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Spring 2000 Course Descriptions
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70200
Theories of Globalization and Postcoloniality
Professor Peter Hitchcock
Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Jameson has remarked that globalization is the "proverbial elephant, described by its blind observers in so many diverse ways." He continues: "Yet one can still posit the existence of the elephant in the absence of a single persuasive and dominant theory; nor are blinded questions the most unsatisfactory way to explore this kind of relational and multileveled phenomenon." Of course, one might say the same of postcoloniality, which remains something of a "white elephant" in the colonial unconscious as it yet reveals a plethora of blindness and insight. Rather than settle for the descriptive prowess of blind observers, this course will advance a polemic about the continuities and breaks between theories of globalization and postcoloniality, one that argues for the specificity of their claims yet keeps alive the revelation of their embrace. Postcoloniality is to culture what globalization is to economics: we will strive to theorize how an explosion of difference is yet dependent on a tenacious logic of homogeneity on a world scale. Globalization is primarily an economic model of capitalist integration; how might postcoloniality problematize the inclusionary zeal of its reach? Is postcoloniality merely a symptom of "first world" cosmopolitanism that must account, as every transnational corporation does, for markets abroad and mobility? Do theories of globalization and postcoloniality supercede paradigms of nation and imperialism, or do they throw into relief the more persistent aspects of their histories? Is there a role for the literary imagination in deconstructing the pieties of the global/local nexus? Ultimately, the course will function as an introduction to the provocations of theory while developing relevant approaches to the study of culture. Obviously, the aim is not to cover every theory relevant to these phenomena (which would aspire to be the elephant hunt of a global safari). Instead we will attempt to clarify and illuminate some of the more salient theories in their midst with reference to pertinent literary texts at our disposal. Suggested readings will include or be drawn from Jameson/Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization, Ong, Flexible Citizenship, Ong/Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, Schwarz and Dienst, Reading the Shape of the World, Bennett, Multicultural States, Bart-Moore, Postcolonial Theory, Bhabha, The Location of Culture, and Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Literature will include: Toer, This Earth of Mankind, Multatuli, Max Havelaar, Devi, Imaginary Maps, and Hagedorn, Dogeaters. A term paper is required.
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71400
Shakespeare's Tragedies
Professor W. R. Elton
Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Close study of what has been deemed the crowning achievement of English, if not of world, literature. Plays will include Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, etc. Close textual study of the plays as "plays," along with consideration of their Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts. The course should be an exciting entree into the world of Shakespearean values and techniques, ideas and their deeply human significances. Texts: New Arden, with New Variorum eds. as back-ups. Only one 10-page paper required. Stress on scholarly-critical techniques of exposition, preparation for dissertation-writing, and publication. Regular conferences, preferably weekly. Start by reading the plays; and Stanley Walls, ed. Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Study in that volume, Elton, "Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age."
We can look forward to a stimulating experience with the greatest of all writers, in his greatest works. No previous work in the field required.
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71600
Drama, Masque, and Spectacle in Renaissance England
Professor Richard McCoy
Tuesday, 2:00-4:00
This survey of Tudor and Stuart drama will explore its origins in and continuing affinities with church rituals, festival occasions, and court pageantry. We will compare miracle plays and moralities with Marlowe's DR. FAUSTUS, royal ceremonial with Shakespeare's RICHARD II, court masques with Midleton's WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN, as well as covert sacramental and magical energies in various other dramas. Additional dramatists considered will include John Webster, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher.
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74100
Romantic Radicals: Wollstonecraft, Shelley and their Circles
Professor Jacqueline DiSalvo
Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
This class will look at two generations of Romantic radicals, especially via the matrilineal legacy from Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle (the group around Wollstonecraft, Godwin & the printer Joseph Johnson, including Blake, Paine, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Amelia Opie) through Mary Shelley and hers (Shelley, Byron, Hunt etc.). But we will also examine the various responses of English Jacobins to the experience of defeat and the failures of the French/bourgeois revolution: conservative defections (Wordsworth and Coleridge), class conscious revisions (Blake), feminist (Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley), and pacifist (Shelley). We will examine the connections to and alienation from popular, grassroots radicalism, from the religious enthusiasm of anti-nomians and millenarians to the violent socialism of the Spenceans. We will also query romanticism as the initiation of and paradigm of a permanent counter-culture within industrial capitalism with strengths & weaknesses. We will examine issues of ideology and utopia; feminism; sexual radicalism, ecological critique; oppositions to slavery and empire, and appropriations & critiques of the Enlightenment. Then, considering the '60's appropriation and '90's critiques of romantic ideology, we will discuss how we assess the politics of romantic appropriation. As background on the politics of the period read E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
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74300
English Literature in the 1860s: "The Old Order Changes"
Professor Donald Stone
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
After the most prosperous decade in its history, England in the 1860s faced new challenges and uncertainties. "Rather like the Sixties of our own century," A.N. Wilson observes in God's Funeral, "inclined to overthrow in toto the values and mores of their parents." It was a time of political crisis (the Second Reform Bill of 1867) and religious crisis (the Newman-Kingsley debate), a time of reflection regarding the "subjection of women" and the emergence of democracy. "The old order changeth," as Tennyson wrote in "The Passing of Arthur" (1869), "yielding place to new." From the rich texture of literary and artistic works of the period, we will focus on these texts: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, Romola; Trollope, He Knew He Was Right or The Last Chronicle of Barset; Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Collins, The Woman in White; Tennyson, the 1869 Idylls of the King; Browning, The Ring and the Book (selections); Swinburne and Meredith (selected poems); plus prose selections from Carlyle ("Shooting Niagara"), Ruskin, Unto this Last; Arnold, Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy; Newman, Apologia pro vita sua; Bagehot, The English Constitution; and Mill, Utilitarianism and The Subjection of Women. The 1860s was also the decade of Disraeli's and Gladstone's political rivalry, of Alice's descent into Wonderland, of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs, of William Morris & Company, and Marx's work on Kapital. It marked the beginning of the aesthetic movement in England: Rossetti, Pater, Whistler. Students are responsible for an oral report and for a term paper in which some aspect or work of the 1860s is examined. It is hoped that (before the semester begins) students will read a historical account of mid-Victorian England: e.g. the relevant portions of Asa Brigg's The Age of Improvement, K. Theodore Hoppen's The Mid-Victorian Generation, or G. M. Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.
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75200
Toni Morrison and the African American Literary Tradition
Professor Barbara Webb
Thursday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
This course will examine the development of Toni Morrison's artistic vision from the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), through Paradise (1998). In our critical reading and analysis of these novels, we will pay particular attention to her explorations of language and form, her use of African American folk traditions and history, and her concept of history as a creative act of memory. We will also discuss the importance of her role as editor and cultural critic. Special emphasis will be given to the critical reception of her work and the revisionary strategies that have characterized her literary project. Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussion of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.
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77400
British Fiction in the First Half of the 20th Century: At the Margin of the Canon And Beyond
Professor Elizabeth Tenenbaum
Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Academic interest in British literature of the first half of the twentieth century has focused so sharply on a small canon of modernists that a broad range of notable fiction of this period is often overlooked. Considered too recent to be historical finds, these works tend to be relegated to dusty shelves as we try to keep up with the heralded writings of our contemporaries. But an understanding of the modern period in Britain entails more than familiarity with major works by Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf. This course can at best provide a sampling of the strikingly heterogeneous fiction created during the period at issue-an age profoundly shaken by two world wars and yet highly conducive to formal innovation, mordant social satire, a reconsideration of domestic life, and the empathetic portrayal of isolated, unconventional figures. Course readings will include such works as Tono Bungay by H.G. Wells, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, selected stories by Katherine Mansfield, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Students will present a brief oral report and submit a fifteen-to-twenty page paper.
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74400
Reading Relations in the British Novel
Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
This seminar will practice close reading of a sample of 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, 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 by Thackeray, Dickens, and the brilliant experimental/reactionary, twentieth-century lesbian novelist, Ivy Compton-Burnett.
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75000
The Idea of the People: American Fiction, 1919-1948
Professor Marc Dolan
Thursday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
This course will explore early 20th century American fiction's fascination with the idea of "the people"-be they stereotypical, folk, populist, emergent, or proletarian. During the years between the two World Wars, this idea or trope cut across at least three distinct poetics (including modernism, naturalism, and that peculiar blend that came to be called "social realism") and at least a dozen seemingly discrete literary movements (including the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Popular Front, and the Southern Renaissance). All sought for different purposes and at different junctures to describe "the people," but what did all these efforts have to do with each other, and with the passage of American literature through this crucially transitional era? We will examine these questions-as well as the interplay between seemingly distinct types of interwar American fiction-through readings of such works as Winesburg, Ohio, Cane, Manhattan Transfer, The Making of Americans, Elmer Gantry, Jews without Money, Mules and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Go Down, Moses, and Delta Wedding. Course requirements include active participation in class discussions, a brief presentation on recent scholarship relevant to a particular text, and a longer presentation and essay reflecting original scholarship in this area of study.
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77100
The Rise of the Novel
Professor David Richter
Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
During the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1800), most of the major innovations in both subject matter and narrative technique take shape. At its beginning the art of fiction often involves the close imitation of true narratives, while, at its end, fictional narrative both competes with and contributes to the writing of historical narrative. Throughout the period, form (in the sense of aesthetic ideology) exerts intense pressure upon content, while content (the social and sexual conflicts of the period, along with the growing force of nationality) exerts a counterpressure upon literary form. In this course we will explore the competing master narratives of the last fifty years explaining the origins of the English novel, including the theories of Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Ralph Rader, and Margaret Doody, and then go on to read some of the most important canonical texts within and against the culture that formed them, a culture that took its own shape, at least in part, from the rise of the novel. Primary Texts:
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, 1688; Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, etc., 1722; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina, or Love in a Maze, 1725; Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, 1747-48; Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, or The History of a Foundling, 1749; Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., 1760-67; Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, 1791; William Godwin, Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams, 1794; Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 1800; Walter Scott, Waverley or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, 1814; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1815; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 1818. (yes, I know, this list will have to be cut down a bit)
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78300
Lives: Biographers and Subjects, Boswell to Byron
Prof. Rachel M. Brownstein
Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
We will examine some of the founding texts of modern literary biography, considering choices of subject and kinds of emphasis. Raising questions of truth, technique, and genre, we will explore connections between biography and history, fiction, and autobiographical genres like letters and journals. In addition to the works (from Johnson's "Life of Savage" to Byron's Don Juan) that began to define the interesting (and interest-bearing) character between the mid-eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, we will read more modern essays (by, e.g., Richard Holmes, Janet Malcolm); stories (by Henry James and Isak Dinesen); and at least one novel (Godwin's Caleb Williams). In addition, each student will report on a very recent full-scale biographical treatment of one of the major figures: Boswell, Johnson, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron. Among the topics we will explore are the connections between the following: biography and celebrity; private life and the public presentation of it; biographical subjects and their intimates; biographers, their subjects, and the readers of both. The conventions of and tropes for defining genius, the ambivalence of hero-worshipers, and the changing function of the heroic in history are aspects of our general subject. We will discuss the cultural roots and resonances of the continuing biographical spectacle of undead authors, and the intractable difference between a writer's voice and his or her life story as told by someone else. Assignments will include weekly one-page papers, joint class presentations, and a long paper.
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79000
Reader-Response Criticism
Professor Sondra Perl
Thursday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
In this seminar, we will explore theories that highlight the reader's role in the construction of meaning by studying the work of Norman Holland, Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser and others. Reader-response invites us to treat texts as social experiences and authorizes students to compose meanings transactionally and dialogically. To grasp this view and the possibilities inherent in this approach, we will document and discuss our own responses to a wide range of poems and novels. (Specific works will be determined by the class.) Students will be expected to keep a reader-response journal, to compose a final reflective paper and to collaborate with others on the creation of a performance piece (often the highlight of the course) based on one of the readings.
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79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism: New Version
Professor David Greetham
Day, Time and Room TBA
This new version of the required U795 course has been prompted by student requests to broaden its scope and to respond to the current ideological, methodological, and conceptual issues involved in the study of "English" as a discipline. Accordingly, the Curriculum and Executive Committees have approved the following revised four-part structure: 1) The historical, institutional context of the discipline, with special attention to the current "culture wars" and the place of "English" within contemporary concepts of interdisciplinarity. Readings might include Eagleton, "The Rise of English," and short selections from such works as Graff, Professing Literature, Leavis, The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought, Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society, Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, Bolton (ed) Culture Wars, and Greenblatt & Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. 2) Archives and Bibliography. Possible selections from Altick and Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research, Werner (ed.), The Poetics of the Archive, Derrida, Archive Fever, Gurr (ed.) The Text as Evidence, Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, Wellek and Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship, Martin, The History and Power of Writing, Manguel, A History of Reading, Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. This section would not just emphasize the practical problem of use of archival material, but also the political and ideological principles behind archival organization and access. 3) Textuality. Concepts of textuality in literature and culture. Possible readings might be selections from Genette, Paratexts, Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer, Landow (ed.) Hyper/Text/Theory, Greetham, Theories of the Text, McGann, The Textual Condition, Tanselle, A Rationale Of Textual Criticism, Ezell & O'Keefe (ed.), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction, Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book, Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. 4) Theoretical Context: Implications of theory for scholarly and academic work. Possible readings might include selections from Mitchell, Against Theory, Eagleton, Literary Theory, Arac and Johnson, Consequences of Theory, Krieger, The Institution of Theory, Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Moxey, The Practice of Theory, Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender, Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Gates (ed.) "Race," Writing, and Difference, Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. Students taking this new version will thus be introduced to the social, cultural, and ideological context in which their specialized studies will be positioned and will also be given an overview of both the methodology of research and its implications for the discipline. I emphasize that the readings listed here for each part are only suggestions: we will certainly not read them all, and only designated parts of those selected. Requirements: Preparations for all class discussions and a couple of in-class presentations. The final paper is similarly flexible: students may produce one of three possibilities--a scholarly "edition" of a short work embodying the textual principles discussed in the course; an introduction to such an edition or collection of works, focusing on the archival and other cultural issues involved; a critical essay founded on the archival, bibliographical, and textual approaches explored. I am also open to other methods of integrating the "scholarly" and "critical" components of the course. Organization: I will be teaching the intersession version of this new course and Professor Kelvin will be teaching the usual semester-long version in the Spring. The alternatives present obvious advantages and disadvantages: in the intersession version we complete the course before the semester proper has begun, thus freeing up students to take a full roster of "regular" courses during the Spring, and because the intersession course is officially a "Spring" offering, students have the whole of the Spring semester to complete the final paper. Moreover, January is "bibliography" month in New York, and I have usually managed to get some of the leading visiting archivists, bibliographers, editors, and textuists to participate in the intersession class. And, because we meet often and for extended periods, students have usually found that there is a greater narrative impetus to the intersession version. The main disadvantage is, of course, that we have to devote pretty much the whole of January to completing this required course: that has usually meant meeting twice a week (normally Tuesdays and Fridays) for three hours, with an introductory organizational meeting held at the end of the Fall semester. The balance in the intersession version is therefore more toward reading and preparation for discussion than in actual archival work in local libraries, which can be done with more leisure and lead time in the conventional semester-long version. I and Professor Kelvin will be available to discuss any other aspect of these choices.
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79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism: New Version
Professor Norman Kelvin
Monday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
As has been made clear, especially to those who have read Professor Greetham's description, the new U 795 will consist of four parts: 1) the culture wars and the current view of English as a discipline. (This is really two topics: the first, conflict between theory-driven literary study and the popular view of what the study should be; and the second, the close combat between any two theories in the post-modern dispensation.) 2) Archives and Bibliography: an introduction to textual scholarship of recent decades. 3) Textuality. In our course, questions about "textuality" will arise naturally (and inevitably) from our understanding of the issues concerning textual scholarship today. 4) Theoretical Context: implications of theory for scholarly and interpretive work. Part 4 will get the most attention. Our premise will be that theory, like the Marxist view of politics, is always there, acknowledged or not. The main question will be, how have the many new theories of recent decades affected the climate of literary discourse? We'll also ask, however, whether these theories are intrinsically different from each other and must always lead to culture wars, or whether they have a common sub-text that makes the wars a battle of shadows. And if we decide they are intrinsically different from each other, we will want to ask further whether this means our discipline is fragmented -- Balkanized, or whether it means simply that we have a much-to-be-desired pluralism. Our questions might be phrased this way: is there -- at the turning of the millennium, conveniently -- a dynamic toward reintegration, toward a unified theory of literature that absorbs the differing linguistic and political positions comprising literary theory today? Or are critics fated to be warriors, happy or unhappy? Or is it, finally, that we have now learned to prefer the particular, to use it productively, and to do so without nostalgia for the general? For Parts 1 and 4, we will use the anthology edited by David Richter, Falling into Theory, and read such selections as Eagleton "The Rise of English"; Himmelfarb, "The New Advocacy and the Old"; Ohmann, "Function of English at the Present Time"; Menand, "The Demise of Literary Authority"; Robinson, "Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon"; Gates, "Canon Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition"; Sedgwick, (from) "The Epistemology of the Closet"; and Said, "The Politics of Knowledge." For Parts 2 and 3 (together constituting textual scholarship) we will read selections from Greetham, Introduction to Textual Scholarship and Theories of the Text; McGann, The Textual Condition; and Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Much of this reading for Parts 2 and 3 will be xeroxed material, distributed in class. And for the all-important fourth part of the course, we will start with such selections from Richter as Barthes, "The Death of the Author"; Kolodny, "Theory, Practice, and Poliitcs of Feminist Literary Criticism"; Spivak, "Imperialism and Sexual Difference"; Levine, "Reclaiming the Aesthetic"; and Nussbaum, "The Literary Imagination." These readings, too, will be supplemented by xeroxed selections, in this case from texts not included in Richter. I shall also provide a very long list of useful secondary reading (none of it required). It will include some of the texts enumerated in Professor Greetham's desription of the course, and others of my own choice. Requirements will be one class presentation and a term paper. The paper may be a critical edition of a short poem; an investigation of how a specific theory enables literary interpretation to become part of cultural history; or an exploration of two or more current theories to see if there is a shared sub-text among them. I shall be glad to discuss these options and answer any other questions about my version of the course (nkelvin@aol.com).
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80200
The Afterlife of Victorian Literature: Postmodern Victorianism
Professor Anne Humpherys
Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
In 1966 Jean Rhys made her famous intervention in Jane Eyre by telling the story of Bertha Mason, Jane's dark double, in Wide Sargasso Sea. Three years later John Fowles published The French Lieutenant's Woman, a novel set in the second half of the Victorian period, with a Hardyesque setting and plot, a self-reflexive postmodern narrator, and a series of Victorian endings from which the narrator refuses to choose. From the beginning of the 20th century there has been a minor industry of appropriations, sequels, and rewritings of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and since 1970 a second minor industry of interventions, adaptations, prequels and sequels to the works and lives of Charlotte and Emily Bronte (also to those of Jane Austen). In the last decade A.S. Byatt has made her reputation as a novelist who writes over and on Victorian literature, and several other less well-known novelists have attempted the "Victorian" novel itself (like Charles Palliser's, The Quincunx, 1989). This course will investigate this "writing on 19th century fiction" in 20th century literature, its relation to the postmodern project, and its impact on the understanding of Victorian fiction and the Victorian period. We will read both 19th and 20th century texts in an effort to understand the general idea of the "after" work and its different manifestations: the sequel, the historical novel, and postmodern intertextuality. The reading list is still in formation, but it will look something like this: we will look at the sequels through works by Trollope (The Warden and Barchester Towers); will pair 19th and 20th century texts (like Hardy's Tess of the Durbervilles, Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman and Emma Tenant's Tess, or Dickens' and Kathy Acker's Great Expectations plus Peter Carey's Jack Maggs); will have segments on the sequels and postmodern interventions in the works of Austen (like Emma Tennant's Pemberly) or the Brontes (like Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, Lin Haire-Sargeant's Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights, or Maryse Conde's Windward Heights) or Sherlock Holmes (like Carole Nelson Douglas's rewriting of "The Secret of Bohemia" [Goodnight Mr. Holmes] with Irene Adler as detective, or the postmodern writer William Hjortsberg's Nevermore, in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is haunted by Poe); and will consider "Victorian" works like those of A.S. Byatt (Possession or Angels and Insects).
An oral report, a 4-page paper, and a final 15-page project, which may be either a conventional critical paper or a sequel to or rewriting of a 19th century text.
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80200
Modernism and Primitivism
Professor Jane Marcus
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The West's encounter with Africa and the East in the 20th century has produced some extraordinary movements and works of art. The work produced is often called "primitive"; though many different definitions of the term are expected to emerge. The "tumulte noir" may be traced in music, painting, photography, sculpture, literature and the other arts like dance, opera and popular culture in Europe, the U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America. Taking a Cultural Studies approach, the class will explore classic texts (T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, using the edition of the text with original drafts and Ezra Pound's corrections, edited by Valerie Eliot), Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Orlando and work by Claude McKay.
We will compare the 800 page original Negro Anthology (1934) edited by Nancy Cunard to the present edition, discussing what was cut and working on our own interpretations of why. This text includes important lost work by many modernist artists, including translations by Beckett and a large section on the Scottsboro Case as well as poetry and polemics, photographs, a section on black "stars," and reports from the African diaspora. Jazz, African art, anthropology and a set of political pronouncements on Harlem, Garveyism, the Communist Party, pieces by W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, George Padmore and many African intellectuals appear in Negro. (A bowlderized text is available from Continuum. The original will be available on reserve at CCNY.)
Other texts may include: Rene Maran's Batoula, Joyce Cary, African Witch, and Mister Johnson, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. The Australian novelist Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children may be read with a work by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show or Mr. Fortune's Maggot.
Critical texts may include Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir (Penn State), Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture (Westview), William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left (Columbia), Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early 20th Century America, Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art (California) and Phillips and Steiner, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (California).
Members of the seminar from both CUNY and CCNY will present oral reports and a 20-page original research paper on or before May 10, 2000. Late papers will not be accepted. Attendance is required; latecomers not admitted.
This class will meet at the City College of New York, 138th and Convent Avenue, NAC Bldg., 6th floor, Wednesdays at 4. Call 650-6694 to confirm the time and room.
My office is NAC 6-261, voice mail 650-6345, home fax 874-1796 or (516) 725-0640. CUNY students please check with Linda Sherwin on the procedures for registration for this class. The reading list will be discussed and finalized during the first class.
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80400
The Pornographic Imagination
Professor Wayne Koestenbaum
Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Despite the rather grand title of this course (stolen from Susan Sontag's magisterial 1967 essay, "The Pornographic Imagination"), this course does not cover the pornographic imagination but plural pornographic imaginations of a variety of 20th century writers, many (but by no means all) of them gay men. We will not attempt a survey of this august tradition in modern art, but will focus on post-1945 literary manifestations. We will begin by reading critical analyses of the history of the term "pornography" and of the place of the porn industry in contemporary North America: texts may include Linda William's Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible," Lyn Hunt's The Invention of Pornography, Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Laura Kipnis's Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, and an essay by Sigmund Freud. We will devote the rest of the semester to novels and poems that feature explicit sexual representation-often in an attempt to derail the representational enterprise altogether. Such works may include some of the following: Jean Genet's Funeral Rites, Dennis Cooper's Frisk, Violette Leduc's La Batarde, Pierre Guyotat's Eden, Eden, Eden, Dodie Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker, Robert Cluck's Jack the Modernist, Red Jordan Arobateau's Street Fighter, Chea Villanueva's Bulletproof Butches, John Rechy's City of Night, the diaries and notebooks of Gary Fisher, David Trinidad's Answer Song, Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. (I would be pleased to hear syllabus suggestions from prospective members of the seminar.) The visual arts are, of course, central to the pornographic field; four to six of our meetings will include visits from artists and curators, who will show slides and videos and will expatiate on the place of the pornographic in their work. One or two poets may also visit, to read and discuss their work.
Seminar requirements: one essay (20-25 pages), due at the end of the semester. Occasional one-page responses to the reading may also be assigned.
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80400
Crime as Art: Murder and Mayhem in Ancient and Victorian Literature
Professors Felicia Bonaparte and Jacob Stern
Friday: 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
A study of the uses of crime in ancient and Victorian literature. Among the topics we will explore (beside the notion of crime itself: what counts as crime? and in what context? and how is it related to sin?) are crime as a means of defining the self and of reconceiving identity; crime as the locus of social reform; as the spur to political change; as psychological fact and metaphor; as epistemological question; as an act of creation manqué; and as visual design in the construction of fictional narrative. In addition, we will discuss the role in crime of myth and ritual; the unique place in mythic crime of the question of what is permissible in matters of killing, food, and sex; the special sacramental connection between ritual death and marriage; and the relationship of crime to the boundaries of civilized life. Our reading will consist of clusters centered on a common theme: (I) Hesiod, Theogony; Tacitus on Nero; William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos. (II) Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis; Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. (III) Aeschylus, The Oresteia; Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies; Euripides, Medea; Daniel Defoe, Roxana; W.M. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon; Arthur Conan Doyle, Study in Scarlet. An additional list of ancient and modern works in England, Europe, and the U.S. will be available for further reading or as ideas for the term paper required for a grade in the course.
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80500
Aestheticism and Ideology
Professor Gerhard Joseph
Monday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
The denigration of the "aesthetic" as just another ideology is part of a large-scale assault on the Enlightenment that has characterized the theoretical pluralism of the last 30 years. We have seen, that is, the absorption of "literary" into the "cultural"/"multicultural," the flattening of value distinctions among "texts" (no longer "works of art"), the attack upon mere formal analysis-i.e., the various interlocking tendencies that might in shorthand be called the triumph of the "ideological." This course will examine the appearance of a discourse on the aesthetic in the 18th century (Addison, Burke, Hume, Kant, Schiller); proceed to ways in which that discourse was extended in pre-modernist/modernist theory from Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde to the New Critics; and then consider the extensive critique of the aesthetic that has issued from political and poststructuralist positions (representative statements on the matter by Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Paul DeMan, Terry Eagleton, Hal Foster, John Guillory, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, George Levine, Ronald Paulson, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Naomi Schor, Roger Shattuck, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Raymond Williams). We will conclude with a look at some recent developments in performance and affect theory that suggest the return of the repressed, a revitalization of the aesthetic as a category of pre-eminent value. A tentative and developing bibliography is available from Linda Sherwin. Requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
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80900
Spirit, Substance and Idea in the English Renaissance
Professor Angus Fletcher
4 Wednesdays: March 22, 29; April 5, 12
2:00-4:00 p.m.
This is a "mini-course" given by our distinguished professor emeritus and will carry two credits.
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81000
Poetry Workshop
Professor W. R. Elton
Monday, 6:30-8:30
This course is devoted to developing poetry skills, at all levels. Regular consultations and class readings of poems. Use of anthologies, e.g., Stanley Burnshaw, The Poem Itself. Considerations of the most recent currents in poetry-writing, including European poets; and of the market for poetry today. Poems will be handled with sensitivity and discretion.
NOTE ON THE PROFESSOR: widely published poet, including, most recently, Partisan Review. Collection, Wittgenstein's Trousers (1991). Poetry-writing grant, 1998, Vermont Studio Center. Many years of directing poetry workshops at the University of California, Riverside, and at CUNY Graduate Center. Many public readings.
Whether you decide to take this course or not, please feel free to drop into my office to discuss your poetry.
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81000
Dissertation Workshop
Professor Joan Richardson
Tuesday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
Designed to help students write the prospectus (which should not take all term) and/or the dissertation, this writing workshop will respond to the needs and the size of the group. There may or may not be assigned readings and exercises, at the beginning. One certain thing is that everyone will read, and respond in writing to everyone else's work, and that the pages to be discussed will be circulated among members of the workshop at least a week ahead of time.
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81200
Chaucer's Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
Professor Gordon Whatley
Friday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
If Geoffrey Chaucer had died before he could start work in earnest on the Canterbury Tales --- the incomplete collection of fragments, on parts of which his modern reputation mainly rests --- he would still be regarded as the most accomplished and brilliant English poet before Shakespeare and Spenser, for he had already written a series of richly varied, experimental, and challenging narratives in response to the poetry of the French courts and the early Italian Renaissance (especially of Dante and Boccaccio). This course focuses on four of these earlier works: three dream-poems, with their narrative visions of exotic landscapes and surreal states of being, and their meditations on divine and human love, language and history, social discord and harmony (Book of the Duchess, Hous of Fame, and Parlement of Fowles); and the complex tragi-comic story of an aristocratic love affair, Troilus and Criseyde, structured as an epic, and set against the backdrop of the Trojan War and the philosophy of Boethius. The readings (from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D.Benson et al.) are in the Middle English dialect from which Modern English evolved. Students new to Chaucer's language usually find it tricky at first, but, with patience and a modicum of effort, quickly gain competence. Although some attention will be given to textuality, classes will be devoted mainly to close reading and discussion of the poems, with the help of frequent short reports on modern critical approaches. The other formal requirements will be an initial 5-page research report and bibliography, and a critical paper (10-15). Students are expected to read widely in Chaucer criticism and relevant background materials. There will be some Reserve reading in Chaucer's sources (Ovid, Virgil, Boethius, Machaut, Boccaccio, and Dante: modern translations), since these writers' works play tangible roles in the Chaucerian poems. The course is thus a good opportunity to explore the intersection of ancient, medieval and Renaissance literature and culture.
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81600
Melville
Professor Neal Tolchin
Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Melville's contemporaries first knew him as "The Man Who Lived with Cannibals," the author of exciting, racy travel narratives; and later in his career a New York newspaper ran the headline "Herman Melville Crazy," after the publication of Pierre, a parody of the popular domestic novels of the 1850s. When Melville died in 1891, his obituary surprised readers, who assumed the forgotten author had passed on decades earlier. His reputation kept alive in England by a coterie of readers, Melville was rediscovered in the 1920s and soon his novel Moby-Dick was regarded as perhaps the greatest American novel. Recently, literary critics have argued for his subversiveness, his conservatism, the possibility he may have been physically abusive towards his wife, and questions surrounding his sexual identity. Melville remains a highly elusive, wonderfully provocative writer, whose experimentations in literary form and voice were a century ahead of his time. We will read the novels Typee, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, Billy Budd, and selected short stories. Requirements: research paper, oral reports, class participation and attendance.
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81600
Finnegans Wake
Professor Edmund Epstein
Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
In this course, we will read through the Wake, emphasizing structurally important passages. In the course of the discussions, we will touch on such matters as: the linguistics of literature, the "universal novel" by such writers as Pynchon, Gaddis, and Arno Schmidt, the new type of poetry invented by Joyce, and the hermeneutics of difficult texts. Students should be reading Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce by the time the term begins. Texts: Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Paperback edition; Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 2nd edition. Oxford UP paperback; McHugh, Roger. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. John Hopkins UP. Paperback edition.
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82100
16th and 17th Century Survey
Professor Laura Silberman
Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
This course will survey major figures and genres of English Renaissance literature and a few less canonical selections. The reading is likely to include: More's Utopia (in English translation), Sidney's Defence of Poesy and Astrophel and Stella, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Spenser's Muiopotmos and Books I and III of The Faerie Queene, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and perhaps another work of prose, and selections from the poetry of Wyatt, Surrey, Donne, Herbert, Lanyer, Marvell and Crashaw. Classes will focus on a careful reading of the texts under consideration, in whatever contexts of history, literary tradition or literary theory seem illuminating. Secondary material will be assigned and suggested, and students will be encouraged to share bibliography of useful articles they have discovered. Students will write one essay of approximately 20 pages in length on a topic of their own choosing and a paper of no more than 10 pages based on the longer essay and written for possible presentation as a conference paper.
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84800
Between the Wars: Modernism, Realism, and Social Crisis, 1915-1940
Professor Morris Dickstein
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
This course will examine the profound changes in American society between the two world wars as seen primarily through conflicting models of art and expression in the period. Readings will include the work of fiction writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiel Hammett, William Faulkner, Michael Gold, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West, as well as poets like Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes. For comparison with these literary models, the course will explore the emergence of modernism in the visual arts, especially painting and prosperity, urbanization, and economic crisis, the revolt against the genteel tradition, the effects of race and ethnicity, and the transformation of popular culture, including the growth of radio, the music of Gershwin and Cole Porter, the shift from silent to sound films, and the development of advertising and public relations. Secondary reading will focus on the social history of the 1920s and 1930s.
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84800
Art and Thought of the 1910s
Professor Louis Menand
Friday, 9:30-11:30 a.m.
An examination of literary and intellectual culture between 1910 and 1920, with emphasis on England and the United States. Texts and topics include: Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons; John Dewey, How We Think; J. M Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," "Politics as a Vocation"; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Gyorgy Lukacs, Theory of the Novel; T. S. Eliot, the quatrain poems and The Sacred Wood; Joseph Conrad, Victory; D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation; theories of cultural pluralism (Dewey, Kallen, Bourne, Locke); modernist aesthetics of fiction (Ford, Woolf, Lawrence), of poetry (Pound, Hulme, Bergson, Marinetti), and of painting (cubism, abstraction, constructivism, vorticism); the psychology of the war; and the emergence of freedom of expression. We will try to look to texts and ideas in their social and political context, and to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the period. The class as a whole will read, usually, a single text, and individual students will present the results of their (directed) research on related texts or on the larger context, to be followed by a general discussion. Students will also submit a final 20-page paper on a topic of their choice, which may be the topic of their directed research.
No auditors.
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Art and Text: Essaying Modernism
Professor Mary Ann Caws
Thursday, 4:15-6:15
The seminar concerns our view, now beginning another epoch, of various art works and literary works of the period that can be roughly defined as modernist. It has an equal concern for trying out, essaying, various ways of writing about or translating this double look. This writing will come from without (social and aesthetic history and theory) and within (participants' own essays and presentations, as the seminar progresses.) Beginning with late romanticism, we will then meditate on a typical few manifestations of realism, symbolism and post-symbolism, cubism, expressionism, dada, vorticism, futurism, surrealism, ending with an assortment of products of post-modernism. Given this premise: looking at before reading about, we will consider what sort of viewing works best for what sort of creation. The subjects under examination will involve European sources and their English and American translations, in the largest sense of the word. Participants will be expected to lead discussions on texts and images, to write at least three brief essays in various modes on a chosen topic or topics, involving different genres, and to make museum visits and reports when appropriate.
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