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alphabetical by instructor
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Ammiel Alcalay
ENGL 80100
Theory Colloquium
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/ 4 credits [92272]
In this course we will investigate a wide range of theories and practices, from the most concrete relationships between form and content, to more abstract conceptual frameworks. We will look at histories of transmission and legitimization while exploring the different ways various theories and practices have either gained institutional currency or remained outside the framework of those politicized structures. The course will be framed by two possibly related phenomena: the dominance of continental theoretical models for literary and cultural scholarship, and the almost complete absence of “investigative poetic” models emerging from the work of North American poets. Within this framework, we will look at many different issues and models, always keeping in mind how students might make use of these theories and practices in their own work. Some of the issues we will explore include: the emergence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought in France in its relationship to the decolonization of Algeria; the rise of continental theoretical models in the North American context in relation to struggles for narrative legitimacy on the part of various peoples and movements in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly that of U.S. veterans of the war in Vietnam; the relationship between literary historical work and theoretical work according to subject matter; the theoretical implications of formal questions regarding poetic meter or narrative structure; the practical meaning of conventional and unconventional formal approaches to theory and scholarship. Throughout, we will draw on a wide range of sources to explore these and other questions. Required readings will include selections by William Carlos Williams, Laura Riding, Josephine Miles, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, Robert Duncan, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and others. Examples of literary/cultural histories might include Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank; Ann Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Geneaology of Language Writing; D.H. Melhem’s Heroism in the New Black Poetry; Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome; Komozi Woodard’s A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics; James Le Sueur’s Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity During the Decolonization of Algeria; Jim Neilson’s Warring Fictions: Cultural Politics & the Vietnam War Narrative. Supplementary readings may include: Aristotle’s Poetics and other classical and medieval sources in rhetoric and poetics; Charles Peirce; Jose Marti; G. Lukacs; Emile Benveniste; C.L.R. James; Edward Said, and many others. Class requirements will include frequent writing responses to readings and the choice by each student of an investigative path to be pursued throughout the course of the semester and presented to the class at intervals.
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Glenn Burger
ENGL 70500
Canterbury Tales
Tues 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [92255]
In this course we will read Chaucer's most experimental work, The Canterbury Tales, taking up a variety of interrelated historical, social, and political questions. How, for example, does Chaucer represent the relations and conflicts among the various classes of late-medieval society, and what effects does Chaucer's own class position—as bourgeois civil servant with strong ties to the aristocracy—have on the production of the Canterbury Tales? What views of gender and sexuality do the Tales present and explore? To what extent are they shaped by Christianity, and how do they represent the relation between Christianity and other systems of belief (classical "paganism," Islam, Judaism)? How does Chaucer treat the interimplication of such categories of identity as race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality? Why—of all the writers of the English Middle Ages—is it Chaucer whom we are most likely to read? What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the "father of English poetry?" Our primary focus will be the Canterbury Tales themselves. But we will also consider some related contemporary texts—such as The Book of Margery Kempe, Le Menagier de Paris, French fabliaux, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies—as well as such early fifteenth-century "continuations" of the Tales as Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and the Tale of Beryn. Students will make one brief seminar presentation and produce a final research paper.
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- Mary Ann Caws
ENGL 86000
Art and Text
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [92256]
This seminar will examine various ways of contemplating the verbal as it interferes (positive sense thereof) with the visual, in several domains. The texts will include passages from novels, poems, films, and essays, both theoretical and personal (including texts by Roland Barthes, John Berger, Rosalind Krauss, etc.) We will take up, briefly, a few schools of painting and thought (Futurism, Dada, Constructionism, Cubism, Surrealism, etc.), examine a few manifestos in context and free-standing, and give a certain consideration to the regions noted for the most challenging creations (Vienna, Worpswede, Madrid, London, New York, Paris), to musical associations with the works, and to a few great decades and events , depending on the interests of the participants. In short, a large-scale topic with a small-scale approach. Participants are expected to have several interests across the board and to develop them in individual work, to be shared with us all at the conclusion of the seminar. The participants will report at least twice on topics of their choice, and write a final paper preceded by one or two short ones, for collective discussion.
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James DeJongh
ENGL 75500
African American Literature I: 1749-1865
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [92275]
Critical understanding of African-American literature of the 19th century has undergone fundamental changes in recent decades as a substantial body of little known published and unpublished works by black Americans has been uncovered, reprinted and reevaluated. By focusing on the influential and preeminent 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 18th century beginnings to Emancipation and its immediate aftermath.
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- Morris Dickstein
ENGL 87400
Film and American Culture In The 1950s: Genre and Politics
Wednesday 6:30pm-9:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000, FSCP 81000, THEA 81500) [92788]
In recent years the 1950s has emerged as one of the most fascinating decades in the history of the twentieth century and in film history. Once stereotyped either as golden age of home and family or a swamp of conformism, repression, and anti-Communist hysteria, the period is now seen as a much more complex and transitional era. This course will examine the cross-currents of politics and culture in the 1950s by focusing on key American films and film genres, including musicals, westerns, films noirs, sci-fi, horror, women’s films, thrillers, and socially conscious dramas about race, troubled youth, the cold war, and other issues. With the help of some key literary and social texts of the period, such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Organization Man, as well as some sidelong glances at key television programs, the course will explore the social and aesthetic context of these films. Topics of discussion will include the cold war, the debate over McCarthyism and conformity, the changes in Hollywood (including the blacklist), the decay of cities, concerns about organized crime and juvenile delinquency, the effects of affluence and suburbanization, the conflicts over race, the rise of consumer culture and of new forms of mass communication, the generation gap, and the changes in American values that led to the 1960s, including the beginnings of the counterculture. The course will try to define the moral and intellectual climate of the postwar era as seen through its films. The films screened will include such works as Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rebel Without a Cause, The Thing, The Searchers, Bend of the River, Pickup on South Street, Forbidden Planet, The Defiant Ones, The Big Heat, Written on the Wind, and The Sweet Smell of Success. The structure of the course will be comparative and cumulative. Each film will be linked with another film or book on a similar theme, to be seen or read in preparation for the class. Each student will be expected to deliver one oral report and to write a research paper. Secondary works will include books like Peter Biskind’s Seeing Is Believing and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.
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Mario DiGangi
ENGL 81400
Reading Shakespeare Historically
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits [92257]
When reading Shakespeare, we are accustomed to taking into account contemporary attitudes on matters such as gender, social order, monarchy, and religion. Yet often these “contemporary attitudes” are conveyed second-hand, mediated and summarized by historians, editors, critics, and teachers. By pairing selected plays of Shakespeare with various documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this course will explore what it means to read Shakespeare historically. Which interpretive methods might be brought to bear on a “historical” reading of a Shakespeare play, and what factors might offer resistance to such a reading? What kind of records constitute the historical archive and what kind of access do they offer to a culture four hundred years removed from our own? How might we theorize the activity of reading “literary” texts in conjunction with “historical” texts? How might such activity relate to or depart from the practices of new historicism? What kind of insight into Shakespearean drama can we gain through examination of contemporary sermons, medical tracts, political speeches, court cases, official records, and so on? We will probably read about seven plays chosen from among the following: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale. We will be using the Bedford Texts and Contexts editions of the plays. For our purposes, the Bedford volumes usefully gather many relevant primary documents for each play, but we will also be analyzing and critiquing how the editors of the individual volumes select and frame the “relevant” texts and contexts (and omit other texts and contexts), and what influence the Bedford series might have on current pedagogical practice and issues of canonicity. (I have an immediate investment in these questions: during the course of the fall semester, I plan to be completing work on the Bedford edition of The Winter’s Tale). We will also be using unedited primary texts from Early English Books On-Line. Requirements include short papers, research projects, and class presentations/collaborative workshops.
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Jacqueline diSalvo
ENGL 84100
Studies in Romantic Poetry: Blake and Counterculture
Friday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [92258]
William Blake can be situated in three countercultures: 1) the esoteric heretical as well as subversive traditions (mysticism, prophecy, primitivism, and the radical traditions of millenarianism and anti-nominees (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters); 2) the oppositional movements of the Romantic era (Jacobinism, feminism, anti-imperialism, critiques of the politics of religion etc); 3) the countercultures and cutting edge paradigms he initiates and anticipates. Einstein, asked the source of his scientific breakthrough, replied, “I just questioned an assumption. Blake, questioning of most of the assumptions of modern bourgeois ideologies, was indeed the prophetic poet he sought to be and possibly the most subversive artist in Western culture. He anticipated aspects of Marxism, socialism, multi-culturalism, sexual radicalism (Reich, Tantra), gender criticism, Freudian as well as transformative and body-oriented psychologies (bio-energetics), non-ordinary states of consciousness, anti-dualism--rethinking the relation of mind and body, matter and consciousness, non-theistic spiritualities, multi-media art, and the rejection of atomistic and individualist perspectives for energetic field theories and the breakthroughs of modern theoretical physics. He also anticipated elements of post-modern theories of language, discourse and ideology (such as Althusser’s concept of interpellation of the subject by ideological state apparatuses), Bakhtin’s dialogism, Foucauld’s analysis of disciplinary culture and power/knowledge, and critiques of realism and logocentrism. But Blake also offered an alternative to aspects of post-modernism, which, while providing useful methodologies of critique, really isn’t post anything, but represents the breakdown of modernism, rather than its potential super cession. Blake, on the other hand, developed alternative paradigms for the revolutionary, utopian, and visionary project he referred to as “building Jerusalem” in place of “State Religion” and its “dark Satanic mills.” The methodology of this class will be to study Blake poetic and artistic works intensively while undertaking a parallel exploration of a few of the cutting edge intellectual and artistic perspectives he anticipated. Students will undertake a semester long investigation of one of these questions and any insights they provide into Blake’s texts. Periodically they will produce brief progress reports and think pieces and share their discoveries with the class. Finally students will write a final paper relating Blake to the questions, and ideas they have explored and the discoveries they have made. In this sense we will not just be studying Blake but being Blakean.
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Marc Dolan
ENGL 75300
The Making of Americans, 1903-34: Stein and Other Modern Folk
Thursday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000, WSCP 81000) [92259]
“The Making of Americans is a very important thing and everybody ought to be reading at it or it.” - Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)
When Gertrude Stein was beginning her long book, The Making of Americans, it was a book about her family as first books are about families and as she began it again and again it was “a complete description of every kind of human being that ever could or would be living” as she was saying some years after finishing it and as she was writing and people were reading the book it became a book about books before and after it and as she was saying just after she had finished it “the only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends on how everybody is doing everything.” In this course, we will read the books Gertrude Stein was reading and writing and the books before and after her long book, The Making of Americans. We will read at them and them and some are reading around and through them. We will read the book Gertrude Stein was writing (in 1903, in 1906, and in 1911) and the books she was reading before (by Henry James) and after (by Dashiell Hammett) and we will read the books by some (like W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound) that were writing and seeing and doing as Gertrude Stein was writing and seeing and doing and we will read a book by one (Sherwood Anderson) who was reading the books she was writing as he was writing and seeing and doing. We will read America as it was and was becoming as Gertrude Stein was writing and seeing and doing, the America that was past and the America that was becoming and the America that was as Gertrude Stein was always enjoying saying “beginning again and again.” Prerequisites: None. Course Requirements: Two presentations and a final paper presenting original scholarship on a text or texts in any medium composed in the first third of the twentieth century. Tentative Booklist: Henry James, The Better Sort (1903) [edition to be determined]; Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst, QED and Other Writings (selected texts from 1903-05) [Liveright]; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) [Norton Critical Edition]; Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (completed 1911, published 1925) [Dalkey Archive]; Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) [Vintage]; Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (selected texts from 1912-35) [Vintage]; Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts (1920) [Penguin]; Sherwood Anderson, The Triumph of the Egg (1921) [edition to be determined]; William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925) [New Directions]; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1928) [Vintage]; Ezra Pound, The ABCs of Reading (1934) [New Directions]. We may also read a few more short pieces from Stein on reserve or even the reduction of The Making of Americans that was published by Harcourt Brace in 1934.
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- Martin Elsky
ENGL 81100
Early Modern Cultural Translations: City, Nation, Empire
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as Comp. Lit. 80900, RSCP 72100) [92599]
This course will focus on the various forms Renaissance and Early Modern culture has taken in geographic space. It will concentrate on the translation of culture across borders from the local to the national, the imperial, and the intercontinental. We will draw on historical analysis to examine how cultural, literary, and visual forms are transformed as they are absorbed in new locations and new political-geographical formations. The central focus will be the processes by which cultural spaces are imagined, projected, and crossed. Our starting point will be current debates over the kinds of borders in which culture is both produced and received; we begin with contemporary claims for the authenticity of local communities and counter-claims for large cross-cultural geographic space; we will consider how these claims bear upon debates concerning the "natural" locations of Renaissance and Early Modern culture. The locations of culture to which we will attend include the Italian city state (especially Florence and Venice) and English, French, and Spanish nation states and transcontinental empire. The course culminates in the New World synthesis of European and indigenous cultural forms that resulted from Early Modern trans-Atlantic exploration. We will examine the historical conditions in which cities, states, and empires are imagined and formed, the symbiotic and violent ways cultures appropriate each other, and the forms in which those appropriations are artistically represented. Examples will be drawn from the historical, literary and visual traditions, including case histories and the theory of the state and empire; lyric, epic, travel narrative, and ethnographic description; prints, drawings, architecture, and cartography. Particular attention will be devoted to the relation of the formal qualities of works to their geographical setting, especially where competing geographies and identity groups intersect. Emphasis will be placed on critical approaches and research problems as illustrated in readings from political and cultural history, literary criticism, and art history as applied so such figures as Dante, Petrarch, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Garsilaso, Thevet, Léry, as well as the monuments of Venice and the major English and Spanish cartographic projects in Europe and the New World. Because this a cross-disciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home discipline for discussion and assignments.
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- N. John Hall
ENGL 84500
The Victorian Novel
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [92260]
A course based on the titles often considered (with one possible exception) "high points" from the period many see as the high point of the English novel. Plenty of reading, but enjoyable reading--for the most part. Along with the novels we shall investigate various approaches and connected issues, as in parentheses.
Dickens: Great Expectations (the autobiographical novel; Victorian publishing practices; the middle or so-called early vs. later Dickens novel; textual problems and the novel) We shall also read brief selections of David Copperfield by way of introducing Dickens. Thackeray: Vanity Fair (the comic novel; the realistic novel; narrative strategies) Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (the erotic [?] novel; narrative strategies) Charlotte Bronte: Villette (the feminist novel; the "interior" novel) Trollope: The Warden and Barchester Towers (the novel of purpose; the comic novel; narrative strategies) Eliot: The Mill on the Floss (the flawed novel; the autobiographical novel) Hardy Tess of the D'Urbervilles (the ideological novel) Butler: The Way of All Flesh (the autobiographical novel; the comic/satiric novel)
The seminar will hold one of its sessions in the Berg Collection of the NYPL, where manuscripts, letters, and first editions will further discussion of the writing habits and publishing practices of these novelists.
Research paper; one oral report; no exam.
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Peter Hitchcock
ENGL 76200
Postcolonial Space(s) in Literature and Theory
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [92261]
Space remains very much in vogue in theoretical discussion, signifying not just place (space to which meaning has been applied) but conceptual coordinates demonstrably less dependent on time as an organizing principle. Jameson, for one, has noted “an end to temporality” although this is a strategy that also signals a desire for the end of the temporary, the endless presentism of the postmodern era. For postcolonial theory the evacuation of historicity at the moment when the peoples of the South claim history in the name of decolonization has all the serendipity of old imperialism’s civilizing mission yet, as we will see, some theorists themselves conspire in pushing messy history to one side (linearity and teleology are not beyond question but have acquired the look of ideological displacement in some readings). This course has three modest aims: to read and discuss the most influential spatial critiques on postcolonial studies; to read pertinent examples of postcolonial writing that think through space; and to propose some working hypotheses on time/space relations for postcolonial theory that may yet clarify why the struggle over space requires a timely rejoinder. Whether the current endeavor to scale world literature is also an attempt to overreach the problem of time in postcoloniality will also enter our discussions. How useful is the spatial imperative in postcolonial studies? Can we speak in terms of specific chronotopes of postcolonial writing? Is the North, as it were, “out of time”? Theoretical readings will be drawn from materialist geographers (including Harvey, Soja, and Smith), sociologists and philosophers (Lefebvre, Heidegger, Benjamin, Bergson), literary theorists (including Bakhtin, Bataille and Bachelard) and pertinent postcolonial critics (Said, Spivak, and Bensmaia). Literary examples will include Farah, Djebar, Pramoedya, Devi, and Roy. (A full reading list will be posted over the summer.) A class presentation and term essay (that may evolve from the presentation) are required.
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Anne Humpherys
ENGL 87100
Narrative Theory
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [92276]
This course will survey developments in the theories of narrative from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, using six short fictions to exemplify and test the theories. The course will be divided into four units. We will begin with Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" and "Prefaces" and their aftermath; move to structuralist theories of narrative (i.e. Vladimir Propp, A.J. Greimas, Roland Barthes), then to post-structuralist models including the efforts to incorporate reading, history, and "race, class and gender" into theories of narrative (i.e. Mikhil Bahktin, Georg Lukacs, Peter Brooks, Nancy Miller, Susan Snaider Lanser, Henry Louis Gates). We will end with recent rethinkings of narrative, including those of the evolutionary biologists.
We will read six short literary texts on which to "practice" some of the theoretical models, including selections from Henry James's “The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories”; Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Sherlock Holmes Stories”; Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”, Tony Morrison's “The Bluest Eye”, and J. Coetzee's “Foe”. Students will give an oral report in which they apply a theoretical model to a literary text. Instead of a long final paper, students will also be asked to do four short (four to five pages) papers, including a write-up of their oral report, in which they apply a theoretical model from each of the units to a literary text.
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Norman Kelvin
ENGL 84500
Modernism: Multiple Beginnings
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [92262]
The subtitle “multiple beginnings” is deliberately ambiguous. It refers to nineteenth-century literary and cultural changes that converge at the turn of the century to form modernism; and also to the twentieth-century movements that began with modernism as a base but diverged from each other almost immediately. Our main geographic site is London, and our focus will be on late nineteenth and early twentieth English literature and cultural history. The nineteenth-century beginnings include the establishment in England of Marxist socialism in the 1880s; the persistence of Romanticism through the efforts of the Pre-Raphaelites; the embrace of French naturalism, aestheticism, and decadence; and the profound effect Walter Pater had on both his contemporaries and later writers, including Wilde, Ella D’Arcy, Violet Paget, and Virginia Woolf. As for beginnings in the second sense, the first decades of the twentieth century witness experiments in technique and the radical transformation of tradition in order to preserve it. This movement we now call “High Modernism.” Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence are examples. In partial contrast, the popular novel becomes meticulous in rendering natural detail, mildly experimental in theme, but as in the past inhospitable to complex motivation; and the subjectivity encouraged by popular literature is a rewarding adaptation to a given society. As for feminism, it remains problematic throughout. Many women writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are conflicted about their own feminist themes, and the evidence is in both aesthetic and popular fiction. The colonial experience, though hermeneutically discoverable everywhere, is, within the high modernist canon, most profoundly witnessed by Conrad; and in popular literature is most explicit in Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also, though England is our site for modernist beginnings, we will look briefly at two early twentieth century American movements – the Harlem Renaissance and Proletarian writing of the 1920 and 30s, both indebted to nineteenth-century naturalism but going beyond it. Class reading may include Marx, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto; D.G. Rossetti, Hand and Soul; stories by J.K. Huysmans, Barbey D’Aurevilly, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde –i.e., the decadent writers whom the hostile critic Max Nordau called “the school of Baudelaire”; Pater, “On Style” and selections from Imaginary Portraits, Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and De Profundis; Kipling, Kim; George Moore, Esther Waters, stories by Ella D’Arcy and Violet Paget; H.G. Wells, Tono Bungay; Conrad, The Secret Agent; ; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier; Henry James, In the Cage; and Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room. Our all-too-brief glance at the Harlem Renaissance and Proletarian literature will include selected readings and class presentations and will be defined against the background of both High Modernism and popular literature. A term paper and a class presentation.
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- Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 88100
Humiliation
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [92268]
This seminar will explore experiences of humiliation, as represented in literature, and as enacted in aesthetic process. Our sources will probably include Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (excerpts), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, poetry and drawings from Antonin Artaud’s final period, Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, José Saramago’s Blindness, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, art and texts by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Louise Bourgeois, and theoretical writings by Julia Kristeva and Silvan Tomkins. We will see one film, possibly Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Students will each develop an original research project, embodied in a final essay.
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Wayne Koestenbaum
ENGL 86400
The Lyric Essay IV
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [92269]
This seminar, an introduction to experimental critical writing, aims to help students develop their styles and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name “essay.” (Experimenting with unusual forms may ease the later process of writing a dissertation, itself an exercise covertly incorporating play-acting, fictiveness, and lyricism.) In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page lyric essay. A lyric essay is a hybrid form, borrowing, as it pleases, from poem, story, drama, diary, rant, and manifesto. Often autobiographical, a lyric essay reveals an idiosyncratic personality, sidesteps expository protocols, and obsessively attends to its own unfolding. The seminar’s format and orientation are the same as in the three previous years, though the assigned texts will be different. (One of our central themes this year will be the erotics of cities.) Possibilities for the syllabus include Walter Benjamin’s Reflections, Gertrude Stein’s Paris, France, Severo Sarduy’s Christ on the Rue Jacob, Jean Genet’s Fragments of the Artwork, Joan Didion’s After Henry, Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartelby & Co., David Antin’s I Never Knew What Time It Was, Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Juan Goytisolo’s Space in Motion, Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Dodie Bellamy’s Pink Steam. No auditors.
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- Jane Marcus
ENGL 86200
20thC British Poetry
Wednesday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [92278]
Beginning with Hardy, Hopkins and Yeats, Keith Tuma’s massive Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press) goes on through the classic poets of Modernism, World War I, the Auden Generation through contemporary poets, (more are included in New British Poetry, edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic (Graywolf Press), our supplemental text. The course will work to provide an overview of the century’s poetry with particular poets, historical moments, and movements given special attention. The changing canon of women writers and writers of color will be taken into account. We will work on David Jones’ World War I poem “In Parentheses,” the poems from a wartime anthology edited by Edith Sitwell, called Wheels, and the important rediscovered 1919 poem “Paris” by Hope Mirrlees, a major influence on The Waste Land, published in the same series by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press , followed by Nancy Cunard’s Parallax. Students will be encouraged to write a brief paper at the beginning of class, to make several short presentations in class and to produce a final paper of original research.
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John Matteson
ENGL 78000
American Women’s Writing, 1637-1900
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81500, WSCP 81000) [92277]
This seminar uses the lens of literature to examine the artistic and social achievements of a legally disadvantaged and politically excluded class: the American woman before the age of women’s suffrage. Invoking a broad range of genres, it observes women speaking of and to female experience and striving to define modes of individuality that are both expressive of self and supportive of community. We shall also consider the struggle of the woman writer to achieve credibility despite the resistance of a patriarchal community of letters, exemplified by Hawthorne¹s denunciation of the "damned mob of scribbling women" and Frank Norris¹s assertion that "fatigue, harassing doubts [and] a touch of hysteria" disqualified women as serious literary artists. Our seminar will discuss the growing diversity of the American national character and the convergence of race and gender issues in the oeuvre of African-American women writers. We shall also follow the transformation of female literary voices through times of vast social change and will examine how female behavior and expression evolved, both to meet and to challenge the requirements of an urbanizing, industrializing and (gradually) democratizing society. While investigating the competing demands of aesthetic achievement and popular success, we shall see how participation in the literary marketplace enabled women to enter and influence the masculine sphere of commerce, as well as how the narration of domesticity became a means toward arguing for a larger role for women outside the home. Novelists will include Sedgwick, Cummins, Stowe, Alcott, and Hopkins. Poets will include Bradstreet, Wheatley, Sigourney, Dickinson, Gilman, and the Zaragoza Club Poets. The genre of the non-fiction narrative will be explored through the writings of Winnemucca, Velazquez, Chen, and others. Other figures are likely to include Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Alice James, and contributors to The Lowell Offering. Many shorter selections will be drawn from the first volume of the recently published Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers. The course will require an oral presentation and a final research paper.
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- Blanford Parker
ENGL 83500
Philosophical Prose from Bacon to Hume
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [92267]
We will discuss the formation of enlightened discourse, the reversal of older metaphysical and symbolic systems, the growth of empirical and sentimental methods, and changes of rhetoric (style/figures). We will look at the Humanist and Cambridge-Platonist works that the later attitudes replaced. The main texts for the course are: Bacon’s Novum Organum, Hobbe’s Leviathan, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, and selections from Hume. The course does not require any previous preparation in the field of philosophy and will be a good foundation for understanding several elements of the modern critical mentality.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
ENGL 75600
Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 82000) [92271]
In this seminar we will pay particular attention to the manner in which Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and James Baldwin worked to make sense of the changing status of the Black American in the mid twentieth century. In particular, we will address questions of travel and migration, technological advance and changing conceptions of race in regard to questions of biology and caste. Moreover, we will be especially concerned with questions of masculinity and desire in these authors’ works. In addition to a set of critical works we will read Ellison's Juneteenth, Invisible Man, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory; Wright's Native Son, The Long Dream, The Outsider and Savage Holiday; and Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Just Above My Head.
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Joan Richardson
ENGL 84500
American Aesthetics: The Fact of Feeling
Thursday11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as ASCP 81500) [92263]
Primary Readings: Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, Wallace Stevens. The common distinguishing features of these figures are:1) a desire to accomplish through their fashioning and performance of language a ministerial purpose, beginning with Emerson, a naturalized ministerial purpose, “to annul that adulterous divorce which the superstition of many ages has effected between the intellect and holiness”; 2) to achieve this purpose by taking into account and translating into their stylistic distortions, in as accurate a representation as possible with a linguistic system, the structure of the natural world as it was perceived in their moments. All actively sought out and studied timely natural historical/scientific descriptions in order to be able to imagine the moving structure in which they lived. This structure for all of them replaced or was identical with the idea of God, and preserved, as well, in realigning the axis of perception, the function, in secular dress, of justification, preparing them and those instructed in their texts for the reception of grace now understood as fact informed by feeling, and complementarily, with the development of psychology and William James’s work, of feeling as fact. It was, significantly, out of this matrix that Pragmatism emerged. Secondary material will include pertinent readings in natural history/science, aesthetics, as well as in the work of certain figures contemporary to one or more of the major subjects, Charles Sanders Peirce, for instance. A seminar report and term paper will be required.
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Michael Sargent
ENGL 80700
Studies in Medieval British Literature
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [92264]
This course will take a variety of critical approaches – rhetorical, new-historicist, feminist and codicological, among others – to unpack the textual strategies and social/cultural role of a particularly remarkable group of late medieval texts: the writings of the Middle English mystics. We will look, for example, at the self-affirming rhetoric of Richard Rolle’s call to the heremitic life; at the way that the appropriation by the pious bourgeoisie of fifteenth-century London of the writings of Walter Hilton both reflected and subverted medieval notions of the religious “estate”; at the complex relationship between the writings of men spiritual advisors and “authorizing” narrators of women’s visions and paramystical experiences and the accounts written by women themselves – of which the Revelations of Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe are the best-known examples. We will explore the place of these writings in the construction of late medieval vernacular theology, which also included some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman and the works of the Gawain poet. We will also consider the physical manuscript culture in which these works were produced and disseminated: how was it, for example, that some of them were copied by the same professional scribes and illuminators as the works of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate and Gower, and survive in the same large numbers of manuscripts, yet have somehow slipped “under the radar” of English literary history? Others of these works survive in small numbers of undecorated, workaday manuscripts, were equally ignored during the intervening centuries, yet have succeeded in drawing considerable attention from modern critics. What determined whether a book would be a “best-seller” in a non-print culture? How did this change with the introduction of print technology late in the fifteenth century? How did printing itself change the literature that it transmitted? Course requirements include a presentation and a final paper.
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Talia Schaffer
ENGL 79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
Monday 11:45am-1:45pm 4 credits [92270]
This course explores what it means to participate in the discipline of “English,” in both pragmatic and theoretical ways. Pragmatically, we will look at how to do graduate-level research, how to locate specialized archival resources, how to identify current critical debates, how to position ourselves as fellow critics. We will work on issues that graduate students need to know. How do you complete a dissertation and how does that differ from a book? How do you write and submit a conference paper or an article? How do you put together a job application? How and what do you teach? What kinds of long-term projects does this profession reward? What kinds of expectations and information do you have about the profession, and how do they match the current economic reality? Theoretically, we will be talking about the historical development of academic “English,” from its beginnings as a tool for indoctrinating working-class and non-English subjects into an ideology of nationhood, through its effects on the literary marketplace and the development of modernism, to its recent role in the culture wars. We will think about ways that the discipline of “English” has changed over the decades, the current issues and controversies in various fields, the recent emergence of new fields as others slide into unfashionability, and the more global reach of today’s English departments. Our aim will be to interrogate the meaning of “English” departments and to discuss ways we might challenge or expand their role. In this course students will work together to discuss these issues, but will also develop their own research projects, either a bibliographic mini-edition or a preliminary dissertation prospectus, allowing you a chance to practice the skills and theories we discuss in class.
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Eve Sedgwick
ENGL 87100
Proust I
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [92265]
This is a year-long seminar (divided into two courses: Proust I and Proust II) organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the psychologies of object relations; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls – to name but a few. For ease of discussion, all students are required to use the new translation edited by Christopher Prendergast (individual translations by Lydia Davis et al.). Those who wish to can also read in French.
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Ira Shor
ENGL 89000
Can Paulo Freire work in Kansas? Critical Pedagogy in Reactionary Times
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as WSCP 81000) [92266]
These are agonizing times for progressive educators, dissident scholars, and public-sector advocates in general. Following author Thomas Frank who asked WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, this seminar will rethink the work of Paulo Freire in this reactionary era. Freire, perhaps the most important world educational thinker of the late 20th century, also co-founder of the Workers Party in Brazil which recently elected labor-leader Lula to the national Presidency, invented a rich rhetoric, theory and practice for democratic politics and critical pedagogy. His frameworks of generative themes, problem-posing, dialogic learning, "untested feasibility," and sociolinguistic research emerged from his work among battered peasants and workers in a Third World country. Can this rhetoric and pedagogy still hold promise for critical educators here in the wealthy North, where the political climate is more and more hostile to democratic politics? This seminar will rethink Freire's ideas and methods, and those whose work followed him, to examine their value for an American rhetoric and pedagogy that question the status quo, that seek transformative discourses in classrooms and society.
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Jon-Christian Suggs
ENGL 85500
Genre Theory and the African American Novel: From Picaro to the Petit Bourgeoisie, 1850-1930
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [92273]
Recent theorizing about the extended prose narrative requires that we take a new look at the development of the African American novel. Some attention, such as Sondra O’Neale’s reconstruction of the bildungsroman in the works of Frances E. W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gayl Jones, has been paid to specific generic issues as parts of this discussion, but nothing that sketches out the dimensions of a new overview of the development of the genre has been suggested. I’d like to take a look at how the African American novel emerges as an adaptive project from the Euro-Anglo-“American” conventions that were themselves evolving in the nineteenth century. For instance, we might ask how a narrative form at least partially dedicated to charting the rising and falling and then rising fortunes of individual members of an emerging class could be adapted to the experiences of subject-actors whose very existence as individuals capable of willed action, of choice, of the capacities of self-knowledge, of irony or of romance were denied by the dominant discursive culture within which they sought to write. The course will read some recent genre theory and revisit some older theories of the novel and take a chronological look at the African American novel from its nascence in the picaresque fugitive narrative through the domestic bourgeois comedies of the New Negro movement. We will end, I think, somewhat where we began, with the picaresque adventures of Max Disher in George Schuyler’s Black No More. Along the way we will try to theorize what we are seeing as African American writers fashion the American novel beside their white contemporaries.
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Scott Westrem
ENGL 80700
Seminar in Medieval Literature: The World of the Medieval Text: Geography, Travel Narratives, and Cartography
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits (cross listed as Comp. Lit. 80700) [92787]
This seminar will focus on concepts of space and of the world that are reflected in medieval European texts from a variety of literary genres, including verse narratives, geographical treatises, chronicles, encyclopedias, travel books, and maps. Scholars have tended to dismiss “medieval geography” as, at best, naive or, at worst, “complete futility” (to apply generally C. Raymond Beazley’s judgment of mappaemundi). This assumption will be a central issue in our seminar as we read material that testifies to considerable interest in (and intriguing speculations about) space—its measurement and boundaries, human habitation within it, its witness to supernatural reality, and its connection with time—between the years 1100 and 1450.This study will allow for a wide variety of critical perspectives. For example, the geographical travel book associated with the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville survives in some three hundred manuscripts, representing the French original and nine translations (several into English, one of which we will study, as well as Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Irish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish), yet it is itself a compilation of earlier books, chiefly about Asia, that have been knitted together in what some call a plagiarism and others a brilliant amalgam. In thinking about this book, then, students will find ample opportunity to test a wide variety of interests and abilities relevant to medieval studies—textual criticism, linguistic expertise, cultural studies, and contemporary literary theories that question the stability of a text or its author. Similarly, the encyclopedic account of the world attributed to Marco Polo and the great world map that hangs in Hereford Cathedral attract a wide variety of critical approaches. In all our endeavors, we will remember that these works are literary and medieval, which will (I hope) force us to consider issues about language, taste, literary quality, textual transmission, scribal influences, and many other matters. Readings will be available in the original language and in translation, except for one or two in Middle English, and seminar sessions will include some training in that language. Students competent in medieval (or modern, for scholarship) forms of Latin, Italian, French, German, Dutch, or a Scandinavian language will have an opportunity to apply themselves to primary sources in these languages. Written assignments: three short (2-3 page) focused ("reaction") papers, an essay (5-7 pages) focused on some aspect of the Middle Ages that we can see or use (such as a manuscript or items in a museum), and a final research paper (10-12 pages). Each student will also make a brief (8-10 minute) presentation to the seminar members. If you have questions, you may see me (4406.05), call me (x8326), or write me (swestrem@gc.cuny.edu).
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TBA
ENGL 91000
Dissertation Workshop
0 credits [92274]
Open only to English students at Levels 2 and 3
The workshop is led by a professor with considerable experience in directing dissertations. Students prepare and read each others' work (including drafts of the dissertation prospectus), as well as discuss the job market and the academic profession.” If you are Level 2 student writing your prospectus, or a Level 3 student at any stage in the process, you are welcome to register for the class. Unfortunately, the day/time and professor leading the workshop are always announced during the first week of every semester. Students may register for the class by adding it via an add/drop form during the first three weeks of class. Further information will follow ASAP.
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SEE ALSO:
- Ammiel Alcalay
MSCP 80500
Antiquities & Modernities: Exploring Political & Poetic Space in Medieval Studies
Thursday 6:30-8:30 p.m 3 credits
Through readings in a wide range of sources, this course will investigate two primary issues:
1) How can we — as students, scholars, and readers — approach sources that are classified as “medieval”? What might constitute the political, cultural, and conceptual parameters of such sources? What would we think of as “covered,” “off-limits” or in need of different approaches? We will explore how various scholars and writers have engaged with their sources for scholarly and creative ends. Examples of this may range from Louis Massignon’s study of al-Hallaj or Michael Sells’s versions of Ibn ‘Arabi to Robert Duncan’s lifelong concerns with Dante; Jack Spicer’s use of the Arthurian cycle; Charles Olson’s interest in Avicenna’s Visionary Recital as interpreted by Henry Corbin; Diane di Prima’s translations of late Latin love lyrics, or my own After Jews & Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Students will be encouraged to consider representations of the “medieval”, wherever they might appear (from films like El Cid, The Return of Martin Guerre, or versions of Tolkien, to the uses poets, novelists, architects, musicians and others have put “medieval” materials to. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the transmission of materials (whether through something like the Abbasid translation movement or the permutation of narratives, poetic forms, and material goods), as well as the relationship between learned and vernacular modes.
2) What are “medieval” conceptions of antiquity and modernity, and how do they differ from our own conceptions of those chronological markers? Given that medieval space intersects many different time frames (from Jewish and Islamic to Mayan), what happens when the traditional European and Asian space of medieval studies opens up to the Americas? Is the concept of Europe, for example, more of a cultural and political construct than a geographical entity? Why is Islamic Spain seldom considered an integral part of European history? What happens when we consider the transfer and transformation of the knowledge of classical antiquity through the Islamic world and into European culture? Once we begin exploding some of these categories, what happens when we venture further, to the Americas, for instance? How would looking at the period of around 600 to 1500 in the Americas recalibrate our concepts of the “medieval?” In exploring such questions we will consider many different texts and disciplinary approaches.
Texts may include:
Alcalay, Ammiel; After Jews & Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
Bernal, J.D., Science in History, Volume 1: The Emergence of Science
Blackburn, Paul, Proensa: An Anthology of Troubador Poetry
Blaut, J.M., The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism & Eurocentric History
Brotherston, Gordon; The Book of the Fourth World
Duncan, Robert; The H.D. Book
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Martin Burke
ASCP 81000
Intro to American Studies
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 3 credits
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Joan Richardson
Comp Lit 85000
Crossing Modernisms: Cavafy and Eliot, Sefaris and Stevens, Ritsos Pound, Elytis and Williams
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 3 credits
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