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Spring 2001 Course Descriptions
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70200
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Caribbean Women's Literature, 1970-present
Prof. Barbara Webb
This course will explore the relationship between gender and culture in the fiction, poetry, and essays of Caribbean women writers. Although these writers represent a variety of responses to the challenges faced by Caribbean women in general, they share a common emphasis on the relationships within the family and nation that tend to perpetuate the inequities of class, race, and gender associated with the colonial past. We will discuss their reinterpretations of Caribbean history and culture, their revisions of nationalist discourse, and their experiments with language and literary form. The course includes texts by Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Opal Palmer, Erna Brodber, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Edwidge Danticat. The major focus of the course is the writing by women from the English-speaking Caribbean; but given the increasingly cross-cultural focus of Caribbean literature since the 1960s, selections by writers such as Paule Marshall, Rosario Ferre, and Maryse Conde will also be discussed. This course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week; a term paper (15-20 pages) will also be required.
- 70500
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Chaucer's Ends: The Canterbury Tales
Prof. Scott Westrem
Everyone agrees that when Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, he left unfinished, and possibly unordered, a collection of tales supposedly told by a group of pilgrims on the road to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, Britain's most popular medieval pilgrimage site. Yet almost everyone would also agree that the resulting book, which he called "the tales of Caunterbury," has guaranteed Chaucer his place with Shakespeare as a towering writer of literature in English. In fact, as Harold Bloom observes in The Western Canon, the Tales "consists of giant fragments" that leave the reader with "little impression of something unfinished." Although there are actually times when the impression of "unfinishedness" is quite powerful, Bloom's sense of the work may explain why even the editors who arrange Chaucer's collected works place his Tales first (though everyone believes he was writing it in his last years), and thus before The Book of the Duchess, which most scholars consider to be his earliest major poem, and one which he actually did complete, probably around two decades before he turned to the "General Prologue." In this seminar, we will read the Book and almost all of the Tales, asking many questions, only one of which will be: What is Chaucer doing? Thinking about the question will lead us to examine his sources (most of them in other languages), themes, narrative voice, character development, and use of genres; we will also pay attention to crucial--if apparently fusty--matters such as codicology, since manuscript evidence certainly influences important conclusions scholars draw about the text. We will of course pay attention to Chaucer's indebtedness to the international literature of his day, particularly to the Italian and French writers of his generation (and one earlier) whose work he used (and transformed) in stunning ways that make him an originator of the very idea of comparative literature. We will also examine pertinent criticism (with an attempt to grasp something of the history of Chaucer criticism), including work by D. W. Robertson, Donald Howard, Jill Mann, V. A. Kolve, David Aers, Lee Patterson, Mary Carruthers, and Carolyn Dinshaw. Knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for this seminar, but a desire to learn it is; we will spend a fair amount of time in early sessions on Chaucer's language. I pay a great deal of attention to student writing with assignments spread throughout the semester: four informal "reaction" papers, one 6-8 page paper requiring work with a manuscript (original or facsimile) or some other medieval artifact, and a lengthier (15-page) research paper. If successful, this seminar will never finish.
Required Texts: The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) and Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, ed. Helen Cooper (New York: Oxford U P, 1989, rpt. 1991).
- 74100
M, 6:30-8:300 p.m.
Lyric, Prose, Modernity
Prof. Joshua Wilner
In one of Baudelaire's late prose poems, a poet tells of losing his halo while dodging traffic on a crowded boulevard: "It slipped from my head into the mire of the pavement, and I didn't have the courage to pick it up - better to lose my insignia than to break my bones." In this allegorical anecdote, Baudelaire captures the desanctified language of the lyric poet as it passes through the busy, crowded world of prose. The cultural condition Baudelaire evokes and its connection with a changing sense of the relationship between poetry and prose will be the subject of this course. We will begin by examining a group of romantic texts (some pages from Rousseau's Reveries, some fragments by Schlegel, the debate over "poetic diction" between Wordsworth and Coleridge) which more or less directly challenge neo-classical genre theory and adumbrate formal possibilities which will emerge more distinctly over the course of the century. We will then turn to another group of romantic texts, including writings by Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Mary Shelley, to study the gender sub-text which informs this history - a sub-text in which the figure of poetic election is male and the matrix of prose female. De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which was a self-conscious experiment in "impassioned prose," and Baudelaire's pre-symbolist Artificial Paradises, which was directly influenced by De Quincey and marked the later Baudelaire's turn from poetry to prose, are at the historical center of the course. They will provide a bridge between the romantic writers with whom we began and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers of experimental prose with whom we will conclude: Rimbaud, Stein, Woolf, and Benjamin.
Requirements: for 4 credits - one short (3 to 5 page) and one long (15 to 20 page) paper; for 2 credits - one 5 to 7 page paper.
- 74100 (a mini-course; 2 credits)
4 sessions, April 17, 19, 24 and 26, 11:45-1-45.
Wordsworth and Clare
Prof. Angus Fletcher
- 74200
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Victorian Poetry and Poetics
Prof. Donald Stone
In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth made grandiose claims for poetry ("the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge") which Victorian poets were to draw upon in a variety of ways: the choosing, for example, of "incidents and situations from common life"; the blurring of the distinction between poetry and prose-or, for that matter, between poetry and other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, and religion. In addition, the Victorians gained from their Romantic predecessors a sense of the poet as "unacknowledged legislator of mankind" (Shelley), as "rock of defence of human nature" (Wordsworth). In this course we will be looking at some of the ways in which Victorian poets, as heirs to the Romantics, redrew the boundaries of poetry, allowing them to write as sages and critics, artists and moralists. For the first class, students are urged to reread or reread Wordsworth's "Preface"-- and are recommended to look at Shelley's "Defence of Poetry and Carlyle's "The Hero as Man of Letters." Thereafter, we will survey some of the varieties of Victorian poetic expression, taking the form of Tennyson's poetics of loss; of Arnold's merging of poetry and criticism; of the Brownings', Clough's, and Meredith's use of poetry as fiction; of the Victorian novelists' use of fiction as poetry (selected passages from Thackeray, Elliot, Charlotte Bronte, Peter); of the fusing of painting and poetry by the Pre-Raphaelites (Dante and Christina Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne); of the expression of religion in poetry (Hopkins, Newman); of the comic spirit in Lear, Carroll, Thackeray, and W. S. Gilbert; of the love of poetic craft in Hardy; of the outpourings of (in Yeats's phrase) the "Tragic Generation" (Wilde, Dowson, John Davidson, James Thomson); and finally of the creations of (Yeats's phrase again) the "Last Romantics"-Yeats, Henley, Housman, and Kipling. This is a vast literary terrain, and it is expected that students will focus on poets they particularly like and want, or need, to study. If students want to add authors to the list (Sir Henry Taylor? Alice Meynell? Thomas Lovell Beddoes?), they are encouraged to do so. We will also consider some of the major critical positions on poetry-by Arnold, Browning, Bagehot, Ruskin, Pater, Symons, among others-made during this period. Each student is responsible for an oral presentation and a term paper.
texts: The Major Victorian Poets: Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, ed. William Buckler (Riverside ISBN 0-395-14024-2) The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Daniel Karlin (Penguin ISBN 0-14-044578-1) Thomas Hardy, Selected Poetry (Oxford ISBN 0-19-283273-5)
- 74300
F, 11:45-1:45 p.m.
The Victorian Novel
Prof. Felicia Bonaparte
The nineteenth century was an age of radical and constant change. Old ideas were being challenged. New ideas were being born. Self, society, human relationships, history, politics, science, art, every area of human thought, every aspect of human existence, every detail of human life was in a state of transformation. Our purpose in this course will be to understand these revolutions and to examine the many ways in which the nineteenth-century novel sought to reflect them and address them. We will therefore be concerned both with what the novels say and with the complex ways they say them, thus with the manner in which the novel comments on social, psychological, philosophical, historical, political, and economic realities, as well as with its language and structure. Finally, we will be concerned with the larger aesthetic issues raised by the these novelists themselves as they attempt to work out a form uniquely designed to express their vision. Readings will include the following (in the editions cited, where listed): Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Penguin); Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Norton); Charlotte Bronte, Villette; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Norton); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World Classics, Bonaparte introduction), George Meredith, The Egoist; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford World Classics, Sutherland introduction).
- 74800
W, 6:30-8:30
Remapping Early American Studies: North American Studies in a Global Frame
Prof. David Kazanjian
This course remaps early American literature via current, critical debates about the "transatlantic," "global," or "international" circuits of that literature. We will read and discuss early American texts, as well as the methodologies and approaches through which those texts have been understood, in order to examine critically both American Literature and American Studies. We will set the stage with two weeks of readings on the current, critical debates, including work by Jenny Sharpe, Amy Kaplan, Donald Pease, and Michael Denning. We will then examine a series of textual and historical flash points in early American, cultural and literary history: * European Narratives of Discovery and Exploration
* The Sexing and Racing of Criminality in Late Seventeenth and Late Eighteenth-Century North America
* The Eighteenth-Century Rise and Nineteenth-Century Decline of Black Sailors on the North Atlantic
* The Turn of the Nineteenth-Century Movement for a National Culture
* "Dime Novels" and the U.S.-Mexico War
Major themes will include: white settler colonialism; class, race, sexuality, gender, and ethnic formations; the rise of the nation-state and national culture; manifest destiny and imperialism; "exceptionalism" and "internationalism;" canon formation; "highbrow" and "lowbrow" literatures. Primary material could include texts by: Richard Hakluyt, William Bradford, John Smith; Ann Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, "Adam," Samuel Sewall, John Saffin, Johnson Green; Brition Hammon, Olaudah Equiano, Venture Smith, Nancy Prince, George Henry; J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Susanna Rowson, Charles Brockden Brown, William Apess; George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Harry Halyard.
- 74900
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Melville
Prof. William Kelly
The works: most of the prose, a significant chunk of the poetry, the critical tradition. An oral report; a seminar paper. Deep divers of every persuasion are welcome; the faint of heart are encouraged to seek enlightenment in other venues.
- 75100
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Postwar American Fiction
Prof. Morris Dickstein
This course will examine some of the most important works of fiction published in America after 1945 as literary works but also as reflections of some significant social developments taking place in the country, including the effects of the war, echoes of the Holocaust, the new middle-class affluence, the growth of mass culture, the decay of the cities and migration to the suburbs, the cold war, the new ethnicity, the rise of the Beats and the counterculture, the civil rights revolution, the war in Vietnam, and the resurgence of feminism. The writers may include Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, John Cheever, Philip Roth, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, and Toni Morrison, among others. Some attention will be paid to the influence of their predecessors who wrote between the wars. There will be some readings and oral reports dealing with the other arts, such as film, painting, and music, and with the social critics of the period, among them David Riesman, William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Betty Friedan. An oral report and a term paper will be required of each member of the seminar.
- 75100
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Art and Thought of the 1950's
Prof. Louis Menand
A study of art, literature, film, and ideas, mostly American, in the 1950s. We will try to see the works we study in their social context, particularly the context of the Cold War. We will examine specifically the following topics: the Hiss case; the post-studio Hollywood movie; Abstract Expressionism; the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine; the New York intellectuals; the Beats; the Sputnik crisis; Elvis Presley and the emergence of rock 'n' roll; the photography of Robert Frank; the literature of ethnicity; structuralist theory (Frye, Merton, Barthes, and Chomsky); the civil rights movement; and European cinema (Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, and Black Orpheus, all released in the United States in 1959). Texts include: Advertisements for Myself, The Liberal Imagination, On the Road, Howl, Mythologies, The Little Disturbances of Man, Peyton Place, Sunset Boulevard, and The Cat in the Hat. Students not enrolled in a Ph.D. program must have the permission of the instructor.
- 75200
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Passing, Lynching and Jim Crow in African American Literature
Prof. Michele Wallace
This course will examine issues of gender, sexuality, passing, lynching and hybridity in Afro-American literature at the turn-of-the-century precisely because such thematic juxtapositions were paramount among the preoccupations of black writers during this period. Given any familiarity with the political and sociological context of their lives, the reasons for this become obvious. Reconstruction had ended in the 1870s with a compromise on the part of the status quo in the North with native whites in the South conditional upon the denial of the civil rights of Afro-Americans, despite passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments designed to protect them. Lynchings, race riots, institutionalized Jim Crow segregation and aggressive racism in the schools, the penal system, and in property and voting regulations were gradually but increasingly widespread and commonplace throughout the South where the overwhelming majority of the black population was still located. Attempts to escape, either in groups or individually, to unsettled territories in the West or South of the Mexican border, and to found black towns (as in Their Eyes Were Watching God and in Paradise), more often than not resulted in the spread of Jim Crow conditions. No one knows how many previously black identified persons who were light enough to pass, and who had once enjoyed certain privileges as free blacks during slavery and as upper class mulattoes during Reconstruction, ultimately passed over into whiteness for their own safety; darker skinned blacks almost uniformly kept their secrets and helped them hide.
It was one of those historical moments, not nearly so rare (although rarely spoken of) as some of us like to think, when fascist sentiments ran rampant throughout the land, not only against blacks but Jews, Catholics, Native (Indians) Americans, Asians and swarthy immigrants of all descriptions. Yet it was also a time of great hope and aspiration for a small and upwardly mobile black intellectual elite (composed of roughly the 10,000 blacks who, against all odds, achieved a college education by 1920). These so called "leaders," whom DuBois hopefully called the "Talented Tenth" (when they were in fact no more than a fraction of 1% of the "race") could not necessarily foretell how long the struggle of their people for freedom and opportunity would be. Needless to say this educated elite frequently but not always overlapped with the formerly upper class mulattoes, many of whom were forced to flee to the North in order to avoid being lynched and burnt out. Both Ida B. Wells and Charles Chesnutt are representative of this cohort. The elite, historian Rayford Logan and others tell us, formed the first great migration of blacks to the North.
Through a careful reading of three of the crucial black texts of this period--Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Ida B. Wells' On Lynchings, we hope to come to a better understanding of how and why American writers of fiction about the South, such as Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson, constructed the often melodramatic stories of frustrated black and mulatto struggle and uplift that have come down to us.
Readings
Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Knopf (1999)--Textbook.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Ida B. Wells, On Lynching (1890s)
Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the U.S., 1880-1917, Univ. of Chicago P, 1995--Textbook.
Charles Chesnutt, Mandy Oxendine (1899)
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, Applewood Books (1907)
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1901)
Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century, Smithsonian P, 1990--Textbook.
Mark Twain, Puddinhead Wilson (1894)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
- 77100
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Maidens, Madmen, and Haunted Houses: 18th and 19th Century Gothic Fiction
Prof. William Coleman
The course will examine gothicism from its origin in the late 18th century through the flowering of the genre in the 19th century, with some reference to modern gothic literature and cinema. It will discuss the literary influences (Shakespeare the German Schauerroman tradition, French erotic fiction, the novel of sentiment) and the cultural influences (antiquarianism, the picturesque) in the development of gothicism. The course will emphasize the importance of gothicism in the presentation of character in European fiction-as a vehicle to depict psychological states, especially mental disorders and sexual obsessions. This is symbolized in the central prop of gothic fiction, the haunted house. The course will also describe gothicism as a genre which women (the predominant writers of the genre) used to describe their limited roles, functions, and rights to other women (the predominant readers of the genre). This is expressed in the central character conflict of gothic fiction-an innocent heroine pursued by a male figure anxious to subject her to arbitrary religious, political, or familial power. Finally, the course will describe gothicism as a response to three late 18th century revolutions: the aesthetic revolution whereby Longinus supplanted Aristotle (thus Burke's observation in On the Sublime and the Beautiful, that under certain circumstances pain and danger are attractive, provided a basis for the aesthetics of gothicism), the literary revolution expressed in the works of the so-called Age of Sensibility, and the political revolutions of the period 1775-1815 (thus, the marquis de Sade's description of gothic fiction in his Idee sur les romans as "the fruit of the revolution of which all Europe felt the shock"). The course will reflect and acknowledge Joyce Carol Oates's observation, that gothicism is "...not a literary tradition as much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life."
- 79000
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Composing: Writing Theory and Practice
Prof. Sondra Perl
Over the past quarter century, a new field has grown from observing writers at work. These studies of composing have generated new perspectives for writing classrooms, new approaches for developing student interest in writing, and new theoretical views on reading, writing, and what it means to create. In this course we will survey the landmark contributions to research on composing -- works by Emig, Graves, Perl, Rose, Heath, Flynn, Sommers, and others. But the emphasis will be on developing students' abilities to extend this inquiry themselves. We will raise key questions: What is writing? How does it unfold? Who are we or who do we become as we write? What fosters or thwarts the act of composing? And we will use the writing we do together as the basis for responding. Students will be asked to fulfill three requirements during the term: (1) present a critical review of one major body of work in the field, (2) keep a weekly response journal on assigned readings, and (3) produce by the end of the term a portfolio of work written during the seminar.
- 79500 (Intensive Intersession Version)
Day/Time TBA
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
Prof. David Greetham
This intensive course is intended to provide students with the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework for dealing with the increasingly complex (inter)disciplinary arrangement of data in media from print to hypertext, and to give practical experience in archival access, data manipulation, and textual production. Operating under a number of different theoretical approaches (from intentionalism to reception to culture criticism to gender studies), the intensive seminar organizes the various practical methods in archival research (enumeration, description, transcription, production, and so on) within a recognition that historical moment, ideological position, gendered identity and other personal and cultural "markers" will influence the apparently objective, positivist assumptions of "strict and pure" bibliography. Students in the course will thus be exposed to the necessary bibliographical and archival skills necessary to gain command of data, but will also be introduced to the conceptual underpinnings of this practique. This balance between the theory and practice means, for example, that we will be just as likely to encounter Derrida's Archive, Fever and Werner's forthcoming collection on The Poetics of the Archive as we will more "conventional" approaches as Altick's Art of Literary Research or Harner's Literary Research Guide. The means of integrating these approaches will inevitably be intertextual, and the textualization of data will be our acknowledged organizational principle. This means that our investigation of manuscript, print, and hypertext will be continually informed by the awareness of the textuality of both the medium and the message. Research thus becomes, and is embedded in, text and culture. The intensive format of the course reflects its theoretical/practical interrelations. We will meet often (usually twice a week), and for longer periods (usually three hours, with a break) than in the conventional seminar, but we will complete the course in just one month! There will be much less emphasis on external archival work and much more on in-class discussion of the specific results of the issues raised by each assignment. I will be on call throughout this period, by e-mail or phone, and we may construct our own-online website for assignments and discussion. This version of U795 will address those students who are interested in linking archival and bibliographical research to their other critical work, but it is only fair to acknowledge that the intensive version will not provide as much experience in library work as the semester-long versions offered during the regular term.
Course requirements:
Attendance at and participation in all sessions; preparation of short research/textual assignments for each session; completion of final print or hypertext edition.
Required texts:
D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1994); Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Virginia,1992, 2nd ed.); Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (Michigan, 1997, 3rd ed.); G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Pennsylvania, 1989). All are available in paperback.
- 79500
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
Prof. Norman Kelvin
This course relates textual scholarship to contemporary theories of literary and cultural interpretation, including those of Bakhtin, J.L. Austin, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Eagleton, Jameson, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Gates, and Morrison. With these as context, we take up such areas of textual scholarship as textual criticism and scholarly editing, focusing on questions to be raised and answered in establishing texts for scholarly use - e.g., for writing doctoral dissertations. There will be special attention to the positions taken by Greetham, McGann, and Tanselle, but the question before us at all times will be, how does textual scholarship-i.e., the choosing or making of a copytext-relate to the modes of interpretation we employ as scholar-critics? The term-project will be a critical edition of a short poem or other brief work, and what is meant by "critical edition" will be explained and discussed. Part of the term-project will also be a reading of the text established, and in developing the reading students will be encouraged to use the literary theory or theories most relevant to their own interests.
- 80400
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Linguistics of Modern Poetry
Prof. Edmund Epstein
The special needs of modern British and American poetry put a great strain upon the English language. Modern poets, such as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and some others meet this unprecedented crisis in two ways: 1) they employ all the resources of the language, including some deep properties that play little part in casual language, and 2) they "sabotage" the English language in subtle ways, to achieve their ends.
Yeats, Eliot and Stevens attempt "timeless" effects in their Symbolist poetry. Hopkins builds the essence of what he is describing--the "instress"-- into the language of his poems. Lowell and Berryman experiment with the disrupted and anguished tone and register of modern discourse in their characteristic poetry.
This course will be an introduction to linguistics, as well as an exploration of the characteristic means of expression in modern British and American poetry. There will be introductions to necessary elements of the phonological, syntactic, and semantic elements of language.
In the class discussions on modern poets, there will also be reference to other poets who experiment with the English language: Pope, Shakespeare, Donne, Emily Dickinson..There will also be reference to poets in other languages, whose practices elucidate those of modern British and American poets: Rilke, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Montale, among others.
Texts: There will be no texts; the instructor has prepared material on language for the class. The students will be able to acquire the texts for analysis in editions of the poets to be analyzed, and in anthologies of modern literature.
- 80400
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Asian Encounters
Prof. Eve Sedgwick
This seminar concerns the relation of Asian religious thought--especially Buddhism--to European and American culture. Vedanta, Taoism, and Buddhism have "arrived" and been influential in western thought in many forms through many different encounters over many centuries. Thus, by now an Asian encounter with western culture must also be understood as a re-encounter with a palimpsest of previous Asian currents and influences (as well as vice versa). Necessarily, then, the seminar also involves a range of difficult methodological, theoretical, and political issues surrounding authenticity, dissemination, appropriation, recognition, and perhaps especially, pedagogy. Reading will be drawn from Buddhist sutras, Romantic and Transcendentalist literature, German philosophy, New Age and self-help literature, critical religious studies, and twentieth-century American fiction and poetry.
- 80400
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Ear Training: Poetry, Music, Performance
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
An experimental-experiential-introduction to the ABCs of poetry, at least its musical dimension: how to hear verse. At the seminar's core is the work of five writers for whom music was a powerful metaphor: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes. We will read them deeply and closely, our ears tuned to musical tropes and to sonorous values (vowel, consonant, pause, rhyme, measure). Though our focus is on these five poets, we will also listen to music itself (including Scriabin's mystical/erotic Poèmes for piano), in order to explore how music can aspire to the condition of poetry, to hear how words are set to music, and to appreciate individual vocal timbre (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Billie Holiday). Exploring philosophies of listening and of performance, we will ask (to use Gertrude Stein's terms): what is the difference between playing for oneself and playing for strangers, or between writing for oneself and writing for strangers?
Critical texts may include John Cage's Silence, Jacques Attali's Noise, Edward Said's Musical Elaborations, and Roland Barthes's The Responsibility of Forms. For assistance in matters of metrics we will consult Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat.
The seminar will take place in a room with a piano and CD player, encouraging frequent demonstrations. Course requirements are an essay (20-25 pages), and a performance, its nature up for discussion. It may be a musical performance, a poetic recitation, a dramatic event, a dance, or a sonic intervention of any kind, including an unveiling and contextualization of a recorded piece.) No musical or poetic background is required, though students already steeped in these arts are welcome to enroll.
The course is devoted to the rapturous meanings of audition-but no "auditors," in the academic sense of the word, will be allowed. Students, however, may take the seminar for two credits, which will entail the performance but not the essay.
- 80500
M, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Narrative Theory and Theoretical Practice
Prof. Gerhard Joseph
This course will survey the developments in narrative theory from the end of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, using various fictions as texts to exemplify and test the theories. We will begin with a brief overview of the theory of fiction from Henry James to Wayne Booth, and then take up some issues in structuralism and post structuralism, gender in narrative, and theories of African-American, post-colonial, and cyber narrative. Some of the readings will be in duplicated handouts, but we will also use Wallace Martin's Recent Theories of Narrative and Narrative/Theory, ed. By David Richter. The literary texts may include (but need not be limited to) Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dickens's David Copperfield, some Henry James short stories, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Morrison's Sula, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Gibson's Neuromancer, and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Students will make a class presentation considering a fictional text of their choice in light of a given week's theoretical perspective and write a final long paper applying some aspect of narrative theory to a narrative text.
- 81000
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Dissertation Workshop
Prof. Tom Hayes
Designed to help students write the prospectus (which should not take all term) and/or the dissertation, this writing workshop will respond to the needs and the size of the group. There may or may not be assigned readings and exercises, at the beginning. One certain thing is that everyone will read, and respond in writing to everyone else's work, and that the pages to be discussed will be circulated among members of the workshop at least a week ahead of time.
- 81300
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Melodramatic Imagination: Drama in the 19th Century
Prof. Anne Humpherys
Melodrama was a dominant mode of meaning-making in 19th century Britain. Though the term has a specific meaning in terms of work written for the stage, recently scholars, most writing in the wake of Peter Brooks' seminal study "The Melodramatic Imagination," have used melodrama as a means to understand 19th century politics, social policy, and economics, as well as painting and the novel. This course will both continue that work and survey 19th century British drama. We will begin at the beginning with the emergence of melodrama out of the French revolution, look at the way it took shape in 19th century drama; consider the way it formed the 19th-century novel; look at some examples of its integration into the understanding of history and social conditions ("The Communist Manifesto," for example, is a 19th century document that understands history in melodramatic terms), and end with speculation about its loss of force as a tool of understanding. We may briefly consider its survival in 20th century film. Readings will include plays, novels, and 19th century plays, novels, and social documents as well as recent critical materials; among these will be plays by Dion Boucicault and novels by popular writers as well as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. There will be a class project which will involve, in addition to studying the texts themselves, looking at works about 19th century acting techniques, music and the mechanics of the stage, all of which I hope will lead to a performance. Students will write a final paper which may grow out of the performance or alternatively engage the issues of the course in the context of other readings.
- 81400
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Shakespearean Tragedy and Religious Identity
Prof. Richard McCoy
This course will focus on four major groups of Shakespearean plays and consider some of their major themes and issues, including the problem of evil and the ethical and teleological dimensions of tragedy, the historical impact of the Reformation on English drama, and the growing awareness of individual and alien identities in the early modern period.
The 10 plays will be grouped accordingly:
1) The great Shakespearean tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
2) Roman plays that confront alien religious beliefs: Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar
3) Problem plays that deal with religion - Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice.
4) History plays that probe the origins of the English Reformation: King John and Henry VIII. Our secondary reading will begin with selections from classic texts on the genre, including Aristotle and Nietzsche, as well as A. C. Bradley's immensely influential Shakespearean Tragedy. We will also utilize the critical theories of Rene Girard, Mieke Bal, and others, to probe the ritual aspects of tragedy, as well as the scholarly approaches of Stephen Greenblatt, Debora Shuger, and others who concentrate on the religious dimensions of Shakespearean theater. Finally, we will explore the increasingly self-conscious inwardness prompted by sectarian conflict through selections from Reformation historians, including Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, and others. Assignments will consist of a brief (5-minute) oral report, an annotated bibliography, and a research paper or teaching portfolio.
- 81500
F, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Gender and Class in Milton, Blake, and Their Puritan and Counter-Puritan Traditions
Prof. Jacqueline DiSalvo
This class will begin with a study of class, gender and sexuality as it appears in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and their Biblical traditions. We will attend to the historical context of the Puritan Revolution and recent historicist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic readings by such scholars as Nancy Armstrong, Aschaf Rushdy, David Lowenstein, Joseph Wittreich, Mary Nyquist, David Norbrook, Sharon Achenstrin, Laura Knoppers etc. Then we will consider Blake's Romantic and counter-Puritan appropriation and revision of Milton. Finally we will examine the Miltonic legacy in American Puritanism via Nathaniel Hawthorne and will study the feminist revisions of these traditions in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison's Paradise. Students will be expected to do substantial reading in primary and secondary works, to contribute to the seminar through an oral presentation and to submit a term final paper or shorter papers. Students can prepare by reading several essays in Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, especially on Puritans, Industriousness, Sabbatarianism, the Poor, the Bawdy Courts, the Church, Parish, Household and Community.
- 81600
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Ulysses
Prof. Elizabeth Tenenbaum
Perhaps the most deviant epic ever written, James Joyce's Ulysses is arguably the richest twentieth-century fictional text written in English. Its salient strengths include its seamless interweaving of authorial insights into the motivations that structure public life and the needs that generate personal behavior; its vivid representation of the multiple social enclaves accessible to its male protagonists; its astute dramatizations of personal delusions that consign their holders to social marginality; its effective conjoining of linguistic experimentation with precise renderings of multiple idiolects; and its recurrent use of intertextuality to juxtapose Ireland's way of life with practices and values that have evolved in civilizations long inaccessible to Ireland due to both chronological and geographic barriers. Devoting a full semester to a single literary text should afford each student time to carefully examine and prepare to discuss each individual chapter of Ulysses. It will, moreover, make it feasible for students to familiarize themselves with an array of critical and theory-based essays, many of which entail astute observations by some of Joyce's most insightful commentators.
Seminar participants are expected to have read both Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before the start of spring semester. Since Portrait traces the formative year of a figure who is to become one of Ulysses' two protagonists, our first meeting will focus on key episodes in this highly unconventional bildungsroman. Subsequent seminar sessions will open with an overview of the reading assigned for that day, often move on to a student's report on a group of relevant studies, and culminate in an open discussion of the textual segment at issue.
The following texts are required readings for this course: Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler (Random House); Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses, ed. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman; Re-viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet Dunleavy; A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, ed. Margot Norris; and one of the following biographies: Richard Ellman, James Joyce (revised edition) or Morris Beja, James Joyce: A Literary Life. (If possible, read Ellman's thorough study. If time pressure makes you hesitate to embark upon this definitive work, settle for Baja's 125-page volume.) This seminar requires each student to present a short oral report and to submit either two 7-to-8-page papers or a single essay approximately 15 pages long.
- 83100
Th, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Women Writers of the 18th Century
Prof. Rachel Brownstein
In the eighteenth century, Virginia Woolf pointed out, the middle-class woman began to write; in the same period the novel, as Ian Watt put it, rose. Others have observed that biography became important in Boswell's and Johnson's century. All these factors worked to demystify and domesticate authorship-and to provoke readers' curiosity about the personal lives of authors. This course will focus on the emergence of the figure of the women writer. We will begin with the stagy question that Catherine Gallagher asks about Aphra Behn, "Who was that masked woman?" The connections between writers and actresses (for in fact the women who began to write were not all middle class), and the still-significant links between publishing and self-display, will be our themes. Reading different kinds of texts, we will study the ways a woman writer's works seem to construct, conceal, and market a provocatively secret identity. The writers in question are Behn (d. 1689) and women of the century that followed hers: Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith and-if there is time-the young Jane Austen.
Students will be responsible for devising three useful questions about each of these writers; for making a class presentation on a work by one of them; and for writing a ten-to-fifteen-page paper about an eighteenth-century woman writer who may or may not be represented in the syllabus.
- 84800
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
American Naturalism and the Market
Prof. Marc Dolan
This course will examine the subtle shift from realist to naturalist poetics at the turn of the twentieth century. In many ways, the changes of this period have stayed with American writing to this day. Naturalism remains the "default poetic" for self-articulation within American Society, from the psychological and sociological self-interpretation of afternoon talk shows to the endless stream of American autobiography (which took much of its current shape during this era). Class discussions in this course will be historicist as well as formalist and will consider the impact of American imperialism, Southern and Eastern European immigration, racist and racialist thought, the increasing dominance of the social sciences, the growth of a national consumer economy, and the development of other non-literary arts (e.g, recorded music, concert music, dance, theatre, interior design, painting, film) on the practice of American Writing. Course requirements include active participation in class discussions, a relatively brief presentation summarizing relevant scholarship on a text under study, and a longer presentation and essay reflecting original scholarship in the field.
Texts may include:
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
Charles Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth (1899)
Frank Norris, McTeague (1901)
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-03)
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Jack London, Martin Eden (1909)
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)
Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)
- 84800
Th, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
American Women Realist Writers
Prof. Neal Tolchin
This course examines recent attempts to recover the history of 19th century American women's fiction. We will begin with an early 19th century work, Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), a novel about Puritan and Native American relations. We will focus on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin, whose work has emerged in recent criticism as central to the reconstruction of the tradition of 19th century American women novelists. To gain a sense for the work that still needs to be done to map out the legacy of women writers in this period, we will explore writers popular in their time but less well known to us today. Lillie Devereaux Blake's Fettered for Life surprises readers by its realism and feminism; the short stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman are particularly subtle and powerful. To explore the multicultural dimensions of this area we will read short stories by Sui Sin Far (Asian American) and Zitkala-Sa (Native American), as well as fiction by African American writers such as Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper. To conclude we will read a novel by Willa Cather to explore the legacy of 19th century women writers for a 20th century author. Requirements: oral report, research paper, class participation and attendance.
- 86000
Th, 11:45 a.m. 1:45 p.m.
Queer Theory and Questions of Race
Prof. Steven Kruger
Feminist and queer theorists have recognized that gender and sexuality are crucially interimplicated with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion. But how effectively has queer theory dealt specifically with questions of race? In what ways, while making sexuality its main object of inquiry, has it also developed a nuanced analysis of race? In addressing such questions we will read theoretical work by writers like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Edelman, de Lauretis, and Dollimore, who might be seen as having "founded" queer theory. We will focus, too, especially on queer work that has engaged explicitly with questions about race; authors who may be read here include Anzaldua, Moraga, Lorde, Munoz, Pellegrini, Harper, Reid-Pharr. Alongside the theoretical readings, we will look at several recent cultural productions (probably a novel, some poetry, and a film-to be chosen in consultation with the class) in which sexuality and race are explored in interlocking, complex, and perhaps problematic ways. The work for the course will include seminar presentations and a final essay.
- 86000
T, 11:45-1:45 p.m.
Theory and Space
Prof. Peter Hitchcock
What use is the concept of space in the study of literature? Cultural theory has been concerned with space from the time that culture itself became an object of analysis. That history has much to do with provenance, the abstract and concrete spaces of cultural practice. Clearly, however, the righteous concern with spatiality was coterminous with particular projects of space, including imperial and colonial expansion. We might call this the territorial unconscious of culture, one which is deeply historical and is a linchpin in understanding periods, genres, forms, and technologies of cultural expression. This course will not attempt to encapsulate such a history, but will be concerned to shed light on the increasing importance of spatial theory in the interpretation of literature. We will address some of the major statements on the articulation of cultural space (including Benjamin's Arcades Project, de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life, Bachelard's Poetics of Space, Foucault's Discipline and Punish) alongside geography's crucial role in bridging the humanities and the social sciences (for instance, Lefebvre's Production of Space, Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity, Soja's Postmodern Geographies, Smith's Uneven Development). We will then attempt three case studies which themselves require alternative approaches for literary critique: urban spaces, postcolonial spaces, and feminist spaces. Each one will interanimate the other(s). Primary texts (Berger's Lilac and Flag, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Djebar's So Vast the Prison) will be supplemented by a variety of secondary material (including Williams, John, Bhabha). Our major concern throughout will be not just a politics of culture, but the development of methodologies of literary space, something that the term essay should reflect.
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