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70200
M, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Novelistic Ethnography and Ethnographic Novels
Prof. Gerhard Joseph
With a contemporary South African novel (Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians) as an outer frame, this course will attempt to read a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century "realist" literary texts (mostly novels) through the lens provided by an emerging "realist" critical ethnography (E. B. Tyler, George Stocking, Jr., James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Christopher Herbert, Mary Douglas, Karen Knorr-Cetina, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Trinh T. Minha, et. al.)-a body of work that has greatly expanded the sense of what kinds of texts may be call "ethnographies." One particular aim will be to track the emergence and interrelation of a pair of crucial ethnographic terms-"culture" and "participant observation" (or, more recently, Sandra Harding's "standpoint epistemology")-in pre-professional, pre-disciplinary forms of writing that helped establish the generic conventions by which distinct cultures and sub-cultures came to be represented in modern times. A particular question arises from this consideration -one that many nineteenth-century texts, both literary and theoretical, seem to address: what are the possibilities and limitations of "auto-ethnography" (the authoritative description of a culture by insiders)? We will also consider the relationship between "ethnography" (which aims to describe distinct cultures) and what might be called "sociography" (which engages with "social problems" arising in changing modern societies). To what extent are these two textual modes separable and to what extent reconcilable? Requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
Primary literary texts chosen from the following list: London Labour and the London Poor, Culture and Anarchy, North and South, Mary Barton, Conningsby, Idylls of the King, Cranford, "Address to the Workingmen" in Felix Holt, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, The Woodlanders, The Voyage of the Beagle, Barchester Towers, New Grub Street, King Solomon's Mines, The Blithedale Romance, Barchester to India, The God of Small Things, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Age of Innocence, Foe.
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70600
M, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Chaucer, Exclusive of the Canterbury Tales
Prof. Glenn Burger
In this seminar we will read the poetry written by Chaucer before the Canterbury Tales, focusing in particular on The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine the role this poetry played in "translating" a Continental and courtly tradition-drawing as it does on the work of Machaut and Froissart, Alan of Lille, and Boccaccio-and consider the relationship of Chaucer's "courtly love" poems to the fraught political landscape of Court and City during the early reign of Richard II. The seminar will draw on a variety of theoretical approaches-cultural materialist, gender, queer, and postcolonial-in order to explore the complex possibilities offered by these texts' interactions with their cultural moment and ours.
Requirements for the course will include 1 or 2 brief seminar presentations and one 20 page paper.
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72000
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Renaissance Poetry
Prof. Martin Elsky
A survey of sixteenth and seventeenth century lyric poetry. Emphasis on text, context, and critical approach. Two themes that will be stressed are one) print and manuscript circulation of poetry; and two) the development of privacy. We will consider the shift from amateur writing to professional authorship, the changing means of production and circulation of texts, and the use of literary writing to negotiate one's place in society. We will also consider how a new sense of the public realm in turn spawned the poetic articulation of privacy. Of special interest will be the way literary works reflect public and private architectural spaces, including religious introspection, sexual intimacy, and the idea of the home. Readings will include Wyatt, Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Lanyer, Marvell.
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74100
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Readings in Romantic Poetry and Prose
Prof. Joshua Wilner
This course will offer a broad survey of British Romantic poetry and prose, with a particular emphasis on lyric poetry and Romantic poetics. Writers studied include: Blake, W. Wordsworth, D. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. Shelley, M. Shelley, and Keats. While there will be some reading in the secondary literature, class discussion will focus on close reading of specific texts, with due attention to historical and biographical context. Throughout our reading and discussion, we will be exploring questions about the relationship between subjectivity and language in Romantic literature and the relationship of Romantic writing to the cultural transmission of patriarchal authority.
Requirements: Requirements: for 4 credits - one short (3 to 5 page) paper keyed to class discussion and one long (15 to 20 page) paper; for 2 credits - one 5 to 7 page paper.
Text: The Longman Anthology of British Literature (The Romantics and Their Contemporaries) edited by David Damrosch, Peter Manning, and Susan J. Wolfson, ISBN: 0321067657.
N.B. Thisis the stand-alone "Romanticism" portion of a two volume Norton-style mega-anthology. You can buy volume two of the larger anthology (which includes all of the material in the Romanticism anthology), if you prefer, but the text I will be "ordering" through the virtual bookstore is the stand-alone Romanticism text.
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74400
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Victorian Literature and Art in the 1850s
Prof. Donald Stone
The 1850s, according to historians, marked the highpoint of Victorian England: the Crystal Palace exhibition symbolized English power at its peak. The literature of the 1850s, however, reveals another England, one fearful of instability (as seen in Dickens's novels and Tennyson's poetry), yearning for order (as seen in Trollope's Barsetshire novels or in the pastoral novels of Gaskell and Eliot), and recognizing new forces at work (Mill, Ruskin, and, above all Darwin). It was also a singularly important decade for women's voices: Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh), Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Bronte), and George Eliot. The reading list will be drawn from the wealth of masterpieces written during the decade: the poetry of Tennyson (In Memoriam, Maud, the first Idylls of the King), Browning, (Men and Women), and Arnold (Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems); the novels of Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray; the prose of Newman (The Idea of a University), Mill (On Liberty), Ruskin, Carlyle, Darwin (Origin of Species). Attention will also be paid to the arts of the period: the 1850s was the decade of the Pre-Raphaelites and the emergence of William Morris. Each student is responsible for an oral report and for a term paper in which some aspect or author of the 1850s is examined. It is hoped that students will look at a historical account of mid Victorian England: e.g. Asa Brigg's The Age of Improvement, K. Theodore Hoppen's The Mid-Victorian Generation, or G. M. Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.
Required texts:
Anthology of Victorian Poetry (e.g. William Buckler, ed., The Major Victorian Poets:Tennyson, Browning, Arnold)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Penguin or other edition)
John Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic" (from The Stones of Venice)
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes (Oxford World Classic)
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Penguin)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (Penguin)
George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford World Classics)
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
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74800
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Before the American Renaissance: Culture and Society in the New Nation, 1780-1840
Prof. William Kelly
This course will examine American cultural expression in the decades been the Revolution and the American Renaissance. The intellectual and artistic range of the period is extensive, and our scope will be correspondingly broad. Among the topics we will address are the following: national originality and the anxiety of cultural influence; postcoloniality and transatlantic negotiation; gender, class and the conflicting legacies of the revolution; multiculturalism and the representation of racial and class differences; history, natural history and the delineation of American landscape; the crisis of cultural authority and the construction of subjectivity; republicanism, democracy, and the emergence of a market economy. Texts include Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia; The Life of Olaudah Equiano; Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography; Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer; Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple; Hannah Foster's The Coquette; Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; The Journals of Lewis and Clark; The Journals of John James Audubon; Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; Washington Irving's The Sketch Book; James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans; Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok; and William Apess's A Son of the Forest. One paper; one oral report.
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749001
Th, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
American Renaissance
Prof. Neal Tolchin
When F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) set the canon for this period (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman), this moment in American literary history took focus as the most exciting, richly subversive, and central one. What is most characteristically American about our literature flows from Emerson, many scholars contend. The first goal of this course is to ground the student in key works by these writers and to trace the history of critical response to their work. The second challenge of the course is to tell the story of how the work of the canonical writers is being reread in the context of the scholarship rediscovering the voices of mid-19th century American women (Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe), African Americans (Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs), and Native Americans (William Apess). Emphasis will be placed on recent critical approaches to the period. Students will be responsible for both oral reports on recent critical texts and a term paper (20pp.); a workshop will be held toward the end of the semester in which ideas for this paper can be tried out. The class will be run as a seminar with an emphasis on student participation, so atendance and preparation are crucial. Students are advised to read Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (Methuen, 1986) before the first class.
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75200
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
African American Literary and Cultural Criticism
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr
This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant of recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African 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 African 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: Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, John McWhorter, Hazel Carby, Robert Reid-Pharr, Henry Louis Gates, Claudia Tate, Philip Brian Harper, Manthia Diawara and Anthony Appiah.
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75200
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
African American Survey, Part II
Prof. James de Jongh
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. 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.
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77100
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The Rise of the Novel
Prof. David Richter
During the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1830), most of the major innovations in both subject matter and narrative technique take shape. At its beginning the art of fiction often involves the close imitation of true narratives, while at its end fictional narrative both competes with and contributes to the writing of historical narrative. Throughout the period, form (in the sense of aesthetic ideology) exerts intense pressure upon content, while content (the social and sexual conflicts of the period, along with the growing force of nationality) exerts a counterpressure upon literary form. We shall read some of these most important canonical texts within and against the culture that formed them, a culture that took its own shape, at least in part, from the rise of the novel.
In addition to exploring the narratives of the eighteenth century, we will also explore another set of narratives, the works of literary history in which scholars from the past fifty years have attempted to explain the origins of the English novel. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) was the master narrative against which recent literary historiographers have staged their own histories, including Michael McKeon, Ralph Rader, Lennard Davis, Catherine Gallagher, Nancy Armstrong, and Margaret Doody. We shall also be examining essays from The Rise of the Novel Revisited, the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction published last year.
PRIMARY TEXTS:
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, 1688.
Eliza Haywood: Love in Excess, 1719
Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, etc., 1722.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, 1740.
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., 1760-67.
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Frances Burney, Evelina (1777).
William Godwin, Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams, 1794.
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, 1800.
Walter Scott, Waverley or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, 1814.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1815.
SECONDARY TEXTS:
Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel (1957)
Ralph Rader: "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel" (1974) and other essays.
Lennard J. Davis: Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983).
Michael McKeon: The Origin of the English Novel (1987).
Nancy Armstrong: Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987).
Catherine Gallagher: Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (1995).
Margaret Doody: The True Story of the Novel (1997).David H. Richter (ed.) Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature (1999).
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79001
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Memory and Imagination: Composing Memoir
Prof. Sondra Perl
Writing in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, Robert Stone tells us, "The power of narrative is shattering, overwhelming. We are the stories we believe; we are who we believe we are. All the reasoning of the world cannot set us free from our mythic systems." In this seminar, we will explore mythic systems -- our own and others' -- with a desire to discover both how we've been shaped by the stories we've been told and how we use language in the service of our own story-telling. In other words, we will be examining notions of truth and falsity and of memory and imagination, while reading and writing memoirs. The reading list, developed collaboratively over the fall semester, already includes but will not be limited to the following: Alicia Partnoy, The Little School; Mary Karr, Cherry; Lauren Slater, Lying; Edward Said, Out of Place; theoretical readings will be drawn from Eliot, Proust, Barthes, Morrison, Kazin, Freeman, Benstock, Caruth and Henke. Each student will be responsible for selecting a theoretical frame and describing how it relates to a particular memoir under discussion; we will make extensive use of BlackBoard, posting, between weekly classes, responses to readings and to issues that arise during the class; but the bulk of our time will be devoted to drafting, responding to and revising autobiographical sketches or pieces of memoir written by class members.
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79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism (Intersession Course)
Prof. David Greetham
This revised version of the required U795 course has been prompted by student requests to broaden its scope and to respond to the current ideological, methodological, and conceptual issues involved in the study of "English" as a discipline. Accordingly, the course is now offered in a four-part structure: 1) The historical, institutional context of the discipline, with special attention to the current "culture wars" and the place of "English" within contemporary concepts of interdisciplinarity. Readings might include Eagleton, "The Rise of English," and short selections from such works as Graff, Professing Literature, Leavis, The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought, Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society, Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, Bolton (ed), Culture Wars, and Greenblatt & Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. 2) Archives & Bibliography. Possible selections from Altick & Fenstermaker, The Art of Literary Research, Werner (ed.), The Poetics of the Archive, Derrida, Archive Fever, Gurr (ed.), The Text as Evidence, Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, Wellek and Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship, Martin, The History and Power of Writing, Manguel, A History of Reading, Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. This section would not just emphasize the practical problem of use of archival material, but also the political and ideological principles behind archival organization and access. 3) Textuality. Concepts of textuality in literature & culture. Possible readings might be selections from Genette, Paratexts, Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer, Landow (ed.), Hyper/Text/Theory, Greetham, Theories of the Text, McGann, The Textual Condition and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, Tanselle, A Rationale Of Textual Criticism, Ezell & O'Keefe (ed.), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction, Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book, Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. 4) Theoretical Context: Implications of theory for scholarly and academic work. Possible readings might include selections from Mitchell, Against Theory, Eagleton, Literary Theory, Arac and Johnson, Consequences of Theory, Krieger, The Institution of Theory, Connor, Theory and Cultural Value, de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Moxey, The Practice of Theory, Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender, Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Gates (ed.), "Race," Writing, and Difference, Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. Students taking this new version will thus be introduced to the social, cultural, and ideological context in which their specialized studies will be positioned and will also be given an overview of both the methodology of research and its implications for the discipline. I emphasize that the readings listed here for each part are only suggestions: we will certainly not read them all, and only designated parts of those selected.
Requirements: Preparations for all class discussions and several in-class presentations. The final paper is similarly flexible: students may produce one of three possibilities--a scholarly "edition" of a short work embodying the textual principles discussed in the course; an introduction to such an edition or collection of works, focusing on the archival and other cultural issues involved; a critical essay founded on the archival, bibliographical, and textual approaches explored. I am also open to other methods of integrating the "scholarly" and "critical" components of the course.
Organization: I will be teaching the "intensive" intersession version of this course during the month of January 2002, and the usual semester-long version will be given in the Spring. The alternatives present obvious advantages and disadvantages: in the intersession version we complete the course before the semester proper has begun, thus freeing up students to take a full roster of "regular" courses during the Spring, and because the intersession course is officially a "Spring" offering, students have the whole of the Spring semester to complete the final paper. Moreover, January is "bibliography" month in New York, and I have usually managed to get some of the leading visiting archivists, bibliographers, editors, and textuists to participate in the intersession class: students will thus be able to interrogate some of those authors they have read. And, because we meet often and for extended periods, students have usually found that there is a greater narrative impetus to the intersession version, and a greater sense of "group" interaction (to this end, it is my understanding that we will be using "Blackboard" in addition to the usual e-mail contacts, so that "conferencing" of the projects will be facilitated). The main disadvantage is, of course, that we have to devote pretty much the whole of January to completing this required course: that has usually meant meeting twice a week (normally Tuesdays and Fridays) for three hours, with an introductory organizational meeting held at the end of the Fall semester. The balance in the intersession version is therefore more toward reading and preparation for discussion than in actual archival work in local libraries, which can be done with more leisure and lead time in the conventional semester-long version. I am available to discuss any other aspect of these choices (dcgreetham@aol.com).
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79500
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
Prof. Norman Kelvin
The course relates textual scholarship to post-modern literary and cultural theory, and includes readings from Bakhtin, J.L. Austin, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Eagleton, Jameson, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Gates, Deleuze and Guattari, and Morrison. These are context, and within it we explore textual criticism and scholarly editing, focusing on questions that have to be answered when anyone chooses a version of a text for a scholarly purpose -- e.g., for writing a dissertation. Positions taken by Greetham, McGann, and Tanselle, our representative textual scholars, will get special attention, but the question at all times will be, how does textual scholarship -- choosing or making a copytext.-- relate to the literary interpretation we employ today? For the student's term project, one choice will be to prepare a critical edition of a short poem (what is meant by a "critical edition" will be explained) and to provide a reading of the poem that reflects the student's own interpretive approach. Another option will be a research paper that assesses textual scholarship's compatibility with a cultural theory of special interest to the student who chooses to write such a paper.
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80200
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Hotel Women: Stein, Rhys, Colette F. Chopin, and Others
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
This seminar is the third in a series exploring intersections of literature, music, and performance (the previous two were "Ear Training" and "Minor Moderns"). In addition to writing a final essay, each student will give an in-class performance--be it recitation, drama, dance, music, or multi-media event. We will provisionally define "hotel woman" as a fugitive sensibility or character, designated feminine, reprieved from the rigors of fixed address. The semester's authors have not always lived in hotels, but their works illustrate the ecstatic liabilities of hotel consciousness, including transience, shiftlessness, languor, depersonalization, sitting, despondency, trance, effeminacy, drift, boredom, satiety, repetition, retirement, imprisonment, hypersexuality, prostitution, shame, and addiction. We will read essays (Heidegger, Kracauer, Bachelard, Koolhaus, Benjamin) exploring the poetics of hotels, and of consciousness thrown into a hotel; we will study the work of visual artists, including the dollhouse photos of Laurie Simmons and the hotel collages of Joseph Cornell; we will read prose by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick (Sleepless Nights), and Marie Redonnet (Hôtel Splendid), and poetry by Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire ("Hôtels"), John Ashbery (Hotel Lautréamont), and Elizabeth Bishop; and we will see a few films, perhaps Greta Garbo's Grand Hotel, Ida Lupino's Ladies in Retirement, or Little Edie Bouvier Beale's Grey Gardens. The course's musical component centers on Frédéric Chopin, and emphasizes his work's embodiment of the hermaphrodite, the has-been, the miniature, the foreigner, and the fairy. We will pay attention to the literary hauntings of Chopin's characteristic forms (small rooms, single-occupancy): nocturne, impromptu, waltz, mazurka, scherzo, ballade, prelude. We will read selections from Chopin's correspondence, and musicologist Jeffrey Kallberg's Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre. Additionally, in our quest to valorize the tiny, the out-of-date, and the wrong, we will listen to salon music (call it "hotel music") by such composers as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Serge Rachmaninoff, Amy Beach, Deodat de Severac, Federico Mompou, Gabriel Fauré, and Francis Poulenc. (Footnote: the subtitle of this sometimes Francophilic course is secretly "A Theory of Pleasure.")
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80200
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
20th Century Poetry
Prof. Grace Shulman
In this period, dramatic changes enlivened the arts, and especially poetry. Beginning in 1912, rhythm, imagery, and verse structure were challenged and redefined, predominantly by Ezra Pound. Poetry was charged with a tension between the watchwords "Make it New!" and echoes of the distant past. Besides the impact on craft, new themes grew into focus, such as the metropolis, the real world and its ironic relation to remote beauty. This course will explore some beautiful poems of the period: the lean, vivid lines of the Imagist school; the great work of Robert Frost, Wallace Steven, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, H. D., and Pound.
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80400
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
The Lyric Essay
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
This course is an introduction to experimental critical writing: in lieu of a final paper, students will write, every week, a brief (two-page) lyric essay. The seminar aims to help students develop their styles and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name "essay." (Experimenting with unusual forms may ease the later process of writing a dissertation, itself an exercise covertly incorporating play-acting, fictiveness, and lyricism.)
What is a lyric essay? Often autobiographical, it reveals an idiosyncratic personality, obsessively attends to its own unfolding, and trespasses on the territory of fiction. We will read examples by a range of writers, including some of the following: Kenko, Sei Shonegon (Pillow Book), Michel de Montaigne, Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Henry David Thoreau, Walter Pater, Marcel Proust ("On Reading"), Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Michel Leiris (Scratches), Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet), Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), Simone Weil, Marianne Moore, Roland Barthes, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Hilton Als (The Women), Jean Stafford (A Mother in History), Francis Ponge (Soap), Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Lynne Tillman (The Madame Realism Complex), Avital Ronell, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictée), Joe Wenderoth (Letters to Wendy's), Sara Suleri (Meatless Days), and Duncan Smith (The Age of Oil). And more!
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80600
T, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Transnational Literature and Theory
Prof. Peter Hitchcock
"...if culture laid the basis of the nation-state, it now threatens to scupper it" Eagleton
What does it mean to talk of "transnational" literature and theory? What connection does this moniker have to the aesthetic predilections and consummate taste of cosmopolitanism? Is it a marker of world citizenship, or does it measure the somewhat more suspect circulation of cultural import/export? How well does literature travel? How fluidly does theory cross borders? Is the logic of transaction the same for both? Indeed, is one merely a symptom of the other? Is the "trans" in translation the "trans" in transnationalism? What is the status of nation for literature and theory in an age of transnationalism? And, finally, is transnationalism a synonym for globalization or does it offer an alternative logic to that devoutly-wished embrace? This course will consider the claims of the transnational on literary study both by considering the macrological concerns that are its possibility and key examples of literature and theory that develop, complicate, and challenge its governing ideas. One of the aims is to question the national/transnational binary in literary analysis that renders the nation itself the common denominator of cultural critique; another is to consider what happens to world literature when it becomes a material force.
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80700
W, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Medieval Welsh
Prof. Catherine McKenna
This course introduces the student to Middle Welsh and its literature. It includes a survey of Middle Welsh grammar, reading and translation of the First Branch of the Mabinogi, and discussion of the scope of medieval Welsh verse and prose in its European and insular contexts from the sixth through the fourteenth century. Additional readings may be added to meet particular student interests. In addition to weekly translation assignments, there will be a midterm and a final examination. Required texts: D. Simon Evans, A Grammar of Middle Welsh, and R.L. Thomson, ed., Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet. Both published by Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and available from Books for Scholars at or Celtic Studies Publications, (781) 398-1834. Recommended: Patrick K.Ford, trans.The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (U California Press), available from the same sources.
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80700
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Medieval World in Travel Narratives, Geographies, and Maps
Prof. Scott Westrem
Near the end of the 1300s, John Gower observed that the English and the Germans were subject to lunar influence, which cause them to "travaile in every lond," their international journeys a result of the effect on them of the inconstant moon. In this seminar we will have cause to acknowledge that interest in parts of the world outside Europe was not limited to people in the north and west. The principal goal of this course, which will focus on writings from between 1200 and 1450 is to develop a sense of how and where Europeans traveled, what they imagined the world to look like, and who they thought they shared it with. Primary source readings will include reports by the intrepid Franciscans John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who went to the court of the Great Khan in the mid-1200s; the Description of the World (Divisament dou monde) attributed to Marco Polo (c. 1298); pilgrimage narratives and a description of the Holy Land from the great period of tension and change between 1280 and 1340; the Book of John Mandeville, from c. 1360 (in the Middle English "Cotton" Version); the "fake" travel book by Johannes Witte de Hese (c. 1391); geographical writings by Honorius Augustodunensis and Roger Bacon; and maps, including the largest surviving traditional exemplar (from the 1290s), which hangs in Hereford Cathedral. We will also pay close attention to theoretical concerns, including the matters of alterity and the "Other," what might be called pre-colonialism, explanations for wonders and monsters, and the integrity (and reliability) of the text. The seminar's purpose is to gain a fuller appreciation for more traditional texts that describe the world or travel in it (Chaucer is an obvious example).
Class requirements will include three two-to-three-page reaction papers (on specific readings), a term paper approximately fifteen pages long), and a short (five-to-seven minute) seminar presentation.
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80900
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Race in the Renaissance
Prof. Tom Hayes
We will read Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, and Aphra Behn's Orookono with special attention to the representation of racial and ethnic difference. We will try to determine how the ethnography of biological racism, rooted in the discourse of the natural sciences, displaced theological discourse and ascertain how our attitudes and fantasies regarding racial and ethnic difference continue to influence our reading of these and other Renaissance works. We will also examine the ways racial and ethnic difference intersect with sexual difference in these texts and explore significant similarities and differences between the representation of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism in the Renaissance and today.
We will read representative critical essays written from feminist, new historicist, post-structuralist, post-colonialist, and psychoanalytic perspectives and discuss how we would teach the above-named texts as well as others that call upon us to deal with racial, ethnic, and sexual difference.
A term paper (15-25pp.) and active participation in class discussions are required.
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81000
Day and Time TBA
Dissertation Workshop
Instructor TBA
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.
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81300
F, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Modern Drama
Prof. Felicia Bonaparte
The last one hundred and fifty years has been one of the most intense and varied in the history of drama. Responding to countless revolutions in art, philosophy, science, technology, economics, society, politics, and any number of other aspects of a rapidly changing world, drama has taken new directions in a thousand different ways both in subject and in form. Our purpose in this course will be to explore this evolution through some representative works. Our focus will be on Western drama, which makes a coherent body of work, but within that limitation, we will look at works that cross the span of the period and the tradition, from Henrik Ibsen to Wole Soyinka, from Pirandello to Adrienne Kennedy. Where appropriate (e.g., Brecht) we will wish as well to look at staging, styles of acting, scenery, and other theatrical concerns. And finally we will also make small forays into different kinds of drama: the drama, for example, of opera (e.g., Richard Wagner and Alban Berg), and the drama of the film. Students familiar with other languages will be encouraged to read the works, where they can, in the original. A reading list will be available by the middle of November and can be emailed on request. Write to me at Fbonaparte@aol.com
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81600
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Austen and Byron
Prof. Rachel Brownstein
On the face of it, Jane Austen and Lord Byron have nothing in common: a novelist and a poet, a virgin and a rake, one publishing anonymously as a generic Lady, the other posturing as an hereditary lord. He was famous in his time; her day didn't dawn until a hundred years after her death, although she is probably more widely read than he is, now. Remarkably, for dead nineteenth-century English writers, both remain figures whose names and portraits signify to people barely familiar with what they wrote. The pictures we have of them suggest that Austen was of the eighteenth and Byron was of the nineteenth century, quite as scholars used to say; in fact she radically reimagined the kind of fiction Burney and Edgeworth wrote, and his satire owes a lot to Pope.
Contemporaries (she turned thirteen a month before he was born), the two of them fairly ask to be joined as an odd couple, if only because both danced so well around the subject of sex (courtship, for her; post-coital alienation and guilt for him). Both wrote about the pressing concerns of people in their time and place. "I want a hero," is how Byron begins Don Juan: especially between the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, questions about the nature of the hero merged with explorations of the heart and mind of a Man of Feeling. Was the soul of a Poet--as Wordsworth conceived it, "fostered alike by beauty and by fear"--the antithesis of that of a Nelson, whose Romantic biographer wrote that as a child he didn't know what fear was? A few years before Byron, Jane Austen, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." It goes without saying that a single man lacks (or wants) a wife; the real question is what kind of man a woman who wants (or lacks) a husband should choose. What kinds of men are worth having?
Austen and Byron, in their different ways, wrote romances that were also critiques of romance. Born into very different circumstances, they were from the start good at doing things with words and interested in what other writers had done. What intrigued them both was the relation of the stories and people and feelings one read about to those that in fact were lived and felt--more generally and abstractly, of words and their music to meaning and the world. Irony, for both of them, was a way to point at the discrepancies.
In this course, we will put Austen and Byron in dialogue, as in some sense they were, about how men and women are and might be. Among the themes are heroes and heroines, in literature and life; writers as signifying figures; home and abroad; private and public; the ideal and the actual; realism and romance; satire, comedy, and irony.
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81600
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Finnegans Wake
Prof. Edmund Epstein
This course will consist of a close reading of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake, the climax of Joyce's creative life, is a gigantic comic poem on the subject of the nature of human beings and earthly life. In this respect, the Wake forms the crown to Joyce's works. There will be constant reference to the themes and techniques of the other works of Joyce, and how they lead up to the Wake. In addition, the Wake provides a classic example of difficulty in text interpretation, so one main concern of the course will be a theoretical treatment of text reading and the limits of interpretation. There will also be constant reference to problems in interpreting other difficult literary texts, such as The Waste Land, and Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum.
Students should read through Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce as soon as possible. There will be one term paper required, on any subject related to the Wake.
Texts: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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82100
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Literature and 17th Century Cultural Revolution
Prof. Jacqueline DiSalvo
This class will contrast the construction of two islands -- that of Shakespeare's Tempest in 1613 and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe about a hundred years later to launch an inquiry into the century of revolution in between them that created the foundations of modern society and culture. What happens to the Renaissance that, in the most drastic literary evolution ever, we go in a century from Shakespeare's poetic drama and Spenserian allegory via Milton's exhaustion of epic to Defoe's creation of the prose novel? Employing the concepts of Foucault's episteme, Bakhtin's chronotope, Marx's ideology, Gramsci's hegemony. Jameson's ideologeme and Habermas' public sphere, this course will interrogate the roots of the master discourses and founding values, myths and institutions of our bourgeois society. Focusing on Milton, the first conscious cultural revolutionary, as the crux of this "Great Transformation" we will historicize his works via Christopher Hill, Norbert Elias and others from a cultural materialist, feminist and psycho-historical stance within a wider context of seventeenth century writers. Setting Milton against selections from Shakespeare (Tempest), Ben Jonson (Bartholemew Fair), the Court masque, religious and political prose (Winstanley, Coppe, Filmer, Hobbes, Locke), metaphysical (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw), Cavalier (Jonson, Herrick) and Restoration (Rochester) poetry and Aphra Behn, we will consider such issues as the re-invention of gender, the construction of subjectivity and oedipalization of the psyche, anti-Petrarchianism and the reconfiguring of marriage, family, and sexuality, the gendered split of public and private, and the move from punishment to discipline. We will examine the invention of vocation and the work ethic, the culture wars of Puritan literacy vs royal spectacle and Bakhtin's popular carnivale, the poetic move from sacramentalism to iconoclasm, from court masque to Milton's closet drama, the disenchantment of nature, decline of magic, and persecution of witches, republican art, and the effects of primitive accumulation and possessive individualism not only on politics but on psychology, religion and literature. By placing seventeenth century cultural production within various theories of the early modern we will try to develop a dialectical approach to its appropriation/subversion in contemporary cultural criticism to create a legacy to ongoing cultural revolution.
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84800
W, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
American Realism 1850-1915
Prof. Morris Dickstein
This course will examine the development of American realism from the 1850s through World War I. It will focus on four overlapping forms of realism: the moral realism of James, Wharton, Kate Chopin, and others, rooted in Hawthorne and the English novel; the social realism of Howells, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and regional writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett; the transgressive or documentary realism of progressive crusaders and muckrakers like Jacob Riis and Upton Sin-clair; and finally the visual realism of photographers like Mathew Brady, Riis, Lewis Hine, and Walker Evans, painters like Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper, and the Ashcan school, and early silent film directors such as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and King Vidor, whose work lies slightly outside this period. The course will trace the beginnings of realism in the carnage of Civil War, the poetry of Whitman, the beginnings of photography, and the tremendous social changes of the Gilded Age, including the influx of immigration, rapid industrialization, and the growth of cities. We'll consider the intellectual impact of the ideas of Darwin and the French naturalists, as well as the simultaneous emergence of American pragmatism in the writings of William James. The major emphasis will be on works by novelists, painters, photographers, and filmmakers as well as their own theoretical statements, but there will also be readings from Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds; Alan Trachten-berg, The Incorporation of America and Reading American Photographs; Eric Sund-quist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Michael Bell, The Problem of American Realism; Miles Orvell, The Real Thing; David Shi, Facing Facts, and other secondary works.
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85500
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Reading in Modernism: Selected Fictional Narratives
Prof. Elizabeth Tenenbaum
Although this seminar has no formal prerequisites, I assume that the majority of its members will have taken at least one course on the twentieth-century literature of Britain, the U.S.A., or both. The syllabus for this course reflects an effort to demonstrate the extraordinary achievement attained by certain modernist novels while generally excluding the texts most often assigned in introductory courses on modern literature. The seminar's inclusion of both British and the American narratives is intended on the one hand to enhance its capacity to evoke the range of issues and techniques that have generated a strikingly varied group of widely-esteemed modernist novels. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of texts by authors rooted in two very different nations permits us to compare the forms that modernism has taken in texts that have arisen from sharply differing national structures and cultural traditions.
Class discussion of each of the readings assigned will include consideration of the context of its creation. But the overarching goal of this seminar is the expansion of our awareness of the many methodological and topical choices made available by the modernist repudiation of the constraints imposed upon creative options by the lingering authority of literary convention.
Seminar readings (in most cases reasonably concise as novels go) include The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford), "The Dead" and several episodes from Ulysses (James Joyce), Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), either Women in Love or Lady Chatterley's Lover-depending on student choice (D.H. Lawrence), Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys), Cane (Jean Toomer), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), In Our Time (Ernest Hemingway), Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner), and Nightwood (Djuna Barnes). Short supplementary essays will be placed on reserve in the Mina Rees Library.
Written course requirements include brief weekly submissions as well as a term paper approximately fifteen pages long. At each class meeting, students are expected to submit three concise, typewritten questions based upon the reading assigned for the prior week. By the ninth week of the course, all students enrolled for four credits must submit a tentative term-paper topic, supported by a 200-to-300 word explanation. This paper will be due two weeks before the end of the semester.
As a prologue to our study of modernist narratives, we will center our opening session on a discussion of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a relatively early, multi-segmented, and highly influential modernist poem. Please find or borrow a copy of this text, and bring it to the first seminar meeting.
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86000
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Zero, Infinity, Chaos, Sublimity
Prof. Eve Sedgwick/Joshua Wilner
The emergent field of chaos theory investigates the interrelationship between chaotic behavior and systematic organization. While the disciplinary context for much of this recent work has been the physical sciences and mathematics, many of the problems and concepts with which chaos theorists work, including iterability, recursive systems, scaling, period doubling, interference and incommensurability can be related more or less directly to concerns which have preoccupied literary theorists and semioticians in thinking about representational systems. Nor is this field of investigation without a significant history: in the West, the aesthetic notion of the sublime, which goes back at least to Longinus, has been the focus of a long and rich meditation on the relationship of language and representation to that which disrupts and limits it, and the legacy of what has been called the "Romantic sublime" continues to exert a powerful influence on our present literary culture. In Asian thought, meanwhile, both Taoist and Buddhist traditions have explored implications of chaos, infinity, and nothingness.
In the belief that this is an area where students of literature, scientists and mathematicians may have something to learn from talking to and reading one another, we propose to investigate in this course some of the possible connections: between current work in chaos theory and literary theory, and between both of these and some traditions of the sublime. We will read contemporary writers on chaos theory such as Gleick, Peats and Briggs, as well as lay writings on number theory (focusing particular on the notions of zero, infinity, and the infinitesimal) by Seife, Rotman, and most importantly, Wittgenstein. (N.B. No special knowledge of mathematics will be needed; "math-phobia" should present no obstacle to participation in discussion, and may indeed become a topic for investigation.) Writings in literary theory will include: de Saussure (on anagrams), Kristeva (on semiosis), Hertz (on Longinus and the sublime) and de Man (on Pascal and the zero). We will use Chuang-tzu and Alan Watts as windows into Taoist and Buddhist traditions. Western literary texts that will be central to our discussion will include Pope (from The Dunciad), Emily Dickinson, Stevens, A. R. Ammons, and some contemporary science fiction.
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86100
Th, 11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Black Women Writers
Prof. Barbara Webb
A study of women writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. This course will explore how these writers address issues of culture, sexuality, and politics in their fiction, essays, and poetry. Of particular interest will be their engagements with nationalist, feminist, and diasporic discourse. How do these women re-envision nation and community in their texts? What are their contributions to the creative use of language and literary form? How do regional and transnational perspectives intersect in their writings? Selected readings will include texts by writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Maryse Conde, Michelle Cliff, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, and Toni Morrison. Requirements: An oral presentation and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.
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86100
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
How not to be a Woman and how not to be a Man: The Construction of Gender in the Victorian Period
Prof. Anne Humpherys/Talia Shaffer
This course will explore the construction of gender in the Victorian era, with special attention to alternative or marginalized gender and sexual behaviors. From a modern perspective we tend to see Victorian separate spheres as monolithic entities, but in reality these identities were profoundly contested. Reading now-forgotten texts reveals some surprising possibilities for alternative subjectivities. The course will investigate just how the model of the Aprofessional man evolved, what kinds of class mobility it facilitated, and how it was in turn altered by the demands of empire. We will also investigate alternate forms of masculinity. We will ask how Victorian novels formulated the infamous Angel in the House, but we will inquire what other forms of female identity realist, sensation, and New Woman novels were able to accommodate. In other words, this course asks how Victorians wanted to be, but also not to be, a man or a woman.
We will explore each model of gender behavior by pairing canonical and noncanonical texts. Reading this way opens up a number of new ideas. What accounts for the difference in the critical trajectory of these texts? Have the noncanonical texts been rejected because they are too threatening, or are they actually conservative in ways that no longer appeal to post-Victorian readers? Do the canonical texts preach an ideologically consistent rhetoric or do they offer nodes of resistance? Possible texts include David Copperfield; John Halifax, Gentleman; The Woman in White; Aurora Floyd; She; Story of an African Farm; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Jude the Obscure, and Dracula, along with various short pieces, both fiction and journalistic. Requirements: one oral report; one short paper, and one long paper.
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