Registration for continuing students begins at 9:30AM on December 3. Registration after January 9 will result in a $25 late fee for all continuing students. January 30 is the last day to register, and February 17 is the add/drop deadline.
To view detailed course descriptions click here or click on the faculty name in the grid below.
Register on Record: CRN 95000
Weighted Instructional Units: CRN 9500X (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 |
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| 11:45- 1:45 | Schaffer
|
Chinn |
Joseph |
Dawson |
Bonaparte Tolchin |
| 2:00-4:00 | Epstein Reid-Pharr |
Koestenbaum |
Reynolds Dickstein |
Greetham McCoy |
Hoeller |
| 4:15-6:15 | Perl Richter |
Giddins Gerstner |
Brownstein Hintz |
Miller Sargent |
|
| 6:30-8:30 | Humpherys Wittreich |
Alcalay Wallace |
Sedgwick Brenkman |
Watts Faherty |
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| Intersession: Greetham Thry & Pract Lit Schlshp | |||||
Courses listed alphabetically by instructor
ENGL
86200. “A Workshop in Contexts of 20th Century North American Poetry.”
Ammiel Alcalay. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM (cross-listed with
ASCP 81500)[CRN 95040].
“Since 1955, poetry or verse as some would prefer it called has,
despite all forebodings that it was dying, taken through a handful of
writers in the United States, a stranglehold on established modes of
thought, analysis, and attention.” John Wieners, 1972
This is a specialized course that assumes some familiarity with at
least some of the writers we plan to read and research. The course will
be structured as a workshop in which the aim will be for each student
to choose a single writer or text, or a cluster of writers and texts,
and work on creating and documenting a dense historical context for
those texts/writers. This will entail extended research into the
formal, biographical, social, political, geographic and other contexts
that the writers(s)/text(s) might suggest, as well as reading and
thinking through other investigative and interpretive models that might
have nothing to do with poetry or poetics. Particular emphasis will be
put on examining original publications, tracing publication history and
decisions (i.e. Gwendolyn Brooks moving from a major publisher to
Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press), and comprehending the context of
small press publishing and personal correspondence in the context of
the cold war and “official verse culture.” The general goal will be to
develop a new and common critical vocabulary while producing a
publishable work on some neglected or under-written about aspect of
20th c. North American poetry. Hopefully, these initial investigations
may also lead into further recuperative projects involving editing,
textual scholarship, and critical commentary.
We will take into account a wide range of poets thought of as major or
minor and associated or clustered around designations such as The New
Americans, the Objectivists, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black
Mountain, Umbra, and the Black Arts Movement (for example: Lorine
Niedecker, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kenneth Patchen, Jackson
MacLow, Madeline Gleason, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen,
Jack Spicer, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, David
Henderson, Jack Hirschman, John Wieners, Sister Mary Norbert Korte, Ed
Dorn, Diane Wakoski, etc.).
Enrollment is limited. In order to register, please send a very brief statement of interest to Ammiel Alcalay at: aaka@earthlink.net.
ENGL 84300.” The Not So Loose and Baggy Monster: Repossessing Victorian Fiction.” Felicia Bonaparte. 2/4 credits. Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 95041].
Contrary to the general view that the nineteenth-century novel was a loose and baggy monster, in the words of Henry James, Victorian fiction is as precise and carefully wrought as the intricate architecture in which it often figured itself. But it was extremely complex and for very obvious reasons. Radical and foundation changes were the order of the day. Old ideas were being challenged; new ideas were being born. Self, society, human relationships, history, politics, science, art, every area of human thought, every aspect of human existence, every detail of human life was in a state of transformation. Its logic, however, as James seems to prove, was not always discernible to those who had already entered the paradigm of a later day. A good deal of archaeological digging has made a number of things intelligible in the last hundred years or so, but critical elements still remain for the most part incomprehensible, leaving us sometimes with a sense that James may have been right after all.
Our premise will be that Victorian writers really did know what they were doing, that every word and punctuation mark they put down had at least one end, and, quite possibly, half a dozen. And our purpose will be to discover what precisely that end was. Thus, we will focus on reading the novels, reading in the sense of learning the idiom in which they express their thoughts, on identifying the frames, shapes, and patterns of their fictions, on deciphering their symbols and determining their signals with the hope that in the end we will be able to understand them in their own conceptual language.
Such an approach will require two things. The first of these is that we bring to our analysis of each novel the ideas that have engendered the foundations on which it builds its action, characters, and themes. In the interest of reading each work in its own conceptual idiom, we will allow the novel itself to guide us to what we need to discuss, introducing at each point only those concepts it seems to invoke. Those that are not familiar to all, and a good number will not be, we will stop and explore as we go, so that, by the end of the term, we will have managed to create a philosophic map of the era. Beyond that, however, we will want to get as close to each work as we can, therefore without interpretive filters. Whatever we may wish to do second (such as ask questions these works do not answer but that we can answer through them, and these very likely will entail most of the isms of current theory—feminism, Marxism, structuralism, etc.), our primary task will be to listen as well and as deeply as we are able to what Umberto Eco has called the intentio operis, the intention of the work.
Our reading list will include the following and in the following order, not chronological but more logical in that it will allow us to get to the ideas of the age in a more user friendly way. I have chosen those editions that, in addition to being scholarly with regard to textual matters, provide only such introductions, or none at all, that help us work on those philosophic maps:
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics, ed., David Carroll, introd. Felicia Bonaparte)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Tark Classic Fiction)
Charlotte Bronte, Villette (Penguin Classics, introduction by Tony Tanner)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; A Novel Without A Hero (Scholarly Publishing Office,
University of Michigan Library. An excellent edition that includes Thackeray's own illustrations)
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Penguin English Library Edition, with introduction by Tony Tanner, in the
old edition if you can find it but in the new if not)
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Penguin Classics, ed. and introduction by Nicola Bradbury)
George Meredith, The Egoist (Penguin Classics, intro. George Woodcock)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics, introduction by Patricia Ingham)
Course Requirements:
There will be no final exam but there will be a final paper on a subject I will ask each of you to discuss with me first.
ENGL 76000. “Modernism, Nihilism and Belief.” John Brenkman. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 95042].
The once widely accepted idea that modernity entails secularization has
been more and more thrown in doubt. This seminar will examine various
facets of this controversy through the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
and T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s own critical reflections on the question, from
his early criticism through his essays on Christianity and culture,
reveal the troubled relation between modernism and religion. The
seminar’s conceptual framework will derive from four important thinkers
who address the complex relation of the secular and the sacred,
nihilism and belief, symbols and ideas, fundamentally as a problem in
the theory and practice of interpretation: Paul Ricoeur (The Conflict
of Interpretations), Emmanuel Levinas (various essays), George Steiner
(Real Presences), and Gianni Vattimo (Belief and After Christianity).
Having been profoundly influenced by the tradition of Nietzsche and
Heidegger, all four of them then return to their respective religious
traditions to ask fundamental questions about the experience of belief.
A few key texts of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Max Weber will be
included, as well as (if translated by then) Julia Kristeva’s recent
book This Unbelievable Need to Believe.
TEXTS :
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works (Oxford) 0192840797
T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (Harcourt) 015151185X
T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (Harcourt/Harvest) 015617735
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Northwestern) 0810105292
Gianni Vattimo, Belief (Stanford) 0804739196
Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (Columbia) 0231106289
George Steiner, Real Presences (University of Chicago) 0226772349
Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader (Blackwell) 0631164472
ENGL
84200. “Epic Self-Making: Wordsworth and Byron, with Others.” Rachel
Brownstein. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 95044].
In this seminar we will revisit the Egotistical Sublime, focusing on
repetitions and revisions. We will explore the allure and the
treacherousness of the sole self as a subject of a poem, and the
inevitable connections to commonplaces, trivial things, and history, as
well as to other people. Framing the project, we will begin with Henry
James’ The Aspern Papers, William Hazlitt’s essay “My First
Acquaintance with Poets,” Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, and
Stuart Curran’s essay, “Romantic Poetry: The ‘I’ Altered.” We will then
turn to the major texts, the great self-centered long poems by
Wordsworth and Byron—the versions of The Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850);
the four cantos (1812, 1816, 1818) of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; and
the complete uncompleted Don Juan. We will also read a biography of
Wordsworth and of Byron, some of Byron’s letters and Wordsworth’s
lyrics, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,
DeQuincey’s Confessions, works by Coleridge, Lamb, and Mary Robinson,
and Burke on the sublime. Students will write weekly response papers,
make presentations to the group, and write a paper to be handed in at
the end of the semester.
ENGL 78100.“Literature, Gender and Sexuality.” Sarah Chinn. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 95046].
This course will explore questions of gender and sexuality in a variety
of literary texts. Given that the previous sentence could mean pretty
much anything, we have our work cut out for us. We'll start by trying
to establish (or at least interrogate) what we mean by "gender,"
"sexuality," and "literature" by looking at literary, historical,
theoretical and visual materials primarily but not exclusively from the
United States and Europe. Once we've struggled our way through these
challenges, we'll focus on a specific place (the United States) and a
specific time (roughly 1850 to 1930) to see how these terms play out in
various literary texts. While a background in feminist/ queer/gender
theories is a plus, it's not a prerequisite for taking this course.
ENGL 86500. “City Culture and Imperialism.” Ashley Dawson. 2/4 credits. Thursday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 95047].
On a scale that dwarfs previous experience, urban spaces have become
cosmopolitan entrepots through which vast quantities of capital, goods,
information, and people flow on a daily basis. For the first time in
history, we are a predominantly urban species. Yet global cities of the
“developed” world such as New York are an increasingly anomalous
embodiment of the urban realm and public space; ninety-five percent of
urban population growth during the next generation will occur in cities
of the “underdeveloped” world - the global South. By 2010, for example,
Mumbai and Lagos are projected to become the second and third largest
cities on the planet, outmatched only by Tokyo.
Cities are also the frontline in contemporary imperialism. As one US
military spokesman recently put it, “The explosive growth of the
world’s major urban centers, changes in enemy strategies, and the
global war on terror have made the urban battlespace potentially
decisive and virtually unavoidable.” Military Operations in Urban
Terrain (MOUT) are one of the most prominent faces of the new
imperialism. Yet if cities are the Achilles heel of military power, US
war-makers are increasingly forced to disavow awareness of the role
played by empire in unleashing forces of unsustainable urbanization
that they are called on to quell. Why have cities become such
strategically important sites? What is the historical background to
these developments? How, for example, did cities function during the
colonial era? What shifts took place during the post-war period of
“imperialism without colonies” that helps explain today’s emphasis on
MOUT? What cultural formations are emerging from this “planet of slums”
and what shifts in political agency and organization do they augur?
Authors and critics likely to be considered in the course include Chris
Abani, Arjun Appadurai, Alaa Al Aswany, Patrick Chamoiseau. Vikram
Chandra, Mike Davis, Frantz Fanon, Stephen Graham, Helon Habila, David
Harvey, Anthony King, Henri Lefebvre, Naguib Mahfouz, Suketu Mehta,
Marjorie Oludhe Magoye, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie,
AbduMalique Simone, Neil Smith, Manil Suri, Eyal Weizman, and Raymond
Williams. In addition to these works of literature and criticism, we
will also discuss a variety of additional urban genres, such as music,
photography, television, film, street performance.
Requirements for the course include class participation, an oral report, and a seminar-length paper.
ENGL
80600. “The Emergence of Cultural Criticism, 1800-1950.” Morris
Dickstein. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM (cross-listed with ASCP
82000)[CRN 95048].
This course will study the origins and
growth of cultural criticism from its modern beginnings to the middle
decades of the twentieth century. The early stages can be traced to the
eighteenth century when political upheavals, religious and
philosophical shifts, and economic changes contributed to new ways of
understanding society. Jűrgen Habermas has traced the origins of the
public sphere to this period. Another key term was culture, a notion
that served to integrate language, geography, ideas, and social
formations. The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution put great emphasis on tradition, folk culture, national
identity, and the organic continuity of manners and morals. In reaction
to the radicalism and rationalism of the Revolution, it highlighted the
power of the irrational, the affective, and focused attention on the
arts as an expression of the individual and collective mind.
With the failure of the political revolutions, the critical energy of
the Enlightenment took on a cultural form. The new cultural criticism
came about as a synthesis of aesthetic and social criticism that has
continued to develop up to the present day. The course will study some
of the key moments of its development in their historical context. It
will begin with a look at what Isaiah Berlin called the
Counter-Enlightenment as represented by Burke in England, Rousseau in
France, Herder in Germany. This introduction will be followed by a
reading of brief texts by nineteenth-century writers such as
Wordsworth, Carlyle, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Baudelaire, Ruskin,
Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde, then a handful of essayists from the first
half of the twentieth century, including William James, Van Wyck
Brooks, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Mumford, George Orwell, Walter Benjamin,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno,
Lionel Trilling, and Susan Sontag, as well as key secondary works such
as Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society. Writers not included in
formal assignments may be covered in oral reports. We’ll also consider
other significant uses of the idea of culture - in anthropology, for
example.
Assignments will include a 15-page research paper and an oral report.
ENGL 86100. “James Joyce 's Ulysses: An Introduction to the Major Works of James Joyce.” Edmund Epstein. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 95050].
This will be a seminar on the works of James Joyce, centering on
Ulysses. It will take up Ulysses in detail, chapter by chapter, along
with the critical issues relevant to Joyce's Modernist and
post-Modernist techniques.
There will be preceded by a short introduction to the early works of
Joyce--Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man. The final
session will be devoted to Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake.
Texts:
James Joyce Ulysses Gabler edition. New York: Vintage, 1986
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press,1982
Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Revised and
expanded edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988
ENGL
85000. “The Plight of Sympathy: Benevolence and Self-Interest in
‘Early’ America.” Duncan Faherty. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM
(cross-listed with ASCP 82000) [CRN 95052].
Towards the
conclusion of Charles Brockden Brown’s quixotic novel Arthur Mervyn, a
lawyer informs Mervyn that if he wanted to profit from his restless
efforts to help others he “should have known his own interest better.”
Despite occupying a chaotic city populated by counterfeiters,
convalescents, madman, and failed speculators, Mervyn seems driven to
wildly circulate in the service of benevolence. The tensions between
benevolence and self-interest that Brown maps in Arthur Mervyn are
hallmarks of many early American novels, as a range of
post-Revolutionary writers sought to redefine what social cohesion
meant in a nation comprised of supposedly liberal individuals. Many of
these writers deployed a language of feeling to grapple with the
unprecedented ways in which the Revolution had called into question
operant definitions of citizenship and identity. Amid the uncertainties
of a culture seeking to define itself in the wake of revolution, many
“American” writers sought to discern the cultural effects of
unregulated self-interest on “national” cultural. In this course we
will examine a range of early American texts which question both the
limits of self-interest and the complex social utility of benevolence.
In so doing, we will consider how many of these writers explored
“deviant” behavior in order to demonstrate how artifice and elusion had
permeated the social fabric of the early Republic, a situation which
made it almost impossible to discern the truth of anyone’s character or
identity. Possible texts include: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Charles Brockden Brown’s
Arthur Mervyn, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, James Fenimore
Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln, Herman Melville’s Israel Potter, Lenora
Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Hannah Webster
Foster’s The Coquette, Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy, Isaac
Mitchell’s The Asylum, Lucy Brewer’s The Female Marine, Tabitha
Tenney’s Female Quixotism, Hannah Craft’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative,
William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Walt Whitman’s Franklin
Evans, and Stephen Burroughs’ Memoirs. In addition to our examination
of primary texts, we will be reading a broad range of recent critical
work to think about the conventions and limitations of disciplinarity,
and to consider the challenges of writing about canonical and
non-canonical texts (to contemplate, among other questions, whether or
not the canonical “status” of a novel demands a different kind of
scholarly engagement). Requirements will include one oral report and a
final seminar paper.
**
Please note: seminar participants should read Adam Smith’s The Theory
of Moral Sentiments in preparation for the first class meeting.
ENGL
87400. “Queer Culture and Media.” David Gerstner. 2/4 credits. Tuesday
4:15PM-8:15PM (cross-listed with ART 89600 & THEA 81500) [CRN
95085].
This course studies the ways queer cultural
producers engage a range of media to explore questions of identity
(sexuality, race, gender, class, nation). The relationship between
queer cultural identity and media is complex—particularly as it is
filtered through a global economy—and, as such, finds its expression
through a dynamic use of multi-mediated platforms. With readings from
queer theorists as our backdrop and through analyses of film, video,
literature, novels, poetry, dance, and other media-arts, we will
consider the varied and diverse contours that generate queer media and
the artists involved in their production. Students are expected to
complete weekly readings, weekly writing assignments, deliver a 15-20
minute presentation, and submit a 15-page final paper.
Readings for the class may include: Abelove, Henry, et.al. The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader; Anzaldùa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera;
Baldwin, James. Another Country; Dyer, Richard. Now You See It; Gever,
Marth, et.al. Queer Looks; Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and
Place; Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider
Queer artists we may study include: David Wojnarowicz, Marlon Riggs,
James Baldwin, Yvonne Rainer, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Audre
Lorde, Riyad Wadia, Jean Genet, Peter Wells, Cui Zi’en, Emile
Devereaux, Gloria Anzaldùa, and others.
ENGL 87300. “Jazz Style and Context.” Gary Giddins. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 81500) [CRN 95086].
Jazz is so often viewed through a single, narrow lens—the chronological achievements of its most creative figures—that we underestimate its importance as a mirror of the times. The familiar narrative of jazz style as a progression of imaginative triumphs (also known as the begat theory, e.g., trumpet player King Oliver begat Louis Armstrong who begat Roy Eldridge who begat Dizzy Gillespie who begat Miles Davis and so forth) ignores the true complexity of musical influence and the historical realities to which jazz actually responds. The Swing Era, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, avant-garde, fusion, neoclassicism, and other jazz styles could have been born only in the eras that did, in fact, produce them. So what does jazz tell us about the American century in politics and war, economics, technology, race and gender issues, and the pop culture that borders one side of jazz and the high culture that borders the other? In this course, we will examine three interrelated narratives in tracing the history of jazz: 1) The chronological l’art pour l’art narrative, in which creativity trumps other concerns and music is viewed as a progressive phenomenon, producing a succession of freestanding masterworks, 2) The fusion narrative, in which jazz reflects (through commercial borrowings, parody, or outright critique) contemporary culture, and 3) The historicist narrative, which is especially useful in considering today’s jazz, and begins with the precept that creativity in jazz is inextricably bound with its past. Without recourse to musicology (definitely not a requirement for this class), we begin with the basic structures of jazz—blues and pop song form—and focus on the way they were used over time, by examining jazz classics, jazz obscurities, and some of the outside influences that define the broader musical mainstream in which jazz operates. We also test our narratives against another historical template, in which this new music originated as a local phenomenon, quickly conquered the world, then retreated into an increasingly intellectual and ultimately specialized pursuit, and was finally crowned as classic—finding a home in academia and recognition from cultural support systems precisely at the moment when it could no longer sustain an audience large enough to crease the national conscience. What is jazz’s role today? What is meant when some argue that it is now “post-historical”? The course texts will include Visions of Jazz (Giddins) and Jazz (De Veaux and Giddins). Course requirements include active class participation and two reports: Each student will serve as a co-lecturer for a particular class; all students will prepare original reports (oral or written) for the final classes.
ENGL 79500.“Theory & Practice of Literary Scholarship” David Greetham. 4 credits. Hours TBA (intersession) [CRN 95053].
This special intersession course being given in January takes up
questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do
scholarship in the discipline of “English,” Theoretically, we consider
what it means to study a national language and literature that has
become global in its reach; we examine the boundaries of the
discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from
other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields (and thus the concept of
“disciplinarity” itself); we consider how varied theories of language,
text, narrative, poetics, author, gender, race, psyche, society,
culture, history, identity, politics (etc.) define, in sometimes
complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline as
it has emerged (and changed) since its first being added to the
university curriculum as a “vernacular” version of “classical” studies.
Practically, we take up the question of how we define objects of
inquiry within “English” studies, how we research such topics, how we
identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how we
develop new knowledge—in sum, we consider nitty-gritty questions
crucial to pursuing graduate and professional work in literary
scholarship. The course follows four main lines of inquiry, examining
1) the historical, institutional context of the discipline, 2) archival
and bibliographical work, 3) concepts of textuality, and 4) theoretical
approaches.
Requirements: Preparations for all class discussions and several
in-class presentations. The final paper is similarly flexible: students
may produce one of three possibilities—a scholarly “edition” of a short
work embodying the textual principles discussed in the course; an
introduction to such an edition or collection of works, focusing on the
archival and other cultural issues involved; a critical essay founded
on the archival, bibliographical, and textual approaches explored. I am
also open to other methods of integrating the “scholarly” and
“critical” components of the course.
Organization: I will be teaching the “intensive” intersession version
of this course during the month of January 2009. The advantage of the
intersession version is that 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 (as well as
presentations of their final projects by former students of the
course): 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 (as opposed to the semester-long
version) 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 at least 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.
ENGL 80700. “Medievalisms.” David Greetham. 2/4 credits. Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM (cross-listed with MSCP 80500)[CRN 95054].
As the “-isms” suggests, this is not a course in medieval culture, but
an examination of how that culture was co-opted, used and abused, in
subsequent periods. “Medievalism” has now become a very productive area
of current research, from art history to politics to video games, and
the range of the course, both chronological and disciplinary, is thus
potentially very wide. While the specific focus in individual sessions
will to a large extent depend on the interests and background of those
taking the course, among the most likely topics are the “construction”
of a “Middle Age” during the “Renaissance” (which is itself a
nineteenth-century term); the changing fortunes and significance of
certain medieval authors (e.g., Chaucer, Langland, Dante); the
re-imagination of the medieval as a point of cultural departure and
replication (e.g., Victorian medievalism in literature, painting, and
architecture); the philological identification of the period as a part
of a national heritage (e.g., in the concept of “Middle English”) and
the influence of such philological studies in the university attitude
to vernacular literatures; the co-option of medieval iconography for
political purposes (e.g., Nazism); the romanticization of medieval in
the Wagner operas; and the seeming ubiquitousness of medieval
narratives and stereotypes in popular culture (from video games to
movies, Broadways shows, theme parks and festivals, ironic or
otherwise). Inevitably, we will have to confront both the seductiveness
of the medieval (as a “return to Camelot”) and the still-pervasive
image of the medieval as alien and primitive (e.g., the moment in Pulp
Fiction when “to get medieval” means to become very violent, a usage
taken up recently in the Andy Borowitz satirical post on Sarah Palin).
Reflecting the wide disciplinary range, as in its previous outing the
success of the course will in part depend upon the contributions of a
roster of visiting experts from a number of programs at the Graduate
Center (e.g., art/architecture, music, history), and I have already had
generous commitments from a number of faculty members.
There are no required texts as yet, though it is likely that we will
make use of various issues of the journal Medievalism, and such
standard references as Mark Girouard’s Return to Camelot, Howard Bloch
and Stephen Nichols’s Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, Umberto
Eco’s “Return to the Middle Ages” in Travels in Hyperreality, Richard
Utz and Tom Shippey’s collection Medievalism in the Modern World; and
Allen J. Frantzen’s The Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English,
and Teaching the Tradition. We will, of course, conclude with that
ur-text Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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ENGL
87500. “Biography, 1600-1800: Personal and Political Histories.” Carrie
Hintz. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 95057].
We will read biographies written from 1600-1800 and theories of
biography from the period, with particular attention to the
construction of the private and public spheres. Text range from John
Aubrey's biographical miniatures to James Boswell's magisterial Life of
Johnson. We will consider the ways in which seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century biographies challenge and extend classical and
medieval models, including hagiography and the portrayal of the
exemplary woman (John Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin will be a
touchstone here). We will look at the political dimensions of intimate
and family biographies by writers like Richard Baxter, Lucy Hutchinson
and Margaret Cavendish. The development of literary biography will also
be a concern, culminating in Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets
(1779-81). Samuel Johnson's writings on biography as a form will be
considered in detail. A wide range of contemporary theory about
auto/biography will be included; the course will be useful for
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century specialists and students working on
life writing in any period.
ENGL
75100. “Race and Sentiment in 19th Century American Writing.” Hildegard
Hoeller. 2/4 credits. Friday 2:00PM-4:00PM (cross-listed with ASCP
82000)[CRN 95058].
This course will investigate the role
sentimental expression played in debates on issues of race—concerning
both Native Americans and slavery-- in 19th century American literature
before the Civil War. If race was a central concern in 19th century
American culture, sentimentality was one of its dominant cultural
modes. The complicated convergence of the two is the focus of this
course. How, and why, did writers use sentiment as a way to address
issue of race? What were the potentials and limits of such a use of
sentiment? The most well-known example of such a convergence is perhaps
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that literally
tried to, and arguably did, move a nation towards change. But, as
literary criticism of the last ten years has made abundantly clear,
sentimentality was, and needs to be recognized as, a pervasive cultural
mode as well as an important literary tradition. In this course we will
delve into much of the recent critical work on sentimental writing in
19th century American literature to explore the role sentiment played
particularly in writings about race. Following the initial
groundbreaking work of rediscovery of women’s sentimental writing by
Jane Tompkins and Nina Baym, and arguments about its great ideological
limits such as Ann Douglass’s work, an expansive body of critical work
has emerged-- by critics such as Julia Stern, Mary-Louise Kete, Jocelyn
Moody, Cindy Weinstein, Glenn Hendler, Kristin Boudreau, Lori Merish,
Joseph Fichtelberg, and many others-- that examines and theorizes
sentimental expressions in a wide variety of texts and context. What is
so exciting about this critical work on sentimentalism is that it opens
up our understanding of the canon and the American tradition itself and
that it creates space for much new critical work still to be done—some
of it hopefully initiated in this course. The seminar is designed to
explore this critical work and to use it as a way to examine
sentimental expressions and their engagement with issue of race in a
wide range of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child,
Catherine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah
Crafts, William Apess, and others.
ENGL 79500. “Theory & Practice of Literary Scholarship” Anne Humpherys. 4 credits. Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 95060].
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
75400. “Aestheticizing Science and Technology: The Fictions of Thomas
Sokal, Michael Frayn, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gibson,
Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, and Richard Powers.” Gerhard Joesph. 2/4
credits. Wednesday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 95062].
“The
universe,” says the poet Muriel Rukeyser debatably enough, “is made of
stories, not of atoms.” Beginning with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions and the “Sokal Hoax” (and the responses of the
scientific and humanistic communities to the latter in The Sokal
Hoax—U. of Nebraska Press), we, in large measure “techno-illiterate
humanists” (Powers, Galatea 2.2, 314), will then consider the fictional
uses of thermodynamics and information theory, quantum mechanics and
ballistics, the history of mathematics, chemistry, molecular biology
and chaos theory, genetics and biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence
and digital theory, etc. in the fictions of Frayn (Copenhagen), Pynchon
(“Entropy,” The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow), Gibson
(Neuromancer , Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Butler (the
Xenogenesis trilogy, especially Dawn), DeLillo (Ratner’s Star, White
Noise, and the conclusion of Underworld), Haraway (“Cyborg Manifesto”
and Modest Witness@ Second Millennium. Female Man Meets Oconomouse),
and Powers (The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the
Dark). Our larger purpose, implicit in the grammatical pun within
“aestheticizing science,” is to show how simultaneously “science,” at
its cutting edges, tends to aestheticize the world (as in, say, Brian
Greene’s recent elegant book on superstring theory, The Elegant
Universe), and contemporary writers of fictions support their purchase
on the “real” by metaphorizing contemporary science/technology into
their work. As they do so, they move us now in the direction of
aesthetic wonder, now in the direction of abject terror (hence, the
emerging genre of the posthuman sublime). Course requirements: an oral
report and a term paper.
ENGL 80200. “Repetition.” Wayne Koestenbaum. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 95063].
This seminar will investigate repetition—as rhetorical device, as
formal feature of literature and art, as philosophical puzzle, as
psychological structure, as private pleasure, and as historical
nightmare. Our texts may include Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, selections from Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche and Homi Bhabha, Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Shelley’s
“Adonais,” poems of H.D., Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, Samuel
Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, Francis Ponge’s Soap, Thomas Bernhard’s
Concrete, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s
The Invention of Morel, the Alain Resnais film Last Year in Marienbad,
W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo, the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo, Sophocles’s
Electra, the Richard Strauss/Hugo von Hofmannsthal opera Elektra,
Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, and the
anthology of blues poems edited by Kevin Young. We may look at examples
of twentieth-century American art (particularly Pop and Miminalism) and
listen to a range of music, including fugues, cabalettas, and blues.
(For texts not originally in English, we will use translations.)
Requirement: a 20-page final essay.
ENGL 81400. “Faith in Shakespeare.” Richard McCoy. 2/4 credits. Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 95064].
Shakespeare’s plays often ask their audience to make great leaps of
faith: The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and
Pericles stage improbable family reunions, and resurrections occur in
Cymbeline and Much Ado about Nothing. Spirits pull the strings in
Midsummer Night’s Dream, a magician controls all in The Tempest, and
ghosts or witches stalk the protagonists of Richard III, Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, and Macbeth. The gods themselves appear in Pericles and
Cymbeline, as well as As You Like It where Rosalind asks the audience
along with other characters to “believe then, if you please, that I can
do strange things.” I want to explore what it means to believe in these
plays, assuming that what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls “poetic faith”
entails something more robust than “a willing suspension of disbelief.”
Drawing on the recent turn toward religion in early modern scholarship,
we will explore the impact of shifts in Reformation theology from a
metaphysical to a psychological and pragmatic conception of belief
where salvation depends not on ceremonial works and objects but on the
subjective good faith and intentions of the believer. At the same time,
I want to use the insights of Renaissance poetics and post-modern
performance theory to analyze the odd sense of presence and communion
sustained by theatrical representation and audience participation. We
will begin with a discussion of parallels between Shakespeare’s plays
and medieval mysteries and miracle drama and then turn to recent
scholarship on early modern religion and culture and on performance
theory. The course will also focus on about 10 major plays dealing with
enchantment in the comedies, ritual in the history plays, intimations
of the sacred in tragedies, and rebirth in the romances.
ENGL 86000. “Trauma Theory and Literature.” Nancy K. Miller. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 95066].
Trauma and Literature will examine the work of writers who bear witness
to the traumatic history of a century fractured by war and atrocity.
The seminar begins with questions raised by the literature of the
Holocaust, and ends at the threshold of the twenty-first century with
the events of Sept.11 as a case study of memorialization. In addition
to first-person accounts that deal with extreme experience, readings
will include essays in visual culture, in particular the role played by
photography and graphic memoir in the representation of traumatic
experience. We will discuss the relation of trauma theory to issues of
gender and sexuality, to narratives of war and nation, and to embodied
suffering in the private, domestic sphere.
Writers include: Barthes, Beauvoir, Bechdel, Butler, Caruth, Cha,
Delbo, Laub, Levi, O’Brien, Sontag, Spiegelman, Woolf.
The work for the course: a seminar report and a 20-page research paper.
ENGL
79010. “When We Look Up from the Text: Reader-Response Theory in
Action.” Sondra Perl. 2/4 credits. Monday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 95067].
“Reading happens,” writes Roland Barthes, “when we look up from the
text.” In this seminar, we will pay attention to our pausing and
looking up, to those moments of reading when we construct what a text
means. Framed by the work of Barthes, Holland, Rosenblatt, Fish,
Fetterly and others, we will examine how our interpretations and
responses differ and how our transactions with texts play themselves
out in complex and often surprising ways. Many of the texts we
consider—novels, memoirs, poems and possibly films—will be selected by
the class. Students will be expected to keep a reader-response journal,
to post weekly responses on Blackboard or possibly on a class blog, to
compose a final reflective paper and to collaborate with others on the
creation of a performance piece based on one of the readings.
ENGL 80100. “Theory Colloquium: Theories of Empire.” Robert Reid-Pharr. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 95068].
In this course we will be most concerned with how matters of empire,
imperialism, colonization, and diaspora, function within culture and
other "domestic" locations. That is to say, we will pay attention to
how one might read literary histories alongside–and through–histories
of empire and resistance to empire. Moreover, one of the major conceits
of this course is that many current treatments of these topics borrow
heavily from the work of "local" or "marginal" theorists. Thus, the
works of Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Albert Memmi will be read as
necessary antecedents to the works of individuals such as Michael
Hardt, Antonio Negri, Amy Kaplan, and Edward Said. Throughout the
course students will be asked to question what "resistance" means in
the context of empire and colonialism. Is it possible for us to claim
that the colonized subject who utilizes the mechanisms of empire to
gain voice has in fact become "de-colonized?" Indeed is the complete
separation of colonizer and colonized ever really a possibility? In
lieu of longer essays students will be asked to write 1000 - 1500 word
response essays to six of the texts that we look at during the
semester. Also, each week at least one student will be asked to provide
a one page critique of the text under discussion as well as a set of
questions to help shape our discussions. These will be delivered to all
participants in the class the day before we discuss the text.
The texts that we will examine include:
1) Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
2) Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
3) Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
4) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
5) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
6) C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963).
7) Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
8) Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
9) Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,
Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998).
10) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
11) Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s
History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995).
12) Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1982).
ENGL 91000. “Dissertation Workshop.” David Reynolds. 0 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM [CRN 95070].
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
83500. “Culture Wars of the 1790s: The Jacobin and the Anti-Jacobin
Novel.” David Richter. 2/4 credits. Monday 4:15PM-6:15PM [CRN 95072].
To the inhabitants of Great Britain, the French Revolution was “an hour
of universal ferment,” either the culmination of the political and
social upheaval provoked by the Enlightenment or its betrayal. For
William Wordsworth, as we all know, it was first the one and then the
other: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” Wordsworth recalled
feeling, till he was subsequently sickened by the “domestic carnage” of
the Terror, “Head after head, and never heads enough/ For those who
bade them fall.” That same political shift can be seen in the works of
novelist Charlotte Smith—one of the English Jacobins—between Desmond of
1792 and The Banished Man just two years later.
If it was hard for English men and women to come to terms with what
they thought and felt about the the ideas underlying the Revolution,
the publication of political discourse was complicated by the fact that
England was almost continuously at war with France for the 22 years
following the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. Promulgating Jacobin
ideas was considered inciting the public in favor of the national
enemy, and a group of English radicals were tried for their lives in
1794 for the novel crime of “constructive treason.” No one was
convicted, but the prosecutions had the effect of driving revolutionary
discourse underground.
Both before and (especially) after 1794, the conflict between radical
and conservative social thought was often waged in the pages of novels,
where fiction conferred the freedom to speak one’s mind. If some
Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin novels are of merely historical interest, many
still make delightfully amusing, and even exciting reading today. We
shall read some of these novels, along with some of the most important
philosophical/political treatises and pamphlets that inform their
positions, conscious, as we attempt to understand these works and the
era that gave birth to them, that complicated and wildly unpredictable
things sometimes happen to ideas when they start operating inside
literary texts. And we should be clear that the arenas engaged by what
one side called the conflict between order and anarchy, and the other
freedom and tyranny, involved gender as well as class, custom as well
as law.
Jacobin novels that may appear on our primary reading list include:
Elizabeth Inchbald: A Simple Story (1791); Thomas Holcroft: Anna St.
Ives (1792); Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792);William Godwin: Things as
They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794); Robert Bage:
Hermsprong, or Man as He Is Not (1796); Mary Wollstonecraft: Maria, or
The Wrongs of Woman (1798); Amelia Opie: Adeline Mowbray (1805).
Anti-Jacobin novels include: Edward Sayer: Lindor and Adelaide (1791);
Charlotte Smith: The Banished Man (1794); Henry James Pye: The Democrat
(1795); Anon: The History of George Warrington, or the Political
Quixote (1797); George Walker: The Vagabond (1797); Maria Edgeworth:
Leonora (1806); Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (1814). Many of these texts
are in print; many others can be read and downloaded from ECCO
(Eighteenth-Century Collection Online), a database accessible through
Mina Rees Library.
Texts of political philosophy and ideology, selections from which may
appear on our primary reading list, include: John Locke: Second
Treatise on Government; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Du contrat social;
L’Assemblée nationale: “Le Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du
citoyen”; Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France; Mary
Wollstonecraft: “A Vindication of the Rights of Men”; William Godwin:
Political Justice.
ENGL
70800. “Medieval English Drama: Affect, Imagination, Piety and
Performativity.” Michael Sargent. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM
[CRN 95073].
In this course, we will be looking at the
complex role of visual imagination and dramatic enactment in the
material culture of spirituality in the later middle ages in England.
Using theoretical/critical approaches drawing upon gender and film
theory and the social sciences, we will talk about the cultural work
done by various dramatic texts, both as written texts and as
performances. We will examine and discuss the role of imagery and
iconography in works of “guided meditation”, in which the reader is
instructed in placing him- or herself (often specifically the latter)
affectively within the frame of the imagined holy scene – as well as
the contemporary reaction against the worship of images in churches
(statues, paintings, stained-glass windows) and “miracles playing”. We
will look at the role of public religious drama (e.g. the York cycle of
mystery plays) as constructive and performative of civic and religious
identity – while also looking at who and what is displaced,
marginalized or overwritten.
The texts that we will read will include the mystery cycles (York,
Wakefield, Chester and N-Town), and a variety of non-cycle dramas,
including, e.g. the Museo “Burial” and “Resurrection”, the Digby
“Paul”, “Mary Magdalene” and “Killing of the Children”, the Croxton
“Play of the Sacrament”, the Macro manuscript moralities (“The Castle
of Perseverence”, “Wisdom” and “Mankind”), Thomas Chaundler’s
fifteenth-century humanist “Liber apologeticus de omni statu humanae
naturae” and “Everyman”. Our coverage of the subject will range from
the manuscript context in which the play texts are preserved through
present-day stage presentation.
ENGL 84500. “Fiction of the 1890s.” Talia Schaffer. 2/4 credits. Monday 11:45AM-1:45PM [CRN 95074].
This course will explore varieties of fiction (novels, short stories,
perhaps aesthetic dialogues and even prose poems) at the fin de siècle.
We will look at aesthetic texts that react against Victorian realism by
attempting to enact new theories of the autonomy of art, including
fiction by Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Una Ashworth Taylor, and Lucas
Malet. While aesthetic fiction drew attention to its own artifice,
politically engaged, journalistically oriented New Women fiction was
forging an alternative to the high-art ideals of the aesthetes, a new
style that has been credited with developing techniques that would be
crucial to modernism. We will read New Women fiction by Sarah Grand,
Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Thomas Hardy. In the 1890s, overcrowded urban
space and changing commercial conditions led to drastic alterations in
the kind of work and leisure available to city inhabitants. George
Gissing and Annie E. Holdsworth explored the daily life of impoverished
East End residents. It felt like an attractive alternative to imagine a
swashbuckling adventure elsewhere in the British empire, and in the
period of jingoism and the Boer War, we will look at work by Rudyard
Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Alice Perrin, and H. Rider Haggard. We will
read Dracula, the novel that expressed virtually every fin-de-siècle
fear, (Jews, homosexuality, reverse colonization, New Women) but also
examine the period’s powerful fantasy of an omniscient intelligence
that can resolve any threat, Sherlock Holmes. This course juxtaposes
lesser-known writing (especially by women) and popular fiction to
canonical texts and reads fin-de-siècle fiction against journalism of
the period, asking what cultural anxieties that generated these textual
solutions. Throughout the semester, we will investigate the stylistic
innovations of the period, seeking to develop an alternative genealogy
of modernism and perhaps even an alternative view of literary history.
We will use criticism and theory that rereads the transition from
Victorian to modern, including work by Steven Arata, Ann Ardis, Linda
Dowling, Jessica Feldman, Rita Felski, Douglas Mao, Steven Arata, Lyn
Pykett.
ENGL 87100. “Proust II.” Eve Sedgwick. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 95076].
This is the second half of a year-long seminar organized around a
close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche 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
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; the uses of paganism; 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. Readings will be in English, in the old translation by C. K.
Scott Moncrieff, though with reference to the French text as well.
ENGL
75400. “Contemporary Multicultural American Fiction and Memoir.” Neal
Tolchin. 2/4 credits. Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM (cross-listed with ASCP
81500)[CRN 95077].
From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize
winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved
(1988), Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Jhumpa
Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2008), all 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; Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir A Place
to Stand recounts his transformation from an illiterate felon into a
poet while in prison. We may also read the work of Julia Alvarez and
Cristina Garcia. 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 readings may include authors Toni Morrison,
Gloria Naylor, Walter Mosley, and John Edgar Wideman. 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.
ENGL
75600. “Blues People: African American Culture in the 20th Century.”
Michele Wallace. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM (cross-listed with
ASCP 81500)[CRN 95078].
This course will carry us through the reading of key canonical works of African American Literature from the turn-of-the-century through the 60s accompanied by considerations stemming from the notion of a blues aesthetic as first hypothesized by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in his seminal study of African American music BLUES PEOPLE.
Our basic readings presently include the following list: WEB DuBois, The Soul of Black Folks (1903), James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jean Toomer, Cane (1923), Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926), Nella Larsen, Passing (1928), Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935), Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1942), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963).
In tandem, and to the degree that students in class are interested in pursuing it for the sake of their own research, we will also explore related works of art, photography and music in each historical period reflective of the literature.
In music (with substitution or alternates where reasonable): Bessie Smith ( St. Louis Blues), Louis Armstrong (Black and Blue) ; Duke Ellington ( Diminuendo in Blue), Billy Holiday ( Strange Fruit), Mahalia Jackson ( Soon I Will Be Gone), Chico Hamilton, Chuck Berry; Nina Simone ( 4 Women), Richie Havens ( Freedom/Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child at Woodstock), Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon ( Steal Away) with the following readings on music: "Swing—From Verb to the Noun" from Blues Peopleand "Defining the Blues" by Steven Tracy.
In visual art: WEB Du Bois Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition (1900) Frances Johnston Benjamin's The Hampton Album; Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson"; Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life Series (1934); Jacob Lawrence, "The Negro Migration" Series (1941); Romare Beaden, The Block (1968) and Faith Ringgold, The Street Story Quilt (1983).
In photography: Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (1943) with Maren Stang's Bronzeville; Langston Hughes and Roy de Carava's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1956).
In film: DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1914)
The blues aesthetic will serve to provide a hypothetical critical armature.
As Tracy writes in his terribly eloquent and impressive book, Langston Hughes and the Blues: "A particular misery and sadness, a particular blues, unites African Americans whose common heritage—in Africa, slavery, and a theoretical freedom—often provides a bond which is difficult for middle class blacks to break." Jones maintained in Blues People (1963) that African American music had always represented an African approach to culture, and that an African worldview faithfully recorded and reflected upon the historical experiences of an oppressed people. Ever since, many brilliant commentators have argued with and tweaked the many facets of this unforgettable work. Despite wide disagreement, it remains a fascinating and central debate continuing to vitalize both African American Literature and African Diasporic Cultural Studies.
Research Paper and Two Oral Report, TBA
ENGL 85500. “W.E.B. DuBois.” Jerry Watts. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM (cross-listed with IDS 81610) [CRN 95080].
This seminar offers an intensive investigation of the life and writings
of W.E.B. DuBois. Through discussions of his major and minor writings,
we will be able to chart dominant as well as oppositional currents in
American/Afro-American thought. DuBois emerged as a distinct
intellectual presence during the last decade of the 19th century and
would continue to publish until his death in 1963. Moreover, throughout
his entire adult life, DuBois was a political activist in behalf of the
freedom struggle of Afro-Americans; obtaining self-determination for
colonized peoples throughout the world; and in his later life, the
Soviet Union led world communist struggle against capitalism. His
political activism informed his intellectual output and vice versa. As
a writer, DuBois wore many intellectual hats during his lifetime:
historian The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United
States of America (1896) and Black Reconstruction in America;
sociologist, The Philadelphia Negro (1899); essayist, The Souls of
Black Folks (1903) and Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1920);
autobiographer, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a
Race Concept (1940); political polemicist and agitator through his
editorial writings in The Crisis, the journal of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and finally,
novelist (I count his novels among his minor works). The DuBois corpus
is far too large to discuss in any single semester, consequently, we
will read selectively from his works. Nevertheless, the course is
reading intensive and will require participation in class discussions.
ENGL
72300. “Milton’s Afterlife: Paradises Lost. Paradises Found.” Joseph
Wittreich. 2/4 credits. Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM [CRN 95083].
In his epics, Milton invokes tradition in order to transform it. He
appeals to theologies, especially in Paradise Regained to theologies of
redemption, in order to modify them, in this poem radically so. With
Milton, then, the accent shifts from losing paradise to its recovery
and then to such questions as whether it is even possible to recover
what has been lost? And if so, how so? by whom? under what conditions?
Do we live in a world of possibilities, in a world with a tomorrow?
Should we expect apocalypse now, or ever—in history, in an afterlife,
if at all? We will keep our attention fixed on Milton and the
scriptural stories he and his female successors, in his own century and
in later ones, revise, rewrite, reinterpret always with an eye on his
and their transgressive maneuvers.
Readings:
John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained; Lucy Hutchinson,
Order and Disorder; Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria; Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; and Toni Morrison, Paradise.
| 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 | |