|
Fall 1999 Course Descriptions
-
70200
T, 4:15-6:15
Prof. Martin Elsky
Renaissance Geographies: The Locations of Culture
This course is an introduction to the various ways Renaissance and Early Modern culture has been mapped in geographic space--from the local, the national, and the imperial. Our starting point will be current debates over the kinds of borders in which culture is both produced and received. We begin with the claims for the authenticity of local communities and the counter-claims for large cross-cultural geographic space. Using recent work in humanist and post-humanist geography as the framework, we will examine how scholarship in several disciplines defines the places in which identity is formed and agency is enacted in the Renaissance and Early Modern period. Those places will include local regions, the city, the nation, and empire (European and transatlantic). Readings will be drawn from cultural and political history, literature, and art history. The themes of the course will include the processes by which cultural borders are imagined, projected, and crossed. Attention will also be paid to the assumptions made by critics and historians concerning the "natural" locations of Renaissance and Early Modern culture. Because this an interdisciplinary course, students are encouraged to introduce material drawn from their home discipline.
[top]
-
70800
W, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Michael Sargent
Multiplicity in Medieval Texts
Between postmodern critical observation and everyday experience on the Internet, we are coming to recognize the degree to which uniformity in a text is the precarious product of print technology and authorial/editorial intention. Because it was produced in a manuscript culture, on the other hand, medieval literature tended to a textual multplicity that modern editors find themselves forced to explain away, either by choosing a single "best-text" manuscript whose readings will be followed come what may, or by reconstructing an ideal text representing what the author "actually" wrote-in either case, burying away in the usually-unread textual apparatus all evidence of what the other manuscripts have to say. In this course, we will look at several medieval English texts that exist in multiple forms for a variety of reasons, and the responses of modern editors and critics to them. These will include: "Sir Orfeo", the F and G Prologues to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, selections from The Canterbury Tales, the Z-, A-, B- and C-versions of Piers Plowman, Mandeville's Travels, and the short and long versions of the Revelations of Julian of Norwich.
[top]
-
U713
Tues., 6:30-8:30
Prof. W. R. Elton
Shakespeare's Comedies
Survey of the work of our greatest comic writer: Shakespeare's comic achievement, among Renaissance traditions of comedy. Close reading of Shakespeare's major comedies: including Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida (his Inns of Court revels plays). Merchant of Venice; As you Like It (among his romantic comedies); Measure for Measure (among his so-called problem plays); and selections among his late romances.
Emphasis will be on original reading of texts, plus awareness of Renaissance contexts. Critical traditions regarding comedy, and varied critical approaches (e.g., feminism, gender-study, etc.) will be applicable.
Two main aims: close, independent readings of dramatic texts; and practice in professional scholarly-critical writing. Research tools and methods will be emphasized. No previous requirements. One ten-page paper to be submitted. Regular conferences.
This should be an enjoyable and profitable experience in maximizing perceptions of Shakespearean meanings; and in preparing for professional scholarly-critical achievement.
(Start by reading plays cited, preferably in the New Arden editions; and reading through Stanley Wells, ed., Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare.) Use New Arden texts.
[top]
-
72300
Th, 6:30-8:30
Profs. Joseph Wittreich and Will Fisher
Paradise Lost: In Theory, In Literary Criticism
We will spend the entire semester wrapping an array of theoretical discourses around Paradise Lost-Reception and Genre Theory, Cultural Materialism, Biblical Hermeneutics and Poetics, Narratology, Deconstruction, Historicisms Old and New as well as Marxist and Revisionary, Gender Theory and Feminism, Queer Theory, and Cultural Criticism-all of which provide a reminder that Milton's poetry regularly exposes the limitations in critical systems, which would contain and explain it. We will also trace the fortunes of Paradise Lost within the history of criticism, examining its shifting reputation and giving special attention to Milton's status as a transformational author who, creating his own traditions, uses them as provocations for individual expression and as incitements for the formation of whole schools of criticism. Current controversies in Milton criticism-the poet's presence in his poetry and where his presence is to be found, his cast of mind (orthodox or heretical), Milton's authorship of De Doctrina Christiana and why it matters, the relationship (if any) between Milton's prose writings and poems, the politics of Milton's poetry, the functions of an author, the state of the text and whose text to teach from-these controversies will be used to provide an initial handle on Milton's epic prophecy, which is said to have effected a Copernican Revolution in the history of poetry. How so, and why so? Each participant will be responsible for a theoretical approach-and for the critical history of some part of the poem (a book, or episode, or crucial passage). Requirements. Oral reports/participation. A Final Paper that, first of all, will use the history of criticism to identify a critical problem(s) and examine existing answer(s) and that, then, will deploy a new theoretical approach to reformulate the problem(s) and reach toward new answers to them.
[top]
-
73100
T, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Blanford Parker
18th Century Literature: 1745-1796
A survey of major poets and prose writers from the death of Pope to the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, which will include a range of genres from the works of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Armstrong, Young, Johnson, Cowper, Smart, Burns, and Blake. We will also read several works of literary criticism and intellectual prose including selections from Warton, Johnson, Kames, Gray, Walpole, Hume, and Cowper. We will stress the growth of the cult of sentiment, the sublime, naturalism and landscape, transitional Romanticism and survivals of Augustan rhetoric. We will end by looking at forms of the Gothic in verse.
[top]
-
74100
W, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Joshua Wilner
Wordsworth's Prelude
An intensive study of Wordsworth's great autobiographical poem. Discussion will focus on the close reading of selected passages with particular attention to the poem's experimental exploration of the rhetoric and epistemology of self-representation, and the ambivalent situation of Wordsworth's project within the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase,"patriarchal poetics." To this end, we will also be giving some consideration to the relation of The Prelude to Paradise Lost and to Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, which students may want to look at over the summer, along with the brief 1799 "two-part" Prelude. We will also look at some of the best recent critical writing on The Prelude, including work by Chase, Hartman, Jacobus, Caruth, de Man, Hertz, Liu, Simpson and Jonathan Wordsworth. Requirements: 1 short paper, 1 long paper, active class participation.
Required text: The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 (Norton Critical Edition, ed. Abrams, Parrish, and Wordsworth)
How does subjectivity enter into what was viewed as radical self-creation?
We will examine the poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Percy Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth
[top]
74100
W, 11:45-1:45
Prof. Meena Alexander
Romantic Poetry: Creating Selves
What does it mean to conceive of lyric poetry as self-creation? How are we to understand the paradigm set up by Romantic poetry? This course involves an exploration of subjectivity, memory and the shifting bodily hold of the real that we discover in Romantic poetry.But what connection does this emphasis on inwardness bear to the marking out of Englishness in this era of early imp erialism, the racialization of the sublime and the contestatory arrangements of gender? How do memory, traumatic forgetting and the singular subjectivity enter into what was viewed as radical self-creation? We will examine the poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Percy Shelley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Phyllis Wheatley; the prose writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas de Quincey, John Stedman and Olaudah Equiano.
Questions of lyric voice and the right to self-creation will be set by the side of issues of race and imperial culture. In our attempt to map memory and traumatic forgetting we will deal with issues of cultural translation moving from Wordsworth's "picture of the mind" through Kalidasa's theatre of memory (his `Shakuntala' was translated by William Jones) and forwards to Toni Morrison's notion of "rememory.''
Requirements: This course will run in seminar fashion with class participation and discussion. A class presentation during the semester on a chosen topic will form the basis of a short essay; one final paper.
[top]
-
74300
W, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Fred Kaplan
Representative Victorians: Carlyle, Dickens, Browning, James
This course highlights the special conditions of artistry and vision of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and Henry James, from Carlyle's essays in 1832 to Henry James' Wings of the Dove in 1902, defining a period roughly synchronous with Queen Victoria's reign. It will also serve as an introduction to Victorian literature and culture. Other Victorian writers, British and American, may be points of reference & discussion. The "representative" in the title is both the conventional use that means typical of a time and place but also the use that emphasizes representation, the act of making/depicting through language and structure. Vision for these writers and for the British and American Victorians in general was political, social, religious (though not for Dickens or James), and ethnocentric as well as literary. Each of these writers is very much of his place & time (all four lived most of their lives in Victorian Britain); but each contributes substantially to how in the dog-days of the late twentieth century we represent the period and the Victorian canon. For Carlyle and Dickens revolution was an issue and an attraction; for Browning, religious and psychological considerations were compelling; for James, money class, and Anglo-American culture were firmly in place and the artistic vision needed to apply itself to social and psychological nuances. Each believed that he lived in times of rapid, radical change which needed to be encouraged, discouraged, redirected. Mechanism/materialism, church-state relations, social equality, individual transcendence and the artist are key issues for Carlyle; materialism, property, money for Dickens; ethnocentrism, relativism, epistemology and human psychology for Browning; class, gender, and art/epistemology for James. Of Carlyle's works, we will read selected essays, selections from Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, and Past and Present; of Dickens', Bleak House, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities; of Browning's, selected poems from Men and Women and Dramatis Personae and selections from The Ring and the Book; of James', Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of the Dove, and Henry James on Browning. Each student will deliver an oral report and write a term essay.
[top]
-
74400
Th, 4:15-6:15
Prof. N. John Hall
The Victorian Novel
A somewhat traditional course, based on the titles often considered "high points" from the period many see as the high point of the novel in English. Plenty of reading, but enjoyable reading-for the most part. Along with the novels we shall investigate various approaches, themes, connected issues, as in parentheses.
Dickens: David Copperfield and Great Expectations (the autobiographical novel; Victorian publishing practices) 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) 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. One oral report, one paper.
[top]
[top]
-
75200
M, 6:30-8:30
Professor James de Jongh
African American Literary Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance 1895-1963
This course will attempt to survey the literary terrain of African American modernity, that is the period between Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition Speech in 1895 and the death of Washington's nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, on the very same day that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" oration at the March in Washington in 1963. In the decades between, three generations of "modern" black writers explored a range and variety of new options and changing forms of literary sounding in order to evoke and express the changing experiences and evolving concerns of Americans of African descent. While this period of literary modernism in African American culture corresponds roughly with the natural life span of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, any study of the innovative soundings of literary modernism in African American literature also must include the earlier efforts of Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins and James Weldon Johnson, and the later achievements of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, and James Baldwin. Understanding the distinction between these modernist writers and the post-modern, post Civil Right Movement generation of the Black Arts Movement also will be among the objectives of this seminar.
[top]
-
79000
Th, 6:30-8:30
Prof. Ira Shor
White Rules: Gender, Class and Pedagogy in 'Whiteness' Discourses
In the past decade, "whiteness studies" has emerged as an interdisciplinary area..Critical discourses on "whiteness" have built on substantial challenges to white supremacy made by multicultural and anti-racist trends in the past few decades. Further, "white" studies have also drawn on the considerable advances made in feminist thought and action. Lastly, "whiteness" discourses have crossed paths with the renewal of working-class studies since the 1970s. From these foundations, "whiteness" is becoming visible in relation to gender and class. In an academy and society where "white" and "male" and "middle-class" and "straight" have been the markers of normality, "whiteness" studies can help decenter the hegemonic dominance of white supremacy, male supremacy, corporate supremacy, and heterosexism. Investigated critically, "whiteness" can also be made visible in regard to teaching and school policy. Because white dominance pervades all institutions, it influences curriculum design, pedagogy, testing, admissions criteria, scholarship awards, and standards for academic discourse and correct usage. This seminar will explore some discourses on whiteness to discover their rhetorical and pedagogical challenges to the status quo in school and society. Lots of discussion and participation are welcome in the seminar. Readings:
--Books:
The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters--Ruth Frankenberg
Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror--eds. Delgado and Stefancic
The Wages of Whiteness--David Roediger
--Articles/Selections:
White is a Color! White Defensiveness, Postmodernism, and Anti-Racist Pedagogy--Leslie Roman
How White Teachers Construct race--Christine Sleeter
My Problem With Multicultural Education--John Garvey
Decolonization and the Curriculum of English--Patrick Mcgee
Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination--bell hooks
'Whiteness As Property"--Cheryl Harris
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness--George Lipsitz
White Silence, White Solidarity--Christine Sleeter
Racial Formation and "The Racial State"--Omi and Winant
Required Writing:
1. Weekly journals on the readings.
2. End-term paper.
[top]
-
79500
Th, 4.15-6:15 p.m..
Prof. Gordon Whatley
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
The course aims to help students (1) to develop some expertise and proficiency in literary research and the practice of literary and textual criticism by working in depth on a single short work (preferably verse) of their own choosing, from their special field of literary interest; and (2) to assess the evolution of modern critical methods and trends, and their changing theoretical background, as evidenced in the chosen work's public reception and critical/interpretive history. Intended primarily for graduate students in the first or second year, the course is a workshop, emphasizing the practice of literary scholarship through bibliographical research in primary and secondary sources, and the close study of the literary object as "text," artifact, cultural and historical ikon, etc. During the first 8 or 9 weeks of the course, through weekly reports, oral and written, each student will research and write different sections of a comprehensive critical introduction to their chosen work, as well as preparing an edition of the text, with appropriate apparatus. The last month will allow time for synthesis, revision, and improvement of the serially produced introduction and text. While students are expected to select the work in question from their area of likely specialization, the workshop structure of the course offers exposure to research tools, sources and critical issues in a variety of fields and periods in which their colleagues are engaged. In addition to giving brief oral reports on progress, problems and discoveries week by week, students will share their results with each other by posting bibliographies, and drafts of portions of the critical introduction, on a web site to be dedicated to the course. Students will select their semester projects before the first class, through prior consultation with the instructor, either in person or via email. They are encouraged, but not required, to select works of which manuscripts or early printed editions are accessible in New York, especially at the NYPL and Morgan library.
[top]
-
80200
W, 4:15-6:15
Prof. H. Aram Veeser
Symptoms of Modernism
A certain hypothesis about Modernism is to be tested with D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Orlando; Conrad, Nostromo; Katherine Mansfield, short fiction; George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier; Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children; Shaw, Major Barbara; Eliot, The Waste Land; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood; Jean Genet, Thief's Journal; Josephine Hart, Damage. Modernism is held together by two obsessions. (1) Remnants of the past. These are inert prejudices needing to be cast away. People must own their desires. (2) Life power. In the naive psychoanalytic formulation, our vital drive potentials need to be liberated from social repression.
Although post-modernisms have long displaced the modernist project, modernist tenets still dominate the New York Times Book Review: Own your desire; Don't duplicate your parents' stagnation; Live with ambivalence; Use your mind (and therapy) to break unconscious patterns. In contrast, literature, film, psychoanalysis, and Marxism-discourses of narrative consciousness and liberation-have all gone off at rather acute angles. How to account for the middle-brow residue of modernism? Short essays will be presented to try to account for this strange case of uneven development. Psychoanalytic theory will be represented by Freud ("The Uncanny"); Peter Brooks ("Repetition, Repression, Return); Robin Lyndenberg ("Freud's Uncanny Narratives"); James Mellard ("Lacan and the New Lacanians"); Juliet Flower MacCannel, ("The Regime of the Brother"). Marxist framing texts will include Lukacs ("Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat"); Gramsci ("On the Southern Question"); Benjamin ("The Storyteller"); Althusser, ("Ideological State Apparatuses"); and Zizek, ("Why Is Woman a Symptom of Man?").
The course requirements are one oral report and one 15-20 page paper. In the paper, the writer ought to consider the usual critical problems and answers related to her or his target novel or play or poem. She/he ought to develop a related or new problem that addresses topics of this course.
[top]
-
80200
T, 4:15-6:15
Professors Patricia Clough and Nancy Miller
Gender, Power, Knowledge: Responses to Modernity
What is the twentieth century? We won't answer that question directly. We will focus instead on significant shifts in consciousness that have marked the course of our modernity. The seminar takes as its point of departure several texts that introduced radically new perspectives on representation and human experience. Looking at various forms of cultural expression, we will examine the intellectual paradigms that continue to frame current debates: the discourse of the "other," the status of the unconscious and subjectivity, the atrocities of war and the work of memory, the interrelation of technology and disciplinarity. The seminar aims to analyze the power relations that inhere both in the construction of gender and in the organization of knowledge. Readings include: Adorno, Beauvoir, de Lauretis, DuBois, Fanon, Foucault, Freud, Haraway, Heidegger, Jameson, and Irigaray; as well as Borges, Conrad, Delbo, Ellison, Gordimer, Hurston, and Woolf.
[top]
-
80400
T, 6:30-8:30
Prof. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Queer Performativity
The term "performativity" has achieved considerable currency in contemporary discourses of gender, sexuality, and critical writing. Yet its bearings and potential are still highly ambiguous. Seeming to carry the authority of two quite different discourses, that of theatrical performance on the one hand, of speech-act theory and deconstruction on the other, it nonetheless means very differently in each. The stretch between theatrical and deconstructive meanings of "performative" seems to span the polarities of, at either extreme, the extroversion of the actor vs. the introversion of the signifier; the supposedly total efficiency of liturgy, advertising, and propaganda vs. the self-referential signifier's dislinkage of cause from effect. This course will begin from the hypothesis that performativity and performance constitute a theoretically, literarily, and politically significant space of mutual overlap and mutual redefinition--somewhere in a neighborhood called queer. The class will explore ways to shift some of the emphasis of this interdisciplinary conversation away from its current fixation on epistemology ("Performativity/ performance can show us whether or not there are essential truths and how we could, or why we can't, know them") by asking new questions about affect ("What motivates performativity and performance, and what individual and collective effects are affectively mobilized in their execution?"). Interpretive discussions of a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, American, and Asian writings and related cultural practices will illustrate the emergent new paradigms. Our explorations will be based on theoretical and historical readings from J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Jeffrey Weeks, Esther Newton, Silvan Tomkins, Michael Moon, and others, but will also include reading of literary texts, viewing of performance tapes, and consideration of the forms of performativity involved in both contemporary spirituality and identity-based political activism.
[top]
-
80500
F, 11:45-1:45
Prof. David Richter
Theory Colloquium
A broad survey of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. The movements covered will include formalism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, gender studies, queer theory, marxism, new historicism, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. We will also attempt to understand the theoretical issues underlying the canon wars of the 1980s and the current disputes about aesthetics and ideology, and the future of literary studies as a discipline. Our class meetings will feature, whenever possible, an invited guest who is expert in the area under discussion (e.g., Richard McCoy for new historicism, Eve Sedgwick for queer theory). Readings will be taken primarily from the instructor's textbook, The Critical Tradition 2e, with additional readings recommended by our guest placed on reserve. (There will also be a short list of novels, stories, plays and poems so that we have texts in common while discussing the application of literary theories.) Writing assignments will be frequent and short: no vast term papers. Our aim, each week, will be to understand the characteristic rhetorical strategies of the various approaches, their powers and limitations, the questions they can answer and those they cannot even ask.
[top]
-
80700
Th, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Catherine McKenna
Introduction to Medieval Irish
This course introduces the student to medieval - Old and Middle - Irish and its literature. We begin by focusing on the grammar of Old Irish, and by the fourth week begin to translate from early Irish lyric poetry, hagiography, and saga. We also survey the history of Irish literature, Europe's earliest vernacular literature, from the seventh century to the twelfth, and students are encouraged to read additional texts in translation. In addition to weekly translation assignments, there will be a midterm and a final examination.
[top]
-
81000
Th, 4:15-6:15
Prof. Richard McCoy
Dissertation Workshop
This course is designed for students who have begun or are about to begin working on the dissertation prospectus. Workshop sessions will alternate with group discussion and individual attention, first, to move candidates through completion of the various parts of the prospectus: 1) Description of project; 2) Survey of related work in field; 3) Progress of research; 4) Chapter outline; 5) Contribution to field; 6) Bibliography. From this plan, then, candidates will complete the course with at least one chapter draft. Work at all stages will be shared to be commented on by both instructors and other students. Underlying considerations directing discussion will include current critical/theoretical conversations, marketability, audience, scope, scheduling feasibility.
[top]
-
81000
M, 6:30-8:30
Prof. W. R. Elton
Poetry Workshop
This course is devoted to developing poetry skills, at all levels. Regular consultations and class readings of poems. Use of anthologies, e.g., Stanley Burnshaw, The Poem Itself. Considerations of the most recent currents in poetry-writing, including European poets; and of the market for poetry today. Poems will be handled with sensitivity and discretion. NOTE ON THE PROFESSOR: widely published poet, including, most recently, Partisan Review. Collection, Wittgenstein's Trousers (1991). Poetry-writing grant, 1998, Vermont Studio Center. Many years of directing poetry workshops at the University of California, Riverside, and at CUNY Graduate Center. Many public readings.
Whether you decide to take this course or not, please feel free to drop into my office to discuss your poetry.
[top]
-
81400
M, 4:15-6:15
Prof. Mario DiGangi
Political Shakespeare
-
This course will serve as an introduction to Shakespeare and the"political" methodologies that have transformed Shakespeare studies during the last twenty years. We will read plays from various genres along with recent essays in new historicism and cultural materialism (including historicist approaches to gender, sexuality, religion, and race). The essays will provide a common set of critical tools for analyzing the ideological effects of Shakesperean drama in early modern as well as contemporary cultures. We will also historicize our analytical tools by situating "political" Shakespeare criticism within the various disciplinary and institutional contexts through which it developed. This will involve a consideration of recent debates surrounding the materialist study of Renaissance culture.
We will read approximately eight plays, which might include the following: The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. We will use The Norton Shakespeare.
Critical essays will be available in a course reader. A New History of Early English Drama (Columbia UP, 1997), a comprehensive collection of historical essays on premodern theater and culture, is recommended as a reference work.
Requirements will include a class presentation and either two shorter papers or one longer paper.
[top]
-
81600
T, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Louis Menand
American Art and Thought of the 1890s
An examination of American culture of the 1890s. Works to be studied include William James, The Principles of Psychology; Charles Sanders Peirce, essays; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "The Path of the Law"; John Dewey, essays; Henry James, stories about art and artists; Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson; William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes; Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"; Herman Melville, "Billy Budd"; Augustus St. Gaudens, sculptures and monuments; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper." We will place these works in a social and political context by looking at additional contemporary materials, including Supreme Court cases, such as Plessy v. Ferguson; debates over the Spanish-American war; the first articulation of a right to privacy; the invention of cinema; the medical and legal situation of women; the socio-economic consequences of the second industrial revolution; and the closing of the frontier. The class as a whole will read, usually, a single text, and individual students will present the results of their (directed) research on the larger context, to be followed by general discussion. Students will also submit a final 20-page paper on a topic of their choice, which may be the topic of their directed research.
[top]
-
85500
M, 2:00-4:00
Prof. Norman Kelvin
Naturalism and Aestheticism: Encountering the Other
-
Naturalism and Aestheticism both begin in the last part of the nineteenth century and both are responses in France to the defeat of radical political movements. Zola, paradigmatic figure for Naturalism, uses it to disclose the class system that survives the disappointed agenda for change. Flaubert, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley's "true Penelope," as he was for Henry James, substitutes formal excellence for political hope. But this mutual beginning as reaction to French history is lost when the two movements enter Anglo-American discourse. On the one hand, they become autonomous literary theories. On the other, they reinscribe themselves, by the end of the century, in political imagining. Finally, as literary movements, they encounter each other: as binary opposites and as a presence within the other. And the impossibility of avoiding the other results in textual tension and instability. It requires an investigation that should lead to a reassessment of both movements. We begin with Zola's Germinal and Flaubert's Sentimental Education and follow with works by Huysmans, Barbey, Villiers, Pater, Wilde, Ella D'Arcy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, viewed as aestheticist texts marked by naturalist devices. Novels of the Goncourt brothers, George Moore, Olive Schreiner, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser will be assessed as naturalist fiction in which aesthethicist concerns are present. We will also note that at the very time Aestheticism begins to define Modernism in England and France, Naturalism comes to mean modernity in America. Finally, we will see that Aestheticism in the visual arts crosses the Atlantic with greater ease than it does in the novel, and ask why this should be so. Background readings will consist of theoretical approaches to our topic (a list will be provided). Requirements are a class presentation and a term paper.
[top]
-
86000
W, 6:30-8:30
Prof. Tom Hayes
Post-Structuralism: The Influence of European Theory in America Since the End of World War II
In this course we will attempt to answer the question of why European "theory" has had such a profound impact on the practice of literary criticism in America since the end of World War II . We will pay special attention to the question of why what is called post-structuralism or deconstruction has had such a strong influence on literary criticism and fiction-writing (e.g. Toni Morrison, John Barthes, Don DeLillo, and Robert Goover), as well as on the fields of women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, black studies. Taking an historical approach, we will try to discover why the post-war rejection of the humanist concept of "man" as a rational, knowing subject attracted the attention of the Yale School of critics (Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hatman, Paul de Man), as well as Fredric Jameson, Craig Owens, Donna Haraway, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Judith Butler. We will read theoretical texts by Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Zizek.
A few relevant texts that provide overviews:
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern. Routledge, 1995.
Dean, Carolyn J. The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan and the History of the Decentered Subject. Cornell, 1992
Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed. Black Literature & Literary Theory. Methuen, 1984.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denegration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought. California, 1993.
Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition. California, 1992.
Pefanis, Julien. Heterology and the Postmodern. Duke, 1991.
Rajchman, John. Truth & Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics. Routledge, 1991.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia, 1997.
Weed, Elizabeth, ed. Coming to Terms. Routledge, 1989.
Zizek, Slavoj, ed. Cogito and the Unconscious. Duke, 1998.
Zizek, Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject. Verso, 1999.
[top]
|
