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Professor Ammiel Alcalay
85000
San Francisco, Los Angeles: Text and Politics
Thursdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55285]
In his "Foreword to Historical Geography", the great geographer Carl Sauer wrote that: "The culture area, as a community with a way of living, is therefore a growth on a particular "soil" or home, an historical and geographical expression... There can be no human geography that does not concern itself with communities as associations of skills." We will explore Los Angeles and San Francisco in this very broad context that Sauer defines, with "the relevance of all human time", and in relation to other continental and transcontinental geographical and cultural reference points. As background, we will look at sources in the region's pre-colonial history, and then try to define what we mean by politics as we move into the colonial period and the development of urban life in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. We will use a wide range of sources in various disciplines (history, urban studies, literary texts, the visual arts, film), in order to establish a historical and theoretical context. We will explore several historical moments in some depth, and students will then be expected to define their own areas of inquiry across a broad range of interests, genres and media. Some of the questions we will examine include: How are these two cities imagined by the rest of the country, or through other parts of the world? How do we determine influence? Is there a location to film representation? What happens when texts are adapted to film across time, as in Philip K. Dick's work? How does American culture locate itself internally and externally? Does New York determine text while Los Angeles determines image? What does it mean to be native to a place? Is Gertrude Stein, born in Oakland, more a part of the place than Etel Adnan, born in Beirut but now living in San Francisco? Is there a relationship between pre-colonial multilingualism and later multilingualism? How do artistic communities organize themselves? What are the relationships between economic organization and artistic production? What are the relationships between social and political movements or repression (union organizing, the red scare, the free speech movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, COINTELPRO), and cultural parameters or productions? Auditors are allowed.
While I have not yet determined a final reading list, I know that the Cold War will be a central concern and areas of concentration will include what has come to be called the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance (culminating in the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965), a range of multilingual and multiethnic writing (the Chinese poetry of Angel Island; European exiles like Brecht and Adorno in Los Angeles; Spanish, Chicano and Asian American writing), and the shifts from internationalism to nationalism to globalization (as seen in the Watts uprising, the international presence of the Black Panther Party and its subsequent suppression, and the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict in 1992). As stated above, students will be encouraged to choose across a wide range of possible materials relating to their own interests. The following books will be drawn on for background, and some may be required:
Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent, Brian M. Fagan The Natural World of the California Indians, Robert F. Heizer & Albert B. Elsasser The Destruction of California Indians, Robert F. Heizer American Indian Languages: Cultural & Social Contexts, Shirley Silver & Wick R. Miller The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles, William McCawley Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Mike Davis City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, Gerald Horne Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, ed. Jervey Tervalon L.A. Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing 1932-1998, ed. Paul Vangelisti, Evan Calbi The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco 1850-1900, Philip J. Ethington Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, Gray Brechin Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, eds. James Brook, Chris Carlsson & Nancy J. Peters Reading California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000,eds. Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, Rebecca Solnit
Two books that will definitely be assigned are: San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, edited by David Meltzer The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar. He is the author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and the cairo notebooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993). During the war in former Yugoslavia he edited and co-translated Zlatko Dizdarevic's Sarajevo: A War Journal (Henry Holt, 1994) and Portraits of Sarajevo (Fromm, 1995) and was responsible for publication of the first survivor's account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic (Basic Books, 1996). He edited and co-translated a major anthology of Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden (City Lights, 1996), the first collection of its kind in any language. He has translated Cuban poet Josè Kozer, Projimos / Intimates (Barcelona, 1990), and The Ark Upon the Number (Cross-Cultural Press, 1982). Sarajevo Blues, a translation of Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, came out in 1998 (City Lights). Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (preface by Juan Goytisolo), was chosen as one of the year's top 25 books by the Village Voice. His new book length poem, from the warring factions, came out in 2002 (Beyond Baroque). At Queens College, he has been given the Excellence in Teaching Award as well as two Presidential Research Awards; he has been a visiting professor at Stanford, is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and has been a fellow at New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies.
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Professor Meena Alexander
76200
Time and the Lyric: the Postcolonial Poem
Thursdays 11:45-1:45 [55280]
Time has a special valency in postcolonial poetry - it is the time of violation and the time of redemption, the wound of history laid bare through task of memory and in the crucible of the lyric the autobiographical `I' seeks form. But how do temporal structures in the poem sustain a memory that cuts through disparate places, bodies, tongues? How does traumatic memory find voice through a past the poet makes? In Omeros, Walcott speaks of the 'radiant wound of language' Can the materiality of language sustain a lyric that works across national borders and cultures? We will reflect on the metamorphic self the postcolonial poet creates, as he or she searches for home through migratory, multiple existences, and examine these and other complexities of poetic process, lyric time, gender and creativity through the poetry of Derek Walcott, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Audre Lorde, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo, David Mura, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin and others. We will pay particular attention to Walcott's use of Homer in fashioning a mythic self that cuts across time, Ramanujan's use of ancient Tamil poetics in the service of postmodern self-fashioning. We will also discuss selected poems by Irish poets, Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian as well as the Wordsworthian creation of a self through literal and mnemonic return to a loved place. The readings for this course as we theorize a postcolonial poetics will include selections from Appadurai, Agamben, Anzaldua, Bhabha, Caruth, Clifford, Fusco, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ramazani, Seyhan,Soja and others. Course Requirements: this course will be a seminar and as such will include weekly discussion of poetry as well as a writing log of responses to the poems or specific issues in poetics. Those who wish to do so, can also hand in poems they have written as part of this informal writing log. There will be a mid term paper and a final research paper, the latter due at the end of the semester.
Texts: they will be on order at Labyrinth Books, 112street between Broadway and Amsterdam, Tel: 212-865-1588. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems; Omeros; What the Twilight Says. A.K.Ramanujan, Collected Poems; Kamala Das The Old Playhouse and other poems; Audre Lorde, Collected Poems; Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome; Marilyn Chin, Rhapsody in Yellow; David Mura, The Color of Desire; Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World; Jehan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English
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Professor Alyson Bardsley
74000
Landscapes and Geographies of Romanticism Wednesdays 11:45 - 1:45 [55268]
A survey of the now-expanded canon of Romantic poetry, with a focus on representations of land. We will consider Romantic exploration, exploitation, and appreciation of territories and landscapes, real and imaginary, touching on contemporary political-economic discourses of agricultural "improvement," as well as aesthetic discourses of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque.
While I haven't finalized the syllabus, here is a partial sample of the texts we will consider: Burke, Philosophical Reflections on the Sublime and the Beautiful, selections; Gilpin, from Three Essays; Beattie, "On Sublime Poetry," selections; Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head and Elegiac Sonnets, selections; Blake, Jerusalem; Scott, Marmion; Joanna Baillie, "Introductory Discourse" and Ethwald, Part I; W. Wordsworth, poems from his tour in Scotland and selections from The Prelude (1850); Coleridge, the "conversation" poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Fears in Solitude," and selections from the Biographia and The Friend; Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, selections; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound; selections from Felicia Hemans; and also a small amount of travel writing.
Auditors are allowed.
Alyson Bardsley got her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1997. She has been teaching in English and Women's Studies at the College of Staten Island since that time. In fall of 2001 she co-taught the Proseminar in Multicultural and Transnational Feminisms in the GSUC Women's Studies Certificate Program. She has essays out or forthcoming in Modern Philology, The Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, and 19th Century Contexts, and a chapter in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She's at work on a monograph on discourses and figures of nationalism in Scottish Romantic writing.
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Professor Glen Burger
70500
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Thursdays 2 - 4 [55281]
Identity, Body, and Community in the Canterbury Tales
In this course we will read Chaucer's most experimental work, The Canterbury Tales, taking up a variety of interrelated historical, social, and political questions. How, for example, does Chaucer represent the relations and conflicts among the various classes of late-medieval society, and what effects does Chaucer's own class position-as bourgeois civil servant with strong ties to the aristocracy-have on the production of the Canterbury Tales? What views of gender and sexuality do the Tales present and explore? To what extent are they shaped by Christianity, and how do they represent the relation between Christianity and other systems of belief (classical "paganism," Islam, Judaism)? How does Chaucer treat the interimplication of such categories of identity as race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality? Why-of all the writers of the English Middle Ages-it is Chaucer whom we are most likely to read? What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the "father of English poetry?"
Using queer, gender, and postcolonial theory, as well as recent historical and cultural studies exploring the complexities of Chaucer's own social situation and those of his audience, we will investigate how, under the pressure of producing a poetic vision for a new vernacular English audience in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer reimagines late medieval relations between the body and the community. Even as the Tales respond to and attempt to represent a new symbolic order of modernity that is coming into being in late medieval England-organized around a new sense of individual and national identity-they incorporate the anxieties that such a departure from the past demands. Attending to this queer performativity inherent in the Tales gives its readers (past and present) an opportunity to see the author and audience constructed with and by the Tales as subjects-in-process caught up in a conflicted moment of "becoming." In turn, such an historicization may help us as (post)modern readers understand that which has been left behind or not yet thought of in assuming modern identities, and so bring to present-day assumptions about identity the realization that social organizations of the body can be done differently.
Our primary focus will be the Canterbury Tales themselves. But we will also consider some related contemporary texts-such as The Book of Margery Kempe, Le Menagier de Paris, French fabliaux, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies-as well as such early fifteenth-century "continuations" of the Tales as Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and the Tale of Beryn.
I haven't absolutely decided which non-Chaucerian texts to order. For now would it be enough to say the following: Any edition of the complete *Canterbury Tales* in the original Middle English will serve. But I would recommend, and will be ordering copies of, *The Canterbury Tales: Complete*, ed. Larry D. Benson, Houghton Mifflin. This and other non-Chaucerian material will be ordered from Shakespeare and Company.
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Professor Mary Ann Caws
87400
Art and Text: Portrait, Self-Portrait, and Place
Thursdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55284]
We will be wanting to look at some of the ways in which painters, poets, and prose writers depict themselves and the other. Some of the self-portraits considered will be those of Chardin, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Derain, Wyndham Lewis, and of some woman painters: Valadon, Tanning, Leonor Fini, etc., to start a discussion of the differences, if any, in self-portrayal and conception. These will be linked to the painters' journals, fiction, letters, and to the ways others see them. The idea of the muse and the sitter will enter our consciousness, and how they are connected with the portraiture and self-portraiture under discussion: thus, James' The Real Thing, and other representations of the "real" and the "posed" and the "adaptable...". Picasso's portraits of Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, for example, as they relate to those women's writings and work.
We will also look at exterior depictions and interior - and the exterior/interior opposition will hold also for place. Examples: Gogol's "The Portrait", Poe's "The Oval Portrait," James' The Portrait of a Lady, and his study of photographs: "The Way it Came", Stein's "Three Portraits" and various writers' idea of other writers and painters... to take a few of the exterior ones. The group portrait is of particular interest here, and we will look at John Berger and Roland Barthes' studies of them, and at various texts depicting groups, which will lead to the idea of place, circles, and contexts: for example, Charleston and the self-portraits and portraits of and by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry -- and various writings: stories, letters, journals, that relate them and to them.
In the representation of, the idea of , and the reality of place, one might consider cities like New York, London, Paris, on the one hand, in their tumult and silence, and, on the other, pastoral, lakes, roads, quiet. And then psychological place(s): the hidden and the overt, the small and protected, or claustrophobic, and the large, unconfined. So, for example, the home or good place ("The Jolly Corner," Hemingway's "The Clean Well-Lighted Place") the closed-in (as in James' In the Cage) or the open space: as in all the poetry of and the prose of the field (John Berger, etc.) Some art/text walking examples: the Australian Philip Hughes (Australia, Greece, France, the Antarctic) - texts literally on paintings.
The way in which the visual modifies our relation to the verbal/to be imagined: say, Van Gogh's bedroom, David Hockney's pools, as opposed to Friedrich's landscapes, moonscapes, seascapes, and, in American art, Ryder, Inness. Then, what I think of as homescapes: Fairfield Porter, and American poetry: Ashbery, Schuyler, etc. Poems with portraits, still lifes, and place consciousness...and so on. Auditors are allowed.
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Professor Morris Dickstein
75300
Between the Wars: American Fiction and Society, 1919-1940
Wednesdays 2-4 [55271]
This course will examine the profound changes in American society between the two world wars as seen primarily through some of its best fiction writers, including (possibly) Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Michael Gold, James T. Farrell, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West. There will be comparisons with the new poetry and the visual arts, especially painting and photography. Attention will be paid to the impact of the war, the revolt against the genteel tradition, the currents of modernism and naturalism, the expatriate scene, the prosperity of the 20s, the growing urbanization, the economic crisis of the 30s, the effects of race and ethnicity, the impact of New Deal programs, and the transformation of popular culture, including the growth of radio, the changes in popular music and musical theater, the shift from silent to sound films, and the development of advertising and public relations. Secondary reading will focus on both literary movements and the social history of the 1920s and 1930s. A term paper and a brief oral report will be required..Auditors are allowed.
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Professor Jackie diSalvo
84200
Countercultures, Their Roots and Legacies: From the Romantics to the '60s
Thursdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55283]
This class will examine the idea that romanticism initiated a permanent counter-cultural challenge to bourgeois hegemony. We will begin by examining the hegemonic ideology that emerges from the Enlightenment to dominate modern industrial society: Newtonian science, Cartesian psychology, Lockean epistemology, liberal political economy & political philosophy, imperialism, and bourgeois patriarchy. Against this, we will place Romantic subversion and transcendence, mostly through Blake, establishing, however, a wider context that includes especially Wordsworth, the Shelleys and feminism.
We will use a cultural studies/historicist approach that locates Romanticism in relation to the Jacobin movement and working class cultures. Most of our theory will be drawn from Blake, elaborated by a Marxist/feminist/psycho-historical methodology as well as some theory from Foucault & Bakhtin.
Having established this orientation, we will study the literature, film and popular counter-culture of the 1960s (through early 70s). We will examine "texts" from and about the period to interrogate the conjuncture/dialectic/contradictions between struggle, vision, and utopia. Our context will be the Civil Rights/ Black liberation, student/youth, anti-Vietnam war/anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist, feminist and sexual liberation movements. It will also include visionary approaches to transformation of consciousness, such as the influence of hallucinogens & eastern religion. We will also examine the utopian communes & "back to the land" experiments and Hippie lifestyle - Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll!
The choice of texts and artifacts has not been finalized, but will probably include Blake poems and "prophecies," selections from Wordsworth & Shelley, as well as fiction, poetry, plays, films, essays, & journalism from and about the "60s", the works of such intellectuals as Norman O'Brown, Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse and contemporary feminist, Marxist, and anarchist theorists. Tentatively, we may begin with Allen Ginsburg's Howl for the Blake roots and Beat influence and perhaps approach the anti-war movement through Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, the Black liberation movement through Alice Walker's Civil Rights novel, Meridian, as well as the Original Last Poets. If possible, we can watch a video of the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and listen to the music of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and others. We will probably read Marge Piercy's utopian-feminist novel, Woman at the Edge of Time. In addition, we will consider key figures, possibly Timothy Leary, Malcolm X, Carlos Castenada etc. and read selections from memoirs & the underground press. Students will do a presentation & a final paper. Try to read Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point in advance. The reading list will be eventually posted on the door of my office - room 4404.
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Professor Edmund Epstein
86100
James Joyce's Ulysses
Tuesdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55248]
In this course, we will engage in a close reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, which would entail careful reading through large sections of the text, from the beginning to the end. In our analysis, we will make reference to other works of Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake.
Ulysses is, to a considerable extent, a High Modernist novel in the realistic tradition. We will seek to understand the historical background of Ulysses as help in grasping the realistic aspects of the novel. However, Joyce never took anything for granted; he constantly reinvented every form he used. Therefore, we will also discuss Joyce's true innovations in the theory of literature and of the novel.
Although there has been some abuse by theoreticians of the notion of Joyce as a post-modern writer, his truly extreme revolutionary post-modernity will emerge as we go through Ulysses. Auditors are permitted.
Required Texts (paperback editions):
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Gabler edition. New York: Random House, 1986. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by Don Gifford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
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Professor Shelly Eversley
85500
Integration and Its Discontents
Mondays 2 - 4 [55236]
This seminar investigates the literary production and the aesthetic experiments by African American intellectuals writing from 1946 to the present. We will consider how the question and the promise of racial integration, marked by the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision has influenced the formal and thematic projects of a diversity of well-known and lesser-known writers. In particular, we will investigate how the terms of blackness, socially and historically conceived as inassimilable, is redescribed within the work by writers such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Wright. Using legal theory to examine questions of race, gender, sexuality, privacy, and psychology, we will extend the common practice of literary and cultural criticism to include an exploration of narrative and aesthetic experiments in African American literature as well as their engagements with concerns that move beyond the color-line.
Under special circumstances, auditors are allowed with permission.
After teaching four years at the University of Washington in Seattle, Shelly Eversley joined the English Department at Baruch College in 2001. She completed her graduate studies in English and American Literature at the Johns Hopkins University in 1997. Her specializations include 20th Century American Literature and Culture, especially postwar literature, race, gender and legal theory. She has published in a number of journals including American Literary History and the current special issue on the 1950s of the minnesota review.
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Professor David Greetham
79500-01
The Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Intersession.. [55238]
This revised 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 course is now offered in a 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 & Bibliography. Possible selections from Altick & 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 & 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 and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 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 several 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 "intensive" intersession version of this course during the month of January 2003, and the usual semester-long version will be given in the Spring with Prof. Kelvin. 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: students will thus be able to interrogate some of those authors they have read. And, because we meet often and for extended periods, students have usually found that there is a greater narrative impetus to the intersession version, and a greater sense of "group" interaction (to this end, it is my understanding that we will be using "Blackboard" in addition to the usual e-mail contacts, so that "conferencing" of the projects will be facilitated). 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. This year that meeting will be on Thursday, Dec. 19th from 1 - 4 p.m. in room C197. 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 am available to discuss any other aspect of these choices - dcgreetham@aol.com
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Professor Marilyn Hacker
78000
Some American Women Poets
Wednesdays 2 - 4 [55272]
Within an overview of the work of twentieth century women poets in the United States, the course will focus on the work of a few key figures of the generation born before and during World War I, notably HD, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop, with attention paid to significant and often-overlooked figures like Anne Spencer, Josephine Jacobsen, Lorine Niedecker and May Swenson. Of particular consideration will be: the role of women writers in the establishment of Modernism; the relevance of or resistance to Modernist tenets in the texts of African American women poets; the counter-tradition to Modernism established by women poets re-visioning and dialoguing with received poetic forms; the expansion of form and genre both by experimental and politically engaged poets; the role of the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement in the creation of what was to become an American feminist literary canon as well as questions of voice in the representation of gender and sexuality. Students will write semi-weekly observation papers as well as a term paper based on an in-class presentation and a final project, which may include creative work or the compilation of an individual anthology with critical introduction.
Texts studied may include, but not be limited to, HD's Trilogy, Gwendolyn Brooks' Blacks, Muriel Rukeyser's poems selected in the volume Out of Silence, Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems, The Love Poems of May Swenson, as well as the anthology No More Masks (Florence Howe, Ed.)
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Professor Tom Hayes
78100
Queering the Renaissance
Thursdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55259]
Although Michel Foucault points out in his History of Sexuality that there was no such thing as "a homosexual" until 1870 when the practice of sodomy "was transposed onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul" (43), same-sex desire is evident in many texts produced in 17th- and 17th century England. Starting with Marlowe's Edward II and continuing with Shakespeare's Richard II and The Sonnets we will discuss examples of same-sex desire that precede modern definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality. We will also discuss examples of "queer" erotic discourse such as George Herbert's poem about nursing at Christ's breast, Richard Crasaw's poem about Mary sucking Christ's bloody teat, John Davies's celebration of Christ's tormented body and Lady Eleanor Davies's references to King James's relationship with the Duke of Buckingham whom he called "his sweet child and wife, that give voice to desires that, outside the sphere of sacred rapture, would be seen as tasteless if not blasphemous. Abezier Coppe, a Ranter who refused compliance with monogamous marriage, wrote about his relationship with "Filthy blinde Sodomites called Angel's men" and told of his joy in "Filthy blinde Sodomites called Angel's men" and told of his joy in "clipping, hugging, embracing, and kissing a poor deformed wretch." Aphra Behn, who often dressed as a man, wrote in the epilogue to her play The Widow Ranter: "Men are but bunglers, when they would express/ The sweets of love, the dying tenderness;/ But women, by their own abundance, measure,/ And when they write, have deeper sense of pleasure of pleasure." In another play by a woman, Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy, the central misogynistic trope of Jonson's Epicoene is re-appropriated.
We will read the following primary texts: Christopher Marlowe, Edward II William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Richard II Poems by George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Davies, and Henry Vaughan , Abezier Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll Laurence Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found, and A Single Bye Eleanor Davies, Prophecies Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter, The Rover Ben Johnson, Epicoene Margaret Cavendish, The Female Academy
We will also read selection from such secondary texts as: Alison Findlay, and others Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700. Longman's 2000. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions. Duke, 1998 Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance. Duke, 1994. Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England. Chicago, paperback edn. 1993. Auditors are allowed.
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Professor Linda Hirsch, Hostos
89020
Studies in Language and Literacy
Mondays 4:15 - 6:15 [55239]
Linguistic Analysis. A lot of chaps pointing out that we don't always mean what we say, even when we manage to say what we mean. - Tom Stoppard, Professional Foul, 1978
While most children have acquired their spoken language by age five, the process of acquiring literacy is just beginning. The focus of this course is the nature of language and its acquisition and the corresponding acquisition and development of literacy. We will discuss various theories of language learning and their implications for teaching and learning. As we examine the roles and functions of language within cultural contexts and social situations, we will investigate the relationships among language, society, and education by reading and discussing texts which consider the sociocultural frameworks for understanding literacy theories. Most importantly, this study of language will be "hands-on." We will actively study language as it is used in various discourse communities including the home, the school and the workplace in order to appreciate how language is used in the world and what it means for both native and non-native speakers to acquire literacy. Central to this discussion will be an exploration of what teachers can do to facilitate students' literacy acquisition and how K-college classrooms can be transformed into environments which foster students' oral and written language development. In order to understand the processes involved in acquiring our language and our growing awareness of its social, communicative and pragmatic functions, we will regularly tape and analyze actual conversational data drawn from a variety of discourse communities. You will be assigned weekly readings and taping assignments so that we may develop a class "data book" of our studies. Each week we will discuss and analyze the data you bring to class. This ongoing collection of data will enable you to focus your inquiry on a particular question/problem/issue of interest to you resulting in a final project which reflects your interests and concerns.
Readings:
E. Kutz, Language & Literacy; J. Mayher, Uncommon Sense: Theoretical Practice in Language Education; S. Pinker, Words & Rules or The Language Instinct; G. Wells, The Meaning Makers: Children Learning Language and Using Language to Learn, and additional readings by authors including Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Jerome Harste, S.B. Heath, Larry Selinker, Catherine Snow and Constance Weaver.
Auditors welcome with instructor permission.
Linda Hirsch is a professor of English in the English Department at Hostos Community College/CUNY and holds a Ph.D. in English Education from New York University. She is currently the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) and Writing Fellows Coordinator at Hostos. Her research focuses on language and literacy development among both native and non-native speakers of English, and in particular, the use of talk and writing as learning tools across disciplines. She is an Adjunct Professor in graduate programs at both New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University where she teaches courses in Language and Literacy, Language Acquisition and Development, Educational Linguistics, Psychology of Language and Reading. In addition, she hosts an education segment on BronxTalk, a cable television talk show, devoted to exploring a broad range of education issues such as literacy instruction, technology and education, and teacher education. Dr. Hirsch also served as a literacy consultant to Ghostwriter, a PBS/Children's Television Workshop multi-media, multiple literacy based television series designed to make reading enticing and relevant to children.
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Professor Peter Hitchcock
86000
Transnational Literature
Wednesdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55273]
"...if culture laid the basis of the nation-state, it now threatens to scupper it"
Eagleton
What does it mean to talk of "transnational" literature and theory? What connection does this moniker have to the aesthetic predilections and consummate taste of cosmopolitanism? Is it a marker of world citizenship, or does it measure the somewhat more suspect circulation of cultural import/export? How well does literature travel? How fluidly does theory cross borders? Is the logic of transaction the same for both? Indeed, is one merely a symptom of the other? Is the "trans" in translation the "trans" in transnationalism? What is the status of nation for literature and theory in an age of transnationalism? And, finally, is transnationalism a synonym for globalization or does it offer an alternative logic to that devoutly-wished embrace? This course will consider the claims of the transnational on literary study both by considering the macrological concerns that are its possibility and key examples of literature and theory that develop, complicate, and challenge its governing ideas. One of the aims is to question the national/transnational binary in literary analysis that renders the nation itself the common denominator of cultural critique; another is to consider what happens to world literature when it becomes a material force.
Readings will include: Spivak, Apter, Moretti, Eagleton, Goethe, Nancy, Mbembe, Said, and Wallerstein on particular theoretical issues; and literature will feature Roy, Djebar, Toer, Munif, el Sadaawi, Farah, Rushdie, and Sebbar. A class presentation and term paper are required.
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Professor Anne Humpherys
80600
Narrative: Its Theories and Its Practices
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55286]
This course will survey developments in the theories of narrative from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, using six short fictions to exemplify and test the theories. The course will be divided into four units. We will begin with Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" and "Prefaces" and their aftermath; move to structuralist theories of narrative (i.e. Vladimir Propp, A.J. Greimas, Roland Barthes), then to post-structuralist models including the efforts to incorporate reading, history, and "race, class and gender" into theories of narrative (i.e. Mikhil Bahktin, Georg Lukacs, Peter Brooks, Nancy Miller, Susan Snaider Lanser, Henry Louis Gates). We will end with recent rethinkings of narrative, including those of the evolutionary biologists.
We will read six short literary texts on which to "practice" some of the theoretical models, including selections from Henry James's The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories; Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sherlock Holmes Stories; George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and J. Coetzee's Foe.
Students will give an oral report in which they apply a theoretical model to a literary text. Instead of a long final paper, students will also be asked to do four short (four to five pages) papers, including a write-up of their oral report, in which they apply a theoretical model from each of the units to a literary text.
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Professor Gerhard Joseph
84500
Victorian Culture Criticism and Its Legacies: The Clash of the Anthropological and the Aesthetic
Mondays 11:45 - 1:45 [55283]
Our current movement between the disciplinarity of literary studies and the trans- or post-disciplinarity of cultural studies may be said to have a nineteenth-century origin in the clash of aesthetic and anthropological definitions of "culture." This course will consider the works of canonical Victorian writers in the three competing Victorian genres (fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry) as both work and generic competition get inflected by nineteenth-century debates about culture--and will explore extensions of those debates into our own time. Victorian founders of cultural anthropology defined culture so broadly as to include everything this side of "nature." On a more limiting "high" ethical/aesthetic side, the English Romantic adaptation of German Enlightenment "Bildung," i.e., the humanistic cultivation of the best self, as in Carlyle (Sartor Resartus) among others, prepared for the Victorian tension between a communal and an individual, a "public" and a "private," a high and a popular notion of culture in the work of Mill (On Liberty), George Eliot (Felix Holt, Radical), Arnold (Culture and Anarchy and some relevant poetry), Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor), Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh), Tennyson ("The Palace of Art," Idylls of the King), Newman, (The Idea of a University), Gissing (New Grub Street), and Pater (The Renaissance). Within our own time and beyond the British Isles, we have experienced a broader, Western attraction/revulsion toward high humanist culture; we have seen the dialectic of culture and barbarism (as defined by the Frankfurt School) in such works as Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (or Despair?), Baudrillard's America, Nabokov's Lolita, the last as readable via Richard Rorty's great chapter on Nabokov and cruelty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. We will conclude with a consideration of the "traveling cultures" (James Clifford) and "global ethnoscapes" (Arjun Appadurai) implicit in Hardt and Negri's Empire, the most influential cultural document of the millennial moment within the academy (at least according to Jean-Michel Rabaté in The Future of Theory). Requirements: an oral report and a term paper. Auditors are allowed.
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Professor Norman Kelvin
79500-02
The Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Mondays 4:15 - 6:15 [55237]
The course relates textual scholarship to post-modern literary and cultural theory, and includes readings from Bakhtin, J.L. Austin, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Eagleton, Jameson, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Gates, Deleuze and Guattari, and Morrison. These provide our context. Within it we explore textual criticism and scholarly editing, focusing on questions to be answered when anyone chooses a version of a text for a scholarly purpose -- e.g., for writing a dissertation. The positions taken by Greetham, McGann, and Tanselle, who for us represent textual scholars, will get special attention, but the question before us will always be, how does textual scholarship -- producing a critical edition -- relate to literary interpretation as we practice it today? Finally, we will consider hypertext, which cuts across textual scholarship and literary criticism, and challenges both. This will set the stage for a discussion of theory and praxis: of the students' needs today and what they may be in the near future. There will be a choice of term projects. One, including as an option "versioning," will be preparation of a critical edition of a short poem (what is meant by a "critical edition" and "versioning" will be explained). The other will be to write a research paper assessing textual scholarship's compatibility or incompatibility with a cultural theory that interests the student who chooses to write such a paper. Needless to say, the challenge of hypertext would serve very well for this second choice.
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Professor Wayne Koestenbaum
87200
Sappho, Dickinson, Stein, Celan
Wednesdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55277]
In this seminar, we will study four difficult poets (Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan) who portray consciousness with unrivaled, flashing intensity; who raise questions of ruin, comprehensiveness, and fragment; and who teach us, anew, how to read. Diversely they master catastrophe, and convert it into always timely artifacts that demand perpetual, provisional, experimental revisitation.
We will begin with Sappho, in Anne Carson's new (2002) English translation. (The edition is bilingual.) Our emphasis will be Sappho's influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone poetics. We may also read Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, an idiosyncratic work of literary criticism. Next, we will survey Dickinson, in Ralph Franklin's reading edition (a distillation of his 1998 Variorium edition); students familiar only with the 1955 Thomas Johnson edition of Dickinson will find surprises. We may also read poet Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, a critical text which indirectly measures how Dickinson's enterprise predicts Stein's and Celan's. (No surprise, that Celan translated Dickinson's poems into German.) Next, we will read Stein. Her amplitude refuses frame, and yet, frame her we must: in front of neighbors (Sappho, Dickinson, Celan), she behaves. We will focus on Stanzas in Meditation, as well as several short Steinian texts that, unlike Three Lives, declare themselves poems. Finally, we will read Celan, in Michael Hamburger's new (2002) updated translation (a bilingual edition). Celan ruins and renovates German, his mother tongue, just as Stein wreaked elysian havoc on American English. Like Stein, Celan was a displaced Jew in France--but with a difference.
Requirements: two-page position paper, read aloud in class; final essay (20-25 pages). Please note: a knowledge of German and Greek, though welcome, and laudable, is not required.
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Professor Adam McKible
75500
American Slave Narratives: Development, Theories, and Legacies
Tuesdays 2 - 4 [55246]
This course will examine the development and legacies of the African American slave narrative. Beginning with nineteenth century writers who are central the genre (Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, etc.), we will also examine fictional treatments of slavery (Brown, Crafts, Stowe). In the final weeks of the class, we will turn to the neo-slave narratives of the twentieth century (Styron, Williams, and Reed). Four major concerns undergird the course: the narrative theories and practices of narrating slavery; ninetieth century fictionalizations of the slave experience as shaped by slave narrators; twentieth century reinventions of the genre; and competing gendered responses and representations of slavery.
There will be one paper (20-25 pages) and an in-class presentation. Auditors are allowed with the permission of the instructor.
Professor McKible teaches American Literature, African American Literature, and Classical Literature. His book, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York, was published by Routledge in 2002. His essays on little magazines and on African American literature appear in The Black Press (Rutgers UP 2001), Contemporary Literary Criticism, the African American Review, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Professor McKible received his MA and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More information can be found at http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/%7Eenglish/mckible.htm.
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Professor Nancy Miller
86000 and IDS84200 20th Century colloquium
America in the 50s
Tuesdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55255]
In 1953, Marilyn Monroe appeared in the first issue of the magazine Playboy and Simone de Beauvoir's revolutionary analysis The Second Sex was published in the United States. In 1953 the Rosenbergs were found guilty and Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, began her odyssey under the sign of their execution in New York's hot summer. Between 1953 and the assassination of JFK in November, 1963 a decade of social transformation unfolded. Despite the well-known repressive effects of containment culture of the Cold War, the suburbanization of American life, the celebration on television of "Father Knows Best," the 1950s were also a time of visible dissidence: the landmark decision of Brown v Board of Education and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, the emergence of Beat writing and culture, rock and roll. In the course, we will look at the complexities and contradictions of this period, in which the problems that were to explode in the 1960s found their earliest expression.
Readings will be drawn from the following: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison, Franz Fanon, Betty Friedan, Anne Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Irving Goffman, Jane Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Grace Metalious, C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, Sylvia Plath, David Riesman, J.D. Salinger, William H. Whyte. Films: All About Eve, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without A Cause, Imitation of Life, The Manchurian Candidate, Breathless, Hiroshima mon amour. Guest speakers will join the colloquium discussion.
Work for the course includes a term-paper due at the end of the semester and in-class participation.
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Professor Sondra Perl
79020
Rethinking Pedagogy: Global Theories and Local Practices
Tuesdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55252]
The challenge in this seminar is to examine, describe, observe, narrate, name, critique, reflect on, and otherwise pay attention to a phenomenon we are so accustomed to we often take it for granted: what happens and what it is we do in classrooms. The sites for this inquiry are many: our GC seminar, the classrooms in which you may be working, classrooms in which your colleagues are working, and/or other settings in which you find yourself learning or teaching. We also have the added challenge of determining how (or if) our learning is enhanced as we explore and make use of Blackboard, a web-based interface.
In this seminar, you will be invited to consider what it feels like to be a learner or teacher in various settings. I am interested in the creation of descriptions of lived experience more than in the assigning of labels. How do you experience yourself as a teacher? A student? When is your experience exciting? Engaging? Powerful? When is it not? What accounts for these differences? And can you write about such experiences in a way that shows rather than tells? In fact, the writing you do will be central to this inquiry. You will be asked to describe teaching and learning by examining small moments, by paying attention to detail, and by crafting scenes that 'lift out' and explore both the visible and the hidden dynamics of classroom life.
You will also be asked to read accounts of learning that explore the dynamics of the classroom from different theoretical perspectives. Readings and perspectives will be drawn from a range of writers and teachers, including, but not limited to, the following: Patrick Finn, Lisa Delpit, Vito Perrone, Patricia Carini, Eleanor Duckworth, Donald Finkel, bell hooks, Ira Shor, Sondra Perl, Eugene Gendlin, and Max van Manen. You will be expected to post weekly responses to readings on Blackboard and to be actively engaged in the Discussion Board forums. The seminar will culminate in two final projects: reflective papers and small group performances of particular theories in action. AUDITORS WITH PERMISSION ONLY
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Professor David Richter
83500
The Enlightenment and Modernity crosslisted with MALS
Mondays 6:30 - 8:30 [55240]
The latter half of the Eighteenth Century was one of the great transitional periods of modern times: an age of monumental intellectual and social ferment. It saw the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the opening decades of the Industrial Revolution. While conservative belief-systems were collapsing (like that of the "great chain of Being" dating from classical times), new systems that would underlie nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologies were being born. All the traditional notions about God's relation to the created world, the individual's duty to his rulers, the subordination of women to men, and the internal workings of the perceiving and acting subject were being called into question.
Meanwhile social and political life was being changed by cultural forces including the emergence of (1) a public sphere dependent on journalism and other forms of print culture; (2) a modern market economy stressing exchange value over use value; (3) progressive forms of religious and quasi-religious belief, including freemasonry and Methodism; (4) a growing attachment to and identification with the idea of the nation, complicated by conflicts between metropolis and hinterland within the nation and between the nation and the empire that it had acquired; and (5) a third gender of so-called "sodomites" and "sapphists" with life-styles seeking public recognition. Unifying all these emergent tendencies was the sense of modernity: the notion that history itself was progressive rather than static or circular, and that the decisions taken today would necessarily shape the world of tomorrow.
In this course we will attempt to survey this ideological watershed and its struggle between revolution and reaction, using samples from all of the enormous variety of genres that made up the field of "literature" in that age, which included poetry, fiction, fable, autobiography, biography, philosophical treatise, history, drama, and opera.
The reading list has not been finalized. I am planning work through a series of topics, so that we would, for example, spend a day on Primitivism and Medievalism in the 1760s, and the central text might be a short novel (Walpole's The Castle of Otranto) but we would also read little bits of other stuff that goes along with it as part of the same cultural stream (MacPherson's translations from the Erse and his forgeries of Ossian, one of Chatterton's forgeries of the poetry of "Rowley," Percy's collections of Border Ballads, Gray's imitations of primitive verse). The next week, we might go on to religion, with the main text being (say) Lessing's Nathan the Wise, with short ancillary readings by Hume, Wesley, Swedenborg. Interested students can go to my website (http://www.qc.edu/ENGLISH/Staff/richter/index.html) , where, near the bottom of the page, they can click on Spring 2003 Courses: English 771.00 and the syllabus with all the readings (as far as I've got with it on any given date) will pop up.
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Prof. Michael Sargent
80700
Margery Kempe in Context
Tuesdays 11:45 am -1:45 p.m. [55243]
Until 1934, all that the world knew of The Book of Margery Kempe was a set of pious extracts printed in pamphlet form at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Wynkyn de Worde. The single extant manuscript was only identified when Col. William Butler-Bowden brought it, together with other family antiquities, to the Victoria and Albert Museum for a valuation; the Museum, having no one on staff with expertise in late medieval contemplative and devotional literature, called upon Hope Emily Allen, an independent American scholar then pursuing her own work in the manuscript reading room of the British Museum, to examine the small, workaday paper volume. She immediately announced her discovery in the Times Literary Supplement.
Ms. Allen proposed an edition of the Book to the editorial board of the Early English Text Society. They agreed, but insisted that she take a collaborator with a stronger background in philology: Prof. Sanford Brown Meech, the editor of the Middle English Dictionary. A job was found for Ms. Allen with the Dictionary project at the University of Michigan, and the two began their collaboration: Meech to produce the text itself and notes on all issues other than those involving late medieval women's spirituality, and Allen to produce a second volume of commentary dealing specifically with those issues. The collaboration foundered, however, and Ms. Allen left Ann Arbor: the one volume produced included only some of her comments, identified in the notes by her initials at the end of each entry for which she was responsible. Butler-Bowden produced a modern-English version of the text, in which the more embarrassingly mystical passages were printed in smaller type.
Today, extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe are to be found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
The Book of Margery Kempe thus offers a particularly rich opportunity for the study both of late medieval literature, and of the construction of "medieval-ism" as a field. It is in terms of both of these contexts that we will read Margery's book. We will read some of the books that Margery read, or that served as models or parallels for her work, including the Middle English lives of three Belgian beguine holy women, and Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; but we will also read modern criticism of Margery's book, not just as secondary literature commenting on her, but as primary literature requiring examination in its own right.
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Professor Eve Sedgwick
87100
Proust II
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55262]
This is the second half of a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homo- and other sexualities. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire and Oedipal psychology; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls - to name but a few.
Registration for students who have not taken the first semester of the class requires permission of the instructor
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Professor Donald Stone
74300
English Literature and the Art of the 1860s: The Old Order Changes
Wednesdays 4:15 - 6:15 [55274]
After the most prosperous decade in its history, England in the 1860s faced new challenges and uncertainties. "Rather like the 60s of our own century," A. N. Wilson observes in God's Funeral, "the 1860s was a decade in which the younger generation felt inclined to overthrow in toto the values and mores of their parents." It was a time of political change (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," Tennyson wrote in "The Passing of Arthur" (1869), "yielding place to new." Perhaps the most popular literary phenomenon of the decade was the "sensation novel" (e.g. Lady Audley's Secret).
From the rich texture of literary and artistic works of the period, we will focus on these texts:
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
Collins, The Woman in White
Eliot, Romola
Gaskell, Wives and Daughters
Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
Browning, selections from The Ring and the Book
Tennyson, the 1869 Idylls of the King
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 midVictorian England: e.g., the relevant portions of Asa Briggs'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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Professor Elizabeth Tenenbaum
86400.
Readings in Recent British Fiction
Mondays 6:30 - 8:30 [55241]
British writers of the high modern period generated a level of international interest that their immediate successors could not maintain. But in recent decades, enriched by a number of vibrant writers of Commonwealth origin, Britain fiction has regained its claim upon international attention. The writers who have blossomed during this period appear (at least from the vantage point of today) too varied to identify as members of a single literary movement. But the widely acclaimed collection of texts that fall under the rubric of contemporary British fiction have added a new dimension to our discipline. In this course, all critical and theoretical perspectives will be welcomed as tools for enhancing our understanding of the texts that we confront and the broadly ranging cultures and events that they encompass. Readings will be drawn from among such writers as Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson. Course requirements include a short oral presentation and a fifteen-page term paper.
The reading list for this course will be available in early December
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Professor Neal Tolchin
85000
Hawthorne and Melville
Thursdays 2 - 4 [55282]
During the period of his life that he was writing Moby-Dick at Arrowhead, his farm in the Berkshires, Melville visited the little red cottage above the Stockbridge Bowl where he met Hawthorne for the first time. Hawthorne's wife Sophia marveled at Melville's "fluid consciousness," as she witnessed Melville open his soul to her receptive but mostly silent husband. Melville remarks in a letter to Hawthorne that he looks forward to talking "ontological heroics" with him. Melville scholars have speculated that his friendship with Hawthorne had a profound effect on Melville's development as an artist; however, Melville seems to have made an equally powerful impression on his older mentor. The character Hollingsworth, in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance may well have been modeled, at least in part, on Melville. In Pierre, the bizarre send-up of the domestic novel that Melville wrote immediately after Moby-Dick, he seems to parody Hawthorne in some aspects of the characters Isabel and Plotinus Plinlimmon. Later in life, in his long narrative poem Clarel, Melville is thought to have addressed a mysterious rift with Hawthorne. To gauge the influence these writers had on one each other, we will read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Typee, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, as well as selected short fiction by each writer. Requirements: The class will be conducted as a seminar, so attendance and participation in class discussions are crucial. Informal Response Papers; Oral Reports on the criticism; and Research Paper.
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Professor Joe Wittreich
82300
Milton Matters
Wednesdays 6:30 - 8:30 [55279]
Let's start this seminar with what readers can agree upon: Milton matters. Yet differences arise-and sometimes become disagreeable disputes-the moment we ask why Milton matters, and then entwine the theoretical gambit, "Who Reads What How?" For some, Milton remains a monument to dead ideas and, as such, a reliable index to the starched theology and retrograde politics, including sexual politics, of his own era. Milton's excellence, apparently, is his relevance to the seventeenth century and irrelevance to our own, with Milton then depicted as a poet who embraces the very values that, having outgrown, we now abhor. Yet there are other voices in this conversation, which speak of double readings, of resistant readings and of subversive texts, of counterspeech. These are the voices that capture the enlarged consciousness of the poet who, once composing Samson Agonistes, encased it within the interpreting context of Paradise Regain'd. We will begin and end this seminar with the last of Milton's major poems, Samson Agonistes, which conveniently (for us) is being performed in New York the first and second Sundays of February. We will dwell on the 1671 poetic volume in which Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes are paired-a volume which is both the completion and climax of Milton's poetic vision. Yet we will also trace the changing mind of Milton from Lycidas (and the poetic volume in which it was first published, Justa Edovardo King Naufrago), through the political tracts by which Milton was best known in his own time, to the poems published together in 1671, asking ourselves along the way and in different contexts whether Milton's writings subtend or subvert the culture of violence out of which they emerge. REQUIIREMENTS: an oral presentation and a final paper of 20 to 25 pages. TEXTS: Justa Edovardo King Naufrago and Christos Paschon (provided by the seminar leader); John Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, Cambridge University Press paperback; Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, Longman paperback; Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on "Samson Agonistes," ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses).
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