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alphabetical by instructor
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Meena Alexander
ENGL 86500
Translated Lives: Body, Memory, Text
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits) [94168]
How do the materials of a writer’s life get translated into the work of art? We will approach the question of literary self-fashioning by thinking through questions of place and dislocation, body and memory given a migratory, diasporic existence. How does language work to convey the details of bodily experience? And what of traumatic memory – when the materials of the shared past or of the personal life are sheathed in forgetfulness? What does it mean to speak of a poetics of dislocation? Several of the writers we will look at have felt that they were forced to fabricate a tradition. In some of the writers there is an overt sense that work of art had to create a space in which alone the self could come into being. To clarify our discussions on bodily experience and the making of postcolonial texts we will turn to early English Romanticism and examine notions of selfhood, imagination and place. We will read Wordsworth’s epic of subjectivity The Prelude (1805 version), Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and selections from Burke, Coleridge, and De Quincey. Our readings in postcolonial literature will include two major works that make use of Wordsworth – Derek Walcott’s long poem Another Life and V.S.Naipaul’s memoir Enigma of Arrival. We will also read selected prose by Walcott and his long poem Omeros. We will read Theresa Cha’s work of experimental prose Dictee and examine the writings of J.M.Coetzee by focusing on his novels, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe and Elizabeth Costello . There will be selected readings from Agamben, Anzaldua, Appadurai, Bauman, Bhabha, Caruth, Cliff, Deleuze and Guattari, Harvey, Merleau-Ponty, Seyhan, Soja, Spivak and others. Requirements: This course will be run as a seminar with class presentations. One short paper and one long paper. Books will be on order at Labyrinth Books, 112 Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, Tel: 212-865-1588.
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John Brenkman
ENGL 87100
Novelists on the Art of the Novel (James, Nabokov, Kundera)
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94170]
The study of the novel is influenced by narrative theory and by novel theory, the former treating the novel as one type of narrative among others (myth, fairy tale, romance, film) and the latter approaching the novel as a genre with specific historical and social meanings. A third, less easily defined influence comes from the reflections on the art of the novel written by novelists themselves. Novelists’ notebooks, essays, reviews, lectures, and prefaces provide a distinctive angle of vision on the techniques, the history, and the aesthetic of the novel. In this seminar we will undertake a preliminary study of the “art of the novel” as a protean genre of criticism by looking at James, Nabokov, and Kundera. We will also read The Portrait of a Lady and Lolita as a way of measuring how James and Nabokov addressed in their practice the aesthetic problems and artistic solutions that preoccupied them as critics. Texts: Henry James, The Art of Fiction, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, and various critical studies; Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature; Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed.
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Rachel Brownstein
ENGL 84000
Studies in Romantic Narrative: Visions and Versions of Romance
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94162]
When they are recalled in nineteenth-century operas and twentieth- and twenty-first-century films, the narratives of Romantic-period writers are rewritten as romances. Nostalgia gets piled upon nostalgia, and irony upon irony: the Romantic sense of the past and Romantic irony with it get ironed out and replaced by a more modern skepticism that seems to have been born yesterday. The tropes and specific narratives of the early nineteenth century are imagined, along with the costumes, as simply romantic.
What is the relation of Romanticism to old, mere, high, and/or true romance? How is the ambivalent romance that early nineteenth-century English writers had with romance understood and represented today? In this seminar, we will explore these questions while reading canonical narrative poems and novels composed in English in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Other questions will be raised as well: about the relation of the past to the present and the characteristic nostalgia of modernity; about the shapes (and the tropes) of the stories that get rewritten and the density and complexity of literary texts. The relationship of literature to fantasy and history, and of language to writers and readers, will be at the center of our discussions.
Major readings for the course include Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt (1812, 1816, 1818), and The Giaour (1813); Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Persuasion (1817); Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes (1819); Scott’s Waverley (1814), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and Ivanhoe, A Romance (1819). Class presentations will bring into the discussion Letitia Landon, W.M. Thackeray, and perhaps Sir Arthur Sullivan on Ivanhoe; two “classic” Hollywood films, Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Ivanhoe (1952), and more recent film versions of Austen’s most romantic novel; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; and perhaps Britten’s Peter Grimes (with Crabbe). To help define key terms, we will round up some of the usual subjects on the subjects of romance (C. Reeve, S. Freud) and irony (F. Schlegel, L. Hutcheon, R. Rorty). Other readings may include Austen’s juvenile History of England, Scott’s review of Emma, some, at least, of Don Juan, and a selection of lyrics and ballads.
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Morris Dickstein
ENGL 75200
American Realism, 1850-1915
Tuesday 2pm-4pm (2/4 credits) [94161]
This course will examine the development of American realism from the 1850s through World War I. It will focus on four overlapping forms of realism: the moral realism of James, Wharton, Kate Chopin, and others, rooted in Hawthorne and the English novel; the social realism of Howells, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and regional writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett; the transgressive or documentary realism of progressive crusaders and muckrakers like Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair; and finally the visual realism of photographers like Mathew Brady, Riis, Lewis Hine, and Walker Evans, painters like Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper, and the Ashcan school, and early silent film directors such as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and King Vidor, whose work lies slightly outside this period. The course will trace the beginnings of realism in the carnage of Civil War, the poetry of Whitman, the beginnings of photography, and the tremendous social changes of the Gilded Age, including the influx of immigration, rapid industrialization, and the growth of cities. We'll consider the intellectual impact of the ideas of Darwin and the French naturalists, as well as the simultaneous emergence of American pragmatism in the writings of William James. The major emphasis will be on works by novelists, painters, photographers, and filmmakers as well as their own theoretical statements, but there will also be readings from Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds; Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America and Reading American Photographs; Eric Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Michael Bell, The Problem of American Realism; Miles Orvell, The Real Thing; David Shi, Facing Facts, and other secondary works.
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Lyn Di Iorio Sandin
ENGL 85000
Latino/a Literary Textures
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94166]
This course will theorize the concept of U.S. Latino literary expression in as much as it affects verbal textures in works by authors writing in English. The following questions will mark the course’s contours. Does magical realism as style and texture, survive its origins in Latin America and translate into the work of contemporary American writers (whether they be Latino/a, African American, White)? Is the magical realism of the Dominican American write Loida Maritza Perez like the magical realism of its most famous practioner Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Does writing by working class writers who reject their Carribean and Latin American origins create a Latino/a literary texture that owes much of its character to its relationship with African American identity and literary expression? How does a focus on race influence the verbal texture of a “contemporary classic” such as Down These Mean Streets? Is there a sub-category that might be termed a “literature of rage” within U.S Latino/a literary studies? Lastly, what of writers, such as Cecile Pineda, who wish to eschew identifications as specifically Latino/a and yet produce work whose “otherness” might be attributed, at least partially, to the ethnically mixed background of the writer?
Literary works we will read will include: Alba Ambert's A Perfect Silence; Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Última; Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera; Junot Díaz's Drown; Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home; Cecile Pineda's Face; Miguel Piero's “A Lower East Side Poem”; Edward Rivera's Family Installments; Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets. We will also view John Leguizamo's performance piece Freak.
We will read theory, criticism, and commentary by: Walter Benjamin, Mary Pat Brady, Cathy Caruth, Juan Flores, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, Avery Gordon, Edvige Giunta, Kristen Silva Gruesz, José Esteban Muoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Lyn Di Iorio Sandín.
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Marc Dolan
ENGL 75400
America in the 1970s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm (crosslisted as ASCP 82000) (2/4 credits) [94174]
In 1982, when Peter Carroll published one of the first histories of the United States in the 1970s, he called it It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. Carroll may have meant his title to be taken ironically, but for many early observers it captured something about that cultural moment. In the short term at least, the 1970s held almost no interest in its own right. It seemed to fall by inaction into the shadows of the decades that preceded and followed it. If you were a liberal, the 1970s was the decade that betrayed the advances of the 1960s; if you were a conservative, it was the decade that delayed the achievements of the 1980s. A succession of failed presidencies, perhaps unequaled since the years before the Civil War, followed one after another as the decade limped to a close. Guitar rock and rhythm & blues became bogged down by the bloat of their own excessive industry, as recordings and radio became corporate beyond all redemption. Perhaps most important, in the wake of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, the two sides of an emerging culture war dug in and prepared for an ongoing conflict on the homefront that has obviously continued down into our own century.
Following the lead of more recent scholarship on the period, this course will attempt to examine the United States in the 1970s in its own right through the use of both primary and secondary sources. The course will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program based in the Art History, English, History, Music, and Theatre doctoral programs and may consider the following specific aspects of the period: birth control in Lawrence, Kansas; Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song and the heyday of the “blaxploitation” film; the interrelationship of Father Daniel Berrigan’s “treason,” the Moral Majority’s “patriotism,” and the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s advocacy; the golden age (or not) of the TV variety show; the discourse of Watergate in print, sound, and image; the birth of the Nuyorican Poets Café and Ethnopoetics Movement; the establishment of rock criticism and the construction of “classic rock”; what ecological activism did and did not have to do with the popularity of self-actualization, meditation, and other organized movements aimed at personal growth; the normalization of disco and the discoization of normality; the emergence of multicultural women’s writing as a distinct and prominent genre in U. S. literature; and the shift from an industrial to a service-oriented economy. If we have time, we may even spend a week on the long-forgotten swine flu epidemic.
Course requirements include class participation, an oral presentation of original scholarship on
U. S. society and culture during the period, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.
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Edmund Epstein
ENGL 86100
Finnegans Wake
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94155]
In this course, we will engage in a close reading of James Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake. The Wake is a gigantic poem on human life, following the center line of human existence—which Joyce regarded as being the growth and development of men and women to the point of love and reproduction. In this book, his hero, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and his heroine, Anna Livia Plurabelle, develop from rebellious children into lovers and then into husband and wife. In the course of the book, the reader encounters his hero and heroine first as children themselves, and then as founders of the family.
The book also provides the reader with a tremendous encounter with language. Since much of the book represents a dream of the hero, the language is correspondingly dream-like. Joyce was once asked why he was so innovative with his lexical experiments: “Aren’t there enough words in the English language already?” “Yes,” Joyce replied, “but they are not the right ones.” But the main encounter will be with a huge work of creation illustrating the giant power of language. The grade of the course will be based upon a term paper.
Required texts: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Roger McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake, John Hopkins University Press Paperback edition.; Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, 2nd edition. (Students should read this biography as soon as possible.); Various handouts.
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David Greetham
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Intersession (This is a Spring course, but will be taught during the intersession, U795) (4 credits) [94202]
This course is only open to English Program students
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.
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Organization: I will be teaching the “intensive” intersession version of this course during the month of January 2006, and the usual semester-long version will be given in Fall 2006. 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. 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. As usual, there will be an organizational meeting December to discuss scheduling.
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Tom Hayes
ENGL 80600
Michel Foucault and the Poetics of Literacy
Friday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94200]
In this course we will show how the work of Michel Foucault enables us to read literary texts in new ways. We will place special emphasis on what Foucault called the repressive hypothesis as it is explained in “The History of Sexuality” and show how this concept illuminates the work of writers as diverse as John Milton and Louis Carroll.
We will read selections from Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish”, and “The Order of Things” and apply insights gained from these texts to the novels of Dickens and Hardy. We will also read two of Foucault’s most controversial essays, “What is Enlightenment” and “What is an Author?” as well as Leo Bersani’s discussion of Foucault in “Homos” (Harvard 1995) and David M. Halperin’s commentary on this discussion in “Saint Foucault” (Oxford 1995).
We will conclude by reading the last two chapters of Simon During’s “Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing” (Rotledge, 1992), where he provides a lengthy critique of Stephen Greenblatt’s use of Foucault in his “ontology of culture”.
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Gerhard Joseph
ENGL 86400
Aestheticizing Science: The Fictions of Thomas Sokal, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Donna Haraway and Richard Powers
Monday 11:45am-1:45pm. (2/4 credits) [94153]
“The universe,” says Muriel Rukeyser debatably enough, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” Beginning with the “Sokal Hoax” and the responses to it in the scientific and humanistic communities, this course will then consider the aesthetic uses of thermodynamics, quantum theory, chemistry, genetics and biotechnology, Artifical Intellegence, etc. in the fictions of Pynchon (“Entropy,” “The Crying of Lot 49”, “Gravity’s Rainbow”), DeLillo (“Ratner’s Star”, “White Noise”, and the conclusion of “Underworld”), Donna Haraway (“Cyborg Manifesto” and “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMale©_Meets_OncoMouse™”) and Richard Powers (“The Gold Bug Variations”, “Galatea 2.2”, and “Plowing the Dark”). Course requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
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Richard Kaye
ENGL 76000
Decadence and Modernism
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm. (2/4 credits) [94172]
Critics and scholars once viewed the cultural ferment known as the Decadent Movement as beginning and ending at the Victorian fin de siecle. Increasingly, however, they have noted how the fin outlasted the siecle, maintaining an intense, mauve afterlike in the Anglo-American modernist writing of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Lawrence, James, Stein, and Faulkner. This course explores how modernist poets and novelists critiqued and refashioned Decadent figures, strategies, and attitudes. Examining literary texts, iconography, and film, we will begin with the turn of the century, a period of pervasive fears and fantasies dominated by such figures as the New Woman, the urban detective, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the self-preening aesthete, the vampire and the femme fatale. In the writings of Pater, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, John Addington Symonds, and Wilde, Aestheticism emerged as a robust, theoretically coherent but varied movement. Writers navigated a world in which theories of degeneration preoccupied the popular imagination. The morbidity, subjectivism, sexual experimentalism and excesses of technique and language characteristic of Nineties sensibility foment differing forms of experimentalism in the work of twentieth-century writers, beginning with writers of the First World War. We will explore how certain modernist and post-modernist texts revise late-nineteenth-century texts and figures---Joyce’s “Portrait of a the Artist as a Young Man”, for example, as a rewriting of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (a work that Joyce admired) and Faulkner’s “Sartoris”, with its doomed Horace Benbow, the dandy-aesthete of Yoknapatawpha. Writers experiment with the erotics of triangular desire (Henry James in “Wings of Desire”, Stein in “Q.E.D”, a rewriting of James’ novel as explicitly Sapphic romance). Finally we will explore the relevance of Decadence to a consideration of post-modernism, where Decadent ideas arguably have had pervasive effects as writers continue to question conventional moral fixities and the premises of realist aesthetics. (We will consider Nabokov’s “Lolita” as a Salome narrative, Phillip Roth’s novella “The Ghost Writer” as an homage to James’ story “The Author of Beltraffo”, and the contemporary British novelist Will Self’s recasting of Wilde’s “Dorian Gray” in the late-twentieth-century London of “Dorian”). Among the texts we will consider: Huysmans, “Against Nature”; Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, “Salome”; Hardy, “Jude the Obscure”; Freud, “Dora: A Case of Hysteria”; Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”; Stevenson, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; Olive Schreiner, “Story of an African Farm”; Yeats, “ Selected Poems”; Eliot “The Waste Land”, Joyce “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; James, “The Wongs of the Dove”; Faulkner, “Sartoris”, Stein, “Q.E.D”; Nabokov, “Lolita”, Roth, “The Host Writer”; Will Self, “Dorian”. Exploring the implications for literary theory of Decadent aesthetics, we will read relevant crtical and theoretical texts, including Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”; Bastille, “Literature and Evil”; Richard Ellmann, “The Uses of Decadence”, Richard Gilman, “Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet”; Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and The New Woman”; Michael Rifaterre, “Decadent Paradoxes”, and Leo Bersani, “The Culture of Redemption”. Oral reports, final paper.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 88100
Sleep
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94160]
This seminar will investigate experiences of sleep, as represented in literature (mostly modern) and as enacted in aesthetic process. Also on our agenda will be fatigue, reverie, insomnia, trance, and automatic writing. Students will be asked to keep a dream notebook during the semester, and to develop a final project from that source. We will begin with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Then we will move to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and sleep-steeped poems by Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Federico García Lorca, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Bishop. We will see at least one film (definitely Andy Warhol’s Sleep, and possibly Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound), and we may hear the last act of Wagner’s Die Walküre, or the sleepwalking scenes from Bellini’s La Sonnambula and Verdi’s Macbeth. Other possibilities for the syllabus: Ovid’s Metamorphoses (excerpts), Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Circular Ruins,” Yoko Tawada’s Where Europe Begins, Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On, Robert Pinget’s Monsieur Songe, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie, Jane Gallop’s Reading Lacan, Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Roland Barthes’s The Neutral (excerpt), and Anne Carson’s “Every Exit is an Entrance.” Requirements: in-class presentation, dream notebook, final essay.
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Steven Kruger
ENGL 80800
Chaucer’s Early Works and Medieval Psychologies
Tuesday 11:45am-1:45pm (cross-listed as MSCP 80500) (2/4 credits) [94159]
Chaucer’s work – from early dream visions like The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame to The Canterbury Tales – evinces a strong interest in psychology, though a psychology very different from contemporary, post-Freudian frameworks. In this course, we will focus especially on Chaucer’s earlier work – the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde – examining how these poems construct an understanding of the psyche in relation to (1) the (sexed, gendered, and sexualized) body; (2) the cosmos, conceived as under the ultimate control of a (Christian) God; (3) the demands of religious belief and practice; and (4) secular realms like marriage, the family, the court, and the nation. To facilitate this investigation, we will read widely and interdisciplinarily in medieval discourses surrounding Chaucer and shaping his conception of psychology: such discourses include theories of dreaming (medical, theological, natural philosophical); treatises on the anima [soul]; handbooks governing religious practices like confession and penance; discussions of such social institutions as “courtly love,” the household, and the public (political) sphere. We will also work with some non-Chaucerian literary works (e.g., selections from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, The Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Commedia, Usk’s Testament of Love, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid) that take up questions related to those Chaucer poses. And we will consider whether and how contemporary psychological theories might be of use to an understanding of medieval psychologies. Students should purchase the Riverside Chaucer (or another complete edition of Chaucer’s writing). Required student work will include in-class presentations and brief written assignments leading to a final seminar paper.
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Rich McCoy and Matt Greenfield
ENGL 71100
Renaissance Genres: Shifts in Form and Vision
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94156]
Walter Benjamin says that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one,” yet, despite intense political and religious fissures, many of the great works of the Renaissance are less disruptive than weirdly protean in their approach to genre, eccentrically adapting older forms and amorphously anticipating new ones. This team-taught survey of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature will deal with changes in major works and genres of the period, including the sonnet, chivalric and pastoral romance, epic, allegory, early versions of the novel, and Shakespeare’s anomalous experiments in tragicomedy. We will discuss the erotic and religious verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Philip Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, John Donne, Ben Johnson, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, and others including Ralegh, Daniel, Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw. We will also read significant selections from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and from Sidney’s Arcadia as well as shorter works of prose fiction by Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, and Robert Greene among others. We will conclude with a discussion of John Milton’s early works as a powerful yet malleable recapitulation of Renaissance forms and themes. Recent work by Harry Berger, Angus Fletcher, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Helgerson, Katherine Maus, Patricia Parker, Debora Shuger, and others will provide a critical and scholarly perspective on early modern literature. Requirements will include an oral presentation, an annotated bibliography due in week 5, a midterm draft due in week 7, and the final term paper due in the last week. We hope that submission of a bibliography and a draft in the first half of the semester will make it easier to produce a polished, substantial, and original final paper by the end of the term.
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Nancy Miller
ENGL 86000
Trauma, Testimony, Mourning: Twentieth Century Literature of Witness
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94189]
“Trauma, Testimony, Mourning” will examine the work of writers who have borne witness to the traumatic events of a century fractured by war and atrocity. In addition to first-person accounts that deal with extreme experience, readings will include critical studies in trauma and visual culture. The Holocaust and its aftermath will be a central though not exclusive focus of the seminar. We will end with a unit on Sept.11 and the role of visual documents and monuments in the process of memorialization. Because photography continues to play a crucial role in constructing our sense of traumatic experience, students who plan to take this course are expected to attend the day-long conference “Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis” that will take place at the Graduate Center on Friday, December 9, 2005.
Writers include: Barthes, Beauvoir, Caruth, Cha, Delbo, Ernaux, Laub, Levi, O’Brien, Sontag, Satrapi, Spiegelman, Woolf.
The work for the course: a seminar report and a 20-page research paper.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
ENGL 75700
The Black Woman’s Novel in Post WWII America
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94187]
In this course we will assess the work of that generation of Black American female writers who gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. We will ask how these women’s writing built upon a tradition of Black American literature dominated by men, particularly Wright, Ellison and Baldwin. Moreover, we will be especially concerned with the ways in which contemporary black female fiction and poetry partakes in the cultural and ethical debates engendered by the feminist and gay and lesbian movements. The course will have a particular focus on the work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni and Octavia Butler and will be supplemented with a heavy dose of secondary and critical texts. Students will write one short “review essay” and a longer seminar paper.
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Joan Richardson and Josh Wilner
ENGL 84200
Transatlantic Romanticism
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94196]
Although Emersonian Transcendentalism has long been recognized as, among other things, an American heir to European Romanticism, it is only in recent years that there has been a concerted attempt to reflect on Romanticism as an inherently transatlantic phenomenon involving criss-crossing currents of influence, dense networks of material relationships, and intimately contested narratives of formation. Without prejudging the success of this attempt, this course will test the viability of "transatlantic romanticism" as a theoretical and methodological construct, in part through a consideration of recent secondary literature but primarily by the study in juxtaposition of writings by such figures as Blake, Wordsworth, Schelling, Coleridge, Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Poe, Baudelaire, Whitman, and Nietzsche.
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David Richter
ENGL 83200
Swift, Fielding, Sterne: Satire and Comedy
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94192]
The course will focus on three rich and wide-ranging masterworks of eighteenth-century satiric comedy (or comic satire): Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy. Course readings will also include shorter, but not necessarily lesser texts by Swift, Fielding and Sterne (e.g., A Tale of a Tub, The Tragedy of Tragedies, A Sentimental Journey). Theoretical concerns will include the Augustan discourse of satire among the Tory wits of the Scriblerus Club, and the development of satiric comedy as a genre in the period between Cervantes and Jane Austen.
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Talia Schaffer
ENGL 84500
Rethinking Aestheticism
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94154]
Traditionally, aestheticism has been perceived as a minor movement at the fin-de-siecle, mainly composed of Oscar Wilde wearing plush breeches and floppy hair. But recently our understanding of this movement and its significance has been drastically expanded. In this course we will examine aestheticism as a revolutionary literary theory and practice, a feminist practice, a major reformer of material culture, an innovative refashioner of gender and sexual roles, a philosophical discourse about subjectivity, and an influential force on modernism. In rethinking aestheticism, we will be reading some now-forgotten authors who were major figures in the movement, giving us a chance to ask some questions about canonization and the way categories of literary history evolved. Along with Wilde, we will be reading Ruskin, Pater, Morris, Stoker, Symons, Dowson, Johnson, Yeats, Hope, James, Lee, Marriott Watson, Meynell, Ouida, Malet, Taylor, and looking at art by du Maurier, Beardsley, and Whistler. Critics will include Denisoff, Thomas, Bristow, Prins, Schaffer, Psomiades, Freedman, Felski, Ledger, Ardis, Laity, and Feldman.
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Eve Sedgwick
ENGL 87100
Proust II
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94164]
This is a year-long seminar (divided into two courses: Proust I and Proust II) organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. 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 homosexuality. 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 psychologies of object relations; 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; 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. For ease of discussion, all students are required to use the new translation edited by Christopher Prendergast (individual translations by Lydia Davis et al.). Those who wish to can also read in French.
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Ira Shor
ENGL 89010
Can Paulo Freire ‘Work’ In Kansas? Critical Pedagogy in Reactionary Times and Places
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94171]
These are vexing times for progressive educators and critical scholars; indeed, for public-sector advocates in general, on the defensive year after year. Is there a "pedagogy of possibility" as Henry Giroux might ask, a tranformative pedagogy that empowers civic educators in reactionary times? In the narrow conditions of the 21st century, is it still useful to turn to Paulo Freire, the premier educational philosopher of the last century? Following author Thomas Frank who asked WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, this seminar will rethink Freire's work in this age of triumphant neoliberalism and runaway globalization, where rhetoric and pedagogy are dominated by a singular message from the status quo, ‘There is no alternative.' Freire answered that 'Another world is possible,' a hope he took from nation to nation after being exiled from his native Brazil by the military coup of April, 1964. What is the future of that hope and how can it embody rhetoric and pedagogy? This seminar will rethink Freire's rich legacy of theory and practice, his frameworks of generative themes, problem-posing, dialogic learning, "untested feasibility," "conscientization," "class suicide," and "anthropological notions of culture" which emerged from his work among battered peasants and workers in a Third World country. Do these frameworks hold promise for critical educators in the North, where wealth and inequality grow yearly, where the climate is hostile to social democratic politics? Freire's contributions will be examined along with some of those whose work followed him, to question their value for an American discourse and pedagogy that seek transformation in education and society.
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Donald Stone
ENGL 84500
Literature and Art of the 1850s
Wednesday 4:15-6:15pm. (2/4 credits) [94169]
"Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the 1850s to be young in." (G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age) Historians have described the 1850s as the highpoint of Victorian England: the decade of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in which British power seemed at its peak. This was arguably the richest single decade of English art and literature, beginning with Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam, Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and ending with George Eliot's Adam Bede, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and the astonishing designs of William Morris. It was also perhaps the most important decade for feminist literature: Charlotte Brontë's Villette, Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Christina Rossetti's extraordinary "Goblin Market."
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Elizabeth Tenenbaum
ENGL 86000
Narrative Literature of Australia and New Zealand
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94165]
Australia and New Zealand (along with their North-American counterparts, the United States and Canada) are historically grounded in a settler population that was simultaneously colonial with regard to its British homeland and colonizing with regard to an indigenous people. Like America’s early states, both of these Antipodean settler colonies emerged from outposts loyal to their mother country to become autonomous political entities and ultimately independent nations with literatures worthy of world attention. But although British usage still merges these two lands into “the Antipodes,” they in fact differ in many significant ways. The fact that New Zealand’s early settlers were God-fearing citizens in pursuit of economic opportunity whereas those of Australia, whose initial British settlement was a spreading penal colony, were largely transported convicts arriving in chains would presumably account at least in part for the long-term differences in the cultures of these two nations. The historical roots of each will be addressed at the start of the semester in selections from Breaking a Man’s Spirit by the Australian writer Marcus Clarke and Station Life in New Zealand by Lady Barker (both published in 1870), and subsequently in the evocation of settlement life in nineteenth-century Queensland in David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon; the account of the Aborigine experience of two previous generations in Sally Morgan’s autobiographical narrative My Place; a novel dealing with early New Zealand history by either C.S. Stead or Maurice Shadbolt; and historical segments of two assigned novels by two Maori writers, Patricia Grace’s Potiki and Witi Ihimaera’s Bulibasha. Our reading of Morgan’s text, a short story by the Aborigine novelist Colin Johnson, and the two Maori narratives identified above will also shed light on the vastly differing cultures and societal roles of Australia’s and New Zealand’s indigenous populations. Another focal issue–particularly in our discussion of The Idea of Perfection by the Australian writer Kate Grenville, Children’s Bach by the New Zealand writer Helen Garner, and short stories by a wide range of writers—will be the relationship between men and women (and the characteristics ascribed to each) in authors from Australia, which has traditionally been a notably male-dominated country, and New Zealand, a nation that takes pride in having been the first to allow women to vote and in which a number of present government leaders, including the Prime Minister, are female. Throughout the semester, however, attention will also be given to aspects of human experience that arguably lie outside the political realm. Of central importance in this context will be the treatment of art--and more fundamentally of perception–in My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey (an Australian writer who has twice won the Booker Prize, an award given annually for the best novel written anywhere within the British Commonwealth of Nations) and the representation of subjectivity, mental disturbance, and madness in An Angel at My Table, the second of three volumes in a personal narrative that Michael Holroyd described as “one of the greatest autobiographies written this [i.e., the twentieth] century” by Janet Frame (who in 2003 was one of three finalists for the Nobel Prize in Literature). Requirements for this seminar include a one-page response to each week’s reading assignment, a class presentation, and a twelve-to-fifteen-page paper.
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Elizabeth Tenenbaum
ENGL 76000
Modernist Fiction
Thursday 6:30-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94198]
We will devote a major fraction of the semester to probing the multifaceted nature of British modernist fiction through a study of four novelists whose writings arguably constitute the core of this transformative literary mode: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Focal issues for discussion will include the innovative visions these writers introduced in three disparate domains: the structural and technical options entailed in narrative art; the intensity, variance, and unpredictable impact of subjectivity; and the degree to which societal structures both enable and constrain human experience. Reading will include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, Lawrence’s Women in Love, a major portion of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway along with either To the Lighthouse or The Waves. These novels will be read in the context of a variety of shorter readings by these novelists including short stories (and possibly a few novellas) and non-fictional selections of three kinds: personal writings (e.g., autobiographical pieces, journal entries, and letters), texts that deal with values, concerns, and beliefs that implicitly ground their writer’s approach to fiction (e.g., segments of Lawrence’s Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own); and explicit discussions of various aspects of narrative literature (e.g., Conrad’s Introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus, Lawrence’s “The Novel” along with segments of Studies in Classic American Literature, and Woolf’s “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” The latter part of this seminar will focus upon relatively short, contemporaneous novels by American and Continental European writers (e.g, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Kafka’s The Trail, and Gide’s The Immoralist). The first of two required oral presentations (twenty to thirty minutes long) will analyze a narrative assigned for discussion (either a short story, a novel, or a single chapter of Ulysses) in the light of a particular critical, theoretical, or interdisciplinary perspective (e.g., Wayne Booth’s rhetorical analysis, Shlomith Rimman-Kenan’s, Michael Riffaterre’s, or Peter Brooks’ narratological theory, Fredrick Jameson’s or Terry Eagleton’s Marxist reading, or any chosen post-colonial, linguistic, sociological, or psychological approach). For the second presentation, students (perhaps working in pairs) will discuss both the continuities and the alternatives to British Modernist fiction found within an American or a Western European novel of the Modernist period (approximately 1900 to 1940) or a subsequent literary era. (For both these presentations, a list of suggested materials will be provided at the start of spring semester.) Additional seminar requirements include the submission of three weekly questions on readings scheduled for discussion and a term paper, optionally on a topic related to either presentation.
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Neal Tolchin
ENGL 75400
The Contemporary Multicultural American Novel
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits) [94173]
From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning I (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988) and Jhumpa Lahiri's I (1999), both of which also won the Pulitzer, the neglected fields of Native American, African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino American literature have gradually drawn the attention of scholars and are now often taught together under the rubric Multicultural American Literature. In contemporary Native American fiction, Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine are regarded as key texts. In Hispanic/Latino American fiction, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me,Ultima is seen as a foundational text for Mexican American fiction; and Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is similarly viewed as a breakthrough novel for Cuban American writing . Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior put Asian American literature on the map as an academic area of study; more recently Fay Ng's Bone and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker have attracted the interest of scholars in this field, as has a text appropriated by Americanists from Canadian writing, Joy Kogawa's Obasan. African American literature is further along in its development as a field of study and possible authors include Walter Moseley and August Wilson.
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This course will be run as a seminar, with oral reports and a research paper required. A good historical introduction to this field is Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
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Jerry Watts
ENGL 85000
Writers and Politics in Twentieth Century America
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm (2/4 credits) [94163]
This course will explore various conceptual and theoretical efforts employed to describe and analyze the various ways that intellectuals have politically functioned in twentieth century United States. Of particular interest will be topics linked to intellectuals as ideological apologists for a given status quo; the intellectual as oppositional ideologue; intellecutals as policy experts; politicized academics; role of intellectuals within religious communities; intellectuals and the mass media; the impact of mass culture on American intellectuals; and the ways that gender and racial differences have informed the intellectual and political practices of American intellectuals in twentieth century United States. Intellectuals and contemporary society.
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Barbara Webb
ENGL 86500
Post-Colonial African Narratives
Tuesday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits) [94158]
A study of how African writers have attempted to transform the political and cultural legacies of colonialism by creating narratives that challenge prevailing notions of national identity and power. We will examine their representations of African history, politics, and culture. Of particular interest will be their engagements with nationalist, pan-Africanist, and postcolonial discourse. We will also discuss how these writers address problems of language and literary form, and how they see their roles as artists and social critics. In addition to literary texts by Anglophone African writers published in the post-independence period, we will read essays by African critics and theorists such as Appiah, Mudimbe, Ndebele, and Gikandi as well as selected writings by postcolonial theorists such as Said and Bhabha among others.
Primary texts: Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God; Ama Ata Aidoo, No Sweetness Here; Bessie Head, Collector of Treasures; Nuruddin Farah, Maps; Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Matagari; Ben Okri, The Famished Road; and Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins.
Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussion of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.
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Scott Westrem
ENGL 70700
Medieval Literature in Britain
Friday 2:00pm-4:00pm (2/4 credits) [94201]
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Joe Wittreich
ENGL 82300
Milton and Popular Culture
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm (2/4 credits) [94157]
In his new edition of Milton’s great epoc, Philip Pullman writes that “Today, nearly three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost was first published, it is more influencial than ever. It will not go away.” We will read Milton’s poem as an epic of consciousness with special attention to writers who have tried to make Paradise Lost a formative test, especially for the youth of a nation. Elizabeth Bradburn and Sarah Siddons and, very recently, Nancy Willard have adapted the poem for children. It is also a foundational text for Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, and for Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and a continual point of reference in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark materials, from which we will read The Amber Spyglass. Students will be invited to bring into play other works like Stveen Burst’s To Reign in Hell, the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman (The Sandman: Season of Mists), and even Toni Morrison’s Paradise, particularly in view of Pullman’s declaration, “I love the audacity of the poem’s opening-the sheer nerve of Milton’s declaring that he’s going to pursue ‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’ How could anyone fail to thrill to a story that begins like this? How could any reader not warm to a poet who dares to say it?” Though the seminar will fix its attention to Paradise Lost, it will also focus on the broader question of Why Milton Matters?
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Nancy Yousef
ENGL 84200
Romantic Sensibilities: Form and Affect
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm (2/4 credits) [94167]
This course will explore the varied forms and expression of “sensibility”--a cultural phenomenon originating in the enlightenment, amplified and critiqued in the romantic era, and extending even to early Victorian writing. At once a measure of psychological depth, emotional responsiveness, and ethical insight, “sensibility” and a cluster of terms associated with it (benevolence, virtue, compassion, heart, sympathy, community, affection) are not only prevalent in fiction and poetry, but are also widely contested in political, philosophical and aesthetic debates of the period that has sometimes been called the “Romantic century” (1750-1850). Beginning with its early roots in eighteenth century theories of natural “moral sense” (in David Hume and Adam Smith), we will then read two hugely influential European works that virtually defined the character of sensibility: Rousseau’s tale of virtuous struggle and triangulated love, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, a virtual manifesto for uncompromised passion. The middle section of the course will be taken up with three related but distinct manifestations of sensibility in British Romanticism. The Poetry of Sensibility will sample representative works by Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Letitia Landon. The Politics of Sensibility will consider how fractious debates over the French Revolution in England reshape the language of sentiment in socially-engaged prose of the period (readings will include selections from Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin). The Aesthetics of Sensibility will consider how several important articulations of romantic poetic practice both incorporate and challenge the cult of feeling (readings from William Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, and Percy Byssche Shelley). The course will conclude with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: three novels that emerge from, and offer powerful but distinct critiques of the culture of sensibility.
Course requirements: Short response papers, one presentation on primary texts or on selected recent criticism, 15-20 page essay.
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In The Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey notes that it is vital to gain a critical understanding of how “the production of images and of discourses” is “part and Parcel of the reproduction and transformation of any symbolic order.” Fashion is central to the profound shifts and transformations in both production and consumption that take place in given social and cultural spaces. The present course will analyze in depth the implications of various theories of postmodernity (Harvey, Appadurai, Jameson, Deleuze). The course will also focus on theories of cultural production and aesthetics (Bourdieau, Shusterman). These texts will ground the research into fashion and dress cultures that the second part of the course will be concerned with. Special attention will be given to case studies drawn from both Western and Eastern cultures (China, India, New York, Africa, Latin America and Britain). We will also examine the role of fashion in constructing “national identity” and local and global cultures. In addition, we will discuss the drastic changes that have occurred since the 1970s and the impact they have had on fashion production, consumption and cultural production in a globalized world.
For more information about the course or a copy of the syllabus contact the professors at the above email addresses.
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