Registration for continuing students begins at 9:30AM on May 7. Registration after June 5 will result in a $25 late fee for all continuing students. September 3 is the last day to register and September 17 is the add/drop deadline. For all other registration deadlines, see the GC academic calendar.
To view detailed course descriptions click here or click on the faculty name in the grid below.
Register on Record: CRN 96500
Weighted Instructional Units: CRN 9650X (the last digit is the value of credits you need to bring you up to 7 credits).
For Dissertation Supervision click here
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
|
| 11:45- 1:45 | Kruger
|
Dolan |
DiGangi |
Hintz Richardson |
Bonaparte
|
| 2:00-4:00 | Staines Vardy |
Koestenbaum Dickstein |
Reynolds Yousef |
Burger
|
Richardson |
| 4:15-6:15 | McBeth
|
Caws Allen |
Hitchcock Marcus |
Miller Hall |
|
| 6:30-8:30 | Elsky |
Alcalay Kaye |
Alexander
|
Shor Watts |
|
Courses listed alphabetically by instructor
ENGL 85000. “ From the Cold War to the Prison-Industrial Complex: Association and Intimacy in 20 th Century American Poetics.” Ammiel Alcalay. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM (cross listed with ASCP 82000) [CRN 96654].
In the context of a national process moving from psychological operations and surveillance to criminalization and imprisonment, we will explore 20 th c. American writing and poetics across diverse relationships (through bonds of friendship, intimacy, allegiance, and association), in order to open up new areas of inquiry outside the conventions of a cultural history divided by school, influence and disciplinary boundaries. By looking at a variety of texts — journals, correspondence, memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies — our goal will be to build a critical context that extends beyond inventory and assessment and towards a “thick description” of inspiration, creation, production, and transmission, through particular people.
Possible texts to be considered include: The Letters of Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov; Charles Olson & Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence; Book of Dreams, Jack Kerouac; The Journal of John Wieners Is To Be Called 707 Scott Street; Strange Big Moon: The Japan & India Journals, Joanne Kyger; My Life As A Woman, Diane di Prima; ‘Scuse ME While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child, David Henderson; Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, Alexis deVeaux, and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.
Such primary texts will be accompanied by a variety of supporting materials, particularly interviews but also edited works in which the relationship of editor and writer is pronounced, as well as historical, political, social, and theoretical background. The class will read certain texts in common and students will be expected to create their own research and reading program, contributing their findings to the common pool of knowledge generated in the class.
Class work will consist of two projects: 1) the creation of a wide-ranging contextual bibliography to accompany a thickly descriptive reading of a text chosen by each student 2) the preparation of a publishable paper or preparation of an unpublished primary text/document on a relationship that each student chooses to more fully explore. Our goal will be to gather these texts into a collection or, if germane, consider publishing them in the Lost & Found series.
In addition, we plan to have access to David Henderson (poet, biographer of Jimi Hendrix, and one of the founding members of the Umbra Poets Workshop, an important precursor of the Black Arts Movement) who will be a visiting fellow at the Graduate Center under the auspices of the Center for the Humanities and the Lost & Found Project. For the segment of the class when he will be present, we will explore the history of Umbra and work with him on formulating ideas for the presentation of documentary and archival materials related to the movement and his own activities with a diverse range of cultural figures.
Finally, we are working on a virtual link to a related seminar being taught by Prof. Don Byrd (author of, among other things, The Poetics of Common Knowledge) at SUNY Albany.
For more information, contact me at: aaka@earthlink.net
ENGL 86500. “South Asian Writing: Body, Memory, Text.” Meena Alexander. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM (cross listed WSCP 81000) [CRN 96614].
We will consider the ways in which writing is bound up with cultural citizenship and how questions of nation, memory, gender and sexuality have worked their way through twentieth century South Asian writing.From Rabindranath Tagore’s cosmopolitanism and concern with cultural translation in the early years of the twentieth century to the struggle with globalization and what has come to be known as the Rushdie affair (the burning of the novel Satanic Verses), South Asian writing both at home and in the diasporic world has struggled with questions of cultural identity. We will read Tagore’s poetry, his essays on nationalism, his play Post Office and his novel Home and the World as well as selections from Gandhi’s autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (available on line.). The Partition of India occurred in 1947 and was marked by a massive migration of people and great bloodshed.. Using the work of feminist scholars we will reflect on questions of trauma and cultural memory focusing on the abduction of women across borders and the silence that has traditionally shrouded the issue. In this segment we will read Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Sadat Hasan Manto’s short stories and selected poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Questions of land, territoriality, possession and dispossession emerge powerfully in Mahasveta Devi’s work and we will read several of her short stories. Fraught questions of multicultural identity , religion and secularism emerge in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses set in late twentieth century Britain. By its side, we will read Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things set in contemporary India. For several of the writers, whether they live in South Asia or are part of the diaspora , the struggle with the English language emerges as a powerful issue. The composition of poetry, with its distilled use of words is of great importance here. We will read poets such as A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar and Jayanta Mahapatra. Theoretical readings will include selections from the subaltern historians as well as others (Amin, Appadurai, Adorno, Asad, Bauman, Bhabha, Chakraborty, Chatterjee, Cheah, Das, Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant, Pandey, Ramazani, Spivak). This course will be run as a seminar with class presentations one short paper( mid semester ) and one final research paper. The books will be on order at Book Culture, 536 West 112th Street New York, NY 10025: Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India; Veena Das, Life and Words; Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Mahasveta Devi, Imaginary Maps; Rabindranath Tagore, Home and the World (this can also be found on line); Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office, selected memoir pieces, essays (found in the Tagore Anthology eds Dutta and Robinson); Arundhati Roy, God of Small Things; Arun Kolatkar, Jejuri; A.K.Ramanujan, Collected Poems; A.K.Ramanujan, Interior Landscape.
ENGL 80700. “Studies in Medieval Literature in Britain: Lovely Money.” Valerie Allen. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 96634].
Coins and words behave in very similar ways. They circulate, they have symbolic value, they fade out of existence. So it is no surprise that literary theory and economic theory share many concerns and have generated a growing body of work devoted to the “economy of literature,” as Marc Shell terms it. Taking money as our theme, we read a diverse spread of the literature of late medieval and early modern England that both reflects the economic preoccupations of the period and fashions a theory of money as aesthetic and hermeneutic principle. By the end of the course, the student can expect to have read a representative selection of texts from the fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, all of which address the monetary in some form; to have gained an overview of the economic history of this period in England; and to have been introduced to some of the main ideas and texts in the philosophy of money and value. Final grade will be allocated on the basis of class preparation and discussion, in-class presentation, written summaries of critical arguments, and a research paper.
Representative literary texts: Piers Plowman; Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, Shipman’s Tale, Canon Yeoman’s Tale, and Thopas; London Lickpenny and other medieval political poems; Thomas More’s Utopia; Arthur Barlowe’s 1584 trip to Virginia; Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist.
Representative historical texts: Marc Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy”; Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century; Jacques LeGoff, Your Money or Your Life; Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe; John A. Yunck, “Dan Denarius.”
Representative philosophical texts: Aristotle and Aquinas on the just price; Nicholas Oresme, De Moneta; Karl Marx, chapters on money in Capital; Georg Simmel, Philosophy of Money; Otto Fenichel, “The Drive to Amass Wealth”; Jean-Joseph Goux, SymbolicEconomies.
If you have questions, please email me: vallen@jjay.cuny.edu .
ENGL 84300. “The Novel of the Double Plot: Realism and Symbolism in the 19 th Century Novel.” Felicia Bonaparte. 2/4 credits. Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 96625].
Although the nineteenth-century novel has, for more than half a century, been regarded as a form that continued the trajectory developed in the eighteenth century of "the rise of realism," as it was called by Ian Watt, Bulwer-Lytton, one of the most prolific of Victorian writers and typical in essential ways of the ideas of his age, called the fiction of his day the "novel of the double plot," one a literal narrative, to be read realistically as a mirror of the world, the other a symbolic narrative that engages with the literal in a variety of ways, most importantly and often by constructing the form and content within which all the parts inhere and from which they derive their meaning.
This course will be concerned with exploring the character of this fictional form: the reasons that it came into being, the ways in which individual writers adapted it to their own ends, the degrees to which different writers emphasized one or the other "plot," the logic of the interconnections between the literal and the symbolic, the nature and origins of its symbols and the extent to which these form what might be called a communal language, the relationship of these symbols to the other formal elements through which narratives are constructed, the questions symbolic narratives raise in our reading of a text and the ways in which these questions differ from questions raised by realism, the manner and reasons it changed through the century, and what finally came of it.
Our readings will be of two kinds. While we examine a number of novels that illustrate different ways in which this form develops in this century, we will also, as we go, look at seminal works that shaped the development of this form.
ENGL 91000. “Dissertation Workshop: Publishing.” Glenn Burger. 0 credits. Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 96624].
Open to level 2 and 3 students only. In this seminar, students will be asked to come to the first class session with a piece of work (finished or unfinished) that they expect to submit for publication. Throughout the semester, the participants in the seminar will “workshop” these pieces, paying particular attention to theoretical and research methods, style and voice. More importantly, we will treat basic questions of how to prepare and submit non-fiction prose to academic journals and other venues. To that end, students will be asked to produce lists of venues in which they would like to publish. Each of these will be “annotated.” That is to say, the students will be responsible for explaining what the focus audience of the journal, press, etc. actually is, giving examples of similar texts that have been published in or by these institutions, and commenting on the mechanics of how to place work within them. These will be shared with all other members of the seminar. The hope is that all students will have taken at least the first steps toward publication by the end of the semester.
ENGL 76000. “Strange Modernism: Verbal and Visual.” Mary Ann Caws. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM (cross listed with WSCP 81000) [CRN 96620].
In the wide range of modernisms, however they are defined, there is always more to read, write, think and do. Some of the texts we may have read at first as relatively innocuous, or at least unproblematic, are potentially far more peculiar than we had thought. So this investigative seminar, in recall but not repeat mode -- none of the readings repeat any of those in our previous Modernisms seminar -- will be spreading out among the following personages. The stranger, the better. Specific works will be determined by availability, and visual links by their relevance and peculiarity. Emphasis on primary rather than secondary texts. No auditors please.
Some possible personages to be consulted: Artaud, Barthelme, Beckett, Breton, Cahun, Cixous, Cortazar, Davenport, Derrida, Gass, Gide, H.D., James, Kafka, Kirkegaard, Kristeva, Lorca, Mann, Melville, Sontag, Woolf, and a bunch of exuberant French poets, like Apollinaire and Cendrars.
ENGL 87400. “Film and American Culture in the 1930s.” Morris Dickstein. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 2:00PM-5:00PM. (cross-listed with ART 89600, THEA 81500. FSCP 81000 & ASCP 82000) [CRN 96629].
This course will focus on the pivotal role of film, writing, the visual arts, music, and popular culture during a period of social and economic upheaval: America in the 1930s. It will explore some of the leading film genres of the period, including gangster movies, backstage musicals, dance films, monster movies, screwball comedies, and dramas or documentaries about the social and economic conditions of the Depression itself, from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang to The Grapes of Wrath. Each week, films viewed at home or on reserve in the library will be juxtaposed with film shown in class, sometimes in unlikely combinations. Special attention will be paid to the work of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, to the role of comedy in a period of social crisis, to the evolution of major studio styles, the economic situation of the industry itself, and the role of other socially meaningful art forms during the Depression, including drama, the novel, documentary photography, music, and mural painting. Readings will include some works of fiction, journalism, and social history, as well as selections from film histories such as Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money, Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, Elizabeth Kendall, The Runaway Bride, Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames, and Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System. Assigned writing from the period itself will include novels by John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and Budd Schulberg, along with plays by Clifford Odets. Students will be expected to deliver an oral report and produce a 15-page term paper.
ENGL 81400. “Shakespearean Masculinities.” Mario DiGangi. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 11:45AM-1:45PM (cross listed WSCP 81000) [CRN 96632].
Masculinity, long a topic of interest for psychoanalytic and new historicist Shakespeare critics, has become central to recent work by feminist materialists, queer theorists, and social historians. Using insights from various critical approaches, we will explore questions such as the following: through what representational strategies (sartorial, gestural, vocal, rhetorical, erotic) is manhood staged in early modern theater and culture? How is masculine identity inflected by distinctions of social status, age, wealth, profession, sexuality, nationhood, or race? How might an analysis of the multiple forms of masculinity unsettle the notion of a monolithic patriarchal culture? What role might the study of masculinity play in recent debates between historicist and “presentist” Renaissance critics? We will examine both canonical and less familiar texts from throughout Shakespeare’s career, as well as some texts by his contemporaries. Requirements include class presentations, brief responses, and a research paper.
ENGL 75300. “Tell about the South: Faulkner and Other Southern Modernists, 1925-1962.” Marc Dolan. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 11:45-1:45 (cross listed with ASCP 82000 & WSCP 81000) [CRN 96630].
From the beginning, critics have instinctively considered Modernism to be an urban movement, a revolt against the provincialism of “the village”—but what are we to make of William Faulkner? Accepted as an oxymoronic rural modernist even in his own time, Faulkner represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overlooked role that regional literature, particularly Southern literature, played in the formation of American modernism. This course will examine a sampling of Faulkner’s novels, as well as novels by several other mid-twentieth-century writers from the American South, focusing on the ways in which they made a seemingly urban and European movement flourish on underdeveloped American soil. In so doing, we will also consider the simultaneously increasing interest in Southern culture throughout the United States during this period, possibly from the standpoints of both postcolonial studies and ethnic studies.
Course Requirements: Two presentations, a bibliography, and a final paper presenting original scholarship on a text or texts from the middle third of the twentieth century that either emerged from or treated the American South.
Tentative Booklist
William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940), in Novels, 1936-1940 [Library of America]
Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925) [Harvest/HBJ]
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) [Norton Critical Edition]
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) [Scribner]
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in Novels, 1936-1940
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) [FSG]
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932), in Novels, 1930-1935 [Library of America]
Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) [HarperCollins—currently out of print but widely available]
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1942), in Novels, 1942-1954 [Library of America]
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding (1946) [Harcourt]
William Faulkner, The Wild Palms [aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939), in Novels, 1936-1940
(It is recommended that, for the Faulkner novels, students purchase the relevant volumes of the Library of America set. Failing that, they should make sure that they purchase the corrected texts for the assigned novels that Vintage has issued in the wake of these volumes.)
ENGL 81100. “Speaking in Tongues: The Ethics and Performativity of Early Modern Prose Genres.” Martin Elsky. 2/4 credits. Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 96650].
The post-Derridean persistence of the problem of language reference throws light on the emergence of early modern prose genres as a response to the moral dilemmas of performative language. Historians of philosophy credit early modern pedagogical practice with initiating a shift in habits of reasoning that stressed the relative, circumstantial nature of truth and its expression in language, which thus acquired the character of theatricality. The result was a privileged position for rhetoric and literary language (over philosophy) as a performance of imagined voices. This theatricality led to an ethical crisis for those whose social status depended on skill in expression: is there a line between authentic performance and imposture, dissimulation, and pandering for position. These issues underlie the formation of early modern prose genres, their experiments with new stylistic formulas, and the spaces they imagine as the settings of performed speech (the public and private spaces of the domestic interior, the court, the solitary tower, the council chamber, and the uninhabited outdoors). Genres will include: the Humanist dialogue and the theatricality of counter-balanced voices; the courtesy book and prescriptions for performing effects in spectators for social advancement; the prose romance and the performance of gender; the commonplace book and reading as a meditation on the moral ambiguities of performing praise in verse. We will also look at prose genres that seek a way out of the dilemmas of performance, genres that had an impact far beyond the early modern period: the invention of the personal essay and the return to philosophical prose through fragmented, discontinuous discourse. We will end with an autobiography by a poet-musician who sought to escape the performed life through the printed book. Readings will include More’s Utopia, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Sidney’s Arcadia (Book I), Jonson’s Discoveries, Montaigne’s Essais, Bacon’s New Organon, and Thomas Whythorne’s Discourses of [his] Life (an undeservedly under-read book).
ENGL 84300. “Trollope.” N. John Hall. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 96636].
I should like this course to be an orgy of enjoyable reading. If you have an even partially Trollopian sensibility; if you can manage to suspend not only your disbelief but also the professional need to read critically, to be ever on the qui vive for this or that theme or whatever; if you are willing to relax and immerse yourself in Trollope's world, the chances are good that you will be charmed and delighted. You may even find yourself, like many "common readers," addicted. Not altogether a bad thing, if we are to trust the testimony of the afflicted. In any case, issues abound in Trollope's 47 novels: love, courtship, marriage, money, politics, women's "disabilities," and many more. We will look at the art of narration as he practiced it, the mechanics of his plot construction, his handling of dialogue; his famous writing habits. Other issues arise: autobiography in fiction, periodical publication, the illustrated novel, novels of connected characters. If I had to name an over-arching theme for our endeavor, it would be to get a handle on that wonderfully elusive phenomenon, the comic novel.
Texts--in Oxford World's Classics if findable--include:
The Warden (a short novel) and its sequel, Barchester Towers (the latter often thought of as Trollope's Pride and Prejudice).
The Last Chronicle of Barset (the final of the six-book Barchester series, and in Trollope's thinking his best single work).
Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux. (two of the more political of the six-book Palliser novels; Trollope saw the two as forming one large novel).
The Duke's Children (the mellow final novel of the Palliser series).
For the rest, we will read some novels independent of the two series:
The Way We Live Now (Trollope's Madoff book).
Cousin Henry and Dr. Wortle's School (short novels).
This list will be subject to change and even curtailing at the will of the group. If the reading seems too lengthy perhaps we can parcel out the latter novels to individuals or small groups who would read and report back to the seminar on what they discover. Some brave soul might even like to read and compare The Eustace Diamonds (Trollope' unwitting version of his favorite novelist's favorite creation, Becky Sharp) and Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
One session will be held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
One paper; no exam.
ENGL 79500 “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship,”Carrie Hintz. 4 credits. Thursday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 96619].
This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be a part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century. Theoretically, we will examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and how various theories define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline of “English” studies. Practically, we will discuss how to define objects of inquiry (“texts” and “contexts”) within “English” studies, how to research such objects, how to identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how to develop new knowledge. The course follows four main lines in inquiry, examining: 1) archival and bibliographical work, 2) concepts of text and textuality, 3) theoretical approaches, and 4) the historical, institutional context of the discipline.
Requirements: The work for the course has two parts: 1) readings in common that will be discussed in class, and 2) an individual project pursued throughout the semester and designed to put into practice the more general issues taken up in the course. Students will periodically report in class on their progress in the individual project. The course grade will be based on the final project, on the work done in stages on that project throughout the semester, and on general participation throughout the semester.
ENGL 86600. “Postcolonialism/Poststructuralism/Postmarxism: Theories of Dissent and Disjunction.” Peter Hitchcock. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 96622].
We are so used to “post”ing theory that understanding its nuance is already lost to generalization and conflation of differing forms of post in its articulation. There is also a deadening presentism prevalent in the politics of post that must, at any cost, announce a fetishistic timeliness by post-dating any current theoretical position (this is basically academic “Twittering”). Thirdly, one cannot discount the power of posting theory altogether, a politics of “after” that is after the idea theory is a luxurious and elitist alibi for the real foundations evident in otherwise relatively simple truths. This course will argue for a somewhat more conflictual, reflexive, and situated understanding of theory in the era of posts. On the one hand it will serve as a polemical introduction to some of the more prominent figures and theories associated with my troublesome trio; on the other, the course will advance a critical paradigm in the service of a practical imbrication of their otherwise disparate concerns. This does not mean the politics of continued decolonization, rigorous anti-structuralism, and Marxist exceptionalism are the same. Far from it. Nevertheless, I hope to clarify the notion that theoretical difference has a politics of alignment and the obfuscation of this possibility principally girds the will-to-post in contemporary theorization and its discontents. This will avoid the supermarket approach to theory (“better reference this Italian, French or Dutch dude somewhere”) and a new passion for dismissing theory as some hermeneutical fib. If we take theory more seriously we might better appreciate its ability to conceptualize radically our research agendas, even if this might mean suspending the pretensions of post in such endeavor, or subjecting its matter of factness to committed reevaluation (approaches that can extend to a variety of posts, like postfeminism, postnation, postcommunism, etc.).
Readings will be drawn from Spivak, Mbembe, Derrida, Baudrillard, Butler, Jameson, Balibar, Ranciere, Zizek, Negri, Agamben and Badiou. Pre-posts will include Spinoza, Marx, and Fanon. While prior knowledge of such theory would be greatly appreciated it will not be assumed. The basis of our discussions will be critical curiosity not estimable fluency. A class presentation and essay will be required in consultation with the instructor.
ENGL 84500. “The Animal Estate: Humans, Beasts, and Literature.” Richard Kaye. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 96628].
The question of what it means to be human is at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, “humanity” has been understood and defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality, consciousness, and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. Recent scientific research and rigorous examinations of taxonomy, however, have raised searching and controversial questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals—an examination that has a long intellectual history as well as a keenly literary dimension in a variety of Trans-Atlantic fictional texts.
This course explores the aesthetics, ethics, and politics animating the relations between animals and humans with particular attention to British and American literary representation from the nineteenth century to the present and to current theoretical debates on animal rights, ecological ethics, and post-humanist philosophy. We will begin with Jeremy Bentham’s landmark section of “The Principles of Morals and Legislation” on the “rights of non-human animals” and then explore Victorian conceptions of the animal world through an extensive exploration of Darwin's "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man," examining, as well, the impact of Darwinian ideas on nineteenth-century culture. We will consider Wilkie Collins' anti-vivisectionist sensation novel "Heart and Science," Kipling's richly allegorical "The Jungle Book," H.G. Wells' fantastical anti-utopian "The Island of Dr. Moreau," Stevenson's urban gothic "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Bram Stoker’s novel of human-beast inversions, “Dracula,” (the last three of these works will be read in terms of their attempts at assimilating, sensationalizing, and containing evolutionary ideas). We will examine, as well, Victorian and Edwardian thinkers such as the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, the feminist activist Frances Cobbe, and the sexual radical Edward Carpenter, whose anti-vivisectionist critiques forged a connection between Englishness, egalitarian ideals, kindness to animals, and anti-colonial politics. We will take up Anna Sewall’s “Black Beauty: Autobiography of a Horse” (called by one contemporary reviewer “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the animal right’s movement”) and explore the premises of American “naturalism" through a consideration of Jack London's "Call of the Wild," another fictional work narrated from the perspective of an animal,. The fictions of modernist "primitivists" will be viewed through a reading of D.H. Lawrence's novella "St. Mawr" (which tells of a young woman who discovers in a stallion the qualities missing from her male lovers) and in what has been called the “sapphic primitvism” of Willa Cather. The class will explore the writings of such recent theorists as Peter Singer, Barbara Hernstein Smith, George Levine, Sandra Harding, Temple Grandin, Josephine Donovan, Harriet Ritvo, Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, Steven Wise, and Donna Haraway. Finally, we will read two works of contemporary fiction: Kirsten Bakis' parable "The Lives of the Monster Dogs,” whose canine protagonists flee animal experimentation in Europe to live as exiles on New York's Lower East Side, and J.M. Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello,” whose heroine is depicted as a radical animal-rights polemicist and an (exhausted) post-humanist “beast.”
Among the questions we will consider: How do distinct literary modes (parable, sentimental polemic, gothic, fantasy, naturalist fiction) differently represent the connections between the human and non-human realms as well as variously argue for moral sensitivity and political action? How does the representation of animals as superior moral agents mark moments of social upheaval and instability? How do writers depict animal consciousness? How does representing animal perception pose a special challenge to Victorian narrative, one that is answered by modernist writers seeking to expand the fictional representation of consciousness? How do writers, drawing on a rhetoric of the “natural,” naturalize racial, sexual, and class-based differences? What are the stakes (aesthetic, ethical, political) in transgressing or maintaining species barriers? What assumptions underpin the claims of animal rights doctrine, evolutionary psychology, and post-humanist theory?
A mid-term paper and a final paper.
ENGL 86400. “Humiliation.” Wayne Koestenbaum. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 96617].
This seminar will explore experiences of humiliation—unfathomable reversals, rendered in word and image, and therefore under aesthetic jurisdiction. Works considered may include Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus or Euripides’s The Trojan Women, a Shakespeare play (Coriolanus?), selections from the Marquis de Sade, Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, the Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, poetry and drawings of Antonin Artaud, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Jean Genet’s A Thief’s Journal or The Maids, Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Thomas Bernhard’s A Party for Boris, José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Diana Trilling’s Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor, Kate Millet’s The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice, Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson, and some modern and contemporary American poetry (Anne Sexton, Dodie Bellamy, Chelsey Minnis). We will see at least one film (possibly Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Martha or Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar); we will observe humiliation’s appearance in contemporary art (video, photography, painting, performance). Students will each develop an original research project, embodied in a final essay.
ENGL 80100. “Theory Colloquium.” Steven F. Kruger. 2/4 credits. Monday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 96621].
This course provides a space for considering where "theory" stands currently in relation to the discipline of "English" and, more generally, literary and cultural studies. What counts as theory? What is gained, and lost, through the maintenance of a distinction between theory and practice? How do we bring theory to the reading of literary and cultural texts? What would it mean, as some have claimed, to be at a point post-theory?
In addressing these, and other, questions, we will consider some of the major theoretical positions and movements of the past several decades—feminism, queer theory, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, materialism/Marxism, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, psychoanalysis—looking at how these stand in relation to each other, at where they differ and where they intersect. Course readings will include both shorter essays that represent particular theoretical stances and recent books that bring together in interesting, quirky, powerful ways different strands of theoretical inquiry.
Each member of the class will be responsible for presenting, once in the semester, her/his understanding of a particular theoretical position. Final essays for the course can address students' individual areas of interest, presenting, for instance, a theoretically-informed reading of texts representing a particular period, genre, author, etc.
ENGL 86100. “Virginia Woolf.” Jane Marcus. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15-6:15PM (cross listed WSCP 81000) [CRN 96626].
Looking at the issues of class, gender and war/peace in Virginia Woolf’s work, the seminar will read, for example, her suffrage novel Night and Day in the context of the history of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement, Midge McKenzie’s Shoulder to Shoulder, and other women’s suffrage novels by Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Robins, etc. with attention to figures like the Pankhursts. A Room of One’s Own and other essays on women will be read both as essays in themselves and as developing “theory” of her own socialist feminism.The Voyage Out in its drafts provides an interesting picture of VW’s backing away from her initial post-colonial critique of imperialism. Alison Light’s Virginia Woolf and the Servants will help us work on VW’s complicated thinking about class. Orlando will be read as a Turkish novel, in relation, not to Vita Sackville-West but to her husband Harold and British policy in the Balkans. Woolf’s fictions of World War I, Jacob’s Room To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway may be seen more clearly by reading in depth in histories and poetries of the war.
ENGL 89010. “Queer Lines of Communication: Speaking/Listening/Writing/Reading to the Non-normative.” Mark McBeth. 2/4 credits. Monday 4:15PM-6:15PM (cross listed WSCP 81000) [CRN 96657].
For such an everyday phenomena, communicating can pose huge challenges. But is the act of communicating so difficult because we take the tasks of conveying and retrieving ideas for granted? Have we become so accustomed to the "standard" (read: normative) commerce of words that we have forgotten how to be creative with them -- to make them do new things? Drawing upon cross-disciplinary sources ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, students will explore the odd daily utterance and reception of words. Participants in the course will investigate subjects such as the non-locutionary power of silence, the rhetoric of listening, the inventive opportunities of reading, and the passive role of the writer. They will revisit the common tropes of communication --"the silent treatment," "in one ear and out the other,""verbal diarrhea," "order in the court"-- to see what these phrases imply about the power dynamics and social perceptions of correspondence. They will invent and play with new figures of speech (as well as listening, reading, and writing) to see how fresh metaphors might open new lines of communication.
Ultimately, members of the class will explore how the "normativizing" of communicative performances affects the acquisition of these primarily linguistic activities. How do we recognize when the novice communicator falters? We often hear the term advanced readers and writers; what do advanced communicators have to do to prove themselves? Once we have grown proficient at speaking, listening, reading, and writing, why do we forget that we were once not masters of these communicative performances? As educators of the communicative arts, why do the questionable performances of inexperienced readers and writers (a.k.a., assignments) foment such strong reactions in us? Why as seasoned readers and writers in unfamiliar writing scenarios do we still become so "angst-written"? How do we rehearse both our students and ourselves into better intercommunication? If we "queer" the lines of communication, can we make them clearer?
Some authors informing this course: Jonathan Alexander (Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy), J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words), M. M. Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination), Cicero (Rhetorica ad Herennium), Cheryl Glenn (Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence), Krista Ratcliffe (Rhetorical Listening), A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh).
ENGL 87500. “Experimental Selves.” Nancy K. Miller. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM (cross listed WSCP 81000) [CRN 96646].
“I do not know how far I differ from other people,” Virginia Woolf worries in “A Sketch of the Past.” Woolf’s perplexity summarizes the memoirist’s dilemma. In this course we will explore the process of self-discovery undertaken by twentieth and twenty-first century writers and artists for whom questions of identity and difference have required experiments in form. In addition to literary memoirs and graphic narrative, we will discuss essays, photographs, visual culture, and critical theory.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Roland Barthes, Alison Bechdel, Samuel Delany, Leslie Feinberg, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Adrienne Rich, Marjane Satrapi, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others.
ENGL 75100. “American Renaissance.” David S. Reynolds . 2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM (cross listed with ASCP 82000) [CRN 96623].
The three decades between 1835 and 1865 are arguably the richest period in American literary history. This period saw the dazzling innovations in philosophy, literary style, and social criticism brought about by Emerson and Thoreau; the metaphysical depth and cultural breadth represented by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne; the breathtaking poetic experimentation of Whitman and Dickinson; and the psychological and artistic achievement of Edgar Allan Poe. The issues of race and chattel slavery were powerfully depicted by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Class conflict was dramatized in popular novels by George Lippard and George Thompson, and women's issues in the fiction of Sara Parton and others. In addition to reading these authors, we shall discuss key theoretical and critical approaches to their writings. An oral report and a 15-page term paper are required.
ENGL 85000. “American Aesthetics: Transcendentalist Pragmatism.” Joan Richardson. 2/4 credits. Thursday 11:45AM-1:45PM (cross listed with WSCP 81000) [CRN 96631].
An awkward phrasing “Transcendentalist Pragmatism”—why? Why not “Transcendental Pragmatism”? The answer begins in the following passage from Stanley Cavell’s “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist”:
To my mind, to understand Emerson as essentially the forerunner of pragmatism is to consider pragmatism as representing most effectively or rationally what Emerson had undertaken to bring to these shores. This is the latest in the sequence of repressions of Emerson’s thought by the culture he helped to found, of what is distinctive in that thought. Such a repression has punctuated Emerson’s reputation from the moment he could be said to have acquired one. So my question becomes: What is lost if Emerson’s voice is lost? […] To repress Emerson’s difference is to deny that America is as transcendentalist as it is pragmatist, that it is in struggle with itself at a level not articulated by what we understand as the political…. What Emerson calls for is something we do not want to hear, something about the necessity of patience or suffering in allowing ourselves to change. [Emphasis mine]
The answering will continue over the course of the semester as we read Emerson, William James, and Barack Obama keeping this admonition of Cavell’s in mind. There will also be additional readings in Cavell as well as the examples from classical and contemporary pragmatists collected in Russell Goodman, Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge, 1995). Supplemental material will include items from recent pertinent publications in The New Republic, The Nation, the New York Times and elsewhere.
A brief seminar report and a term paper will be required.
ENGL 91000. “Dissertation Workshop.” Joan Richardson. 0 credits. Friday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 96633].
Open to level 2 and 3 students only. This seminar covers techniques of dissertation writing, research, analysis, and documentation. Students at the prospectus stage or the chapter stage will work on their own projects and read each other’s work under the professor’s guidance. In addition, the course explores avenues toward publishing students’ work in scholarly journals or as book-length monographs.
ENGL 79010. “’7 WRDS U CNT SAY ON TV’: Rhetorics of Domination and Resistance.” Ira Shor. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 96638].
George Carlin, who practiced Foucault’s “fearless speech,” became a comic legend in 1972 after his arrest in Milwaukee for obscenity. He had just delivered his stand-up routine on the “seven words you can’t say on TV.” Carlin’s nasty lexicon prompted his arrest and a long litigation that eventually brought the Pacifica Foundation to the Supreme Court, which narrowly upheld the FCC’s right to restrict indecent speech in 1978.
Carlin’s famous “seven words” were actually ten obscenities (see the You Tube clip posted after Carlin died last June at 71). Forty years ago, when mass movements put government and corporations on the defensive, Carlin was targeted by a second (hidden) harassment. After a 1969 TV appearance where he “lampooned” FBI-chief Hoover and the Bureau, Carlin became targeted for undercover surveillance. One arm of the state (the FCC) went after Carlin in plain sight and another (the FBI) shadowed him in secret, Carlin discovered from his FOIA file.
With discourse as his weapon(in this case the rhetoric of satire performed in public and reproduced for circulation), Carlin attracted a lot of official scrutiny, as did other dissident artists, scholars, authors, and activists then. Clearly, rhetoric was not then and is not now neutral, harmless, innocent or ideology-free; it is a site of power relations; it is a tool to affect how self and society develop.
Control of communication has always been practiced by dominant groups to secure their dominance. Domination of “the rhetorical setting” helps ruling groups maintain the unequal status quo in which we all come of age. However, the rhetorical setting, while dramatically unequal, is not flat, linear, static or one-dimensional; it has always been a contradictory space of complex agency and unpredictable contention. We are indeed spoken or inscribed by the social contexts in which we speak but we also “write” these contexts by our interventions. All in all, then, rhetoric is the particular medium for the social construction of the self and for the self’s construction of society, but certainly as a complex of contention rather than as a simplex of domination.
This seminar will explore rhetoric as a productive and contested terrain of social practices. Rhetoric, which emerged 2500 years ago as an oral art of civic deliberation, was understood from the first as generative; it enabled the production of discourses capable of influencing belief and action(teaching us what is good, what is possible, and what exists, according to Goran Therborn). Rhetoric, then, hardly “mere words,” is an extraordinary human invention, a phenomenal tool for articulating and bringing to life one world or another as the best outcome of our human potential.
World-making, self-creating, and meaning-driven, rhetoric in society includes powerful “legitimate discourses” and “legitimate speakers”(to use Pierre Bourdieu’s formulations) and “disqualified discourses” and subjugated knowledges”(to use Foucault’s notions). The rhetorical setting thus presents a suite of hegemonic, alternative, emergent, and residual discourses unequally circulating at any specific time or place(to adapt Raymond Williams’s cultural schema). This seminar will examine this contention of circulating discourses, between rhetorics of domination and those of resistance. How does hegemony work rhetorically to sustain itself and to contain alternatives? How do counter-hegemonic practices emerge and gain traction? George Carlin persisted in his use of the 7(10) dirty words in his art of public satire while the state has expanded surveillance since Carlin’s famous arrest. In such ongoing conflict, what is effective resistance?
Readings: Foucault(Society Must Be Defended; Discipline and Punish), Bourdieu(Distinction; Language as Symbolic Action), Ohmann(The Politics of Letters), Scott(Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Thinking Like a State), Therborn(The Ideology of Power), Pratt(“Arts of the Contact Zone”), Freire(Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Adult Literacy”), Elbow(Writing Without Teachers, Writing With Power), and others.
Writings: Weekly discussion journals, brief class presentations, final short paper.
ENGL 71100. “Spenser’s Queens.” John Staines. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM (cross listed with WSCP 81000 ) [CRN 96618].
Queens appear the early-modern British imagination as objects of both desire and revulsion, fear and admiration. In confronting their confusion over a female body with the “heart and stomach of a king” and their anxiety over the “monstrous regiment” of women heading the patriarchal order, poets (male and female) employ their rhetoric to speak to, shape, and master the royal image, simultaneously celebrating and resisting the seductive power of queenship. This course will focus on the various guises under which Spenser engages Elizabeth and her opposite Mary Queen of Scots in The Faerie Queene, the fullest, most brilliant of these conflicted meditations on the problems of modern monarchy and queenship. Together we will read The Faerie Queene, with some attention to Spenser’s shorter lyrics (The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again,Amoretti). We will read these poems against other representations of Elizabeth (especially her own speeches) and Mary Queen of Scots (like the forged sonnets of “Casket Letters”), also giving some attention to other contemporary poets (Philip and Mary Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Mary Wroth). Some issues to consider: the poet as political counselor; sex and gender in religious and political polemics; the gendering of romance, epic, and lyric; mutuality vs. hierarchy in Protestant sexuality and marriage; the place of emotions in political life; male counsel and the paradox of the “Elizabeth’s monarchical republic.” Each student will also prepare an oral presentation and a final paper.
ENGL 84200. “Coleridge’s Reputation.” Alan Vardy. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 96627].
Samuel Taylor Coleridge began his career as a committed radical dissenter, making political speeches against the war with France in the 1790s, publishing a radical weekly, The Watchman, etc. Later in his life, after abandoning his earlier Unitarian principles, he sought to rehabilitate his reputation as a conservative patriot, the sage of Highgate. From the outset then, Coleridge’s reputation has been highly contested, from his defending himself against charges of Jacobinism to charges of political apostasy by his old friends (WilliamHazlitt foremost among them) to being a failed husband, a bad father, an opium addict, etc. This seminar will make a systematic study of Coleridge’s poetry, poetics, political writing and philosophy from this particular perspective. For example, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was considered incoherent and a drag on sales when first published, but now enjoys a reputation as a work of genius and “pure imagination” (his phrase). We will study the works themselves, initial responses, and subsequent critical judgments. Particular attention will be paid to Coleridge’s self-conscious efforts to construct his reputation as a philosopher, critic and theologian, and on his family’s furthering those efforts in the face of posthumous scandal. The Norton edition, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, will serve as the main text, and essays, reviews, book chapters, etc. will be available on e-reserve. Frequent short papers of 2-3 pages and a research paper of 15-20 pages are required.
ENGL 85500. "Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Black Women." Jerry Watts. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM [ 97424].
This class will read and intensely analyze black female autobiographies written during the twentieth-century. We will utilize theoretical texts on autobiography as a distinct genre. Moreover, we will attempt to isolate various themes, arguments, and tendencies that seem to be present in most black female autobiographies. The class will focus on the ways that black female autobiographers utilize narratives and language to construct themselves as dynamic racialized and genderized subjects. The list of Afro-American female autobiographies written during the twentieth century would be far too large to confront in a single class. Consequently, I will choose the autobiographies that we are to study and discuss. However, I will leave class periods open to discuss black female autobiographies chosen by the students. I would like to see us read the autobiographies of Anna Julia Cooper; Mary Church Terrell; Ida B. Wells; Zora Neale Hurston; Pauli Murray; Nikki Giovanni; Maya Angelou; and bell hooks.
ENGL 80600. “Listening to the Other: Readings in Psychoanalysis.” Nancy Yousef. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 96651].
This course will survey psychoanalytic writing with particular attention to its conceptualization of the relationship between self and other(s). Beginning with Freud’s important essays on the technique and practice of psychoanalytic treatment, we will proceed to examine major developments and revisions in modes of writing and thinking about insight, interpretation, work, and cure in psychoanalysis. Post-Freudian writers to be studied include Winnicott, Klein, Balint, Loewald, Bollas, Benjamin, Chodorow, and Lear. Our readings of theoretical and clinical writings will focus on concepts of transference, countertransference, projection, enactment, resistance, and reverie. Study of psychoanalytic writing will be punctuated by readings of exemplary literary texts that offer alternative or complementary modes of understanding and representing the challenge of understanding other minds.
| CRN | Instructor | |
| 36758 | Alcalay,Ammiel | |
| 48238 | Alexander,Meena | |
| 05850 | Bonaparte,Felicia | |
| 29461 | Bowen,Barbara | |
| 23222 | Brenkman,John | |
| 12146 | Brownstein,Rachel | |
| 36759 | Burger,Glenn | |
| 11637 | Caws,Mary Ann | |
| 26678 | Coleman,William Emmet | |
| 05849 | Cullen,Patrick | |
| 24261 | Danziger,Marlies | |
| 93919 | Dawson,Ashley | |
| 23296 | De Jongh,James | |
| 25192 | Di Salvo,Jacqueline | |
| 05857 | Dickstein,Morris | |
| 47909 | DiGangi,Mario | |
| 48438 | Dolan,Marc | |
| 36760 | Elsky,Martin | |
| 15348 | Epstein,Edmund | |
| 93921 | Faherty,Duncan | |
| 05729 | Fletcher,Angus | |
| 47903 | Greetham,David | |
| 36761 | Hall,N. John | |
| 36762 | Hayes,Thomas | |
| 69454 | Hintz,Carrie | |
| 47923 | Hitchcock,Peter | |
| 93920 | Hoeller,Hildegard | |
| 28781 | Humpherys,Anne | |
| 96018 | Israel, Nico | |
| 47998 | Joseph,Gerhard | |
| 08201 | Kaplan,Fred | |
| 69524 | Kaye,Richard | |
| 12145 | Kelly,William | |
| 48444 | Kelvin,Norman | |
| 35708 | Koestenbaum,Wayne | |
| 28386 | Kruger,Steven | |
| 14939 | Marcus,Jane Connor | |
| 12988 | McCoy,Richard | |
| 23295 | McKenna,Catherine | |
| 48665 | Milhous,Judith | |
| 05727 | Miller,Nancy | |
| 92513 | Mlynarczyk,Rebecca | |
| 32012 | Otte,George | |
| 47926 | Parker,Blanford | |
| 47936 | Perl,Sondra | |
| 47918 | Reid-Pharr,Robert | |
| 17651 | Reynolds,David | |
| 12144 | Richardson,Joan | |
| 36484 | Richter,David | |
| 36763 | Sargent,Michael | |
| 36764 | Savran,David | |
| 36765 | Schaffer,Talia | |
| 48700 | Sedgwick,Eve Kosofsky | |
| 26217 | Shor,Ira | |
| 47908 | Stone,Donald | |
| 48522 | Suggs,Jon-Christian | |
| 05844 | Timko,Michael | |
| 11496 | Tolchin,Neal | |
| 69453 | Vardy,Alan | |
| 48378 | Wallace,Michele | |
| 36766 | Watts,Jerry | |
| 31324 | Webb,Barbara | |
| 30399 | Westrem,Scott | |
| 15359 | Whatley,E. Gordon | |
| 48172 | Wilner,Joshua | |
| 05843 | Wittreich,Joseph | |
| 69455 | Yousef,Nancy | |