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alphabetical by instructor
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Rachel Brownstein
87500
Essays in Conversation
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [62297]
Hazlitt wrote that an essay is "like the remarks which occur in sensible conversation," explaining that the reader "is admitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers." At a time when personal essays are what most people most often read, it seems useful to consider the history of the genre in English-in this course, an interesting portion of that history. Starting a century before Hazlitt and ending with his essays, we will read public letters by, e.g., Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, and Keats, alongside pieces of prose in the least pretentious of literary genres. Our focus will be on the style and tone that create the illusion of intimacy with a distinctive personality, on plain speech and on the charms and truth claims of essayists. Charles and Mary Lamb are among the authors we'll read, and the connections and conversations among writers will be among our themes. Students who sign up for this course should have a special interest first of all in prose style and secondly in Romanticism, or the Very Long Eighteenth Century. Writing assignments will include imitations of at least two of the seven or eight writers on the syllabus, plus a critical paper.
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Marc Dolan
85000
America in the 1940s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (Cross Listed as ASCP 82000) 2/4 credits [62302]
In a way, the 1940s is the overlooked middle child of modern American cultural history. Too often, it is lost in the shadows of its chronological siblings and split down the middle in our historical perceptions: viewed as a comforting aftermath to the Great Depression or a foreboding prelude to the years of the Cold War. Most often, it is probably seen as no more than the time of the Second World War, a conflict that admittedly affected the length and breadth of American life more thoroughly than nearly any historical event of the twentieth century.
When we look closer, however, there is much more to American art and expression in the 1940s than the obvious cultural residue of these three larger historical transformations. This was the era in which swing gave way to bop, in which abstract expressionism took hold in American painting, and in which Jewish American and African American voices finally arrived at the center of American letters. It was (in Michael Denning's phrase) "the age of the CIO," as well as the golden age of the Southern literary gothic and film noir, not to mention the transcultural crucible in which three great musical hybrids were formed--country & western, rhythm & blues, rock & roll. Comic books came of age in the 1940s, and the Hollywood studio system loudly died, soon to be quietly reborn as a supplier for television. In this decade, communists became progressives, and progressives became liberals. American journalism, and indeed nearly all American nonfictional prose, was changed forever by these years, as was the grammar of American gender roles. This course will examine some (but obviously not all) of these transformations and will feature class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program, presenting topics both within and outside their own disciplines. Course requirements include class participation, a presentation of original scholarship on the period, and a final paper.
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Edmund Epstein
86100
Finnegans Wake
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [62292]
In this course we will go through Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. In addition, we will be referring constantly to the other works of Joyce--Ulysses especially--for thematic and artistic insights into the Wake.
The main work of the course will be devoted to reading the Wake as a narrative of the growth, maturing, and age of the human family. There will also be constant reference to Joyce's innovations in narrative technique and literary style. Other modern works influenced by Joyce--most prominently Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum, and the works of Donald Barthelme and Samuel Beckett--will also be examined in the course of the term.
Texts:
James Joyce Finnegans Wake.
Richard Ellmann James Joyce
Roland McHugh Annotations to Finnegans Wake
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David Greetham
79500
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship
Intersession 4 credits [62263]
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.
2) Archives & Bibliography. 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
4) Theoretical Context: Implications of theory for scholarly and academic work.
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.
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 2004. 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. 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 on December 18th at 2 pm in the thesis room (4406.11). 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 - dgreetham@peoplepc.com
This course is not open to non-matriculated students.
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Tom Hayes
87200
Metaphysical and Postmodern Poets
Thursday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [62269]
Richard Rambuss has written that "The metaphysicals, with their characteristic mise-en-scene of the spiritual bordering the carnal, the sacred abutting the profane, supply what are perhaps the most provocative grounds for interrogating the orthodoxies of current scholarship on devotion, desire, and the body; indeed, the volatile heterodoxies of these poets make such reconsideration a requisite. Achieving their effects with a rhetoric of the extreme and often deliberately courting the perverse, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and their fellows have accrued from their own time down into ours more charges of excess, indecorousness, and queerness than one finds imputed to any other early modern literary practice" (Closet Devotions 17-18).
With this in mind, this course will explore the premise that there is an analogy between the metaphysical poets and poets that have been called postmodern. That is, just as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan revolted against the smooth, sensuous, Petrarchan poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Wyatt, and Ben Jonson, poets such as John Ashbery, Silvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and Frank O'Hara (who has been called "the quintessential postmodern poet") - reacted against such modern masters as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens.
The possibilities for comparison here are enormous. For example, we will explore how Plath's anti-patriarchal "Daddy" answers Eliot's pious "Four Quartets" and how Rich's angry "Diving Into the Wreck" might be read as a response to Auden's serene ode to Yeats, just as her "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" echoes Donne's poem by that same name. (Another example of a postmodern poet echoing a metaphysical poet is Ashbery's "The Picture of Little J.A. In a Prospect of Flowers," and Marvell's "The Picture of Little T.C. In a Prospect of Flowers.")
The key texts are of course the poems mentioned above. Also helpful are:
George Herbert and the 17th-Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare. Norton.
The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner, Penguin.
Sona Raiziss, The Metaphysical Passion: Seven Modern American Poets and the 17th- Century Tradition.
Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris.
Beat Poets, ed. Carmela Ciuraru, Everyman's.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, U of Minnesota.
Craig Owens, "Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. U of California.
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Carrie Hintz
83200
Restoration and 18th century Women Writers
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm (Cross listed as WSCP 81000) 2/4 credits [62274]
Carrie Hintz has been an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College/CUNY since 1999. She is the author of An Audience of One: Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 (under contract at the University of Toronto Press) and the co-editor of Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2003). She has also published articles about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing, utopian literature, children's literature and pedagogy.
Our class will consider plays, life writing, novels, and poetry written by women between 1660 and 1832. We will read works by writers such as Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, Katherine Philips, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah Fielding, Mary Leapor, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Hays, Jane West and Jane Austen.
The course will engage with changing notions of female authorship throughout the long eighteenth century, challenging our perception of the division between public and private in the period. Several literary and cultural forms we now associate with privacy (such as the letter) shaped the public writing of both men and women, especially the novel. While some women writers who sought and achieved print publication experienced ambivalence about their visibility as public authors, others saw their writing as an extension of their public personae as spies, actors, activists and travelers. After considering the permeable boundaries between women's public and private writing, we will examine the connection between female authorship and sexuality, from the explicit desire and gender play of Restoration writers like Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley to the less sexually explicit courtship novels of Burney and Austen. We will devote the final three weeks of the course to Jane Austen, seeing her novels as part of a continuity of women writers who served as her models and foils. Our discussion will also touch on women's attitudes to social class and poverty, violence against women, women's use of satire and humor, and utopianism.
Primary materials will be supplemented with a wide variety of theoretical and historical articles and books by critics like Kristina Straub, Randolph Trumbach, Janet Todd, Catherine Gallagher, Martine Watson Brownley, Judith Butler, Ruth Perry, Eve Sedgwick, Felicity Nussbaum, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Terry Castle and John Richetti. The syllabus will be available by the last week of November, and interested students should e-mail Carrie Hintz for a copy (carriehintz@hotmail.com).
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Peter Hitchcock
76200
Anglophone Literature in Theory and Practice
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62296]
What could be more harmless than the OED definition of "anglophone" as a person who speaks English? As soon as one begins to specify this person, and this English, the innocence of the word dissolves into a history of colonial and postcolonial import. Anglophone is always somebody else's English just as Anglophone literature is somehow not American or English. At what point does a literature cease to become English but Anglophone instead? Does an Anglophone literature carve out its own identity as separate from English, or is it implicated in the tradition that would expel it? Is it the mark of incorporation or exotopy? Do writers think "Anglophone" or is it institutions that provide such categorical largesse? What cultures and politics are at stake in the study of Anglophone literature?
In a series of readings of theory and literature, this course will attempt to provide some answers to such questions while, I hope, raising several more. The aim will not be to provide some normative definition of "anglophone," but will instead look at its critical edges in understanding how forces of decolonization and recolonization are in a struggle over the meaning of English and literatures in English. Most of our readings will study anglophone writing of the periphery (and not as peripheral). We will also consider the crisis created when an anglophone writer writes from within the edifice of English (and England). In part "anglophone literature" wants to be innocent of postcolonial theory and politics. On the affirmative side, our readings might wish to consider "anglophone" as a decolonization of English (and the English) wrought by conditions of globalization. What is changing curricula is also changing how one understands transnational cultures.
Suggested Readings: The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), Secrets (Farah), Potiki (Grace), The God of Small Things (Roy), David's Story (Wicomb), Anil's Ghost (Ondaatje), Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga), White Teeth (Smith), Palace of the Peacock (Harris). Critical readings will include selections from Bhabha, Spivak, McClintock, Ngugi, Brathwaite, James, and Harris.
There will be a term essay.
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Anne Humpherys
84300
The 19th Century British Novel of the Provinces
Thursday 6:30pm- 8:30pm. 2/4 credits [62280]
As the literary scholar Ian Duncan has said there is "a kind of fiction distinguished by its regional or provincial setting [that] flourished in the nineteenth century in Britain." The characteristics of this setting, according to Duncan, are that it is distinctive, differentiated from the metropolis or from other regions within the nation, and that it is at the same time familiar, that it is, in Raymond Williams' phrase, "a knowable community." However there are two different types of this distinctive nineteenth-century novel. One is the regional, whose setting is constructed to emphasize its difference from any other region and whose world is for the most part stable; the emotional appeal is nostalgia. The other is the provincial, whose setting is constructed in terms of its difference from the metropolis and which, as a result, is in dialectical interchange with the fast changing modern world. Its emotional contours are both nostalgic and anxious. However, both types-and the separation is not clear in general or in any single work-are part of a project of defining the nation and thus open in interesting ways to being discussed and theorized in terms of postcolonial theories.
This course will trace the shift from the regional novel, which emerged in the early 19th century in novels about Ireland, Scotland and rural England (i.e. Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village [1823]) , to an ideological expansion in terms of nationhood in the provincial novels of Elizabeth Gaskell Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant. Around 1875 there was another shift, corresponding to rising anxieties connected to the imperial project, and the stability of the idea of nationhood in the novel of the provinces is undone, the primary example being the novels of Thomas Hardy. We will consider not only the evidence for this trajectory but also some of the causes and implications.
We will read some of these novels: Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford (1852), North and South (1855), Cousin Phillis (1864), Wives and Daughters (1866); Anthony Trollope, Dr. Thorne (1858); George Eliot: Adam Bede, (1859), Middlemarch (1872); Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe Junior (1876); Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).
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Gerhard Joseph
84500
Novelistic Ethnography and Ethnographic Novels
Monday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits [62279]
With a contemporary South-African novel (Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians) as an introductory frame, this course will consider a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century "realist" literary texts (mostly novels) through the lens provided by an emerging "realist" and post-realist critical ethnography (E. B. Tylor, James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, George Stocking, Jr., Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Christopher Herbert, Mary Douglas, Karen Knorr-Cetina, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Trinh T. Minhha, James Buzard, Patricia Clough, et. al.) - a body of work that has greatly expanded the sense of what kinds of texts may nowadays be called "ethnographies." One aim will be to track the nineteenth-century, pre-disciplinary emergence of a pair of crucial ethnographic terms - "culture" and "participant observation" - that helped establish the generic conventions (implicit in Harding's "standpoint epistemology," Haraway's "situated knowledges," etc.) by which distinct cultures and sub-cultures have come to be represented in our disciplinary and post-disciplinary discourse. A particular question arises from such considerations: what are the possibilities and limitations of "autoethnography," the authoritative description of culture by "insiders" as over against the perspective of "outsiders"? Requirements: an oral report and term paper.
Primary literary texts chosen from the following list of Anglophone works: London Labour and the London Poor, Culture and Anarchy, North and South, Mary Barton, Cranford, Coningsby, Idylls of the King, "Address to the Working Men" in Felix Holt, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Demos, New Grub Street, The Voyage of the Beagle, Barchester Towers, Daniel Deronda, King Solomon's Mines, Last of the Mohegans, Passage to India, The Arrow of God, The God of Small Things, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Custom of the Country, Foe, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Female Man.
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William Kelly
75100
American Lit from 1820-1865
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (Cross Listed as ASCP 82000) 2/4 credits [62282]
This course will consider a wide range of American writing produced in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. We shall attend closely to each of the assigned texts, locating them in their appropriate historical and social contexts. Among the themes that we shall pursue are the following: the invention of cultural tradition, the anxieties of revolutionary influence, the reciprocal construction of self and nation, the determining force of slavery, the countervailing representations of public and private space, the cultural consequences of an emerging market economy, and the precarious character of antebellum subjectivity. One seminar report; one final essay.
TENTATIVE SYLLABUS:
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia; Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer; C.B. Brown, Wieland; Irving, The Sketch Book; Cooper, The American Democrat; Poe, Selected Tales; Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches; Emerson, Selected Essays; Thoreau, Walden; Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Melville, Benito Cereno; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Lincoln, Selected Speeches
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Norman Kelvin
79500
Theory & Practice of Literary Scholarship
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 4 credits [62264]
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, Althusser, Greenblatt, Sinfield, Gates, Deleuze and Guattari, and Morrison. These provide our context. Within it we explore textual criticism and scholarly editing, focusing on questions that need to be answered when anyone chooses a version of a text for a scholarly purpose -- e.g., for writing a dissertation. The positions taken by Greetham, McGann, and Tanselle, who for us represent textual scholars, will get special attention, but the question before us will always be, how does textual scholarship -- producing a critical edition -- relate to literary interpretation as we practice it today? Finally, we will consider hypertext, which cuts across textual scholarship and literary criticism, and challenges both. This will set the stage for a discussion of theory and praxis: of the students' needs today and what they may be in the near future. There will be a choice of term projects. One, including as an option versioning, will be preparation of a critical edition of a short poem (what is meant by a "critical edition" and "versioning" will be explained). The other will be to write a research paper assessing textual scholarship's compatibility with a cultural theory of special interest to the student who chooses to write such a paper. Needless to say, the challenge of hypertext would serve very well for this second.
This course is not open to non-matriculated students.
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Rich McCoy
82100
Sacrament, Sign and Show Biz in the Early Modern Era
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62271]
The Protestant Reformation caused enormous political upheavals as well as a profound cultural revolution that has been described as a "crisis of the sign." In the words of contemporary ballads, "God's sacraments" were reduced to "Uncertain signs and tokens bare," and "blessings turned to blasphemies." Yet, despite fierce iconoclasm and the suppression of miracle and mystery plays, allegory continued to flourish in pageantry and verse and drama continued to evoke the numinous and mystical. We will focus on a number of classic plays, such as Marlowe's Faustus, Shakespeare's Macbeth, King Lear, and Pericles (in performance at BAM), and Webster's Duchess of Malfi, selections from Spenser's Faerie Queene and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, masques by Jonson and Milton, and religious lyrics by Donne, Herbert, and others, exploring the epistemology of figurative language and concepts of presence and representation. We will also discuss the importance of emblematic and visual imagery, using Blackboard as a means for viewing and examining examples.
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Catherine McKenna
86400
Writing Ireland, 1922-2002
Monday 2:00pm-4:00pm (Cross Listed as CL 85500) 2/4 credits [62294]
An examination of the political emergence of Ireland from colonial subordination into ambitious and contested nationhood and beyond, and of the cultural struggles and conflicts that have pitted 'Irish' against 'English', Catholic against Protestant, layman against priest, Gael against 'West Briton', city against countryside, man against woman, and child against parent in the course of that process. A reading of the construction, loss, and transformation of multiple Irish identities through a selection of texts--novels, for the most part--that constitute one possible map of the period. Companion texts--memoirs, essays--and appropriate critical and historical readings will situate these firmly in their landscape. Principal texts will include Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September; Frank O'Connor, Guests of the Nation; Peig Sayers, An Old Woman's Reflections; Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds; Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices or Without My Cloak; Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn ; Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne; John McGahern, The Dark ; John Banville, Birchwood or The Untouchable; Brian Friel, Translations; Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark; and Jamie O'Neill, At Swim Two Boys. As historical background, students might want to look at J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, or Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985
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Sondra Perl
79020
Reader Response Theory in Action
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62301]
"Reading happens," writes Barthes, "when we look up from the text." In this seminar, we will pay attention to our pausing and looking up, to those moments of reading when we construct what the text means. Framed by the work of Barthes, Holland, Rosenblatt, Fish, Fetterly and Cixous, we will examine how our interpretations and responses differ and how the transaction between reader and text plays itself out in the moment-to-moment lives of readers. The texts--novels, memoirs and poems--will be determined by the class. Students will be expected to keep a reader-response journal, to post weekly responses on Blackboard, to compose a final reflective paper and to collaborate on the creation of a performance piece based on one of the readings.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
75700
Samuel Delany and His times
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [62286]
In this course we will treat much of the most prominent work that has been produced by novelist and essayist, Samuel Delany. In particular, we will look at his early novels, Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, and then turn to those novels that helped establish him in the mid-seventies as one of the most significant speculative fiction writers of his generation, especially Dhalgren and Triton. We will then read the whole of Delany's Neveryon series and then continue with his later works, especially Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and his memoirs, The Heavenly Breakfast and The Motion of Light in Water. We will end the course with Delany's controversial late novel, The Mad Man. All the while we will pay particular attention to Delany's own methods of critique and self-critique. One of the most significant questions before us will be how one might place Delany within debates surrounding Semiotics, Deconstruction, Black American Literary and Cultural Theory and Queer Theory. And we will be especially concerned to understand what the example of Delany can tell us about the interdependency of presumably distinct theoretical and artistic traditions.
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Robert Reid-Pharr
78100
The History of Black Sexuality
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm (Cross Listed as WSCP 81000) 2/4 credits [62287]
Two questions animate this course. Is there a history of black sexuality that is distinct from the now well defined field known simply as The History of Sexuality? Further, how does sexuality operate in the production and reproduction of black identity? Or to state the matter from a different vantage point, is it possible to suggest that "race" is lived precisely as sexuality? In answering these questions, students will be asked to wade through large amounts of primary and secondary materials that address both matters of history as well as literary and cultural theory. With particular emphasis on the black community in the United States, the readings will include work from Anne McClintock, Martha Hodes, Siobhan Somerville, Paul Hoch, James Baldwin, Calvin Hernton, Eldridge Cleaver, Charles Johnson, Berverly Guy-Sheftall, Hortense Spillers, Anne du Cille, Evelyn Hammonds, Cornel West, Philip Brian Harper, Charles Nero, Marlon Ross, Jose Munoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Essex Hemphill, Huey Newton and Samuel Delany
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David Richter
80600
Biblical Narratology
Tuesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62300]
"Biblical Narratology" is an oxymoron. Contemporary narrative theory was created to operate on the complexities of works like Absalom, Absalom! rather than 2 Samuel, on works that are wholes rather than totals, written by identifiable authors whose lives and attitudes we can discover by research. It was designed to work on established texts, rather than ones where additions, omissions, and transpositions imposed by later redactors may have warped them almost beyond recognition. It presumes that we understand in at least a rough and ready way the system of genres within which a given narrative has its place, and can intuit whether a given narrative is intended to be read as fiction or fact or an intricate combination of the two. None of this is true of biblical narrative. Yet given the massive importance within Western culture of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, we are driven to try to unlock their secrets with whatever tools are at our disposal.
This course will introduce Biblical narrative, its special characteristics, and the various theoretical methods that have been used to interpret it recently, primarily from the two main camps of contemporary narrative theory, the structuralist/semiotic school associated with Gérard Genette and the rhetorical/formalist school associated with Wayne Booth. But we will also be looking into feminist, queer, Marxist, and yes, postcolonial readings. Our principal narrative texts will be those in Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Jonah, Daniel, Mark, Luke, and Revelation. The literary critics and narrative theorists whose ideas we will be trying out will start with Erich Auerbach, and include, among others, René Girard, Roland Barthes, Mieke Bal, Phyllis Trible, Esther Fuchs, Terry Eagleton, Meir Sternberg, Robert Alter, and Daniel Boyarin; the chief whipping boys will be Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye.
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Michael Sargent
70700
Medieval Literature in Britain
Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm 2/4 credits [62266]
Between postmodern critical observation and everyday experience on the internet, we are coming to recognize the degree to which uniformity in a text is the precarious product of print technology and authorial/editorial intention. In fact, from an economic point of view, we might note that text was the mass-product of industrial capitalism. Because it was produced in a manuscript culture, on the other hand, medieval literature tended to a textual multiplicity that modern editors find themselves forced to explain away, either by choosing a "best-text" manuscript whose readings will be followed come what may, or by reconstructing an ideal text representing what the author "actually" wrote - in either case, burying away in the usually-unread textual apparatus all evidence of what the other manuscripts have to say. In this course, we will look at several medieval English texts that exist in multiple forms, and the responses of modern editors to their textuality. These will include "Sir Orfeo", the F and G prologues to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, a selection of the lyrics of Richard Rolle, the Z-, A-, B- and C-versions of Piers Plowman, Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection and the short and long versions of the revelations of Julian of Norwich.
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Eve Sedgwick
87400
How to do Things with Words and Other Materials
Tuesday 6:30pm-8:30pm (Cross Listed as WSCP 81000) 2/4 credits [62298]
"How to Do Things with Words and Other Materials" is an experimental seminar/studio workshop in which participants will think about and practice a variety of ways of combining written text with other visual media. Roughly speaking, the "artist's book" will be our subject, but we will also consider comics and graphic novels, mail art, graffiti, broadsides, playing cards, and other genres that make unconventional use of the materiality of both the written word and its support. In parallel with historical and theoretical discussions, outside speakers, and visits to local collections, participants will work on creating a portfolio of works in various formats and materials, each exploring different aspects of the complex relations among language, materiality, and visuality. The required text is Keith Smith's Structure of the Visible Book.
Some notes: (1) This is not a class on fine printing or bookbinding. (2) While free to use digital techniques, we will not broach the area of electronic media. (3) Participants must be interested in doing art as well as looking at and thinking about it, but need not be proficient in drawing or printmaking. (4) Many materials, including use of a library of over 1200 rubber stamps, will be provided. Students are invited to supplement these materials in whatever ways they wish. (5) As a studio course, "How to Do Things" will be (regretfully) limited to 10 registered participants, with no auditors allowed. Registration is allowed only with written permission of the professor; please email beishung@aol.com to find out how to apply for admission to the class. This course is not open to non-matriculated students
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Donald Stone
84400
Victorian Poetry and Poetics
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62278]
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 acquired 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 read 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: Tennyson's poetics of loss; Arnold's mixture of poetry and criticism; the Brownings', Clough's, and Meredith's use of poetry as fiction; the Victorian novelists' use of fiction as poetry (selected passages from Eliot, Thackeray, Pater); the fusing of poetry and painting in the Pre-Raphaelites and associates (Dante and Christina Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne); the religious poetry of Hopkins and Newman; the comic spirit in Lear, Carroll, Thackeray, and W.S. Gilbert; Hardy's devotion to poetic craft; the poems of what Yeats dubbed the "Tragic Generation" (Wilde, Dowson, Davidson, Thomson); and finally (citing Yeats again) the "Last Romantics": Yeats, Henley, Housman, and Kipling.
We will also consider some of the major Victorian critical positions on poetry made by Arnold, Browning, Bagehot, Ruskin, Pater, Symons, among others. 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. 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 (0-14-044578-1); Thomas Hardy, Selected Poetry (Oxford pb 0-19-283273-5). Note: Alibris and other online book dealers have inexpensive copies of the superb (1100 page) Woods-Buckley Poetry of the Victorian Period (1955, 1965).
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Neal Tolchin
75400
The Contemporary American Multicultural Novel
Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm (Cross Listed as ASCP 81500) 2/4 credits [62284]
From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999), both of which also won the Pulitzer, the neglected fields of Native American,African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino American literature have gradually drawn the attention of scholars and are now often taught together under the rubric Multicultural American Literature. In contemporary Native American fiction, Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine are regarded as key texts. In Hispanic/Latino American fiction, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima is seen as a foundational text for Mexican American fiction; and Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is similarly viewed as a breakthrough novel for Cuban American writing. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior put Asian American literature on the map as an academic area of study; more recently Fay Ng's Bone and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker have attracted the interest of scholars in this field, as has a text appropriated by Americanists from Canadian writing, Joy Kogawa's Obasan. African American literature is further along in its development as a field of study and possible readings include Edward P. Jones' recently published The Known World. This course will be run as a seminar, with oral reports and a research paper required. A good historical introduction to this field is Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
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Alan Vardy
74000
Re-visioning Romanticism
Monday 4:15pm-6:15pm 2/4 credits [62276]
Alan Douglas Vardy earned a PhD from the University of Washington (1996). His research areas include the English peasant poet John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. He is particularly interested in the intersections between literature and history. He is the author of John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Palgrave Publishers, October, 2003), has published articles on Clare in the John Clare Society Journal and contributed a chapter to the volume John Clare: New Approaches. His Coleridge research has been published in The Coleridge Bulletin, and his chapter, "Her Father's Remains" on Sara Coleridge's editing of her father's works will appear in Nervous Reactions: Victorian Responses to Romantic Writers (SUNY Press, 2004). With David Baulch, he is preparing an edition of the verse dramas of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (under consideration by Broadview Publishers). He has begun research for a book on the posthumous editing of Coleridge, with the goal of establishing how the Coleridge we know was created by a series of family editors in response to shifting social circumstances.
This seminar will offer a thorough introduction to Romantic period poetry and culture. The emphasis will fall on the poetry and politics of the 1790s, but significant attention will be paid to so-called second-generation Romantic writers and the inter-generational tensions they manifest. The course will foreground issues of canon formation through the detailed evaluation of the editorial decisions behind Duncan Wu's Romanticism: An Anthology, which will serve as the course text. The Romantic period has become one of the most thoroughly 'historicized' bodies of literature in the canon over the course of the last decade, and the ways in which this critical work dictates what and how we read will be a key subject in the seminar. For example, we will explore how the poetry of the 1790s intersects and participates in the political controversies of the day by reading it along side radical pamphlets. Feminist theory has equally made claims on the period, and we will also spend time evaluating those developments. The goals of the seminar are thus three-fold: a working knowledge of the poetry and poetics of the period, a thorough historicizing of those materials, and a careful consideration of how literary culture is formed and transformed over time.
REQUIRED TEXT: Wu, Duncan (ed.) Romanticism: An Anthology. Blackwell
RECOMMENDED TEXT: Butler, Marlilyn (ed.) Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy. Cambridge
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Term paper of about 20 pages (due at the last seminar meeting) 70%
Seminar participation including six short papers, and a presentation* 30%
For further information: avardy@hunter.cuny.edu
*The short papers will explore a variety of topics and texts, and may be used to develop your paper topic. The presentations will be given at a small in-class 'conference' near the end of the semester, and expanded and revised into the final papers. The intention is to provide practice in producing conference papers, and revising for publication.
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Michele Wallace
75600
Ralph Ellison, Folklore and Modernism
Monday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [62289]
The centerpiece of Ellison's oeuvre remains his fascinating yet ultimately inscrutable first novel Invisible Man. Join me in this class in pondering its mysteries-- for instance, how the novel attempts to respond to the emerging modernist canon in Western literature at the same time that it doffs its cap to various cultural landmarks in African-American music and culture, in particular jazz and the blues. Ellison's Invisible Man is not your typical first novel but rather the product of a sophisticated connoisseur of the art and politics of the thirties and forties, a mid-career writer whose goal was to write a historically important work that would transcend and avoid the sociological limits that so heavily weighed upon the reputations of his contemporaries Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In an endeavor to recreate his own fascination with the interpretive thickness of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Ellison's Invisible Man is deliberately encyclopedic in its references and allusions, and there are a variety of texts available today that can help us in delving into this matter, including the wonderful new comprehensive and exhaustive biography by Howard University literary historian Lawrence Jackson, as well as the recently published volume of letters between Ellison and Albert Murray, and a range of new critical approaches in particular to his incorporation of his extensive musical background into his writings. Ellison had first wanted to be a musician since growing up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and went to Tuskeegee as a music major. Consequently, his experience of the music scene and the emergence of jazz, the blues and gospel in the South in the 20s, 30s and 40s was ultimately folded into his novelistic voice.
While Ellison was quite shy about publishing fiction subsequent to Invisible Man, he did publish a series of the most influential essays in Afro-American cultural critique probably ever written in Shadow and Act and Goin To The Territory. We will also look at his closest literary and artistic kin--Albert Murray, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Duke Ellington, and Stanley Crouch, among others. We will take on the posthumously published final novel as well. This will ultimately be a research seminar in which we will be endeavoring to find new and creatively inclusive ways (feminist, queer, materialist, etc.) of reading Ellison and his peers.
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Barbara Webb
85500
Creole Poetics in Caribbean Fiction and Poetry
Thursday 4:15pm-6:15pm (Cross Listed as WSCP 81000) 2/4 credits [62291]
This course will trace the evolution of the idea of a Creole poetics in Caribbean writing. Although the primary focus of the course will be the fiction and poetry of the English-speaking Caribbean, we will also read texts by writers from other areas of the region as well as the diasporic communities of North America, such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Edwidge Danticat. Contemporary writing of the Caribbean has no fixed national or geographic boundaries. The writers themselves often reside elsewhere but their fiction and poetry continually invoke Caribbean history and culture. The process of creolization, that difficult transformation of indigenous, African, Asian and European cultures in the Americas is the cultural model that informs the poetics of the texts we will be reading. Beginning with the origins of Caribbean modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, we with discuss Claude Mc Kay's Banana Bottom (1933) as an early exploration of the problematics of colonialism, migration and cultural self-definition that foreshadows many of the literary concerns in the post-1960s period of decolonization. It is during this later period that Caribbean writers increasingly turn toward the region itself in search of distinctive forms of creative expression. We will discuss their ongoing investigation of the history of the region and the relationship between orality and writing in their experiments vernacular forms-from folktales and myths to popular music and carnival. Primary texts: Claude Mc Kay, Banana Bottom; Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants; Lorna Goodison, Selected Poems; Derek Walcott, Omeros; Earl Lovelace, Brief Conversion and Other stories; Erna Brodber, Myal; Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven; Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco; Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! We will also read selected cultural criticism and theoretical writings by Brathwaite, Glissant, Harris and Brodber. 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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Gordon Whatley
70300
Introduction to Old English Language and Literature
Friday 11:45am-1:45pm 2/4 credits [62267]
"Old English" (OE) constitutes the first documented phase of the English language (ca. 700-1150), and OE literature, preserved in manuscripts of the 9th-12th centuries, is by far the most plentiful and diverse of the surviving vernacular literatures of early medieval Europe. While some knowledge of OE is fundamental to understanding (or teaching) the history of English, as well as for serious work in all Middle English and Scots literature, OE is of deep and abiding interest in itself. The language at first glance looks difficult, but motivated students routinely succeed in acquiring a reading knowledge in a 14-week course such as this one. After six weeks working on shorter translation exercises and elementary grammar, the focus shifts to reading more extensive passages of secular and religious prose in the original and in translation. Selections will include: a 10th-c. legend of the "transvestite" saint Eugenia, followed by some classic pieces from the surviving manuscripts of poetry (Dream of the Rood, Judith, Wanderer or Seafarer, the fall of Satan and temptation of Adam and Eve from Genesis B, and The Wife's Lament or one of the riddles). In addition to working on the weekly texts, each student will occasionally report briefly on selected critical studies interpreting or theorizing the readings (some attention will be given to the historical development of Anglo-Saxon studies in the larger context of "English" and the professionalization of the Academy). Also required is a modest paper (12-15 pp) on any topic in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. Students with some prior experience and enjoyment of learning a modern or ancient language should have little difficulty handling the work. We will make use of "Blackboard" for posting handouts and sharing materials; elsewhere on the Web there are some excellent sites useful for learning the language and researching the literature and culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Contact me with queries re. books, etc., and please register early if you think you may take the course: gwhatley@QC.edu
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Joe Wittreich
82300
Paradise Lost and Some Romantic Reincarnations
Wednesday 6:30pm-8:30pm 2/4 credits [62273]
It has been said that with the publication of Paradise Lost Milton effects a revolution in the history of literature, with Paradise Lost, subsequent to its publication in 1667, leaving its imprint everywhere, on poetry and prose alike. We will read Paradise Lost, along with Paradise Regain'd, and then examine their formative influence on such works as William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton, Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Lord Byron's Cain. We will look at lines of connection between Milton and these writers, some of which are established by authors who, in conversation with one another about Milton, give us an amplified sense of what Christopher Cauldwell calls "Miltonic Romanticism." Requirements: 1 oral presentation, and an end-of-term essay of approximately twenty (20) pages.
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Andre Aciman
CL 74000
The Films of Eric Rohmer
Tuesday 6:30pm - 8:30pm 3 credits [62248]
This seminar examines how the films of Eric Rohmer, while reflecting Rohmer's long association with Les Cahiers du cinéma and the innovations of the Nouvelle vague, are equally at home in the literary tradition of the roman d'analyse, as the psychological novel--which dates back to the middle of the Seventeenth Century--is known in France. Rohmer's films present the case for a wider, more integrated understanding of artistic forms that do not necessarily reflect mainstream 20th-century intellectual and aesthetic currents. Readings will include Plautus, Shakespeare, Pascal, Marivaux, and Kleist, as well as writings by Rohmer himself, his contemporaries, and his critics. Films to be screened and analyzed include: My Night at Maude's, Claire's Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, Full Moon in Paris, A Winter's Tale, An Autumn Tale, and others.
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Ammiel Alcalay
CL 85500
Foreign Policy & Domestic Space: The Poetics of Social Knowledge
Thursday at 4:15pm-6:15pm 3 credits [62256]
In this course we will look at the relationships between institutions and ideas, between policies and poetics, as we trace parallel and conflicting boundaries between institutional representations of issues and events, and creative or poetic responses to them. We will look at both broader issues (imprisonment, liberation, the private, the public, nativity, conflict), and responses to particular instances, primarily specific events, lives or wars (these may range from King Philip's war in 17th c. New England, to the American war in Vietnam, the break-up of ex-Yugoslvia, and the Middle East, particularly 20th c. Iraq and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, etc.). Our aim will be to consider how what have been called "moral geographies" are created, through the cultural and political practices that frame our conceptions of the imaginable and unimaginable, the acceptable and unacceptable, the natural and unnatural.
In mapping and exploring this terrain, we will look at different kinds of knowledge construction, from changing conceptions of the ancient world or narratives of the 1960s, to the development of the university structure and academic priorities in relation to the military/industrial complex during the Cold War; from Charles Olson's concepts of history, knowledge, and the "post-modern", to the later development of ethnopoetics. We will consider texts ranging from a variety of media, disciplines, frameworks, time periods, and languages - from Sumerian tablets to footage of the war in Iraq; from prison literature to anti-war manifestos. In doing this, we will look at issues of translation in a much larger sense: from individual and institutional practices of the translation of actual texts or concepts from other languages, cultures and situations, to the philosophic implications of the representation of articulated experience as an act of resistance to generalization. This course is given in conjunction with a course on Palestine/Israel & South Africa by visiting professor Elias Khoury from Lebanon at New York University, on Tuesday afternoon (for more information, check the NYU listings). Over the course of the semester, Prof. Khoury will have the opportunity to address our class on related issues and I will address his class. We hope to have visiting speakers and public events in conjunction with the themes we are covering. We encourage interested students, particularly those concentrating on Middle Eastern literatures, to enroll for both courses.
The range of authors and contexts will be wide, allowing each student to accommodate their linguistic abilities and interests; while the final reading list has not yet been selected, selections from the following may be included: Cuneiform Texts & the Writing of History by Marc Van de Mieroop; The Name of War: King Philip's War & the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore; Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 by Melani McAlister; selections of Melville's poetry and journals; selections from Charles Olson; correspondence between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan; texts by Etel Adnan; Chester Himes; Semezdin Mehmedinovic; Ghasan Kanafani; prison letters of George Jackson; Abdellatif Laabi; Leslie Marmon Silko, et al. A more complete reading list will go out to registered students before the semester. Any inquiries about the course can be made to me at: aaka@earthlink.net
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Felicia Bonaparte
CL 87000
Seminar: Studies in European Drama: The Theaters of Apollo and Dionysus: Studies in Marlowe/Shakespeare, Corneille/Racine, and Goethe/Schiller
Wednesday 4:15pm-6:15pm 3 credits [62257]
The history of art and of criticism, and indeed of philosophy generally, has repeatedly distinguished two very different modes of thought, ways of knowing, kinds of art. Using Nieztsche's The Birth of Tragedy as a starting point for our inquiry, and including other essays that comment further on this conflict (such as Schiller's landmark work On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry which not only, in his view, distinguished Goethe's art from his own but had an important influence on the development of Nietzsche's thought) this course will explore this opposition--if indeed it proves to be one--in the work of six great dramatists in three different times and places. In the process we will be concerned to examine such ideas as: instinctual art, philosophic poetry, the war of the ancients and the moderns, the relation of form and content, the role of art in society and even more in civilization, the relation of art to religion, the relation of art to myth, the relation of myth to religion, the nature and function of paradigms, the question of an artistic language, the idea of a genre and its relation to an age, and the various ways in which all of these and many more reveal themselves in different eras and national literatures. Knowledge of a foreign language will not be required in this course but those who are able to read French or German will be encouraged to read the plays in the original if possible and, in reports and class discussions, to introduce the rest of the seminar to the subtleties not available in translations of these works.
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