be juxtaposed with “popular” Christian legends such as those of Saint George (England’s patron saint) and Saint Francis of Assisi (“the last Christian”) from the South English Legendary (late 13th c.) and the visionary subjectivities of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Juliana of Norwich’s Showings. Most of the course readings will be available in modern translations, but there will be opportunities for the specialist or afficionado to work also with the original versions; everyone will be expected to handle Chaucer’s English (for which there are numerous online aids). Students will report regularly on recent critical scholarship, and will be encouraged to research issues of textuality, intertextuality, and historicism, or to explore and test theoretical models for further understanding of the course readings.
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The term "autobiography" entered the English language in 1797. It had become necessary in order to describe a literary phenomenon that was perhaps bound to proliferate in a period during which conceptions of identity, consciousness and memory were addressed and reconceived with ever-greater force. While the autobiographical project has significant literary precedents, the Romantic era saw an explosion of creativity driven by the difficult attempt to capture the particularity of self-experience. This seminar will follow the autobiographical impulse as it is manifested in a variety of genres, but we will pay particular attention to a set of unavoidable issues: the confessional imperative driving representations of the self, the rhetorical styles of sincerity, and the anxious imagination of sympathetic readers. We will begin with Rousseau's seminal experiments in self-disclosure, The Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, works characterized by the troubling oscillation between the desire for transparency and the impulse for self-vindication that comes to typify romantic confessional narratives. We will continue with Wollstonecraft's Letters on Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, an innovative melding of private experience and meditative observation "calculated," according to Godwin, "to make a man fall in love with its author." Wordsworth's Prelude, the remarkable long poem attempting to trace the "growth of my own mind," will receive especially close attention. Among the most challenging literary achievements of the era, The Prelude has long been the site of contentious critical debates about the nature of Romanticism, and so it will provide us the opportunity to explore shifting theoretical approaches to the period as a whole. Keats called Wordsworth the poet of the "egotistical sublime"; the younger poet's efforts to balance irrepressible self-expression and disciplined self-effacement will guide our reading of his poetry and letters. DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Hazlitt's "First Acquaintance with Poets" will round out our study of romantic self-representation and its discontents. In the final section of the course we will read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, first-person narratives that will allow us to consider more fully intersections between romantic autobiography and fiction.
Requirements: In-class presentation, occasional short response papers, final essay.
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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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