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alphabetical by instructor
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Ammiel Alcalay
ENGL 80200
Poetics & History/Regional Poetics: Redefining the ‘Post-modern’
Thursday 6:30 – 8:30 2/4 credits [66149]
Emerging from the work of key modernists such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Melvin Tolson, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, and others, the “New American Poetry” includes writers associated with groupings such as the Objectivists, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain School, the Beats, the New York School, the deep image and ethnopoetics movement, the New York School, and the Umbra Arts Workshop. While writers associated with the New Americans have begun to get increased critical and scholarly attention over the past 20 years, very few attempts have been made to place their work in broader historical, political, social and cultural contexts. Taking the encounter between Ezra Pound and Charles Olson as a key chapter in the post WWII break between aesthetics and politics, we will explore Olson’s definition and conception of the “post-modern” (a term first coined by him in a 1951 letter to the poet Robert Creeley). Olson’s conception, both as a thinker and as rector of Black Mountain College, demanded nothing less than a complete reordering of thought that would entail the creation of a completely new curriculum, in every sense imaginable. Using these ideas as a base, the course will look at different directions taken by poets (these may include Amiri Baraka; Wanda Coleman; Edward Dorn; Robert Duncan; Bob Kaufman; Lorine Niedecker; Alice Notley; Laura Riding; Muriel Rukeyser; Jack Spicer; Philip Whalen, et al). Students will be asked to pursue lines of tradition or controversy in poetries and poetics (projective or open verse as against deep image; the Beats as tourists in the San Francisco Renaissance; ethnopoetics and natives; Umbra Arts as an integral element of the Lower East Side scene, etc.), or to pursue areas of knowledge evoked through Olson’s reading (in pre-history; the Ancient Near East; classical antiquity; Meso and North America; Norse mythology; economics; geography, etc.), and the implications of such studies on form, genre and poetics.
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Meena Alexander
ENGL 76300
Migration and Memory: Invented Selves
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [66105]
We will reflect on the metamorphic self the writer creates, as she or he searches for home through migratory, multiple existences. The works of fiction and poetry that we study will lead us into sustained reflection on what Zygmunt Bauman speaks of as the `liquid culture’ of our transnational era. As part of this task we will pay particular attention to several complex, interrelated questions -- cultural translation and what it means for the writer to fabricate a tradition; beauty and the role it plays in the creation of form, in the aesthetic evocation of violence; trauma and dislocation, the complexities of how time and the body are grasped and the centrality, either hidden or overt, of gender, sexuality and race. Is it possible to speak of a late, postcolonial poetics? What is the interface between such an emergent poetics and what we think of as American ethnicity? How to make sense of the fierce self-fashioning that often drives migrant writing, and with it the yearning for a sometimes impossible home? These are some of the questions we will attend to. There are three segments which will come together in this course. A segment, where we read texts such as Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth; Djebbar’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment; Bauman’s Identity; as well as selected essays by Agamben, Anzaldua,Appadurai, Asad, Bhabha, Caruth, Clifford, Glissant, Seyhan, Soja, Spivak. A segment on Asian American literature where we read Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior; Theresa Cha’s Dictee; Faye Ng’s Bone; Li-Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You; as well as selections from David Mura, Marilyn Chin, Arthur Sze. A segment on Irish poetry where we read the poems of Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney’s long poem Station Island.
Course Requirements: this course will be conducted as a seminar and as such will include weekly readings and presentations, one short mid term essay and one final research paper. The texts will be on order at Labyrinth Books.
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John Brenkman ENGL 86100
Henry James’s Late Novels
Wednesday 2-4pm 2/4 credits [66140]
Henry James’s final published novels—The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)—continue his long-standing preoccupation with the differences between American and European wealth, sensibility, and tradition. As regards their place in the history of the novel, these three works take James’s transformation of the English marriage novel to new extremes and at the same time test the stylistic limits of psychological realism. In light of these thematic and formal concerns, we will address the aesthetic question of the novels’ principle of construction. What are the imperatives and motives that animate the composition of the novels? What do James’s prefaces and notebooks reveal, and conceal, about the aesthetic problems that the writing of the novels posed? And what sorts of solutions do the novels themselves embody?
(Students are asked to read The Portrait of a Lady for the first meeting of the seminar.)
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Rachel Brownstein
ENGL 84000
Jane Austen in Context
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66121]
Since 1975, most scholars and critics have studied the historical context of Jane Austen’s novels, considering their relation to the author’s life and family, revolutionary politics and ideas, Regency society, European wars, and, most notoriously, the British empire and imperialism. Others have focused on such contexts as print culture, the tradition of women novelists, and the theatre, or on Austen’s place in the literary canon and her reception over the years. What has been the effect of these various contextual emphases on the continuing strong tradition of formalist readings? Do we read the texts differently and/or more insightfully now? We will consider this question, and glance, as well, at the more than Shakespearean broad appeal and malleability of the novels, those mystifyingly prolific adaptations and imitations, sequels and “prequels” generated by the very idea of Jane Austen. (The brand-new Bollywood “Bride and Prejudice” will be released in the U.S. in December, 2004).
For this seminar we will read or reread the six novels and the minor works, focusing closely on the texts while sampling critical approaches to Jane Austen. Students will write brief weekly response papers and a term paper, and give at least one oral presentation.
I will count on everyone’s having read Pride and Prejudice before the first meeting of the seminar, when we will look together at scenes from the 1995 BBC miniseries, and discuss translating the novel into film. Then we will proceed chronologically through the small corpus, beginning with the juvenilia (and getting to Pride and Prejudice again), using the sequence to address questions about narrative and history, and notions of personal and historical development and change over time.
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Morris Dickstein
ENGL 85000
The Politics of American Fiction, 1930-1980
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000) [66127]
With a few important exceptions, major 20th-century American novels have rarely grappled with politics directly, though they often have serious political implications. Starting with the Depression, however, and continuing with World War II, the cold war, the 1960s, the Vietnam way, and the rise of movements such as black nationalism and feminism, American writers developed new forms of social and historical fiction that often carried a strong political valence. Beginning with contrasting examples of radical fiction by Michael Gold, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, this course will examine how political ideas worked their way into novels, including satiric fiction by Mary McCarthy and Tess Slesinger, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, and more contemporary novels by Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo. The course will emphasize the uses of history to illuminate present conflicts and the contrast between realistic or journalistic techniques and postmodern methods. Some attention will be paid to films that parallel the approaches of these novels or adapt them to another medium, including Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, and Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
Assignments will include a brief oral report and a term paper.
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Marc Dolan
ENGL 75100
America in the 1850s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits [66148]
Has there ever been a more central moment in U. S. culture than the 1850s? Most obviously viewed as the decade during which the nation moved toward civil war, the importance of the 1850s looms large even when that period is viewed from perspectives not exclusively related to sectionalism or slavery. This was the decade during which American literature came into its own, not just in the widely noted works of the “American Renaissance,” but also in the explosion of domestic and sentimental writing, as well as in the turn from nonfiction to fiction by African American authors. In performance rather than print, it was the decade in which the minstrel show—arguably the first indigenous form of U.S. entertainment—spread throughout the nation, bringing with it the notable success of the first widely-known American songwriter, Stephen Foster. American reform changed forever in the 1850s, as did the nation’s political parties. In this decade, too, the heterogeneity of the American national character became nearly undeniable, as the changes wrought during the previous decade by immigration from the east and imperialism in the west began to show a perceptible impact on the “face” of the United States. Sectionalism and slavery were the crucibles into which all these revolutions (and more) were poured, so that even those phenomena not directly shaped by region or race could not help being affected by them, and by each other.
This course will examine some, but obviously not all, of these transformations and will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program based in the Art History, English, History, and Music doctoral programs. Most of our work will be with primary rather than secondary sources. These sources may include Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird)’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), The Life of P.T. Barnum as Written by Himself (1855), Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales (1856), John Brown’s “Address to the Virginia Court” (1859), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859), Martin Delany’s Blake (1859-62), and Abraham Lincoln’s "Address at Cooper Institute" (1860), as well as selected congressional deliberations over the Compromise of 1850, anti-popery tracts, minstrel songs, and paintings of the Hudson River School. We will probably also avail ourselves of the online reconstruction of Barnum’s “Lost Museum.”
Course requirements include class participation, an oral presentation of original scholarship on U. S. life during the period, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.
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Edmund Epstein
ENGL 86100
Ulysses
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66139]
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 aspectsof the novel. However, Joyce never took anything for granted; he constantly reinvented everyform 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.
I recommend that, before the class begins, you reread The Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.
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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David Greetham
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice in Literary Criticism and Scholarship
4 credits [66107] January intersession class
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. Borges’ "Library of Babel" is (of course) a sine qua non. 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 2005, and the usual semester-long version will be given 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: students will thus be able to interrogate some of those authors they have read. And, as a special added bonus this year, one of the former participants in the intersession version, Kathy Harris, has been selected as one of the three "new scholars" addressing the Bibliographical Society of America’s annual meeting, which we will attend. 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. The main challenge 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. This year, there will be an organizational meeting on Wednesday, 15 December 2004 at 1:00 p.m. I hope all those interested in taking this version of the course, but if not, please do get in touch with me at dgreetham@peoplepc.com or dgreetham@gc.cuny.edu.
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Tom Hayes
ENGL 81100
Anti-Semitism. Racism, and Colonialism in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Behn
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66115]
We will begin with an examination of anti-Semitism in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. We will then discuss racism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Othello which will lead us to a discussion of colonialism and sexual difference in Shakespeare’s Tempest and in Behn’s Orooknoo. We will try to decide whether these works are inherently anti-Semitic, racist, and colonialist. We will point out similarities and differences between anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and today and we will discuss how we might teach these works in undergraduate courses. As a coda we will read Coetzee’s Foe.
Some recommended books and essays on individual works:
Ross Ballaster, “New Hystericism: Behn’s Orooknoo: the Body, the Text and the Feminist Critic,” in New Feminist Discourses. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. Routledge, 1992. 283-95.
Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Othello’s Lost Handkerchief,” in Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics. Ed. Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein. SUNY, 1996. 151-80.
James L. Calderwood, The Properties of Othello. U. Mass., 1989.
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers. Methuen, 1987. (On Merchant).
Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” in Learning to Curse. Routledge, 1990. (on Tempest).
Gayle Greene (on Othello), Joseph Pequigney (on Merchant), Catherine Belsey (on Merchant), Carol Thomas Neeley (on Othello), Ann Thompson (on Tempest), in Shakespeare and Gender: A History. Ed. Deborah E. Barker & Ivo Kamps. Verso, 1995
Lloyd Edward Kermode, “Marlowe’s Second City: The Jew as Critic at the Rose in 1592,” SEL 35.2 (Spring 1995): 215-29.
On anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism:
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Genealogy of Morals. Vintage, 1989.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death & Sensuality. City Lights, 1986.
Joan Copjec, ed. Radical Evil. Verso, 1996. An excellent collection of essays.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Grove, 1967.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989.
- - -. “On Radical Evil,” in Tarrying with the Negative. Duke, 1993. 83-124, see also 148-53.
- - -. “The Banality of Evil,” in The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 1997. 54-60.
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Gerhard Joseph
ENGL 84400
Victorian Poetry and the Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [66125]
"The function of criticism at the [ever] present time," says Matthew Arnold in a famous essay of that name, is "to see the object as in itself it really is." Concentrating upon the themes, forms, and figural strategies of some major Victorian poets (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti), we will examine the shifting relationship of "subject and "object," of consciousness and the objects of consciousness, as their constructions move from the Victorian period to the present. We will, that is, consider the different epistemological/aesthetic implications of "seeing" involved in a German (via Coleridgean) organicism behind Arnold's dictum as they prepare for New Critical formalism; in Pater and Wilde's impressionism as it prepares for Harold Bloom's "antithetical criticism," Stanley Fish's "affective stylistics," and reader-response theory more generally; in the Geneva School's phenomenology as it generates some Anglo-American approaches to Victorian poetry in the sixties; in structuralist/post-structuralist substitutions of "text" and "intertext" for "object" and "works" in the seventies and eighties; and in Lacanian and feminist theories of the "gaze." As evolving critical frames for our primary reading in the poets, we will look at sections of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn, Walter Pater's "Introduction" and "Conclusion" to The Renaissance and "Aesthetic Criticism," Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist," Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading, Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class?, J. Hillis Miller's The Disappearance of God in Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, Roland Barthes's "From Work to Text," Richard Machin and Christopher Norris's Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, and Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. We will all along be dipping into two recent issues of the journal Victorian Poetry dedicated to the question of “what’s new” in the commentary on Victorian poetry. Course requirements: one short oral presentation and a term paper.
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David Kazanjian
ENGL 80600
Literature and History
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [66108]
What is the relationship between the historical and the literary? How do we read literature historically and history literarily? In this class, we will examine various theoretical paradigms for interpreting the relationship between history and literature, including those deriving from literary history, new historicism, historiography, pragmatism, genealogy, and speech act theory. We will seek to consider literature not merely as a verifiable object, and history not simply as the context for aesthetics, but rather to generate a robust relationship between the allegorical and the archival. We will read theoretical accounts of the relationship between history and literature by such authors as Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Teresa Brennan, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Gallagher and Steven Greenblatt, as well as "case studies" of recent literary and historical criticism that exemplify various ways of cross-reading history and literature. Most of the case studies will be drawn from the burgeoning field of transnational American Studies, but this class will be relevant to all literary periods and fields.
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Norman Kelvin
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice in Literary Criticism and Scholarship
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 4 credits [66106]
The course relates textual scholarship to postmodern theory. It includes readings from Bakhtin, J. L. Austin, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Eagleton, Jameson, Althusser, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Gates, Deleuze and Guattari, and Morrison. These provide our context. Within it we explore textual scholarship, focusing on questions to be answered when producing a critical edition or selecting a version of a text for a purpose such as 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 relate to postmodern theory, including literary interpretation? We will also take up hypertext, which cuts across textual scholarship and literary criticism, and challenges both. In brief, we'll discuss theory and praxis, focusing on students' current needs and what they may be in the future. There will be a choice of term projects. One, including versioning, will be preparation of a critical edition of a short poem (the terms "critical edition" and "versioning" will be explained). The other will be to write a paper assessing textual scholarship's compatibility with a cultural theory that has special interest for the student electing the choice. The challenge of hypertext, it should be added, would serve very well for this second option.
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William Kelly
ENGL 75000
Before the American Renaissance
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000) [66103]
This course will examine American cultural expression in the decades between the Revolution and the American Renaissance. The intellectual and artistic range of the period is extensive, and our scope will be correspondingly broad. Among the topics we will address are the following: national originality and the anxiety of cultural influence; post-coloniality and transatlantic negotiation; gender, class and the conflicting legacies of the Revolution, the representation of racial and class differences; history, natural history, and the delineation of the American landscape; the crisis of cultural authority and the construction of subjectivity; republicanism, democracy, and the emergence of a market economy. Among the writers we will consider are the following: Jefferson, Crevecoeur, Equiano, Hannah Foster, Lewis and Clark, Audubon, Irving, and Child.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 86400
Lyric Fiction
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [66143]
This seminar studies poetic fictions - certain twentieth-century experimental prose narratives, subjective, monomaniacal, and word-intoxicated, beginning either with Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and including "half-cracked" works by Robert Walser (Selected Stories), Samuel Beckett (Texts for Nothing), Gertrude Stein (A Novel of Thank You), Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein), Thomas Bernhard (The Loser), Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile), Severo Sarduy (Maitreya) , Carole Maso (Ava), and others. Our concern will not be to define and circumscribe the reach of "lyric fiction" but to enjoy unclassifiable specimens of a delicate, hothouse lineage, poems traveling under fiction's incognito, novels borrowing the stringency, self-reflexivity, and formal caginess of lyric poetry. Requirements: one in-class oral presentation, and three 8-page experimental essays, due (approximately) the fifth, ninth, and fourteenth weeks of the semester. In these essays, students will be encouraged to employ fictive and/or lyric modes - to perform an essayistic task with the aid of fiction's wily armature, or with recourse to lyric's intensity of invocation, faux-idiocy, and immediacy. (Auditors admitted by permission of instructor.)
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Steve Kruger
ENGL 70700
Representations of Religious/Racial Difference in Middle English Texts
Wednesday 11:45 – 1:45pm 2/4 credits [66101]
This course is intended as a survey of medieval English literature, providing students with a sense of the wide range of genres and texts that characterized literature written in Britain from ca. 1100 – ca. 1500. The majority of texts will be read in the original Middle English (but students need not have any prior experience with Middle English); we may also read some Welsh, Irish, Anglo-Norman (French), and Latin texts in translation. One subject taken up in many of these texts is religion and the differences among religious traditions – Christianity, Christian heresies (“Lollardy”), “paganism,” Islam, Judaism – and we will particularly focus on works in which this subject is central. We will also consider whether religious difference as represented in medieval texts shares anything with more modern constructions of racial difference. Texts read for the course may include John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (in part), William Langland’s Piers Plowman (in part), Cleanness, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Corpus Christi drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Lollard and anti-Lollard polemic, Middle English romances like The Siege of Jerusalem and Sir Gowther, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (in part), Anglo-Norman romances, Latin texts depicting disputations between Christians and Jews, poems by Scottish authors like Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, and Lindsay. Students will be expected to do at least one in-class presentation and write a final essay for the course.
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Nancy Miller
ENGL 88000
Women’s Life Writing: From Sand to Satrapi
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66151]
Reading autobiographical works drawn from several national literatures, we will seek to identify the “invisible presences” as Woolf termed them in Moments of Being, that shape the subjects of life-writing and make them who they are. The seminar will begin in the nineteenth century with George Sand’s Story of My Life and end in the twenty-first with Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis. Twentieth-century writers will include Mary Antin, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Natalia Ginzburg, Audre Lorde, Carolyn Steedman, Eva Hoffman, Jo Spence and Annie Ernaux.
Work for the course, one short paper, one long paper, and one in-class presentation. One of the presentations may be autobiographical.
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Sondra Perl
ENGL 89000
Research Methods – Writing Ethnographies
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66146]
In this seminar, we examine the philosophic underpinnings of knowledge construction in anthropology and in composition studies in order to frame a rationale for using enthnographic methods in classroom research. The course has a reflexive bent in that writing, the primary means by which knowledge is constructed in anthropology, is also the subject of study for doctoral students in composition and rhetoric.
Questions we address will include the following: With what author-ity does anyone author anything about anyone else? How are ethnographies anything other than fictions? In what way might the lens of 'culture' help us design research within writing classrooms? What is human science and how does it enable us to ground studies of classrooms and student writers in lived experiences?
Against a backdrop of methodological pitfalls, students will practice formulating researchable questions and then attempt to answer them by engaging in small-scale research projects. Students will be expected to bring fieldnotes and other forms of raw data to class and to situate their work within the frames and questions provided by the readings and class discussions. Each week, two students will be expected to report collaboratively on one of the readings. Final projects may take the form of classroom narratives.
Use of Blackboard
Blackboard will be used in a hybrid manner to develop conversations between class sessions. It will be used for posting responses to readings and for collaborative data analysis of small-scale research projects designed and undertaken by students. Students will be required to log on weekly and to post responses to readings at least 3 days prior to the weekly class meeting. They will then be expected to read through the posts of their classmates, to respond on BB, and to print out at least one excerpt that raises an important question. These questions will then become the subject of class discussion.
Readings will include (but are not limited to) chapters from the following: Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience; Barbara Kamler, Relocating the Personal; Michelle Fine and Lois Weiss, Speed Bumps; Buraway et. al, Ethnography Unbound; Eileen de los Reyes and Patricia Gozemba, :Pockets of Hope How Students and Teachers Change the World; Josselson et. al, Up Close and Personal: The Teaching and Learning of Narrative Research; Gelya Frank, Venus on Wheels; Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, Composing Ethnography; H.L. Goodall, Writing the New Ethnography; Gian Pagnucci, Living the Narrative Life.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
ENGL 85500
Readings in Afro-American Literary and Cultural Theory
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81500) [66135]
In this course we will ask whether the now well established idea that Black American literary theory and Black American cultural theory are distinct (because they are among the only American intellectual traditions built upon the need to prove the innate humanity of a people) continues to be a useful point of departure for contemporary students. In particular, we will pay attention to how the rather significant challenges posed by feminism and queer theory, cultural studies, postmodern theory and psychoanalysis have forced many Afro-Americanists to rethink some of their most sacrosanct notions regarding what does and does not compose Afro-American literature and culture. The readings will be chosen from a selection of key texts published over the last two decades. In every case the focus will be on the rather self-conscious manner in which Afro-Americanists have approached theory and criticism. That is to say, we will examine in detail the mechanisms utilized by scholars to announce and maintain Afro-American specificity even as their efforts become increasingly complex and abstract. Among the authors whom we will examine are Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Brent Edwards, Robert Reid-Pharr, Fred Moten, Samuel Delany, Claudia Tate, Hortense Spillers, Houston Baker, Anthony Appiah, Manthia Diawara and Toni Morrison. Students will write a series of short papers and prepare annotated bibliographies in consultation with the instructor.
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David Richter
ENGL 83200
The Rise of the Novel
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66119]
During the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1830), 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. We shall 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 assigned will be by such writers as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
In addition to exploring the prose fiction narratives of the eighteenth century, we will also explore another set of narratives, the works of literary history in which scholars from the past fifty years have attempted to explain the origins of the English novel. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) was the master narrative against which most recent literary historiographers have staged their own countervailing histories, including Michael McKeon, Ralph Rader, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, Nancy Armstrong, and Margaret Doody. We shall also be examining essays from The Rise of the Novel Revisited, a recent special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
A fuller syllabus is available at http://qcpages.qc.edu/ENGLISH/Staff/richter/rise.html
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Talia Schaffer
ENGL 84300
Reading the Underread: Victorian Women’s Noncanonical Novels
Monday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [66123]
John Sutherland has pointed out that "the tiny working areas of the 'canon.' the 'syllabus,' and the paperbacked 'classics' are poor reflections of what the Victiorian novel actually meant to Victorians." In spite of the fact that roughly 60,000 works of fiction were published between 1837 and 1901, "generations of students have left their academies thinking that this richest of literary fields comprises half-a-shelf's length of works by Dickens, two Brontes, George Eliot and Hardy." What happened to the rest, and what can we learn by re-examining a few of them? This course interrogates the processes of canon formation and canon revision, inquires about the politics and genres traditionally excluded from the canon, investigates the potential problems of constructing of a category called the 'noncanonical,' and monitors case studies of Victorian women's novels with interestingly vexed relations to canonicity. We will start with the fascinating case study of Jane Austen's reputation in the early nineteenth century. We will then look at popular fiction, trying to figure out what accounted for the enormous appeal of this work and how popularity might mitigate against a work's survival as the literary marketplace altered and academic needs developed in the early twentieth century (Corelli, Ouida, Braddon). We will read domestic realism by Yonge, Craik, and Oliphant, investigating feminist modes of recovery work and asking just how (and if) feminism can read work whose politics are either reactionary or indecipherable. Finally, we will end with two major novels by Malet and Ward, once considered the two central novelists of the 1890s, now both forgotten, and we will try to figure out what accounted for the radical decline of these novelists' reputations by reading contemporary reviews, looking at changes in the profession of authorship, and thinking about the literary criteria associated with the advent of modernism. Criticism may include work by John Guillory, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Francis O'Gorman, Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Peter Keating, Kate Flint, Deirdre David, Elaine Showalter, Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyers, Ann Ardis, Lyn Pykett. Students give a presentation and a final paper of 20-25 pages. In that final essay, students will be encouraged to investigate a case study of their own choosing, either writing about how a canonical figure like George Eliot maintained her status or else exploring, through period reviews and other primary documents, just why a given text became obscure.
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Eve Sedgwick
ENGL 87400
How to do Things with Words and Other Materials
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66144]
"How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials" is a seminar/studio workshop in which participants will think about and practice a variety of ways of combining written text with other visual media. Roughly speaking, the "artist's book" will be our subject, but we will also consider comics and graphic novels, mail art, graffiti, broadsides, playing cards, and other genres that make unconventional use of the materiality of both the written word and its support. In parallel with historical and theoretical discussions, the class will incorporate outside speakers and visits to local collections. Rather than writing papers, participants will work on creating a portfolio of works in various formats and materials, each exploring different aspects of the complex relations among language, materiality, and visuality.
Some notes: (1) This is not a class in fine printing or bookbinding. (2) While free to use digital techniques, we will not broach the area of electronic media. (3) Participants must be interested in doing art as well as looking at and thinking about it, but need not be proficient in drawing or printmaking.
The required text is Keith Smith's Structure of the Visual Book.
Because this is a studio class, enrollment is strictly limited to 12 students, who will be admitted only with permission. Those wishing to enroll should submit a statement of interest, and if possible some samples of their work, to Prof. Sedgwick by November 29. The names of those admitted will be posted by December 3.
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Elizabeth Tenenbaum
ENGL 86000
Fiction of Twentieth Century Australia and New Zealand
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66137]
The primary goal of this seminar is to stimulate broadly-based engagement with narratives selected to represent narrative achievement in the past half-century by each nation of the Antipodes. At the start of this period, both were fundamentally agricultural society's and shared assumptions that could be aptly conveyed through the narrative use of conventional representation. But well before its end, both had evolved into far more urbanized, sophisticated cultures eager to develop narrative modes ideally suited to embody the complexity now seen in both society and personal experience. But the rich fruits yielded by this process have largely escaped attention within the United States. Although several CUNY campus libraries offer both primary and secondary readings that reflect the phenomenon at issue, the Graduate School's Australian holdings present a bleak picture indeed. The fractional part of a single shelf of the Mina Rees allocates to the literature of both Antipodal nations is manifestly by dominated by the dozen volumes devoted exclusively to Katherine Mansfield's work despite the fact that, though New Zealand born and bred, she became a published writer only after settling in Modernist England, never again to reside in the Antipodes.
Like Canada and the United States, both Australia and New Zealand were founded as "settler colonies" of Britain. In each of these cases, English settlers eventually displaced indigenous inhabitants whose prior claim to the land in question was clear when these immigrants arrived. Both Antipodal nations, following the pattern of America's earliest states, evolved from contented outposts of a common mother country into resentful objects of foreign rule and finally into strikingly independent nations. But both Australia and New Zealand can be described as comfortably tolerant cultures, committed to environmental protection and nuclear sanity. But conjunction of striking similarities and and major differences these two nations' cultures and may offer America urgent reason to take notice of their narrative achievements, which may prove uniquely able to extend our national self-knowledge by enabling us to lucidly divide the road that emanated in our current national culture between decisions imposed by the identity that we cannot discard and the turns we have freely chosen in the face of fully equally alternatives.
Because of the large number of texts that fully deserve inclusion, I will try in every case assign the shortest text that seems to fairly represent to a given writer's most important strengths, and in certain cases to constrain even leading novelists to the number of added pages the relevant week's assignment could seem afford. In addition to the timely completion of all assigned for a given class, you will be expected to submit (ideally in an e-mail dispatched the evening before we meet) three questions that deal with any aspects of the reading\assigned for a given class. (In general, your three questions should address differing segments the week's assignment). Finally, plan on submitting two drafts of a term paper about twelve pages long.
Readings in Australian literature will be chosen from among texts by Patrick White, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Christine Stead, Sally Morgan, Elizabeth Jolley, Kate Grenville, and Todd James Pierce. Authors of New Zealand texts will be selected from the following: Maurice Shadbolt, Janet Frame, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Alan Duff, and Emily Perkins. One or two anthologies may also serve as sources of several stories. A schedule of reading assignments will be available the second week in December. Early starters can assume that Ihimaera's Bulibasha will be one of the novels assigned.
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Neal Tolchin
ENGL 85000
Melville
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81500 [66129]
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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Jerry Watts
ENGL 85500
Richard Wright and His Times
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66131]
Richard Wright was one of the most influential American writers of the twentieth-century and perhaps the most influential Afro-American writer of the twentieth century. In this seminar we will analyze most of Wright's major fiction and non-fiction works while paying particular attention to the intellectual, political and artistic influences that gave rise to them (ie. black life in the South; black migration; American style communism; proletarian literature; socialist realism; black protest fiction; expatriation; existentialism; anti-colonialism). By focusing on Wright, we will investigate important debates among American intellectuals and artists during the 1930s through the 1950s. Moreover, we hope to ascertain Wright's influence on other writers, some of whom followed in his footsteps (ie. Chester Himes, Ann Petry, William Gardner Smith) and some of whom rejected him (ie. Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin) while still others pretended that he did not exist (ie. Willard Motley).
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Barbara Webb
ENGL 75700
Black Postmodernism: African American Fiction since the 1970s
Thursday 4:15 - 6:15 2/4 credits [66104]
A study of the poetics and politics of postmodernism in the fiction of African American writers since the 1970s. Although the last three decades of the twentieth century were undoubtedly the most productive and innovative period in the development of African American literature and literary criticism, it was also a period of extreme social and cultural fragmentation in African American communities. In this course we will examine how African American writers have addressed the problems of literary representation when faced with increased commodification of culture and knowledge, the proliferation of new forms of literacy and orality, and the break down of traditional forms of community. Our readings will also include some selections not usually considered postmodernist but that address similar concerns about identity, culture, writing and possibilities for social change. We will read selected essays by postmodern theorists such as Lyotard, Jameson, and Hutcheon as well as essays by literary critics and cultural theorists who have been involved in ongoing discussions about the relevance of postmodernism for African Americans at the turn of the 21st century, such as bell hooks, Cornel West, Wahneema Lubiano, and most recently Madhu Dubey. Primary texts: Ishmael Reed, "Neo-HooDoo Manifesto" and Mumbo Jumbo, Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure, Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters, John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday, Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, Charles Johnson, Middle Passage, Toni Morrison, Jazz, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Nathaniel Mackey, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Gayl Jones, The Healing. Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.
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Scott Westrem
ENGL 80700
The World of the Medieval Text: Geography, Travel-Narratives, and Cartography
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66150]
This seminar will focus on concepts of space and of the world that are reflected in medieval European texts from a variety of literary genres, including verse narratives, geographical treatises, chronicles, encyclopedias, travel books, and maps. Scholars have tended to dismiss "medieval geography" as, at best, naive or, at worst, "complete futility" (to apply generally C. Raymond Beazley's judgment of mappaemundi). This assumption will be a central issue in our seminar as we read material that testifies to considerable interest in (and intriguing speculations about) space-its measurement and boundaries, human habitation within it, its witness to supernatural reality, and its connection with time-between the years 1100 and 1450.
This study will allow for a wide variety of critical perspectives. For example, the geographical travel book associated with the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville survives in some three hundred manuscripts, representing the French original and nine translations (several into English, one of which we will study, as well as Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Irish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish), yet it is itself a compilation of earlier books, chiefly about Asia, that have been knitted together in what some call a plagiarism and others a brilliant amalgam. In thinking about this book, then, students will find ample opportunity to test a wide variety of interests and abilities relevant to medieval studies-textual criticism, linguistic expertise, cultural studies, and contemporary literary theories that question the stability of a text or its author. Similarly, the encyclopedic account of the world attributed to Marco Polo and the great world map that hangs in Hereford Cathedral attract a wide variety of critical approaches. In all our endeavors, we will remember that these works are literary and medieval, which will (I hope) force us to consider issues about language, taste, literary quality, textual transmission, scribal influences, and many other matters.
Readings will be available in the original language and in translation, except for one or two in Middle English, and seminar sessions will include some training in that language. Students competent in medieval (or modern, for scholarship) forms of Latin, Italian, French, German, Dutch, or a Scandinavian language will have an opportunity to apply themselves to primary sources in these languages.
Written assignments: three short (2-3 page) focused ("reaction") papers, an essay (5-7 pages) focused on some aspect of the Middle Ages that we can see or use (such as a manuscript or items in a museum), and a final research paper (10-12 pages). Each student will also make a brief (8-10 minute) presentation to the seminar members.
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Gordon Whatley
ENGL 80700
After the Bible: Religious Narrative in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66109]
O sages standing in God's holy fire/ As in the gold mosaic of a wall ... (Yeats) A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing and so I wanted to have Four Saints that did nothing and I wrote Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything. (Stein).
The Christian Bible was only, and barely, the beginning of Christian narrative literature. Two centuries before the Church fathers could agree on the canon of the New Testament, anonymous story tellers were already at work creating new types of narrative about the apostles and saints who embodied and personified Christian life and ideals after Jesus. Known collectively today as "hagiography" and constituting a vast addendum to the canonical Scriptures, this body of texts grew and flourished as devotional and liturgical reading, and as Christian narrative entertainment, for well over a thousand years, during which time it replaced biography and marginalized history in the literary canon. Hagiography is notoriously indifferent to historical authenticity, or psychological realism or verisimilitude, while favoring idealized and melodramatic extremes of virtue and malice, and radically reconstructed gender roles. Emphasizing the miraculous over the mundane, the supernatural over "nature," extolling virginity and pacifism, yet obsessed with violence, victimization and the erotic, the "Lives," "Passions," and "Miracles" of the Christian saints formed a new mythology to enrich the culture of Christian piety and its cults of "God's friends," the Christian saints. The present seminar will provide a selective introduction to this enormous body of early Christian and medieval literature and its modern scholarship, focusing on the Acts of the Apostle Andrew, the Acts of Bishop Cyprian, the Passions of the virgin martyrs Cecilia and Juliana, Athanasius' Life of the desert hermit Antony, the legend of Thaïs the prostitute, Bonaventure's Life of Francis of Assisi, and the legends of Mary Magdalen and Elizabeth of Hungary (et al.). These common core readings will be all in translation. Seminar projects might focus on selected medieval vernacular versions of these and other legends, and/or on post-medieval manifestations of the hagiographic genres, in works as different as John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" (Acts and Monuments), Crashaw's lyric meditations on Sts. Mary Magdalen and Theresa, Swinburne's St. Dorothy, Anatole France's Thaïs (1880), Shaw's Saint Joan, Anouilh's Becket and The Lark, Cecil B. De Mille's Sign of the Cross (1932), Mervyn Le Roy's Quo Vadis? (1951), Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (1928), and the recent dramatization of Flaubert's Temptation of St. Antony by Robert Wilson and Bernice Reagan (2003), to name only a few.
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- Joshua Wilner
ENGL 74000
Readings in Romantic Poetry and Prose
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [66102]
Intended as a complement to Prof. Wittreich's fall 2004 Romanticism course, this course will focus on the writings of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats. With the Wordsworths and Coleridge, we will give special attention to the intense and complex patterns of collaboration and sometimes conflict reflected in Lyrical Ballads, the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, early versions of The Prelude, and Coleridge's poems from the period of his close association with William and Dorothy. Emphasis will also be given to the theories of imagination and of poetic language developed by W. Wordsworth in various prefaces and essays, and by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria and elsewhere. Through an examinaton of Keats's letters, we will look at how he defines his poetic project in relation to Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, Coleridge, and trace the extraordinarily rapid and dynamic development of that project from Endymion through the Odes to "The Fall of Hyperion." Throughout we will be concerned with how all four of these writers respond to the social and political transformations of their age.
Texts:
Wordsworth, William. The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics), ed. Stephen Gill.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals (Oxford World's Classics), ed. Pamela Woof
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics), ed. H. J. Jackson
Keats, John. The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics), ed. Elizabeth Cook.
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Joseph Wittreich
ENGL 82300
Lyric, Polemic, Dramatic Milton
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [66117]
We will start with Justa Edovardo King naufrago (1638), the volume in which Lycidas first appears and which itself provides a pattern, a design for the 1645 Poems of Mr. John Milton and 1673 Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions, both of which, along with “Paradise Regain’d” . . . To which is added “Samson Agonistes” are at once illustrative of and paradigmatic for poetic volumes conceived not only as gatherings of poems but as themselves a poem. Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to the publisher of Lyrical Ballads, the poems themselves are but the stanzas of an ode, which is the volume itself; or as Robert Frost quips, where there are twenty-five poems published together, the twenty sixth is the poetic volume. Milton’s poetic volumes were the means by which some later poets conceptualized their poetic volumes and theorized their projects, much as critics would later do in a volume like Poems in Their Place, edited by Neil Fraistat, or in the many more recent discussions of the idea of the book, or in the on-going “Book” seminar (under the aegis of Peter Stallybrass) at the University of Pennsylvania. Our initial concern will be with how poets contextualize their own poems through organization and placement--a concern that we will then pursue in terms of both Areopagitica and Of Education. In the last third of the course, that we turn to other sorts of contextualizations for Milton’s poetry, especially biblical, as they inform both Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Indeed, Milton seems to invoke scriptural stories only to trangress them and then to encourage contextualizations different from those currently in fashion, thus not only (not even principally) Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Euripides and Seneca, along with the biblical tradition of tragedy as its is exemplified by the Book of Revelation or by Christ suffering, both of which Milton foregrounds through citation in his preface to Samson Agonistes. Our largest concern will be with what new editions of Milton, with what a new Milton criticism, will look like in this twenty-first century and new millennium.
Required text: Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edition. London and New York: Longman, 1997.
Seminar requirements: (1) an oral presentation and (2) a final paper.
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Felicia Bonaparte (English) and Jacob Stern (Comparative Literature)
CL 70300
Writing the Ancients and Reading the Moderns: Literary Texts and Contexts
Mondays 6:30-8:30 3 credits
This course will be concerned primarily with the various conceptual languages implied in ancient and modern texts. We tend, as modern readers especially, to focus more on verbal texts than on the conceptual structures through which all texts acquire their meaning. We bring our own theoretical paradigms to our interpretation of texts before we attempt to decipher the idiom in which these texts are actually written. As a result we often misread or misjudge a work of literature, misunderstand the traditions and genres that inform its form and purpose, and even misconstrue the age and the nation in which it was written.
Some will say that to decipher or read a text is, in fact, impossible, but this is precisely one of those paradigms we tend as moderns to bring to texts. The vast majority of writers would emphatically disagree, and we, at least for the length of this course, will assume with them that reading is possible but that it asks of us certain skills and a certain body of knowledge.
The works on our reading list, cited below, will serve two principal purposes. Pausing on many pivotal moments in the history of western thought, they will offer ideal examples of the main conceptual languages to be found in western literature. The special relationship, moreover, between the ancients and the moderns, the latter defined in the broadest sense as everything from the Renaissance forward and even one medieval work, will allow us to concentrate on one central and typical current in the progress of modern literature, the rewriting of ancient texts, their reconstruction and deconstruction, as each writer, age, and nation attempts to find his/her/its unique place within the traditions it inherits.
Readings will be selected from the following: Homer, The Odyssey; Dante, Inferno; Kerouac, On the Road; The Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Aeschylus, The Oresteia; T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion; Sartre, The Flies; Aeschylus, Prometheus; P.B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus; Euripides, The Bacchae; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; Mann, "Death in Venice"; Euripides, Alcestis; T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party; Herodotus, The Histories; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Books 6 and 7); Wagner, Rienzi; Tacitus, Annals(section on Nero); Michelet, Joan of Arc; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities;Vergil, The Aeneid; Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage; Purcell, Dido and Aeneas; The Bible (The Gospel According to Matthew); Melville, Billy Budd; Lawrence, The Man Who Died; Aristophanes, The Frogs.
For further information, please write to bonaparte1019@aol.com or jstern@gc.cuny.edu
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Martin Elsky
CL 89000
Philology: Language, Context, and Crisis
Mondays 4:15-6:15 4 credits [ ]
The 50th anniversary of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the most influential critical works of the twentieth century and much celebrated as a monument of resistance to the horrors of the second world war, is the occasion for examining the history of philology as an intellectual, political, and moral force.This course focuses on a series of seminal works that have grounded literary study in philology, the historical study of language and culture. The course will cover a range of works and writers from antiquity to the present, but will draw particular attention to the period beginning in the late 18th century and culminating in the crisis of the 20th century. We will examine the works in question as responses to decisive moments of epochal change. We will also examine the resistance to philology and historicism at these moments. The course will be divided in to four parts: (1) To establish the paradigm for the relation between language and social change, we will begin with the invention of philology in the Renaissance by a rising intellectual class supporting a new secular order. (2) We then move to the 18th Century, when the history of language became associated with the rise of nation states and with national movements expressed in philosophies of history, philosophies of language, national histories, literary histories and ultimately literary criticism. This part of the course focuses on the relation between the historical study of language and progressive causes associated with the rise of the modern state, the creation of national literatures and biblical hermeneutics. (3) We then turn to the core of the course, the response of philological criticism to the crisis of nationalism in the two world wars, especially to philology's attempt to place European literature on a new transnational basis. We will consider the new relevance of medievalism, romance philology, pan-Europeanism, and the example of Dante as an alternative to the national basis of philology, all exemplified in the work of Auerbach. (4) The course concludes with a brief consideration of the post-war conflict between historicist and anti-historicist movements, such as post-structuralism and the so-called New Philology. Readings will include works by Valla, Bacon, Herder, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Mommsen, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Croce, Vossler, Curtius, Auerbach , Derrida, Foucault.
For further information, please write to melsky@gc.cuny.edu
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The course aims to enrich the dialogue among the disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities that has characterized the study of fashion and dress. By nature and definition interdisciplinary, fashion is a field that, more than others, calls for collaboration and dialogue. Indeed, this course is a manifestation of such theory and practice.
Scholarship in the emerging fields of fashion and dress studies has contributed to the re-conceptualization of the relationship between the public and private selves, as well as between public and private spaces within modern and post-modern discourses. In this way the very notions of "personal" and "public" are redefined in a non-dichotomous and non-hierarchical relationship, opening spaces for new explorations into psychic life, dreams, fantasy and their conscious and unconscious manifestations through dress in visual and cultural spaces. This leads to one of the central themes of the course: namely, the critical analysis of issues pertaining to identity formation (national/transnational), the presentation of the self, the politics of the self's performances and its interrelations with race, the body, gender and class. Drawing on a wide range of sources including critical theory, photography, film, video, art design, pop music and literature, this course aims at giving a thorough understanding of fashion as a form of communication and as an industry. The course will pay a great deal of attention to the impact of fashion on economies and societies in both the East and West. The class will feature several internationally renowned guest speakers from the CUNY community and outside.
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