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ENGL 76000 “Modernisms Visual and Verbal: 1860-1960,” Mary Ann Caws.  2/4 credits.  Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM.  [CRN 93017] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

Touching on an obviously wide range of topics, this investigation of various kinds and styles of what we generally call "modernism," and "post-modernism" will adapt itself as it goes along to the interests of the participants. The convergences with such movements as Symbolism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Existentialism, Concrete Poetry, and the like (or the unlike) will not be avoided.  Such questions as: what about the "pre-modern" and its dating, what really matters to make something "modern," is there a "neo-modernism" or/and a "pseudo-modernism," how have the generally considered high points of this hundred-year scope changed, and when, what changes in the so-called canon are important as the history of modernisms will underlie the conversations, whose title is plural in order to leave the range as open as possible. Some crucial localities can be predicted in the two different and interconnecting realms of art and text -- listed alphabetically, in the understanding that the representation of one kind or style may be very limited: Simone de Beauvoir,  Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Joseph Cornell, Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Henry James, James Joyce, Stéphane  Mallarmé, Henri Matisse, Tom Phillips,  Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

ENGL 87400 “Film Noir in Context:  From Expressionism to Neo-Noir,” Morris Dickstein. 2/4 credits.  Wednesday 6:30PM-9:30PM.  [CRN 93018]  (cross-listed with FSCP).top

This course will explore the style, sensibility, and historical context of film noir. After tracing its origins in German expressionism, French “poetic realism,” American crime movies, the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, and the cinematography and narrative structure of Citizen Kane, we will examine some of the key films noirs of the period between John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon of 1941 and Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958. These will include such works as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Out of the Past, Detour, Shadow of a Doubt, In a Lonely Place, Gun Crazy, The Killers, DOA, Ace in the Hole, The Big Heat, and Kiss Me Deadly. We’ll explore the visual style of film noir, the importance of the urban setting, the portrayal of women as lure, trophy, and betrayer, and the decisive social impact or World War II and the cold war. We’ll also examine the role played by French critics in defining and revaluing this style, and touch upon its influence on French directors like Melville (Bob le Flambeur, Second Breath), Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player), and Chabrol (La Femme Infidele, Le Boucher). Finally, we’ll look at the post-1970s noir revival in America in such films as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Body Heat, and Red Rock West. Readings will include materials on the historical background of this style, key critical and theoretical texts on film noir by Paul Schrader, Carlos Clarens, James Naremore, Alain Silver and others, and the work of some hard-boiled fiction by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, David Goodis, and Patricia Highsmith.

Students will be expected to do an oral report and a 15-page term research paper, as well as to study the assigned films both in and out of class.

ENGL 86000 “Genealogies of Magical Realism: From European Surrealism to the Literatures of the Americas, and Beyond,” Lyn Di Iorio. 2/4 credits.  Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM.  [CRN 93019]. top

This course explores the literary mode known as magical realism, starting with a focus on its relationship to other literary modes and schools such as allegory, European surrealism, and modernism, and progressing to some classical Latin American magical realist texts.  We will also evaluate magical realist influences and effects in works by U.S. writers, including minority writers, as well as some postcolonial texts.  We will pay close attention to a dominant strain in Latin American magical realism that rejected the European influence in surrealism, which itself had resisted empiricist canons and bourgeois norms.  We will attempt to make sense of how classical Latin American magical realism posited a magic innate to the terrain of the Americas in the wonder expressed in the narratives of its conquest and discovery; the primeval dimensions of its rainforests, canyons, and vast rivers; the mixing of its heterogeneous races; and the sincere faith in the animistic and shamanistic religious practices of its indigenous and African American groups.  Finally, we will examine how contemporary U.S., and postcolonial, texts challenge and revise this type of magical realism.  Works we may read include: Manifestoes of Surrealism and Nadja by André Breton; The Kingdom of This World and The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; The Famished Road by Ben Okri; Geographies of Home by Loida Maritza Pérez; The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle by Edgardo Vega Yunqué; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; and short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, María Luisa Bombal, and Sandra Cisneros.  In addition to the primary texts, we will read selections from some works of literary criticism and anthropology by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Suzanne Preston Blier, Maggie Ann Bowers, Lyn Di Iorio Sandín, Angus Fletcher, Fredric Jameson, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, José David Saldívar, Michael Taussig, and others.  The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussion of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.  Seminar participants will hand in a final (15-20 pp) research paper exploring novel literary or anthropological aspects of magical realism or surrealism. 

ENGL 81100 “Early Modern Print and its Detractors:  Author and Artist, Publisher and Reader,” Martin Elsky. 2/4 credits.  Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 93020] (cross-listed with RSCP 72100). top

This course will examine the possibilities that the mechanically reproducible word and image brought to the production of the literary, visual, and intellectual arts and their delivery to an audience. Readings will be drawn from history, literature, and art history. We will begin by considering the various ways print technology affected the dissemination of ideas and information in early modern culture. We will then turn to the impact of print on literature and art in relation to competing forms of publication (painting, manuscript, and performance). Topics will include the relation between painting and reproducible print, and the professionalization of the printmaker as artist in Italy and Northern Europe; the rivalry between print publication and manuscript circulation of verse and prose; the relation between print and performance versions of drama; the development of the professional authorial persona and the resistance to authorial status; the place of women writers in networks of publication; the deployment of varied means of publication to negotiate position with family, coteries,  and patrons. The course will end by considering the combination of text and image in the illustrated publication of news of the conquest of the New World. Topics will be examined in relation to specific writers and artists, including Mantegna, Dürer, Diana Mantuana, Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, Labé, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, and Cortés. Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, participants are encouraged to make use of material from their home discipline. Assignments will include an oral report and a semester project.

ENGL 87500 “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Autobiographical Fictions,” N. John Hall. 2/4 credits.  Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 93021]. top
     
There are all sorts of fascinating critical problems in autobiography--beginning with the  seemingly impossible problem of definition, and moving through questions of readers' expectations, the ways in which autobiography gives voice to particular groups, the issue of whether women's autobiography differs from men's, autobiography as "act" or performance, 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 that all (or almost all) fiction is autobiographical.   Our principal texts range from early Victorian through 20th century.  Often two readings will be paired, for obvious reasons, in a vain effort to discover the true state of things, to find out, as the saying goes, "what really happened."

We will first consider contemporary theories of autobiography (brief excerpts supplied in photocopy): Gusdorf, Olney, Lejeune, Bruss, Eakin, Benstock, Abbott, Heilbrun, Nancy K. Miller, Mason, et al.

We will discuss in relatively quick succession a series of short autobiographical texts and letters (supplied in photocopy) in tandem with corresponding chapters in novels generally regarded as especially autobiographical: Charles Dickens, the "Autobiographical Fragment" paired with the first 15 chapters of David Copperfield; Charlotte Bronte, letters to M. Heger paired with selections from Villette; George Eliot, selected letters and poetry paired with selections from The Mill on the Floss.
     Next, we read three supposedly "straightforward" autobiographies:
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography  (parts of his novel The Small House at Allington are
   relevant in this connection).
J. S. Mill, Autobiography.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son.
       We return to two avowedly autographical novels:
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh.
James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, seen against the corresponding treatment of
    Joyce's early years in Richard Ellmann "magisterial" biography.
We move to three celebrated memoirs, works especially noteworthy for autobiographical "strategy" and "performance":
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.
                                                             ------------
Time permitting, and as the class wishes, we shall also look into in various unconventional approaches to autobiography as in  Max Beerbohm’s  Seven Men, Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, John Updike’s Self-Consciousness, Eunice Lipton’s Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire.
We may even entice some living autobiographer to make a brief guest appearance. 
     One oral presentation; one  paper; no examination.

ENGL 79500 “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship,”Carrie Hintz. 4 credits.  Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM.  [CRN 93022]. top

This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be a part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century. Theoretically, we will examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and how various theories define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline of “English” studies. Practically, we will discuss how to define objects of inquiry (“texts” and “contexts”) within “English” studies, how to research such objects, how to identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how to develop new knowledge. The course follows four main lines in inquiry, examining: 1) archival and bibliographical work, 2) concepts of text and textuality, 3) theoretical approaches, and 4) the historical, institutional context of the discipline.
Requirements: The work for the course has two parts: 1) readings in common that will be discussed in class, and 2) an individual project pursued throughout the semester and designed to put into practice the more general issues taken up in the course. Students will periodically report in class on their progress in the individual project. The course grade will be based on the final project, on the work done in stages on that project throughout the semester, and on general participation throughout the semester. 

ENGL 86600 “When was the Postcolonial?: Temporality in The Theory and Practice of Decolonization,” Peter Hitchcock.  2/4 credits.  Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM.  [CRN 93023]. top                                                                                                 
In 1996, Stuart Hall posed the provocative question, “When was the post-colonial?”  His answer, in a wide-ranging paper of typical bravado, is to separate the “us and them” polemics of the anti-colonial movements from a time/space in which such binaries can be interrogated for their post-colonial implications.  The past tense is a conceit that simultaneously foregrounds necessarily different moments of decolonization and a more general problem of temporality in postcolonial critique.  This course aims to come to terms with the vexed logic of time in postcolonialism since it clearly marks the difference between the half life of theoretical concern and the deep structures of change in the experience of postcolonialism itself.  Much of the doubts raised by Hall and others in the Nineties over the state of postcolonial studies revolved around whether it constituted an academic field with rigorous protocols of self definition.  Part of the course will analyze this theoretical paradox, since many of the key concepts in play (ambivalence, mimicry, differance, etc.) seem to dissolve the field in advance.  Yet the major question for postcolonial studies came not from the internecine struggles of the academy but from the changed meanings of postcoloniality in light of the collapse of the Eastern bloc (and various client states) and the reordering of the globe in the image of neoliberal structural adjustment.  Suddenly, the time of some postcolonial states became rapidly truncated and anxious and we soon witness the effulgence of the failed state as a verdict on decolonization.  The temporal disjunction between theory and postcolonial states will be one focus our study, but so too will symptoms of sur-vivre (living on) in theory and in major literary texts that bear the imprimatur of postcolonialism beyond its time.  The time of decolonization is with us still, but as a form of future conditional.  As such, the course can be read as an introduction to important theorists and writers in “this field which is not one” but also as a series of pertinent lessons on the significance of time and of chronotope in critical analysis.

Readings will include: Hall, Derrida, Spivak, Bhabha, Min-ha, Mbembe, Bakhtin, Parry, Marx and Said.  Fiction will include Abani, Djebar, Wicomb, Vera, Habila and a film, Mambety’s Hyenas.  Individual essays will be posted on the course website.

Course requirements: a class presentation and a term paper to be discussed with the instructor.

ENGL 80600 “Narrative Theory,” Anne Humpherys. 2/4 credits.  Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM[CRN 93024]. top
 
This course will survey developments in the theories of narrative from the end of the nineteenth to the early 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, Kathy Mezei, 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, perhaps 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.

ENGL 86000 “Global Decadence,” Richard Kaye. 2/4 credits.  Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 93025] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

Although critics invariably consider Decadence in terms of British and French literary texts—and only then as a brief “mauve interregnum” (in John Updike's words)--this seminar explores Decadence as an internationally pervasive set of ideas, movements, techniques, and figures, many of which have maintained a keen afterlife in modernist and post-modernist  texts.  In addition to focusing on Anglo-American Decadent writing, the class will explore French, German, Italian, and Russian literary Decadence along with a work from Latin America.  In the writings of Huysmans, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, Decadent scenarios and tropes seem to exist outside of history, as both naturalist and realist techniques are skewered, (although in the anarchist writer Octave Mirbeau’s semi-satiric fiction, Decadence becomes a politically cognizant mode.) In fact, the European turn-of the-century is an ideologically complex period of pervasive fears and fantasies, in which excesses of language and erotics dominate, along with such sensational figures as the New Woman, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the cult-inspiring aesthete, the vampire, and the femme fatale.  Fin-de-siècle writers navigated a world in which theories of “degeneration” and sex scandals preoccupied the popular imagination.  In the writings of Pater, Symonds, and Wilde, Aestheticism emerges as a robust movement that increasingly becomes linked to Decadent peril.  The course will explore how British and American women novelists sought to situate themselves within urban Aestheticist and Decadent cenacles invariably defined as male. Additionally, we will consider two German novellas—Thomas Mann’s “Blood of the Walsungs” and Georg Trakl’s “Desolation"--as well as Strauss’s operatic adaptation of Wilde’s “Salome.”  The influence of Wilde will be traced elsewhere in Europe, where writers variously respond to the playwright's writing, public downfall, and posthumous myth.   Modernist poets and novelists such as Yeats, Eliot, and James, meanwhile, critiqued and refashioned Decadent figures, tropes, and strategies.  Finally, the seminar will take up twentieth-century revisions: Nabokov’s “Lolita” as a tragicomic Salome narrative, Philip Roth’s novella “The Ghost Writer” as an homage to James’ “The Author of Beltraffo”, and Will Self’s rewriting of “Dorian Gray” in “Dorian". Issues of translation will be considered.
Among the other texts we will consider: Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” Huysmans, “Against Nature”; Octave Mirbeau, “The Torture Garden,” Baudelaire, “Poems” (Selections);  Wilde, “Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Salome”; Mallarmé, “Poems,” (Selections);  Stoker, “Dracula”; D'Annunzio, "The Child of Pleasure"; Yeats, "Poems" (Selections); Eliot, “Poems” (Selections);  Schreiner, "Story of an African Farm," Kuzmin, “Wings”; José Lezama Lima, “Paradiso”; “The Dedalus Books of Russian and German Decadence"; Showalter, ed. “Daughters of Decadence.” Critical and theoretical texts will include Gautier, “Preface to ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin,” Nordeau, “Degeneration” (Selections); Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Bataille, “Literature and Evil,”  Talia Schaffer, “The Forgotten Female Aesthetes” (Selections); Richard Ellmann, “The Uses of Decadence,”  Richard Gilman, “Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet," Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman,”  Michael Riffaterre, “Decadent Pardoxes,” Laura Engelstein, "The Keys to Happiness," Leo Bersani, "The Culture of Redemption."  Mid-term paper and a final paper.

ENGL 86400 “The Lyric Essay,” Wayne Koestenbaum. 4 credits.  Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 93026] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

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.”  In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page lyric essay, always in response to a specific assignment.  What we will call provisionally the “lyric essay” is a hybrid form, borrowing 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.  Our reading may include a focus on the philosophical essay as a lyric performance—unstable, divided, fitful, stammering, explosive, misleading.  Possibilities for the syllabus are works by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Dorothy Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Colette, Robert Walser, James Baldwin, Jacques Lacan, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lydia Davis, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson.  No auditors.  4 credits only.

ENGL 70500 “The Canterbury Tales,” Steven Kruger. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 11:45AM-1:45PM.  [CRN 93027]. top

This course will consider a variety of questions raised by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which we will read in the original Middle English. A work that is – in Donald R. Howard’s resonant formulation – “unfinished but complete” and that survives in a variety of quite different textual incarnations (with the order of the tales varying widely from manuscript to manuscript), The Canterbury Tales raises significant questions about medieval authorship, principles of poetic structuring and closure, manuscript transmission, and scribal practice. The tales themselves are various in genre and poetic form; they also are often based upon, even (loosely) translated from, earlier sources. We will consider how their variety, and the variety of the sources, shapes our reading of individual tales and of the larger work in which they are contained. The Canterbury Tales is often taken as a work concerned to comment upon, or even intervene in, late medieval English social arrangements, and we will consider whether and how the work provides social or political commentary on the “estates” of English society; on gender hierarchies; on the status of the Church and its clerical representatives; on war; on marriage and the family (etc.).

Alongside the text of The Canterbury Tales itself we will read a variety of other kinds of material: (1) sources and analogues for the tales; (2) later literary responses to Chaucer’s poem; (3) historical/documentary material that might shed light on Chaucer’s work; (4) current critical treatments of The Canterbury Tales; (5) theoretical/critical discussions that might be pertinent to reading Chaucer and medieval texts more generally.

Students should buy the Riverside Chaucer or another full, annotated, original-language edition of Chaucer’s works or of The Canterbury Tales. Additional readings will be placed on E-reserve. Students will be required to do one in-class presentation and a final seminar paper. 

ENGL 78000 “Women’s Writing: Women’s Modernist Documentaries,” Jane Marcus.  Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 93028] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

Concentrating on non-fictional works by Rebecca West  - Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, Nancy Cunard – The Negro Anthology (1934)  [in photocopy form, using the 800 page original edition, NOT the reprints]- and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Years and the Scrapbooks, we will discuss these three projects as modernist documentary projects.

The work of women photographers like Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, Kati Horna and Dora Maar and the work of war journalists will be examined – Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, etc.  Possibly women’s historical novels will fit into this project as well.

ENGL 89000 “Narrative and Ethnographic Inquiry,” Rebecca Mlynarczyk. 2/4 credits.  Monday 4:15PM-6:15PM.  [CRN 93029]. top

This seminar will give students a chance to learn about narrative approaches to research in such fields as composition and literacy studies while at the same time practicing these methods in an exploratory research project of their choosing. Readings will include key theoretical texts by D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, John Creswell, Clifford Geertz, H. L. Goodall, Jr., Max van Manen, and Laurel Richardson as well as books, articles, and dissertation chapters illustrating different forms that narrative inquiry can take.  Some of these sources will be read by the whole class while others will be read and reported on by small groups.  Authors of several works on the reading list will visit the seminar to discuss their research and respond to student questions. 

Early in the semester, students will identify an area of interest for their own explorations using various methods of narrative inquiry, and we will spend considerable class time meeting in small research/writing groups to work with materials from these ongoing projects.  Some of the questions we will inevitably confront include:  What type of inquiry do I wish to pursue?  Should I decide on research questions before or after entering the field?  What is the role of theory in narrative inquiry?  What techniques are most useful for recording observations and emerging interpretations?  How should I approach analysis? How do I account for my own positioning in the research?  What options are available for writing?  We will use Blackboard to continue these discussions outside of class time.  Class members will work together to negotiate the writing requirements for the course, with the understanding that this writing will consist primarily of drafts and revisions resulting from the students’ own projects.  Inquiries can be directed to rebecca.mlynarczyk@gmail.com.

ENGL 83500 “Johnson and His Age,” Blanford Parker. 2/4 credits.  Tuesday 11:45AM-1:45PM.  [CRN 93030]. top

ENGL 82100 “Representing Bodies in Early Modern England,” Tanya Pollard. 2/4 credits.Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM.  [CRN 93031] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

This course will examine how writers imagined and represented bodies in early modern England.  Conceptually, bodies changed dramatically in the period: the longstanding humoral model, inherited from the Greek physician Galen, was confronted with challenges from Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsan pharmacy, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, and new illnesses and medicines introduced by international travel and trade.  Amid all these changes, bodies on page and stage were dissected, dismembered, drugged, displayed, disciplined, adorned, painted, and ravished.  We will examine how different genres represent these and other bodily states, with attention to the body's relationship to the mind, the emotions, the environment, and literature itself.  Readings will include tragedies (including The Duchess of Malfi, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Hamlet); comedies (including The Taming of the Shrew, Bartholomew Fair, and Volpone); and erotic epyllia (including Venus and Adonis and The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image); as well as selections from cookbooks and cosmetic manuals (such as Platt's Delights for Ladies), antitheatrical polemics (including Gosson's School of Abuse), medical texts (such as Crooke's Mikrocosmographia, and Culpepper's A Directory for Midwives), and conduct books (including Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman).  Assignments will include a presentation, occasional brief written responses, and a final paper.

ENGL 80300 “Readings in Black American Literary/Cultural Criticism and Theory,” Robert Reid-Pharr.  2/4 credits.  Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM.  [CRN 93033] (cross-listed with ASCP 81500 and WSCP 81000). top

This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of Black American literature and culture. Participants in the seminar will be asked consistently to wrestle with the question of whether or not it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism. In relation to this question we will read a number of authors who seriously challenge our ability to utilize race as a critical category. We will also, however, be equally concerned with understanding how one might best define what has come to be known as the Black American literary tradition. Thus, the students who will be best served by this course are those who possess at least a basic knowledge of both nineteenth and twentieth century Black American writing. Questions of "black" corporeality, gender and sexuality will figure prominently in the course. In particular, participants will be asked to think through the manner in which developments in Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies impact Black American literary and cultural critique. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Authors whom we will examine include, among others: Paul Gilroy, Candice Jenkins, Jacqueline Goldsby, Claudia Tate, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Stephens, Madhu Dubey, and Daphne Brooks.

ENGL 91000 “Dissertation Workshop: Publishing Seminar,” Robert Reid-Pharr.  0 credits.  Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM.  [CRN 93032]. top

Open to level 2 and 3 students only.  In this seminar, students will be asked to come to the first class session with a piece of work (finished or unfinished) that they expect to submit for publication.  Throughout the semester, the participants in the seminar will “workshop” these pieces, paying particular attention to theoretical and research methods, style and voice.   More importantly, we will treat basic questions of how to prepare and submit non-fiction prose to academic journals and other venues.  To that end, students will be asked to produce lists of venues in which they would like to publish.  Each of these will be “annotated.”  That is to say, the students will be responsible for explaining what the focus audience of the journal, press, etc. actually is, giving examples of similar texts that have been published in or by these institutions, and commenting on the mechanics of how to place work within them.  These will be shared with all other members of the seminar.  The hope is that all students will have taken at least the first steps toward publication by the end of the semester.

ENGL 75100 “Race, Slavery, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” David S. Reynolds. 2/4 credits.  Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 93034] (cross-listed with ASCP 82000). top

Slavery, the greatest injustice in American history, gave rise to compelling literary works and occupies a central position in American cultural studies.  For Emerson and Thoreau, slavery not only contradicted the nation’s ideals but also raised profound questions about ethics and individual responsibility. Whitman tried to mend the social divisions caused by slavery through all-embracing poetry.  Melville probed the psychological and metaphysical ambiguities of what he described as “the knot” of slavery.  Other pre-Civil War authors who explored slavery’s many dimensions included John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Maria Child.  Slavery produced the nineteenth century’s most popular novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as powerful autobiographies and novels by African Americans. This seminar considers the full range literary treatments of slavery in the context of nineteenth-century racial attitudes, religious and reform movements, and developments in economics and politics.  Arguments against and for slavery are represented by the writings of reformers and orators.  Mark Twain’s novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson provide literary codas in their retrospective portrayals of slavery.  Along with exploring primary texts, the course traces developments in race-related literary criticism and theory.  A term paper and an oral report are required.

ENGL 80200 “American Aesthetics: From Revelation to Neuropolitics,” Joan Richardson.  2/4 credits.  Thursday 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 93035] (cross-listed with ASCP 81500). top

Even before the moment of first arrival in the New World, John Winthrop offered his fellow passengers on the Arbella in delivering his lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), a vision of their projected community as a body. His words fashioned a proleptic covenant with the God whose Providence could ensure him and his accidental congregation safe landing on the threatening shore. For Winthrop and his hungry listeners, the body offered as "model" was that of Christ. Within this conception, all the many members were to imagine themselves performing throughout their lives and into the generations following them, if God's promise was to be kept on their "errand into the wilderness," the multifarious functions necessary to the ongoing life of the one great spiritual body described in Revelation. Doing so would fulfill their continuing part in the covenant secured with their successful anchorage. Thus the idea later described as the motto of the pointedly secular republic, E pluribus unum, had already been articulated in the theological motive that gave birth to this variety of "American" experience.

Of course, by the time the Founding Fathers of the republic gave what would become, literally, currency to the Latin phrase, Enlightenment values had begun to re-inflect the nature of God, the anthropomorphic image yielding somewhat to the more abstract Deistic notion of Godhead. Still, the idea of active participation in the larger body, translated into "separate but equal," informed the population of the growing nation through the years of the secularizing impulses of the nineteenth century. This translation was epitomized in the person and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who pronounced "the sentence [as] the unit of democracy." His vision was of a naturalized Pentecost wherein the Holy Spirit became identified with this intrinsically processual political principle, realized by him as an organism, ever renewing itself and being modified in a changing environment. Through the rhetorical structures of his lectures and essays, the "model" of Christ's body was gradually refigured as the activity of "divinity"--divining, questioning, uncovering the evolving "method of nature" beneath the transient forms of appearance. "Man thinking" rather than "man inhabited by thought"--inhabited by ideas inherited from authority, scriptural or otherwise--was to recognize his participatory responsibility in "creation," describing for each generation "an original relation to the universe," a relation informed by developments in the different "sciences" as they precipitated out of natural history.

The Emersonian project has continued, translated into the 20th century in part through the work of William James and in part through the work of philosophers and poets whose attention to the sound of words demand that we reflect on our own thinking processes, divine what it is to mind, have a mind--Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Stevens, Stein, Susan Howe, for example. Recent work in neuroscience and in some areas of theory continues to investigate and illuminate the nature of these processes, examining how information becomes embodied, the nature of interpretation, feedback. What was once revealed through religious experience, strictly understood, is now considered an aspect of what William Connolly calls "neuropolitics." Discussions through the semester will trace the trajectory sketched here and provide an appropriate context for examining issues underpinning the upcoming elections.  

Requirements: Term paper and brief seminar presentation.

ENGL 87100 “Proust I,” Eve Sedgwick. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 93037] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

This is the first half of a year-long seminar organized around a close, start-to-finish reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. We will be considering a wide range of the issues, motives, and ambitions embodied in the novel, including its complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro- American homosexuality. Other preoccupations that I hope will emerge through our discussions include the changing possibilities of novelistic genre; narratorial consciousness; texture; habit and addiction; experimental identities; adult relations to childhood; the spatialities of present and past; the vicissitudes of gender; the bourgeois maternal in relation to such other roles as the grandmother, the aunt, the uncle, and a variety of domestic workers; the uses of paganism; alternatives to triangular desire; the languages of affect; phallic and non-phallic sexualities; the phenomenology and epistemology of oneiric states; the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism; and the affective, phenomenological, and philosophical ramifications of an interest in the transmigration of souls – to name but a few.  Readings will be in English, in the old translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, though with reference to the French text as well.

ENGL 89010 “The Final Frontier: Rhetorics of Space and Place,” Ira Shor. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM.  [CRN 93036]. top

This seminar will pose Space and Place as rhetorical frontiers. Space and Place are fairly recent terrains for discourse analysis. Historically, rhetoric has focused on linguistic forms and practices, on language that circulates verbally, textually, or mechanically. For 2500 years, rhetoric has taught us how to understand and produce meaningful linguistic discourses. In doing this, rhetoric functions as rules and  techniques to craft discourses for intentions and situations. Such rhetoric shapes our social selves so that we can “read” and “be read by” everyday experiences. Given rhetoric’s long preoccupation with orality and textuality, how then do we use it to reveal the meaning of Space or Place? How does the built world become a language we decode? How do built environs function as spatial pedagogies teaching us to fit into such spaces?  If Space and Place conform us, can critical pedagogies teach us to reform and resist the arenas we inhabit and the selves they inscribe in us?

Physical spaces, then, are here posed as embodied discourses, formative encounters, and sites of power relations. They teach us what exists, what is good, and what is possible, to use Therborn’s framework for the pedagogy in rhetoric. Foucault argued that powerful regimes of discourse are housed by disciplined spaces—schools, prisons, hospitals, factories, etc.—which “normalize” us as we inhabit them. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus--the unequal social process that structures distinct preferences and abilities in different populations--also operates at both the linguistic and the physical levels. To study this final frontier, readings will be in Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey, Foucault on “heterotopias,” de Certeau, Cronon, several recent texts of composition in public spaces by Grego and Thompson, Mathieu, Welch, and other sources.    

Our society is driven by conflict over Space and Place, hardly news. In 2008, New York City is in perhaps its greatest building boom ever. The City is being remade massively, erasing architectural history, settled neighbors, open spaces, public needs, and local memory. Centuries ago, Puritans in 1620 came upon an abandoned Indian settlement with leftover beans, corn, and seed for planting. Most natives there had died from germs spread by rescued European seamen in a prior shipwreck. The Puritans’ good fortune to find a fertile empty place signaled to them divine providence. Some then sought out natives to repay for what they had taken and even worried over their right to native property. A future governor of Plymouth, John Winthrop, addressed these concerns in a famous 1629 tract, Reasons for the Intended Plantation in New England: “As for the natives in New England, they enclosed no land, neither have they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve land by, and so have no other natural right to these countries. So if we leave them sufficient for their own use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and us.” Two wars later, 1637 and 1675, the English held the land. Natives did not use land as did Europeans whose guns, germs, economy, and rhetoric drastically reshaped the terrain. 

This European-American rhetoric of land rights contrasts with the rhetoric in Star Trek, from which this seminar’s title comes. Captain Kirk, the muscular envoy, declared Deep Space as “the Final Frontier.”  However, Kirk was restricted by his Federation’s “Prime Directive”: Never interfere with the historical development of any worlds you encounter. Kirk’s adventures in Space were apparently ruled by a post-colonial ethic: seize no lands, appropriate no wealth, disturb no settled populations. Such an ethic, elusive in history, is inspirational in a sci-fi Utopia. Space and Place, finally, are not merely embodied discourses but are also imagined structures brought into being by the ethics and rhetorics constructing them. 

ENGL 75500 “’Origins’ and the African American Novel,” Jon-Christian Suggs. 2/4 credits.  Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM.  [CRN 93038]. top

This course is a combination of theory and literary history: how might we understand the origins of the African American novel in the nineteenth century—as  distinct from the American novel, the English novel, the “novel”? Six early African American novels  (Clotel, Our Nig, The Garies and Their Friends, The Bondwoman's Narrative, The Curse of Caste, and Blake) are our "problems."  Against and around them we will seek to build a frame of literary, more broadly cultural, and socio/economic/political influences.  Readings in theories of the novel, slave narratives, non-fiction prose, and poetry by African Americans of the colonial and antebellum periods will be supplemented, time permitting, with archival work at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A supplementary reading list will be available by midsummer at the latest. Meanwhile, please begin reading those novels among the six listed with which you are not yet familiar. Some familiarity with American literature in general before 1865 would be helpful. Class presentations and a paper.

ENGL 74000 “Romantic Pedestrians in the City,” Alan Vardy. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM.  [CRN 93039]. top

This seminar will examine a broad range of literary representations of the life of the writer in the city--their daily interactions and transactions in traversing urban space.  For example, Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience will be read as the field notes of a politically engaged urban peripatetic. In addition to Blake’s poetry, the metropolitan writing of De Quincey (including Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Hazlitt and Lamb will provide the textual bases for much of our discussion.  Urban discontents, most notably Wordsworth, will be read as part of the social and cultural context, and the whole of the seminar will be placed in the broader context of the shift of the British population from the countryside to the city with the enclosure of common lands and the rise of industrial capitalism.  The trope of Romantic solitude, figured in the solitary Wordsworthian walker, will be challenged by a counter-aesthetic emphasizing engagement, sociability, and social critique.  We will discuss Magazine culture (including The Analytical Review, The London Review, The Examiner, The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, etc.) as the form and forum of aesthetic and social contestation.  The seminar invites a broad range of approaches to the material (walking and cognition, the politics of resistance, the poetics of space, the construction of urban subjects, the invention of the flaneur, proto-situationists, to name but a few possibilities).  Blake, De Quincey, Hazlitt and Lamb texts will be required, and many essays and poems will be available on e-reserve.   

ENGL 70300 “Introduction to Old English Language and Literature,” E. Gordon Whatley.  Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 93040]. top

 “Old English” (OE) constitutes the first documented phase of the English language (ca. 700-1150), and OE literature, preserved in manuscripts of the 9th-12th centuries, is the most plentiful and diverse of the surviving vernacular literatures of early medieval Europe. While some knowledge of OE is fundamental to understanding (or teaching) the History of the English Language, as well as for serious work in most Middle English and Scots literature, OE is of abiding interest in itself. The language at first glance looks “foreign” but experience has shown that motivated students routinely succeed in acquiring a reading knowledge in a 14-week course such as this one. After a few weeks of elementary grammar and short translation exercises, the focus shifts to reading more extensive passages of secular and religious prose in OE and translation, including lives of saints such as the “cross-dresser,” Saint Eugenia, and/or the martyred English king Edmund. Also to be studied are some classic pieces from the surviving manuscripts of poetry (Dream of the Rood, Judith, Wanderer or Seafarer, Genesis B, The Wife's Lament, riddles, etc.). In addition to working on the weekly texts, students will occasionally report briefly on criticism or theorizings of the readings (with some attention to the development of Anglo-Saxon studies, “philology,” “English,” and the Academy). Also required is a modest paper (12 pp) on any text or topic in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. On the Web there are excellent sites to help with learning the language and researching the literature and culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Contact me with any queries, and please register early if you want to take the course: E.Whatley@QC.cuny.edu.

ENGL 84200 “Romanticism and the Ethical Imagination,” Nancy Yousef.  2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15-6:15. [CRN 93041] (cross listed with WSCP 81000). top

This course is at once a study of major romantic authors and of the interaction of ethics and literature considered as a problem of literary history and theory.  We will address ourselves to the challenging revisions of enlightenment aspirations that make the period so tumultuous, and the texts it produced so rich.  Fundamental questions first mooted in philosophy find new urgency and complexity in romantic literature even as they are fought over the in political sphere: the force and limits of sympathy, the necessity of trust, the foundations of equality.
The course is divided into three parts.  We will begin with a study of key pre-romantic formulations of the problem of self and other in Hume, Rousseau, and Kant.  We will then consider responses to the French Revolution as symptomatic of the convulsive revaluation of terms such as "compassion" and "community" in writings by Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Hegel.  The third section of the course will be devoted to case studies in the core of the romantic canon, focusing on Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Jane Austen.

Important historical events and cultural developments that upset established forms of domestic, communal, sexual, and political relations will be touched on, but our main concern will be the evident conceptual imperative to establish the bases ("natural," "conventional," "contractual") of relationships between individuals as manifested in a range of imaginative, theoretical, and political writing.  At once comparative and interdisciplinary, the course offers an opportunity to explore methodological and historical approaches to the relationship between ethics and literature (secondary readings will include Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jessica Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Cora Diamond).

ENGL 91000 “Dissertation Workshop,” TBA. 0 credits.  TBA [93042]. top

Open to level 2 and 3 students only. Intended for students writing dissertation prospectuses and drafting chapters of their dissertations.