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Spring 1999 Course Descriptions
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U702.00
T, 2:00-4:00
Decolonizing (the) English: Studies in Anglophone Literature
Prof. Peter Hitchcock
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 imbricated with 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 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 at the turn of the millennium. 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. The first class will discuss Lawrence's "England, my England" and questions of England, English, and Englishness.
Suggested Readings: The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), The Black Album (Kureishi), Crick Crack Monkey (Hodge), The God of Small Things (Roy), The Bone People (Hulme), Trainspotting (Welsh), Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga), Crossing the River (Phillips), The Famished Road (Okri). Critical readings will include selections from Bhabha, Spivak, McClintock, Ngugi, Brathwaite, James, Harris, and Pennycook among others. There will be a term essay.
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U705.00
Th, 4:15-6:15
The Canterbury Tales
Prof. William Coleman
A close reading of The Canterbury Tales. Students need no prior experience of Middle English, however. The course will begin with a survey of 14th century English. The course will emphasize source study of the Tales and an understanding of Chaucer's works within the literary culture of 14th century Europe. It will examine Chaucer in the context of classical and medieval Latin literature, of contemporary French writers, and of the three masters of Italian "trecento"--Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. (In connection with this, arrangements will be made for students to participate in a special showing of 14th century European literary manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library.) The course will also discuss the Tales as an "unstable" work--that is, the fact that The Canterbury Tales is an unfinished work which survives in a variety of forms. This textual situation allows for a multiplicity of readings of the work. Students have the option of writing a single long paper, or of completing two to three short papers on individual tales, their literary backgrounds, and their critical reception. The class text will be The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition (1987).
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U714.00
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Shakespeare: The Last Plays
Prof. W. R. Elton
Now, for the first time offered, this course on Shakespeare's final achievement will include some of his last tragedies and comedies--or final romances: Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Winter's Tale, among others.
Aims: to develop close-reading perceptions; and professional scholarly-critical writing skills.
Begin by reading through Stanley Wells's Companion to Shakespeare Studies, including the essay by Elton on "Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age." Acquire New Arden Texts of the plays. Read and reread!
Requirement: one ten-page paper, to be developed by regular conferences.
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U731.00
T, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Survey of 18th Century Literature
Prof. Blanford Parker
The course will survey the important poetic genres and modes of the period from 1660-1760. It will treat of Baroque and transitional poetry in order to clarify the peculiar rhetorical, intellectual, and prosodic qualities of Augustan verse. Rochester, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Thomson, and Johnson will be emphasized. Works not listed among the required texts will be given in hand-outs. Students will be expected to pay for copying. Office number (College of Staten Island): (718) 982-3649.
Required Texts:
John Dryden, Poetry and Prose of John Dryden, Oxford English Authors Edition
Rochester, Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, (ed. Vieth) Yale
Jonathan Swift, Complete Poems, (ed. Rogers) Yale
Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, (ed. Butt) Yale
James Thomson, The Seasons and Other Poems, (ed. Sambrooke) Oxford
[Package with handouts for Greville, Butler, Cowley, Garth, et. al.}]
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U740.00
W, 11:45-1:45
The American Renaissance
Prof. David Reynolds
Arguably the richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830-60) features Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson and others. This course places the major works in their cultural context and uses them as touchstones for discussions of contemporary critical approaches to literature. Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy and literary theories are related to other key writings of the period, such as Thoreau's Walden and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The issues of slavery and race relations are traced in a variety of texts, including Melville's "Benito Cereno," Frederick Douglass's autobiographical Narrative, and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Women's issues and other themes explored are the issue of class in an emerging capitalist economy, literary treatments of religion, and the development of a distinctly American style. Melville's Moby-Dick is investigated as a capacious meeting place of numerous themes and strategies of the period. Current critical and theoretical debates about the period are probed. Active participation in class discussion is strongly encouraged. A 15-page term paper is required.
Required texts: (1) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol 1., 5th edition (ed. Nina Baym et al); (2) Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK, Norton Critical Edition (ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker); (3) Harriet Beecher Stowe, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (any edition).
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U741.00
Th, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
The Longer Romantic Poem
Prof. Angus Fletcher
Description forthcoming.
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U742.00
Th, 4:15-6:15
High Victorianism: Literature and Art of the 1850's
Prof. Donald Stone
The 1850's according to historians, marked the highpoint of Victorian England: the Crystal Palace exhibition symbolized English power at its peak. The literature of the 1850's, however, reveals another England, one fearful of instability (as seen in Dicken'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 Woman), 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 (The Origin of Species). Attention will also be paid to the arts of the period: the 1850's 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 1850's 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 Classics); 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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U744.00
W, 2:00-4:00
All About All the Brontes
Prof. Anne Humpherys
The title is presumptuous if not preposterous. Nonetheless, we will try over the course of the semester to consider the artistic work both visual and verbal, both juvenile and mature of the Bronte family. We will study the family as a system, perhaps surveying the history of their consolidated biographies. We will have sessions on the rich Bronte manuscript holdings at the Morgan Library. We will try to account for the staying power of Jane Eyre by studying its critical reception from the biography of Charlotte by Elizabeth Gaskell to the novel's notoriety in the 19th century, and into its role in the development first of feminist criticism and then of postcolonial thought. We might even look at the history of the Brontes and their novels on film. Though we will obviously talk about Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, we will also look at the juvenilia by the sisters and Branwell, the collected poems, the other three novels by Charlotte, the two by Anne, and the drawings and paintings by all. One oral report, one four-page paper, and one 15-20 page paper.
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U751.00
Th, 9:30-11:30 a.m.
Art and Thought of the 1960s
Prof. Louis Menand
An examination of the intellectual culture of the 1960s, from a mostly American point of view and with an emphasis on issues relevant to literary studies. The hypothesis is that a number of widely accepted knowledge claims and aesthetic assumptions were debunked during the decade and were replaced by claims and assumptions of a different sort, and that these changes radically altered the social status (and thus the nature) of art and ideas. We will try to understand these changes by looking closely at specific events, including: the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism; the Mailer-Greer Town Hall debate; the Chomsky-Foucault debate; the controversy over Portnoy's Complaint; the Clay-Liston heavy weight championship fight; the early career of Andy Warhol; the Paris uprising of 1968; the Supreme Court decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade; and the emergence of the New Hollywood. The class as a whole will read, usually, a single text, and individual students will present the results of their (directed) research on a particular figure or event, to be followed by general discussion. Students will also submit a final 20-page paper, on a topic of their choice.
No auditors.
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U752.01
F, 11:45-1:45
Americans, African-Americans, and the Law
Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs
As the two major narrative systems of the 19th and 20th centuries, literature and law each inscribe the lives of African Americans. At the same time, African-American literature interrogates and critiques American law. The course will look at selected novels and the laws and legal concepts they address to determine more concretely the nature of this relationship. We will operate historically and theoretically, examining not only the intertextuality of law and African-American literature over time, but the effects of romanticism and modernism on each. Students will be required to provide the instructor with one short paper that opens her or his inquiry into these matters, an annotated bibliography that points to a researched paper, and a final paper itself.
Required texts: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Martin R. Delany, Blake, or the Huts of America; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces; Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio; Walter White, Fire in the Flint; George Schuyler, Black No More; Constitution of the United States of America; Distributed material from Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in American Life (Suggs; forthcoming).
Recommended texts: A bibliography will be provided and specific primary and seondary works will be noted. Some will be on reserve.
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U752.02
Th, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.
Readings in African-American Literature, 1960s-Present
Prof. Barbara Webb
A study of the fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of African American writers from the 1960s to the present. The Black Arts movement of the 1960s was a period of cultural and literary reorientation that opened the way for the new approaches to writing and literary criticsm that have characterized contemporary African American literature. This course will include texts by writers such as Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones), Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, and John Wideman among others. We will examine their experiments with language and form, and their use of African American folk traditions, popular culture and history; we will also discuss their revisions of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Special emphasis will be given the historical and social context of each work. The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week; a term paper (15-20 pages) will also be required.
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U756.00
T, 415-6:15 p.m.
Women of Modernism: Experiments
Prof. Mary Ann Caws
What were the special gifts of the women we think of as modernists, and how did they contribute to what we choose now to call modernism? What kinds of modernism did they make, how have those lasted? We will focus particularly on the creators of experimental forms--in texts and lives, from early modernism to high and post-modernism.
We will go calling in the fields of fiction and the essay, poetry and visual art, in the company of Akhmatova, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Boyle, Leonora Carrington, H.D., Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Mina Loy, Joyce Mansour, Toni Morrison, Vita Sackville-West, Nathalie Sarraute, Stevie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Tsvetaeva, Christa Wolf, Virginia Woolf. The visual background will be supplied by Vanessa Bell, Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Dora Carrington, Sonia Delaunay, Goncharova, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keefe, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Meret Oppenheim, Lee Miller, Toyen, and the filmmaker Nelly Kaplan (Belen). Other figures, from Salome to Kiki de Montparnasse, Nadja, and Rrose Selavy will make an occasional appearance. Knowing we can't take them all along, we will see where they will take us.
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U774.00
W, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Conrad and Faulkner
Prof. Elizabeth Tenenbaum
Joseph Conrad, a native of Poland and a master seaman, saw a good deal of the world before becoming an English novelist; William Faulkner, on the other hand, spent most his life in Oxford, Mississippi. Yet despite profound differences in their lives, their approaches to writing fiction are closely allied. Boldly unconventional in technique, both writers characteristically employ multiple narrative viewpoints, chronological dislocations, and idiosyncratic writing styles. While they are typically Modern in their effort to represent the contents of their major characters' minds, they differ from their fellow Modernists in the range of figures to whom they apply this approach. They excel, furthermore, at interweaving their depiction of individual subjectivities with extended explorations of such aspects of public life as political conflict, societal change, interracial and intercultural relations, and the very concept of "community." This seminar will read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," "The Secret Sharer," Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absolom! Absolom! and selections from Go Down, Moses. Students may write either two short papers or a single long one, totaling 15 to 20 pages in either case. In addition, they will submit three weekly discussion questions. Recommended biographical and critical readings will be placed on library reserve.
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U790.02
T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Principles and Practices in Qualitative Research
Prof. Sondra Perl
Research in composition studies is a hybrid affair. It has roots in the social sciences, the humanities and in philosophic inquiry. Consequently, designing and conducting research in the field of composition inevitably leads one to select an orienting view. In this seminar, we will briefly explore the various orientations toward inquiry in composition which have emerged over the past 25 years with a particular and lengthy focus on one school of thought: the philosophic and practical implications of what Max van Manen calls "human science." This approach will bring us into contact with views of reality that are at once phenomenological, hermeneutic and semiotic. We will be asking, in essence, what does it mean to study lived experience -- not only to those of us who engage in such research but to those who become our subjects? Of what value is such work? What are the pitfalls whenever we attempt to describe and interpret another's experience? How, in other words, do we see our own seeing? How do we account for our own biases and even more troubling our own blindness? What forms allow us to write accounts of research that address such issues?
To grasp these ideas, seminar participants will design and conduct small classroom inquiries. Class sessions will be devoted to discussion of emerging questions, methods of data collection and analysis and multiple and conflicting views of interpretation. The overall goal is two-fold: to provide those new to composition studies with a way of entering the discourse on and practice of classroom-based research and to offer advanced students an opportunity to design philosophically sound research projects appropriate for the dissertation.
The primary texts for the course will include (but will likely not remain limited to) van Manen's Researching Lived Experience (SUNY Press, 1990) and Mortensen and Kirsch, Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy (NCTE: 1996).
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U795
Day andTime TBA
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism (Intensive Version)
Prof. D. C. Greetham
This intensive course is intended to provide students with the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework for dealing with the increasingly complex (inter)disciplinary arrangement of data in media from print to hypertext, and to give practical experience in archival access, data manipulation, and textual production. Operating under a number of different theoretical approaches (from intentionalism to reception to culture criticism to gender studies), the intensive seminar organizes the various practical methods in archival research (enumeration, description, transcription, production, and so on) within a recognition that historical moment, ideological position, gendered identity and other personal and cultural "markers" will influence the apparently objective, positivist assumptions of "strict and pure" bibliography. Students in the course will thus be exposed to the necessary bibliographical and archival skills necessary to gain command of data, but will also be introduced to the conceptual underpinnings of this practique. This balance between the theory and practice means, for example, that we will be just as likely to encounter Derrida's Archive, Fever and Werner's forthcoming collection on The Poetics of the Archive as we will more "conventional" approaches as Altick's Art of Literary Research or Harner's Literary Research Guide. The means of integrating these approaches will inevitably be intertextual, and the textualization of data will be our acknowledged organizational principle. This means that our investigation of manuscript, print, and hypertext will be continually informed by the awareness of the textuality of both the medium and the message. Research thus becomes, and is embedded in, text and culture.
The intensive format of the course reflects its theoretical/practical interrelations. We will meet often (usually twice a week), and for longer periods (usually three hours, with a break) than in the conventional seminar, but we will complete the course in just one month! There will be much less emphasis on external archival work and much more on in-class discussion of the specific results of the issues raised by each assignment. I will be on call throughout this period, by e-mail or phone, and we may construct our own-online website for assignments and discussion. This version of U795 will address those students who are interested in linking archival and bibliographical research to their other critical work, but it is only fair to acknowledge that the intensive version will not provide as much experience in library work as the semester-long versions offered during the regular term.
Course requirements:
Attendance at and participation in all sessions; preparation of short research/textual assignments for each session; completion of final print or hypertext edition.
Required texts:
D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland, 1994); Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Virginia,1992, 2nd ed.); Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (Michigan, 1997, 3rd ed.); G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Pennsylvania, 1989). All are available in paperback.
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U795.00
T, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism
Prof. Norman Kelvin
How does textual scholarship relate to current theories of literary interpretation? The question will guide our inquiry in this course. With special attention to the work of Greetham, McGann, and Tanselle, we begin by covering the basic areas of textual scholarship, focussing on methods for establishing a copytext. We then look at some major statements of post-modernist theory, including those of Derrida, Paul de Man, Eagleton, Jameson, Barthes, Todorov, Showalter, Greenblatt, and Henry Louis Gates. Throughout our discussion we'll ask, how does the particular theory of literary interpretation with which we are dealing at the moment connect with textual shcolarship? what cultural assumptions do they share? do any literary approaches and areas of textual scholarship shape each other? The term project: preparing an edition of a poem or other brief work.
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U804.00
Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Language of Literature: The Linguistic Craft of Yeats and other Modern Poets
Prof. Edmund Epstein
This course will combine a critical approach to modern poetry with a short introductiion to the study of language. There will be a short introduction to the phonology and syntax of English, followed by the application of linguistic techniques to the analysis of poetry.
The course will center on the poetry of William Butler Yeats, who was a revolutionary experimenter in language. The emphasis will be on the unusual linguistic requirements that a Symbolist aesthetic imposed upon poets in the Symbolist tradition.
Other poets treated will include Pound, Eliot, Hopkins, and Robert Lowell. There will be some analysis of poetry by Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake, Shelley, and Coleridge. There will be reference to French poetic techniques in the poetry of Verlaine, Mallarme, and Valery.
Texts: The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition. ed. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
The instructor has prepared some materials on phonology and syntax. They are being printed up by the Queens College Press, and will cost approximately ten dollars.
Recommended but not required: Students may derive some knowledge of linguistic terms and techniques of linguistic analysis if they consult general introductions to linguistics such as: Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, and Harnisch, Linguistics: an Introduction to Language and Communication; Fromkin and Rodman, An Introduction to Language.
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U804.02
T, 6:30-8:30 pm
Proust and International Gay Modernism
Prof. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
This is the second half of a two-semester course that will cover the whole of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Students may read the novels in French or English. We will use Proust as an ongoing focus for discussion of a variety of issues and traditions in critical theory. A particular emphasis, however, will be placed on Proust's continuing centrality in European-American intertextual explorations of queer sexuality and culture. Readings "around" Proust will include theoretical and biographical studies, as well as selected primary texts by contemporaneous and subsequent novelists and poets.
Instructor's permission required for registration.
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U809.01
M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution: English Literature in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Prof. Richard McCoy
A broad survey of major works and historical accounts of the period as well as recent criticism. Authors studied will include Wyatt, Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lanyer, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Wroth, Marvell, and Milton.
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U 810.00
Th, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Dissertation Workshop
Prof. Joan Richardson
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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U810.01
M, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Poetry Workshop
Prof. W. R. Elton
Now, for the first time offered, this coures is devoted to developing poetry skills, at all levels. Regular consultations and class readings of poems. Use of anthologies, e.g., Stanley Burnshaw, The Poem Itself. Considerations of the most recent currents in poetry-writing, including European poets; and of the market poetry today.
Poems will be handled with sensitivity and discretion.
NOTE ON THE PROFESSOR: widely published poet, including, most recently, Partisan Review. Collection, Wittgenstein's Trousers (1991). Poetry-writing grant, 1998, Vermont Studio Center. Many years of directing poetry workshops at the University of California, Riverside, and at CUNY Graduate Center. Many public readings.
Whether you decide to take this course or not, please feel free to drop into my office to discuss your poetry.
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U809.02
W, 6:30-8:30
Race In The Renaissance: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Behn
Prof. Tom Hayes
We will read Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, three plays by Shakespeare--The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest--and Aphra Behn's novel Orookono with special attention to the representation of racial and ethnic difference. We will try to ascertain how our attitudes and fantasies regarding racial and ethnic difference influences our reading of these works. We will also examine the ways in which racial and ethnic difference intersect with sexual difference in these texts and explore significant similarities and differences between the representation on anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, 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 these and other literary texts that call upon us to deal with the troublesome concepts of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference.
A term paper (15-25 pages) and active participation in class discussions are required.
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U814.00
M, 6:30-8:30
Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Prism of Practical Criticism
Prof. W. Speed Hill
Ceci n'est pas un cours des Sonnets de Shakespeare. Rather, taking Shakespeare's Sonnets as an exemplary text, the course will survey the varieties of critical approaches these poems have elicited in roughly, the last fifty years. Included would be: new critical/formalist; old historical; structuralist; new historical; reception theory; gay theory; psychoanalytic; feminist; genre theory; rhetorical; deconstructive; post-structuralist; comparative (Petrarchanism); and cultural materialist. Though selections from other sonnet sequences may be consulted (Sidney's Astrophil and Stella; Spenser's Amoretti; Daniel's Delia; Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Drayton's Idea), the readings, lectures, and class discussions will focus on the variety of critical approaches Shakespeare's problematic texts have historically elicited--and continue to elicit.
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U816.00
M, 4:14-6:15
William Blake: The Politics of Culture
Prof. Jacqueline DiSalvo
This course will involve an intensive study of Blake's major poetry including: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, Europe, Book of Urizen, Milton, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, and others. To a lesser extent we will also consider some of Blake's art and his illuminated books. We will seek to locate his works historically in the context of his period of intense political and cultural contention amid a radical sub-culture of Jacobins, millenarians, occultists etc. We will examine the revolutionary romanticism of his visionary myth with its anticipation of both Marx and Freud, its challenges to mind-body dualism, and its interrogation of conventional discourses of religion, sexuality, gender, politics and even "sanity." And we will consider Blake's radical poetics in the light of such modern theorists as Bahktin and Foucault, with its deconstruction of assumptions about realism and personality, and distinctions between popular and high culture, its exposure of its own processes of production, and probing of the relations between art and power and the possibilities of a transgressive art. Texts will include The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman and the illustrated versions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Blake's "America: A Prophecy" and "Europe: A Prophecy" (Dover). For historical background students should read E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. An oral report and final paper will be required.
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U816.02
W, 4:15-6:15
Melville
Prof. Neal Tolchin
This seminar will survey Melville's major fiction: Typee, Redburn, White-Jacket, Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, Billy Budd, and his short stories. Emphasis will be placed on recent critical approaches to Melville, the classic criticism of his work, and the two recently published biographies by Laurie Robertson-Lorant and Hershel Parker. Course requirements: oral reports on the criticism, a seminar paper (a draft of which will be presented to the class), and class participation.
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U831.00
Th, 2:00-4:00
Pamela to Emma: The Heroine and the Novel
Prof. Rachel Brownstein
We will focus on the structural importance of the heroine to the novel as the form develops from Samuel Richardson's narratives to Jane Austen's. Sir Charles Grandison, the Richardson novel that Austen knew best, is not on the syllabus--but students are encouraged to read it and reflect on what it makes one think about: the hero as heroine, the differences between the witty and sentimental heroines, the way analyses of character come close to replacing plot. Books to be read and discussed include Pamela and the unabridged Clarissa, Lennox's The Female Quixote, Burneys's Evelina, Edgeworth's Belinda, Wollstonecraft's Mary and Maria, with Godwin's Memoir and Wollstonecraft's Letters from Scandinavia, and at least four novels by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. In addition, each student will choose one additional novel of the period--by, e.g., Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Hays, Mary Brunton, Charlotte Smith--and characterize it to the group. A paper based on this presentation and another paper will constitute the written work for the seminar, in addition to the lists of questions provoked by the readings that are to be handed in each week.
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U848.00
M, 2:00-4:00
American Realism
Prof. Morris Dickstein
This course will examine the development of American realism from the 1850's through World War I, beginning with the poetry of Whitman and the photographs of Mathew Brady. It will focus on four overlapping forms of realism: the moral realism of James, Wharton, Chopin, and others, rooted in Hawthorne and the English novel; the social realism of Howells, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and regional writers like Jewett; the transgressive or documentary realism of progressive crusaders like Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair; and finally the visual realism of photographers like Brady, Riis, Lewis Hine, and Walker Evans, painters like Homer, Eakins, Hopper, and the Ashcan school, and early silent film directors like Griffith, Chaplin, and King Vidor. The course will trace the beginnings of realism in portraiture, in the carnage of Civil War, and the tremendous social changes of the Gilded Age, and we'll examine the impact of the ideas of Darwin and the French naturalists. 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 Mumford, The Brown Decades; Kazin, On Native Grounds; Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America and Reading American Photographs; Eric Sundquies (ed.), American Realism: New Essays; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Michael Bell, The Problem of American Realism; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism; David Shi, Facing Facts, and other secondary works. An oral report and a term paper will be required.
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U860.00
M, 11:45-1:45
The Confluence of Contemporary Theory and Fiction: Foucault:Pynchon--Jameson--Baudrillard:DeLillo
Prof. Gerhard Joseph
In a paranoid epistemology that links contemporary theory and narrative, Michel Foucault is arguably to Thomas Pynchon as Jean Baudrillard is to Don DeLillo. The seminar will test that hypothesis of ratio by examining theoretical and fictional works of the paired writers, with Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" as a bridge between the pairing. We will close with a comparison of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and DeLillo's Underworld to see whether either or both are "modern" in Matthew Arnold's sense of the term (in "On the Modern Element in Literature"), i.e., works that are "comprehensively adequate" to the portrayal of "a deeply interesting epoch." Requirements: an oral report and a term paper.
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U861.00
Th, 6:30-8:30
Black Feminist Thought
Prof. Michele Wallace
I would expect that each time I teach it, the function and perimeters of this course will change. The goal is, roughly, to consider the most recent developments in what I like to call "black feminist thought," although the concept of such a rubric as a stable or even a provisionally cohesive entity seems to me highly problematic. Consequently, I've chosen not to deal with "black feminist thought" as a historical category (in which case we might focus on the works of black feminists of the nineteenth century or black feminists of the second wave (including myself), but rather to push boundaries of "feminist" and "black" as far as they can go to encompass what a "black feminist thought," would be likely to find important. As such, our readings are not determined by the ethnicity or gender identity of the writer, nor are they confined to conventionally literary texts, but rather the choice is guided by the relevance and potential usefulness of the writer's project to the likelihood of a world which might find itself able to include a "black feminist thought" -- or even better still, no longer in need of one.
It is my plan that the books we read in this course will change each time in order to accomodate the latest and most interesting work in the overlapping fields of gender studies, race studies, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, historical, literary or theoretical. Of course, there is a predilection toward the racial. In this instance, we will be looking at (although this list is subject to change): Nell Painter's Sojourner Truth (New York: Norton, 1997); Toni Morrison's Beloved along with its Jonathan Demme film adaptation; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. (Chapel Hill: Univ of NC Press, 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940; Hazel Carby's Race Men; and Patricia Hill Collins's Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice.
Strictly for your personal reference, and therefore recommended texts you will not be required to read are: Toni Morrison, Things We Do in the Dark; Beverly Guy-Sheftall's Words of Fire; Paula Gidding's When and Where I Enter; W.E.B. Dubois's Souls of Black Folk; Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind; Martin Duberman's Paul Robeson; Barbara Smith's The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom.
The requirements for the course, aside from regular attendance and participation in discussion, are either one or two brief oral reports on assigned readings as well as a final paper of 12 to 15 pages.
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U862.00
W, 4:15-6:15
Warhol
Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
Intensive study of the work of Andy Warhol, with an emphasis on his writings and his early films. We will explore his effect on the evolution of queer culture; the questions of agency, authority, and collaboration that arise from his methods; his ironic reproductions and repudiations of Hollywood, the star system, and cinematic history; the limits and possibilities of conceptual art, performance art, Pop art, camp and fashion; his relation to the avant-garde; his promulgation and erosion of such roles as fine artist, dandy, flaneur, homosexual, and genius. Though focused on Warhol, the seminar is also inevitably concerned, more generally, with the 1960's, Pop art, underground cinema, and queer cultural production.
Texts will include all the written (or spoken) works of Andy Warhol: a: a novel, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Popism, and The Andy Warhol Diaries. Secondary works may include Stephen Koch's Stargazer, David Bourdon's Warhol, the journals of Candy Darling, and Reva Wolf's Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960's. Films to be screened will include "Blow Job," "Harlot," "Kiss," "Loves of Ondine," "My Hustler," "Haircut," and "Vinyl."
Students will be encouraged to use the Museum of Modern Art's Film Study Center, which has study prints of most of Warhol's films.
Requirement: one oral presentation and one essay (20-25 pages) on any aspect of Warhol's life or work.
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