|
Fall 2000 Courses
- 70200
F, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Postcolonial Memory: The Politics of Home
Prof. Meena Alexander
We will explore questions of personal memory, historical identity and aesthetic self-fashioning in texts drawn both from the early era of decolonization and the late twentieth century. How does memory bind one to place? What happens when the sensuous density of a loved location can no longer be taken for granted? What kind of identity can be said to come into existence given a migratory, diasporic existence? And what of questions of race and sexuality - how do they structure the grasp of the lived body and of the evolving literary text? We will consider the tensions that come into play given transnational narratives that fashion selves and refigure identities, even as they focus on violence, traumatic memory, migratory homes and multiple exiles. And what of the materiality of language as it cuts across the index of place and gives voice to selves written across fraught, shifting, national borders? In the course of exploring these and other questions we will critically consider connections between the literary productions of postcoloniality and contemporary American multiculturalism.
The texts we will consider will be drawn from the following: Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Assia Djebar, Fantasia; Tsitsi Dangaremba, Nervous Conditions; V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival; Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses; Derek Walcott, Collected Poems; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; David Mura, The Colors of Desire; Theresa Cha, Dictee. We may also consider narratives from the Partition of the South Asian subcontinent, including the short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto and the oral testimonies of abducted women; selected writings of Michelle Cliff and Toni Morrison; selections from the works of Asian American writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri; Arthur Sze and Hisaye Yamamoto.
The theoretical materials on body, memory and hybrid identities will include readings from some of the following: Gloria Anzaldua, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, James Clifford, Coco Fusco, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward Soja, Gayatri Spivak. Students in the course are welcome to include materials pertaining to their own research interests, including visual art, performance work, video and film.
Course requirements:
The course will be run as a seminar with weekly student participation, assigned readings and detailed discussion. One oral presentation and one research paper 15-30 pages.
The texts for the course will be on order at Labyrinth Books, W.112 Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, Tel: 212-865-1588.
- 70900
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The Age of Caxton: The Transition from Manuscript Culture to Print Culture in the Late 15th Century
Prof. William Coleman
The course will examine the transition from manuscript to print culture during the incunabulum period. (An incunabulum is a work printed in the 15th century-literally, in the cradle of the age of printing.) It will discuss three essential topics for the study of incunabula:
1. the technology of early printing (i.e. how things got printed),
2. the patronage system and the economics of early printing (i.e. why things got printed), and
3. the creation of the literary canon during the period of early printing (i.e. what things got printed).
The course will study the development of printing in three different literary-cultural environments: Germany, Italy, and England (i.e. where things got printed). It will also discuss the work of the most prominent printers in these three countries (i.e. who printed things) and, in particular, the work of the first English printer, William Caxton.
Students will learn the standard bibliographical tools for research in 15th century printing, plus the techniques of bibliographical description which have been developed in the past few decades.
New York City libraries are particularly rich repositories of 15th century printing. The New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Grolier Club Library have extraordinarily important incunabula collections. Arrangements will be made with the curators of these collections for students to make supervised use of these materials.
- 71400
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Shakespeare's History Plays
Prof. W. R. Elton
Of the three dramatic genres listed in the Contents of Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), this Histories remain the least adequately studied, though certainly among his most important works. This course will examine, among the histories, Henry IV, Parts I and II, Henry V. Richard II, and Richard III. Other histories may be included as time allows. These plays will be studied in their dramatic and poetic structure; in relation to the comedies and tragedies; and in relation to the historical texts (e.g., Holinshed) from which they derive.
Requirements: One ten-page paper, whose first draft is due at midterm. Texts: Use the New Arden (now in its third edition), wherever possible. Become acquainted with the techniques of research, and bibliographical tools.
Acquire and read through the New Companion to Shakespeare; and note Elton essay on Shakespeare and Ideas. Acquire a sense of the relations and descent of English monarchy. Be especially aware of the role of Falstaff with these plays, and relations to comedy.
- 71600
Th, 2:00- 4:00 p.m.
Shakespeare in Context
Prof. Kate Levin
Shakespeare is regularly thought of as a unique and, by implication, solitary genius: a playwright without peer -- and without peers. This course seeks to correct that impression by reading a sampling of his plays alongside plays by some of his contemporaries, colleagues and inspirations, including Marlowe, Jonson and Middleton. In addition to striving for alert, nuanced readings of all the plays we survey, the following questions may shape our inquiries: What is specifically "Shakespearean" about Shakespeare's language or dramaturgy? How much of his work depends on conventions established and promoted by others? How do the playwrights we are reading register the influence of other writers? Why has Shakespeare been canonized to the exclusion of other members of the extraordinarily talented community of theater artists in which he worked?
Requirements will include an oral presentation and related short paper, and a longer final essay.
- 74100
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Revolution to Disillusion: British Literature & Culture of the Romantic Age
Prof. Nancy Yousef
Beginning with the great cultural trauma of the French Revolution, this course will serve as an introduction to issues, texts, and controversies central to the Romantic period. We will pay particular attention to the effort to rethink the realm of the social, for this is the principal legacy of the Revolution in early nineteenth century culture. The limitations, possibilities, and grounds of human relations (both personal and political) are persistent concerns throughout this period, at times explicit, at times driven underground. The course will be divided into three parts. In the first, we will address the complex topic of the intellectual and cultural impact of the French Revolution in England: the idealism and renewal the Revolution seemed to instantiate, the disillusioning realization that a reign of terror could be unleashed under the banner of fraternity and virtue, the impact of the political repression and treason trials at home. The aspirations, challenges, and defeats of the 1790's continued to exercise an influence on the work of important writers (such as Wordsworth and Coleridge) whose careers extended into the next century. The second part of this course will focus on the "turn to nature" in major works of the first generation poets. We will consider how the dynamic between mind and nature works variously as an occlusion, displacement, or recasting of social and interpersonal concerns. We will conclude with a brief treatment of the emergence of the "aesthetic" as flight from, and as fantastic fulfillment of, the desire to establish social or affective bonds.
Authors will include Rousseau, Burke, Schiller, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Keats, and Hazlitt. Recent theoretical approaches will be addressed throughout, the course, as well as the long critical tradition that has made this so fruitful and contested a period of study. Requirements: The course will be run as a seminar with discussion and presentations on theoretical or historical topics relevant to the week's reading. Students will submit a final paper on a topic of their choice.
- 74900
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The American Renaissance
Prof. David Reynolds
Arguably the richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830-65) features Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and others. This course places the major works in their cultural and historical contexts. Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy and literary theories are related to other key writings of the period, such as Thoreau's Walden and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The issues of slavery and race relations are traced in a variety of texts, including Melville's "Benito Cereno," the autobiographical Narrative of the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Women's issues and other hotly debated social topics are explored in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Margaret Fuller's essays, and Dickinson's poetry. Among the other themes pursued are the issue of class in an emerging capitalist economy, literary treatments of religion, and the development of a distinctly American style. Melville's Moby-Dick is investigated as a capacious meeting place of numerous themes and strategies of the period. Key critical debates surrounding the period are also discussed.
- 75100
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Experiments in Post-1945 American Poetry
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
The consoling chimera of "experiment" permitted American poetry to flourish in the last half of the twentieth century. Without legislating which kinds of prosody qualify as experimental and which do not, we will read the works of a dozen or more poets who have attempted innovative subject or technique, and whose effectiveness and influence stem from the strangeness of their methods. Always we will be alert to questions of sound, muteness, brevity, length, disclosure, stammering, dailiness, difficulty, and accident. We will read New York School poets, Beat poets, Confessional poets, West Coast poets, and several unclassifiables. Poets studied will include some of the following: John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Palmer, Myung Mi Kim, Alice Notley, Lyn Hejinian, Frank Bidart, A.R. Ammons, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, Anne Sexton, and Anne Carson. (I would be pleased to receive syllabus suggestions from prospective students.) If it is still in print, we will begin by reading Donald M. Allen's 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry.
Requirements: oral presentation (including annotated bibliography of critical responses to a particular poet), and an essay (20-25 pages, due at the end of the semester).
- 75200
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
African American Literature I: Slave Narratives & the Literary Imagination
Prof. James De Jongh
Critical understanding of African American literature of the 19th century is undergoing fundamental change today as a vast body of previously unknown published work by black Americans is being uncovered and reprinted. The Schomburg Collection of 19th Century Women Writers and The Periodical Literature Project, both edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., are two such sets of exciting, new source materials. By focusing on the influential literary form of the 18th and 19th century slave narratives, this seminar attempts to present a coherent and comprehensive overview of the discourse of African American literature, from its late 18th century beginnings to the turning point represented by W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
- 75200
W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
Race and Modernity: African American Literature from Fauset to Ellison
Professor Jon-Christian Suggs
This course tracks the gradual construction of the African American "modern," beginning with a generation of "Edwardian" sensibilities--Jessie Fauset, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Walter White. After them came the New Negroes (Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, and the rest) and after them, the modern realists: Wright, Attaway, Motley, Himes, and Ellison. Among all of these were the "sports" and anomalies, Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, George Schuyler. Does this list suggest a developmental paradigm in African American literary history or is it simply a chronology without a story? If there is a story behind these writers and their texts taken collectively, what is it?
- 75600
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
English Modernisms
Prof. Mary Ann Caws
A seminar discussing a few shapes assumed by various texts, written in the English language, as seen within our present conceptions of modernism. (Modernisms and conceptions deliberately take the plural form here, so as not to limit presentations and arguments.) While some aesthetic movements and a few tiny mags may insist on making their way into our space, we will place our main focus on individual writings as well, in poetry and in prose.
We will strongly resist the temptation to separate off British modernism from American modernism, even as the urge is present. Increasingly, what we see looking back to the Great Age of Modernism is not two totally distinct entities, but an impulse with two often interwoven strands. When the paths seem separate, we will let them seem and be so; when not, not.
Two papers are required, the first before the term break, the second, by the last class. Class reports. A roll call of the authors considered might well include some, if not all, of the following: D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, W.B.Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green; Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy. Yes.
- 78300
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
19/20th Century Autobiographical Fictions
Prof. N. John Hall
There are all sorts of fascinating critical problems in autobiography-beginning with the seemingly impossible problem of definition, and moving through questions of readers' expectation, the ways in which autobiography gives voice to particular groups, autobiography's relation to biography, etc. But the crucial problem, for most critics and readers, is autobiography's uneasy connection to and difference-if any- from fiction. It is said that all autobiographies are fictions, and all (or almost all) fiction is autobiographical-though clearly some fictions are seen as more autobiography than others. This course will first consider contemporary theories of autobiography (reasonably brief excerpts supplied in photocopy from Gusdorf, Olney, Lejeune, Bruss, Easkin, Benstock, Abbott, Heilbrun, Mason, et al). Next we will examine some 19th century novels generally regarded as especially "autobiographical" and then move to formal autobiographies (for the novels, ancillary material, noted here in parentheses, will be supplied in photocopy): Dickens, David Copperfield (the famous "autobiographical fragment"); Charlotte Bronte, Villette (selections of letters to M Heger); George Eliot, Mill on the Floss (selected letters and poems); Trollope, Small House at Allington (first three chapters from Trollope's An Autobiography); Edmund Gosse, Father and Son; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Then we return to the novel, with Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent, seen in the context of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. One session will be devoted to autobiographical criticism, namely Nancy K. Miller's Getting Personal (selections supplied in photocopy), with guest appearance by Prof. Miller. Time permitting, we shall look at additional autobiographies, selected by the class: provocative possibilities include, but are not limited to, Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia; John Updike, Self-Consciousness, Nuala O'Faolain, Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. One oral presentation; one paper.
- 78400
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Satire in England
Prof. Blanford Parker
The course will cover all modes of satire in the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). We will study Horace, Persius, and Juvenal as Classical models for the formal verse satire; Rabelais and Cervantes as models of burlesque in fiction; and Bacon and Hobbes as models for a general satire of human knowledge.
The chief texts for the course will be the major satirical poems of Butler (excerpted), Rochester, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay and Churchill. We will also look at prose satire including: Sterne and Austen (the novel as satire), Hume (philosophical discourse as satire), and Gibbon (history as satire).
We will also canvas the theory of satire in works of Jonson, Hall, Boileau ("L' Art Poetique"), Dryden ("Original and Progress of Satire"), Pope (Peri Bathous), Johnson and others. We will discuss the significance of the change from controversy to general satire in establishing the character of Enlightenment rhetoric, and as a social and political underpinning for establishment of the modern.
- 79000
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Colloquium on the Teaching of Writing
Prof. George Otte
No other site of instruction has been such a testing ground for composition pedagogy as the City University. Rich in approaches and answers to the many questions besetting writing instruction, CUNY has produced an unusual number of composition luminaries. Yet there is no grand consensus on the complex issues of writing instruction, here or elsewhere. Beyond a general commitment to improving teaching and learning, the field is characterized by tensions, dilemmas, and debates regarding a variety of issues: assessment and evaluation, kinds and genres of writing (e.g., personal vs. academic writing), uses of technology, the relation of theory to practice, forms of cultural assimilation and resistance, fluency vs. correctness (especially for non-native speakers of English), and forms of classroom interaction (the so-called de-centered classroom, collaborative learning, critical teaching, etc.). With multiple perspectives on such matters to consider, the colloquium will eschew a speaker-of-the-week approach; instead, every other week, the colloquium will bring together at least two guests from CUNY's composition community who represent different (often contrasting) perspectives on these topics, alternating these discussions with weeks of reflective reading, discussion, and writing. In addition, the course will entail a major project which may be done individually or collaboratively.
- 79000
Hours: to be arranged
Teaching College English (Teaching Practicum)
Various Instructors
Required course for teaching interns.
Each CUNY college participating in the teaching internship program has a practicum for interns tailored to that campus's student body and composition philosophy, and taught by a college authority on composition. Participants discuss theories of teaching composition and their actual experiences in the classroom. Readings and course requirements vary from school to school, but all students are trained in writing pedagogy. Classes usually take place at the colleges. At registration, check with the English Program Office for the names of instructors.
- 79500
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Literary Scholarship
Prof. Gordon Whatley
The course aims specifically to help each student develop (1) expertise and proficiency in literary research and the practice of literary and textual criticism by working in depth on a single, representative short work of literature, chosen by the student for its relevance to their own research interests; and (2) to assess the evolution of modern critical methods and trends, and their changing theoretical assumptions, as evidenced in the chosen work's public reception and critical/interpretive history. Aimed primarily at graduate students in the first or second year, the course is an opportunity to experience dissertation research on a small scale. The class meets as a workshop for the first eight or nine weeks: each student presents a weekly report on the evolving stages of a focused project to produce a mini-edition of his/her chosen work. These stages will include using traditional library research tools and on-line resources to compile a comprehensive bibliography of printed editions and other primary sources, and an annotated bibliography of secondary sources (interpretive & textual criticism, biography, intellectual and cultural history): in short, all the materials necessary for producing an annotated edition of the text with a critical introduction. The introduction is an extended essay, synthesizing, and perhaps going beyond, previous scholarship, in order to "situate" the work as an artistic production in significant relation to its author's other works, and in the context of its historical and cultural moment; the introduction will also describe the work's critical reception over time and developing or declining status in the modern literary canon. While a self-contained short work in verse by a "major" author is ideal for the purposes of the course, short plays or prose works such as stories, essays, sermons, etc., are also feasible (for obvious reasons, works composed very recently, and lacking a developed critical tradition, are impractical).
A general aim of the course is to help students familiarize themselves with the character and scope of the discipline of literary scholarship as reflected in their main field of interest, but the workshop structure of the course exposes students to the tools and issues of the other fields and periods in which their colleagues are engaged.
Students should select their semester projects before the first class, through prior consultation with the instructor, either in person or via email. They should also be aware that the course's emphasis on library research requires an unusually heavy time commitment, especially during the first month or so.
- 80200
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Literature & Religion in the 19th Century: From Blake to Hopkins
Prof. Fred Kaplan
This course will deal with the centrality of religious belief and experience to British Romantic and Victorian literature. We will discuss, as background, nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of religion and some nineteenth-century religious movements and controversies, particularly natural theology, pantheism, evangelicism, unitarianism, the Oxford Movement, Methodism, Christian socialism, biblical fundamentalism, Darwinism, and the Higher Criticism. The emphasis, though, will be on how varieties of religious experience and belief provide both fuel and spark for the literary imagination. Among the authors from whom selections will be read are Blake (Milton), Coleridge ("Aids to Reflection," "Church & State"), Shelley, Prometheus, Carlyle ("Sartor Resartus"), Mill (Autobiography), Browning (selected monologues), Tennyson ("In Memoriam"), Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Eliot (Adam Bede), Arnold (Literature & Dogma), Swinburne (selected poems), and Hopkins (selected poems & prose). Hopkins' synthesis of religion and aestheticism is particularly important to the course. Students who want to engage with similar dynamics in American literature will be welcome to substitute or add Emerson or Stowe or Twain and extend knowledgability about American forms of religious belief and revival in the 19th century. Twain's satiric anti-religious views in the later works can serve as a powerful representation of the literary imagination gaining great energy from anti-Christian biblical inversion. Milton himself, of course, dominates the deep background. But, from the late twentieth-century perspective, the overview includes, for example, T.S. Eliot, William Buckley, and Jimmy Swaggert. There will be additional optional readings and bibliographies for students preparing for comprehensives. One brief oral report and one paper are required.
- 80500
T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
Introduction to Literary Theory
Prof. Nico Israel
This course is designed to introduce incoming graduate students to literary, critical, and cultural theory. Issues to be examined include the nature of language and the role of linguistics, the problems of the self and subject as conceived by psychoanalysis, the relation of language to ideology, and philosophical questions of hermeneutics, scepticism and truth. The latter part of the course explores recent work on race, post-modernism, queer theory, cultural studies, trauma studies, globalization and post-coloniality. Readings to include essays by Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Saussure, Lacan, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Habermas, Jameson, Bhabha, Gilroy, Butler, Agamben and others. Prerequisites: Some familiarity with twentieth century literature and philosophy will be helpful. Students will be asked to write five 2-page position papers, one 5-7 page midterm paper, and one 10-12 page final research paper, No auditors allowed.
- 80600
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Technological Responses to Modernity
Gerhard Joseph
Through an interweaving of theoretical, fictional, and visual texts, this course will explore the links during the past fifty years among systems analysis, virtual thought chaos theory, cyberfiction, televisual/cinematic culture, and hypertext. To periodize, have we moved from "modernity," not so much into "postmodernity," as into the "posthuman"? How does a subject's agency express itself in a cybernetic age, within the global empire of the commodified and the "simulacral"? How are the new technologies transforming the human sciences (not to mention the humanities more narrowly) from whose disciplinary perspectives we belatedly describe consciousness and the world? And if we buy into the thesis of radical metamorphosis, are we inclined to indulge a dystopic, plangent nostalgia for what is passing on or to welcome a new evolutionary stage for the species, a "reinvention of nature" (to use Donna Haraway's utopic language)?
Some possible theoretical texts: selected essays surrounding the "Sokal Hoax," Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972-77; Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings; Umberto Eco, selections from Travels in the Hyperreal; Avital Ronnel, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, and Electric Speech; Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Technoculture; Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identify: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; Mark Dery, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture; N. Catherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science; James Gleick, Chaos; David Bolter, Writing Space, George Landow, Hypertext. Some possible novels: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (or Gravity's Rainbow?); Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star (or White Noise?); William Gibson, Neuromancer (or The Difference Machine?); Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Samuel Delaney, Trouble on Triton; Octavia Butler, Dawn; Joseph McElroy, Men and Women. Some video art: Laurie Anderson, Bill Viola, Mona Hartoum, Shirin Neshet, and Nam June Paik. Some films: Blade Runner, the two Terminator and three Alien films, Videodrome, Robocop, Until the End of Time, Paris, Texas, The Matrix. Requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
- 80700
W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
Women's Mystical and Visionary Literature of the Later Middle Ages
Prof. Michael Sargent
The later medieval period in western Europe (ca. 1300-1450) saw the growth of a vernacular mystical and visionary literature of which the major authors were women: Mechtild of Hackeborn, Hadewijch of Brabant, Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Siena, Bridget of Sweden and Elizabeth of Hungary are among the best-known continental examples. Simultaneously, there grew up, particularly among the convents of Dominican nuns and the beguinages of the Rhineland, collections of lives of holy women in which mystical and visionary phenomena were recounted as well. Although students will be encouraged to read these works in their original languages, we will be dealing in this course with those that were transmitted in Middle English translation: primarily Marguerite (The Mirror of Simple Souls), Catherine (The Orcherd of Syon) and Bridget (the Revelations, in one of their several versions), possibly Mechtild (The Booke of Gostlye Grace) and Elizabeth (the Revelations), and the anonymous collection of four women saints' lives in Bodleian MS Douce 114 - and of course, the two prominent English writers in this field, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.
The level of difficulty of the language of these prose work is approximately that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Modern English versions of a number of these texts are available, but their use for course work will be discouraged.
- 80900
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The Renaissance & the Prestige of Modernity
Prof. Martin Elsky
Since Burckhardt's founding study of the Renaissance in the 19th century, the prestige of the period has rested on its claim to be the inaugurating moment of modernity. Starting with Burckhardt, this course will review a variety of theories of modernity (some of the late 19th, but mostly of the 20th century) as they relate to the Renaissance, and as they appear in literature, history, art history, and philosophy. We will explore how the evolving definitions of Renaissance modernity responded to 20th century movements and ideas such as republicanism, fascism, feminism, the Early Modern, popular culture, and post-coloniality. Topics will include the pre-World War I American model of the Renaissance, the creation of a new American Renaissance school by emigres fleeing European fascism, and the reconfiguration of Renaissance modernity in Early Modernism and Transatlanticism. Primary texts will be drawn from, and will address issues in English, continental, and transatlantic cultures, and will be read in conjunction with representative theories of the modernity of the Renaissance. An oral report and either one long or two short papers are required. Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce materials from their home discipline.
- 80900
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Renaissance Survey: Gender Issues
Prof. Tom Hayes
The current (postmodern) argument that gender identity should be unfixed and fluid has its roots in the Renaissance. It is not simply that some Renaissance texts construct heterosexuality while others open the subliminal possibilities for homosexuality, but that in several Renaissance texts gender--and hence sexuality itself--is unstable and ambiguous. With this hypothesis in mind we will try to determine how and why puritanism and homophobia became dominant modes of thought in early modern England. We will also try to understand why there can be no direct, unmediated relation between masculine and feminine subject positions and how we might define sexual difference in a way that encourages diversity and change.
We will read the following primary texts: Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, Shakespeare, The Sonnets and Richard II, Ben Jonson, Epicoene and The Sad Shepherd, Thomas Middleton, The Family of Love and Women Beware Women, John Webster, The White Devil, Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Miriam, Eleanor Davies, Prophetic Writings, Anna Trapnel, Visions and Poems, Andrew Marvell, Lyric Poems John Milton, Samson Agonistes
Theoretical and historical studies: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality and Herculine Barbin, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries ; Allen Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England; Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety; Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy; Comensoli and Russell, eds., Enacting Gender; Epstein and Straub, eds., Body Guards
- 81000
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Dissertation Workshop
Prof. Gerhard Joseph
Designed to help students write the prospectus (which should not take all term) and/or the dissertation, this writing workshop will respond to the needs and the size of the group. There may or may not be assigned readings and exercises, at the beginning. One certain thing is that everyone will read, and respond in writing to everyone else's work, and that the pages to be discussed will be circulated among members of the workshop at least a week ahead of time.
- 81000
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Poetry Workshop
Prof. W. R. Elton
This course is devoted to developing poetry skills, at all levels. Regular consultations and class readings of poems. Use of anthologies, e.g., Stanley Burnshaw, The Poem Itself. Considerations of the most recent currents in poetry-writing, including European poets; and of the market for poetry today.
Poems will be handled with sensitivity and discretion.
NOTE ON THE PROFESSOR: widely published poet, including, most recently, Partisan Review. Collection, Wittgenstein's Trousers (1991). Poetry-writing grant, 1998, Vermont Studio Center. Many years of directing poetry workshops at the University of California, Riverside, and at CUNY Graduate Center. Many public readings.
Whether you decide to take this course or not, please feel free to drop into my office to discuss your poetry: Room 4406.05; x8322.
- 81500
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Milton's Poetic Volumes: 1645, 1671, 1673
Prof. Joseph Wittreich
We will start with Justa Edovardo King naufrago (1638), the volume in which Lycidas first appears and which itself provides a pattern, a design for the 1645 Poems of Mr. John Milton and 1673 Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions, both of which, along with "Paradise Regain'd" . . . To which is added "Samson Agonistes" are at once illustrative of and paradigmatic for poetic volumes conceived not only as gatherings of poems but as themselves a poem. Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to the publisher of Lyrical Ballads, the poems themselves are but the stanza of an ode, which is the volume itself; or as Robert Frost quips, where there are twenty-five poems published together, the twenty sixth is the poetic volume. Milton's poetic volumes were the means by which some later poets conceptualized their poetic volumes and theorized their projects, much as critics would later do in a volume like Poems in Their Place, edited by Neil Fraistat, or in the many more recent discussions of the idea of the book, or in the on-going "Book" seminar (under the aegis of Peter Stallybrass) at the University of Pennsylvania. Our initial concern will be with how poets contextualize their own poems through organization and placement--a concern, in the last third of the course, that will give way to other contextualizations as illustrated by Samson Agonistes. Indeed, Milton seems to encourage alternative contextualizations to those currently in fashion, thus not only (not even principally) Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Euripides and Seneca, along with the biblical tradition of tragedy as its is exemplified by the Book of Revelation or by Christ suffering, both of which Milton foregrounds through citation in his preface to Samson Agonistes. Our largest concern will be with what new editions of Milton, with what a new Milton criticism, will look like in the next century and new millennium.
Required text: Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edition. London and New York: Longman, 1997.
Seminar requirements: (1) an oral presentation and (2) a final paper (15 to 20 pages in length).
- 84800
Th, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
American Aesthetics: William & Henry James
Prof. Joan Richardson
Discussions in this seminar will focus on the various facts and facts of feeling that contributed to the emergence of the Jameses' distinctively performative styles. Particular attention will be given to the impact of the Darwinian information, the significance of the visual, the concern with language and consciousness, and the later 19th century American scene. In addition, certain texts of Swedenborg, Emerson, and Peirce will be considered in their informing relations to the work of both William and Henry.
Those registering for the seminar are encouraged to read over the summer William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890, unabridged version, available in a one volume Harvard U.P. paperback). Other readings during the term will include Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, selected prefaces to the New York Edition, "The Art of Fiction"; William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and selected letters from the brothers' correspondence.
Weekly response papers will be required instead of seminar reports. A term paper will also be required.
- 85500
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Naturalism & Aestheticism: Encountering the Other
Prof. Norman Kelvin
Naturalism and Aestheticism begin in France in the Nineteenth Century; and, from my perspective, are reactions to the failure of the Revolution of 1848. By Common agreement Zola is the paramount figure in Naturalism; and in retrospect Flaubert takes on the role in Aestheticism. Zola, who grew up in the France shaped by the defeat of the Revolution, by its devolution into the Second Empire, makes "science" a substitute for dreams of a better future. Flaubert, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley's "true Penelop" (as he was for Henry James), substitutes formal excellence for political hope. But this mutual beginning as response to a political event in France is lost when the two movements enter Anglo-American literary discourse. At first they try to be autonomous; but by the end of the century they reinscribe themselves in political imagining, this time British and American. In addition, they encounter each other, both as binary opposites and as a presence, each within the other (as they did earlier, in France, too). From the later encounter, new forms emerge, and this cultural shift requires a reassessment of both movements in their second phase. In our course, we begin with Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Zola's Germinal. We follow with works by Huysmans, Barbey, Villiers, Peter, Wilde, Ella D'Arcy,, Violet Paget, James, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton, all these viewed as aestheticist texts marked by naturalist devices. Novels of the Goncourt brothers, George Moore, Stephen Crane and Jack London will be read as naturalist works in which aestheticist concerns are present. We will also note that at the very time aestheticism begins to define Modernism in England and France, Naturalism means modernity in America. Finally, we will see that Aestheticism in the visual arts crosses the Atlantic with greater ease than it does in the novel, and ask why this should be so. Background readings include theoretical approaches to our topic (a list will provided). Requirements are a class presentation and a term paper.
- 86000
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Non-Oedipal Psychologies
Prof. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
This is an experimental seminar that will explore historical and contemporary alternatives to the psychological models that have the most currency in present literary studies. The dominant, Lacan-inflected reading of Freudian psychoanalysis embodies many assumptions that have been questioned, whether from within or outside of psychoanalytic thought. Among them are the interpretive isolation of the mother-father-child triad; the determinative nature of childhood experience and the teleology toward a sharply distinct state of maturity; the primacy of genital morphology and desire; the centrality of dualistic gender difference; and the emphasis on linguistic models of mental functioning. In this seminar we will look for interesting alternative currents of psychological thought in writers who may include Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Wollstonecraft, Ruskin, Freud, Ferenczi, Klein, Tomkins, Deleuze, Balint, and Bollas. Seminar participants will also pursue and share individual/small group research on ancient, medieval, and non-Western psychological traditions.
- 86100
Tuesday 2 p.m-4 p.m.
Office hours: 4 p.m.-6 p.m.
Women Writers and Intellectuals: 1940s-1970s
Prof. Nancy Miller
Can women writers gain cultural authority as public intellectuals only by dismissing or refusing feminism? Beginning with Virginia Woolf, we will examine the work of major writers from England, France, Germany, and the United States, who produced essays, novels, and poetry from the war years through the advent of second-wave feminism. Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Elizabeth Hardwick, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Christa Wolf, and Julia Kristeva. Prominent cultural figures and intellectuals, these women have often played an important role in public debate but many have refused the category of gender as relevant to their positions. What kinds of values and views--aesthetic, psychological, social--have led many women writers to dismiss or refuse feminism? We will consider this process directly and indirectly through a certain number of recurrent preoccupations: writing, sexuality, art, taste, identity, style, politics, violence, war, and so on. We will end the semester with a discussion of contemporary feminist and postfeminist writing.
Work for the course: one oral presentation, one short paper, and one term paper, due at the end of the semester.
- 86100
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Women Writers and the 30's in Britain
Prof. Jane Marcus
This course will concentrate on the politics of the 30's, class issues, the rise of fascism and racial issues for Black British, Irish and colonial writers,and the poetry of the Spanish Civil War. While the focus is on women writers, after an overview of the canonical Auden/Spender group, we will also read the Indian writer, Mulk Raj Anand, and the Irish working class writer, James Hanley.
Texts will include:
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, The Years, Three Guineas
Nancy Cunard, The Negro Anthology, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936), "Opus 7" (poem)
Works by Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Rosamund Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison, Storm Jameson, Antonia White, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rebecca West.
[top]
|
