PhD Program in English
PhD Program in EnglishLink to the Graduate Center Homepage
COURSES: SPRING 2010

For all registration dates and deadlines, see the GC academic calendar.

To view detailed course descriptions click here or click on the faculty name in the grid below.

Register on Record: CRN 10000

Weighted Instructional Units: CRN 1000X (the last digit is the value of credits you need to bring you up to 7 credits).

For Dissertation Supervision click here

 

 
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
11:45- 1:45

Schaffer
Victorian Bodies

 

Dolan
America in the 1830s: Interdis Persp

Wilner
Readings in the Romantic Lyric

Joseph
Culture Thry: Ethno Novels & Novelistic Ethno


Burger/Kruger
High and Late Medieval Dream Vision

 

Hoeller
Thry & Prac Lit Scholarship

Tolchin
Cont Multicultural Am Novel


2:00-4:00

Dawson
Mongrel Nation: Lit & Rac Form in Mod Britian

Schlutz
Freedom & Nec: Literary Phil Pers 1750-1820

Dickstein
Autobio Turn in Postwar Am Writ, 1940-1980

Koestenbaum
Playing with Freud

Reynolds
Colonial & Federal Am Lit

Israel
Beckett & Sustainability

McCoy
Romance & Rapture

Sargent
Dissertation Wkshp

 

Epstein
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake



4:15-6:15

Caws
Writ & Paint in Bloomsbury

 

 

Richter
Biblical Narratology

Webb
Black PoMo: Af Am Fic Since 1970s


Brownstein
Jane Austen in Context

Hayes
Miltonic Tradition: Blake, Ginsberg, Neil Hurston & Morrison

Miller
Feminism, Autobiography, Thry

Yood
Sophists to Systems: Rhets Past, Comps Pres, Engs Future

 

6:30-8:30

Mlynarczyk
Contro in Comp: Hist Persp


 

Whatley
After the Bible: Saints Legends in Late Ant, the Mid Ages, and Mod

Faherty
"Revolution and the World": The Cult Geo of the Early Am Novel

Watts
Af-Am Lit During a Turbulent Period: 1960s

 

Di Iorio
Caribbean Spirits, Colonial Ghosts

 
Intersession: Greetham Thry & Practice Lit Scholarship

Courses listed alphabetically by instructor

ENGL 84000. “Jane Austen in Context.” Rachel Brownstein. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM. (cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 10127].

The shelves have groaned for some time now with books and articles that place Jane Austen in her various contexts, from the narrowly biographical to the very broad. The novelist and the novels have been located ever more precisely in their time and place, as well as in political and social history (local, national, and international); literary and intellectual history (romance, realism, Romanticism; women’s writing, comedy and satire; the canon and the reading public); and in the circumambient culture or cultures. As recent writers and filmmakers have explored the flip side, the post-modern side, the dark side, and of course the ever green and pleasant side of Austenland, the afterlife of the novels and the figure (or name) of the novelist has provided yet another context.

While contextual studies have shed new and interesting light, they threaten to overwhelm the texts. Heated arguments that Jane knew about sex or invented it, or that Locke or the Napoleonic Wars, the slave trade, India, private and public theatricality, the culture of consumption, or the triumph of bourgeois individualism are central to interpreting Austen’s stories tend to rage on for their own sakes. In this course we will survey the full field of Austeniana, but look most closely at the novels. Our focus will be on the relationship of the reader to the author imagined behind them, or between their lines.

Required reading includes the six completed novels, a biography of the novelist, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). We will also read Austen’s letters and her minor and unfinished works. Students are expected to be familiar with Pride and Prejudice and the “classic” adaptations of 1940 and 1995. Writing includes weekly one-page response papers, a brief class presentation about an important work or trend in Austen studies, and a 10-15 page paper handed in at the last class meeting.

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ENGL 80700. “The High and Late Medieval Dream Vision.” Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger. 2/4 credits. Thursday 11:45AM-1:45PM. (cross-listed with MALS 70500). [CRN 10128].

Medieval theorists conceived the dream as potentially revealing or commenting on individual psychology, the social and the political, and cosmic truth, all at the same time. Perhaps this capacious definition of dreams helps account for the extraordinary popularity, from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, of the literary genre of dream vision. Many of the major European writers of the period – Alain de Lille, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machaut, Chaucer, Shakespeare – produced works that are in conversation with the tradition of dream literature, and dream poetry is central to the high and late medieval English literary tradition.

In this course, we will examine a wide range of medieval dream visions, thinking about how these works engage, in complex ways, with questions about the individual psyche, sociality, and the metaphysical. We will read works selected from among the following authors and texts: Boethius, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun (The Romance of the Rose), Guillaume de Deguileville, Jean Froissart, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland (Piers Plowman), Pearl, John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, James I of Scotland, The Assembly of Ladies, Lancelot of the Laik, The Court of Sapience, John Skelton, and Stephen Hawes. In considering such works, we will attend to the ways in which the dream vision was used to explore the experience and ideology of courtly love; its involvements with theological and devotional discourses; its navigation of the complexities of medieval gender and sexuality, and of such social institutions as marriage, the family, the court, and pilgrimage. We will consider, throughout, how historicist approaches to medieval material might be useful, as well as what kinds of critical theoretical approach (psychoanalytic? Deleuzoguattarian? queer? postcolonial?) might be particularly fruitful in the reading of such medieval texts.

Students will be expected to prepare two oral presentations in the course of the semester, and to write a 20-page seminar paper.

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ENGL 76000. “Writing and Painting in Bloomsbury.” Mary Ann Caws. 2/4 credits. Monday 4:15PM-6:15PM. (cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 10129].

What a bunch of creative types there were in old Bloomsbury! This seminar will focus on the art, the art theorizing and criticism, the literary works,  and the personal writings of those beings we know, familiarly, as the Bloomsberries, and more formally as the painters Carrington, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and the writers Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey,  Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, Vita Sackville-West, Gerald Brenan, Quentin Bell, Frances Partridge, and their many associates and friends . Here there converge letters and lives and journals and works20of visual and verbal art. We will discuss, for instance, Roger Fry’s art writing and his friendship with the psychological theorist Charles Mauron (Bloomsbury’s man in France, known for his "psychocriticism") and Fry’s translations of Mallarme, as well as Mauron’s friendship with Morgan Forster, and his translations of Virginia Woolf – comparing them with other translations of the same works; we will compare Duncan Grant's paintings and those of Vanessa Bell of the same objects, and so on. In short, we want to deal with Bloomsbury figures and their creations as a group: its interrelations, its biography, and its works and workings.  Brief papers and a final paper as well as oral reports. 

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ENGL 76200. “Mongrel Nation: Literature and Racial Formation in Modern Britain.” Ashley Dawson. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10130].

Say Britain and most people imagine the changing of the guards outside Buckingham Palace, tea and crumpets served by phlegmatic butlers, and black-clad vicars bicycling through the foggy lanes of medieval villages. In trying to define the national character, for example, George Orwell famously wrote of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.” Although Orwell went on to write of the exhaustion of British imperial zeal, it’s his account of an isolated and autochthonous Little England that stuck in the popular imagination. Such images, key to marketing the UK to foreign tourists today, do little justice to the massive changes the country has undergone over the last half-century. And I’m not just talking about the marriage of David Beckham and Posh Spice – since 1945, Britain has “lost” an empire, acquired a democratic socialist state, been shaken by social movements such as feminism and gay rights, transformed itself into a multiracial society, faced integration into the European Union, seen strong devolutionary movements splinter the nation, and pioneered disruptive neo-liberal programs of social restructuring, just to name a few changes.

This seminar seeks to interrogate and challenge representations of Little England by tracing the transnational, multi-racial genealogy of Britishness. What, we will ask, are the specificities of racial formation in Britain? To what extent are insular representations of national identity produced through more or less conscious disavowals of the globe-spanning circuits of economic and cultural exchange and domination through which modern British identity was forged? How did such exclusionary definitions of belonging change as “colonization in reverse” set in after 1945? We will begin our discussions in the era of exploration and trans-Atlantic slavery, continue by looking at Britain and Britishness during the zenith of imperial power, and conclude with analysis of the evolving cultural scene in the second half of the 20 th century, placing developments in the cultural sphere in the broader context of the political and economic transformations of British society.

Primary texts we are likely to read include Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl, Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Secondary readings are likely to include work by the following critics: Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Hazel Carby, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall, Peter Hulme, Peter Linebaugh, Anne McClintock, Pratibha Parmar, and Edward Said. Class work will consist of a seminar-length research paper and a conference-style public presentation of research.

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ENGL 75400. “The Autobiographical Turn in Postwar American Writing, 1940-1980.” Morris Dickstein. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 81500). [CRN 10131].

This course will examine the uses of autobiography by postwar writers such as Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elie Wiesel, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, and Norman Mailer. We will explore these writers’ recasting of their own experience in works of fiction and poetry as well as in supposedly factual yet artfully constructed memoirs and essays. The course will contrast the introspective and confessional turn in American writing with the greater social emphasis of so much writing in the 1930s. Broader themes will include the pervasive impact of Freud and psychoanalysis, along with the shock of the Holocaust; the renewed influence of autobiographical modernists of the 1920s, especially Fitzgerald and Hemingway; the effects of rising economic prosperity and consumer culture; the emergence of Beat writing and a bohemian counterculture in the 1950s, along with a wider youth culture; the cultural revolutions of the sixties, including the decline of sexual inhibition, the attack on puritanism and censorship, and the convergence of the personal and the political; the appearance of new forms of confessional poetry and first-person journalism; and the emergence of feminism and identity politics. Background readings may include the work of social critics of the period, such as Friedan, Whyte, Riesman, and Marcuse.

Besides weekly readings, course requirements will include an oral report and a 15-page term paper.

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ENGL 86500. “Caribbean Spirits, Colonial Ghosts: Haunted Texts from the Extended Caribbean” Lyn Di Iorio. 2/4 credits. Thursday 6:30PM-8:30PM. (cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 10132].

Writers with roots in the Caribbean often seek to create texts or other artworks that deploy a new aesthetic, one which reflects the polyglot mixtures, rhythms, syncretisms, and power relationships that forged the Caribbean. But the new forms are frequently haunted by the ghosts of an old history. It is this history, often emerging as a haunting, that lends character and commonality to the area of "the extended Caribbean"—the region stretching from the northern coast of Brazil through the Caribbean archipelago and encompassing the southern coastal areas of the United States. While this region is divided by obvious national, geographic, language, and other differences, it has in common the importance of the plantation system in its history. This seminar will juxtapose the West Indies, the hispanophone Caribbean, and other parts of the "extended Caribbean" to explore the legacy of colonialism and the plantation ( and the racial divisiveness it set into motion) as well as issues pertaining to language, diaspora, creolization, and the increased importance of women's voices in the exploration of new yet haunted Caribbean identities.

We will start with Mary Prince's slave narrative; a brief excerpt from Bartolomé de las Casas's History of the Indies; and some chapters from: The Repeating Island by Antonio Benítez Rojo, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, and Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant. This historical frame of reference will be integral to our discussions. However, our understanding of the complex relationship between the past and its ghosts, and cultural expressions driven by the spirit of something new, will come from the texts on our syllabus. Most of the works we will be reading are either modern or contemporary. Primary texts may include: The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys; Louisiana by Erna Brodber; Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid; The Book of Night Women by Marlon James; and Our Lady of the Night by Mayra Santos-Febres. Besides the critical works mentioned above, other critical works might include: Specters of the Atlantic by Ian Baucom; Haiti, History, and the Gods by Joan Dayan; ghostly matters by Avery Gordon; The Repeating Island by Antonio Benítez Rojo, and my own book Killing Spanish.

Requirements: A final research paper; one or two presentations; participation; and an interest in ghosts, real or figurative.

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ENGL 75100. “America in the 1830s: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Marc Dolan. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 11:45AM-1:45PM. (cross listed with ASCP 82000). [CRN 10126].

"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"
- Daniel Webster, 27 January 1830

The United States has never been a homogeneous, coherent entity, but did anyone even think that it was until the 1830s? This was the decade during which such "internal improvements" as canals and railways first started to make commerce and circulation between the nation's regions a commonplace occurrence, as well as the decade during which the McCormack reaper first made large-scale commercial farming possible. It was the decade during which the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, reached their peak capacity, as well as the decade during which the United States suffered its first truly national economic depression. Throughout the decade, as Joseph Smith, Charles Grandison Finney, and others worked hard to forge uniquely American forms of religion, touring minstrel shows, tract societies, and a dozen widely circulated national magazines simultaneously helped establish the nation's first intraregional demotic culture, a culture that wasn't dependent on England or Europe for its origins but drew much of its power from allegedly "feminine" sources. It was the decade of Jackson's Indian Removal Act and the best known writings of William Apess, the decade of the Nat Turner rebellion and the best appeals of David Walker, the decade that saw the high tide of both the Davy Crockett almanacs and the Hudson River School in painting. It was a seemingly arbitrary segment of just ten years that nevertheless moved from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to Emerson's Nature and then back as if by a rip current to Cooper's The American Democrat. The debates about what an American was that dominated this decade would not be settled for at least a generation (if ever), but the fact that those debates were waged in the first place is an indication of how pivotal this era was.

This course will examine some, but obviously not all, of these transformations and will feature in-class visits from faculty members of the American Studies Certificate Program based in the Art History, English, History, Music, and Theatre doctoral programs. Most of our work will be with primary rather than secondary sources. Course requirements include class participation, an oral presentation of original scholarship on U. S. life during the period, and a final paper that expands on the presentation.

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ENGL 86100. “James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.” Edmund Epstein. 2/4 credits. Friday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10133].

 In this course, we will be discussing James Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. We will go through the book, emphasizing the continuities from section to section, and the various techniques of each section. There will also be many references to other works by Joyce, and how they led up to Finnegans Wake , and .references to other modern works that were influenced by the Wake.

  Textbooks:

 Finnegans Wake (paperback edition)

Roger McHugh Annotations to Finegans Wake John Hopkins University Press

 If available: Edmund Epstein A Guide Through Finnegans Wake University of Florida Press (paperback edition)

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ENGL 85000. “’Revolution & the “World’: The Cultural Geography of the Early American Novel.” Duncan Faherty. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 81500). [CRN 10134].

In her introduction to the revised edition of Revolution and the Word (2004), Cathy Davidson notes that the word “postcolonial” does not appear in the original edition (1986) of that seminal work “even though the creation of a culture in the wake of a revolution is its primary subject.” The shift in critical perspective registered in Davidson’s remark is the starting point for this course. Approaching early American fiction both transatlantically and transhemispherically, we will consider the ways in which the trajectory of U.S. cultural history was driven by the complex circumstances of colonialism. By moving beyond our proclivity to imagine national cultural as a closed system, we will consider how early “American” novels situate their renderings of U.S. exceptionalism within global networks of exchange. We will read a broad range of texts, including works (written by post-revolutionary Americans) focused on North Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Spain, India, Antarctica, and the South Pacific. Possible texts include: the anonymously published History of Constantius & Pulchera, Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American,  J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot, Sally Wood’s Ferdinand and Elimra: A Russian Story, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater, Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy, Herman Melville’s The Encantadas, Lenora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart, Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, James Butler’s Fortune's Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mercutio, Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America, and Susannah Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers.
Course requirements include class participation, a brief oral presentation, and a final paper.
N.B. Seminar participants should read the new edition of Davidson's Revolution and the Word (2004) before the first meeting.

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ENGL 79500. “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship.” David Greetham. 4 credits. tba. [CRN 10123].

This special intensive intersession course being given in January offers an alternative format to the full-semester models, while covering basically similar materials. It takes up questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English,” and even attempts a definition of the field. Theoretically, we consider what it means to study a national language and literature that has become global in its reach; we examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields (and thus the concept of “disciplinarity” itself); we consider how varied theories of language, text, narrative, poetics, author, gender, race, psyche, society, culture, history, identity, politics (etc.) define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline as it has emerged (and changed) since its first being added to the university curriculum as a “vernacular” version of “classical” studies. Practically, we take up the question of how we define objects of inquiry within “English” studies, how we research such topics, how we identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how we develop new knowledge—in sum, we consider nitty-gritty questions crucial to pursuing graduate and professional work in literary scholarship. The course follows four main lines of inquiry, examining 1) the historical, institutional context of the discipline, 2) archival and bibliographical work, 3) concepts of textuality, and 4) theoretical approaches.

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: The advantage of the intersession version is that 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 (as well as presentations of their final projects by former students of the course): students will thus be able to interrogate some of those authors they have read and “survivors” of the course. 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 challenge (as opposed to the semester-long version) 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/Fridays or Mondays/Thursdays) for at least three hours, with an introductory organizational meeting held at the end of the Fall semester. The balance in the intersession version is therefore more toward reading and preparation for discussion than in actual archival work in local libraries, which can be done with more leisure and lead time in the conventional semester-long version. As usual, there will be an organizational meeting in December to discuss scheduling, but since Monday Jan 4 is the first possible day after the winter break, I would like to plan for Mondays and Thursdays, from, say 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., with a brief break for lunch.

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ENGL 86400. “The Miltonic Tradition: William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, Zora Neil Hurston and Toni Morrison.” Thomas Hayes. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 10135].

In this course we will read the work of five major writers in the context of what may be termed the Miltonic traditon, which may be defined as a radical dissonance in relation to the prevailing orthodoxy. We will begin by reading books III and IX of Paradise Lost, paying particular attention to the representation of Eve and Satan as rebels. We will then move to a reading of William Blake's poem, entitled "Milton," and to the utopian poem, "Jerusalem." We will consider Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which is certainly a major Miltonic work, before we look carefully at Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." By the time we get to Zora Neale Hurston's There Eyes were Watching God, and Toni Morrison's Sula, we will have a clearer understanding of the Miltonic tradition. Our purpose throughout is not to maintain that the five writers named above deliberately patterned their work on a Miltonic model but that despite his undeniably misogynistic faults, he remains a dynamic, influencial, and worthy figure in the history of English and American literature.

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ENGL 79500. “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship.” Hildegard Hoeller. 4 credits. Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 10122].

This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be a part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century. Theoretically, we will examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and how various theories define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline of “English” studies. Practically, we will discuss how to define objects of inquiry (“texts” and “contexts”) within “English” studies, how to research such objects, how to identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how to develop new knowledge. The course follows four main lines in inquiry, examining: 1) archival and bibliographical work, 2) concepts of text and textuality, 3) theoretical approaches, and 4) the historical, institutional context of the discipline.

Requirements: The work for the course has two parts: 1) readings in common that20will be discussed in class, and 2) an individual project pursued throughout the semester and designed to put into practice the more general issues taken up in the course. Students will periodically report in class on their progress in the individual project. The course grade will be based on the final project, on the work done in stages on that project throughout the semester, and on general participation throughout the semester. 

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ENGL 86000. “Beckett and Sustainability.” Nico Israel. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10136].

“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”: So concludes The Unnamable, final novel in Samuel Beckett’s celebrated mid-1940s trilogy, which the self-exiled Irish author translated "back" into English from French in the late 50s. “Going on,” in Beckett’s writing, implies something more (or other) than simply confronting, and overcoming, adversity; rather, it implies a process, by turns excruciating and laughable, through which contradiction, failure, and the anxiety of hope are irresistibly entwined. This process, which might tendentiously be called “sustainability,” has important implications for both aesthetics and politics, and indeed entails a reconsideration of the relation between the two fields across the twentieth century. With this reconsideration in mind, our seminar will explore texts from Beckett’s long, long, writing career, from the early poems and critical essays (of the late 1920s-early 30s), through the novelistic trilogy and major plays (40s and 50s), to the incursions into film and television (60s and 70s), to the late prose experiments (of the 80s). Far from a “Single Author” course—after all, it was Beckett’s writing to which Foucault referred when posing the ground-clearing question “What is an Author?”--the seminar will approach Beckett’s writing as a constellation into the study of language, literature, theatre, genre, ethics and politics (especially postcolonial politics) across the century. Beckett’s desperately spare, utterly uncompromising writing will be discussed as a sort of test case in twentieth century studies, in which the familiar rubrics “modernism,” “late modernism” and “postmodernism” are thrown into question. In the latter part of the semester we will explore Beckett’s impact on a variety of arenas, including especially literature, philosophy and visual art. These readings/viewings might include works by Sartre, Blanchot, Fanon, the Brazilian “Concrete” Poets, Adorno, Bernhard, Derrida, Deleuze, Andre, Hesse, Smithson, Nauman, Kelman, Coetzee, Sebald, Badiou, Cavell and Agamben. Reading knowledge of French helpful but not essential. Requirements: regular attendance and participation, ten-minute oral presentation, 2000-word midterm paper, 4000-word final research paper (topics and approaches to be discussed).

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ENGL 87100. “Culture Theory: Ethnographic Novels and Novelistic Ethnography.” Gerhard Joseph. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 10137].

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. Minh-ha, James Buzard, 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 a culture by ‘insiders” as over against the perspective of “outsiders”? Requirements: an oral report and a 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 Workingmen” in Felix Holt, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Demos, New Grub Street, TheVoyage 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 theCountry, Foe, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Female Man.

The primary secondary texts will be Christopher Herbert’s Culture and Anomie and James Buzard’s Disorienting Fictions: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels.

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ENGL 80200. “Playing with Freud.” Wayne Koestenbaum. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 2:00PM-4:00PM.(cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 10138].

A survey of Sigmund Freud’s works, in the spirit of play.  No fees.  No diagnoses.  With a prankster’s light-footedness, and with a nod to D. W. Winnicott, who gave “play” its due, we will approach Freud’s texts as springboards for our own writerly adventures.  Freud offers abundant fruit for creative co-optation:  paradigms, metaphors, vocabularies, dramas, blunders, baggage.  In lieu of a final paper, students will write, each week, a two-page exercise, in response to specific assignments.  These short essays will form a piecemeal document of your encounter with Freud’s stimulating, chutzpadik, maddening corpus.  Readings (in English translation) may include Studies in Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, case histories (Dora, Dr. Schreber, the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Little Hans), The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Question of Lay Analysis, Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and many landmark essays (“Screen Memories,” “Family Romances,” “A Child is Being Beaten,” “The ‘Uncanny’,” “Character and Anal Erotism,” “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” “Negation,” “Mourning and Melancholia,” “On Narcissism,” “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis,’” “On Female Sexuality,” “Fetishism,” “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gravida,” and “Medusa’s Head”).  We could spend the rest of our lives reading the thinkers who revamped, interpreted, and challenged Freud, but, with some exceptions (H.D.’s Tribute to Freud?  a tidbit from Lacan?), we will not give them our attention this semester.  No auditors. 

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ENGL 81100. “Romance and Rapture.” Richard McCoy. 2/4 credits. Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10139].

From the middle ages through the Renaissance, audiences thrilled to the heroic exploits, ardent loves, and astonishing incidents in narrative, poetic, and theatrical romances, but a reaction began by the 18 th Century, with some, like William Congreve, contending that the “giddy delight” of romance is ultimately supplanted by the recognition that “‘tis all a lye.” Nevertheless, its attractions are inextinguishable, and many argue that its extravagant fabrications constitute the “structural core of all fiction” (Northrop Frye). This course will analyze the motifs and patterns of romance – quests and episodic detours, intimations of magic and miracle, disguise, duplicity, and discovery, and recovery from recurrent loss – as well as the mixed reception of its blend of absurdity and wonder. We will also explore the roots of romance in late antiquity through chivalric adventures of the middle ages to the hybrid creations of the Renaissance, blending allegory, pastoral, epic, and tragicomedy. Readings will include selections from the Odyssey and Aethiopica, Chrétien de Troyes and Chaucer, Ariosto and Cervantes, Sidney and Spenser as well as plays by Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher. We will also consider ways in which romance continues to pervade the novel with selections from Scott, Austen, and Nabokov as well as popular contemporary romance fiction and film. Finally, we will review theoretical discussions of romance from the sixteenth century treatises through Mikhail Bakhtin, Patricia Parker, Margaret Doody, Barbara Fuchs, Janice Radway, and others. Assignments will consist of a short oral presentation on assigned readings and critical sources, annotated bibliographies, and a research paper.

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ENGL 88000. “Feminism, Autobiography, Theory.” Nancy K. Miller. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM. (cross listed with WSCP 81601). [CRN 10125].

Feminist theory has long been entangled with autobiographical practices. In this seminar, we will revisit key texts in modern feminist theory that emerge from an autobiographical framework. Our goal: to reread the many ways in which contemporary feminism has told its many stories, primarily in its foundational moments. How are the connections made between story and life, metaphor and activism, literature and critique, aesthetics and politics? Readings will include personal and theoretical essays, anthologies, memoir, literary criticism, visual culture and graphic experiment, beginning with Virginia Woolf and ending in the first decade of the twentieth-first century.

Work for the course will entail oral presentations and a final paper.

Registration for ENGL 88000 is limited to English Program students only. All others should register for WSCP 81601.

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ENGL 89010. “Controversies in Composition: Historical Perspectives.” Rebecca Mlynarczyk. 2/4 credits. Monday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 10140].

In this seminar, we will focus on a number of controversies that have shaped and re-shaped the field of composition studies. For example, we will examine changing attitudes toward language and correctness, ranging from those of Mina Shaughnessy to Min-Zhan Lu and beyond. A related area is the controversy surrounding “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” as set out in the 1974 CCCC position paper, a “right” that continues to be debated by such scholars as Lisa Delpit, Geneva Smitherman, and Suresh Canagarajah. Another area to be examined is the role of reading in composition; we will look at the view of reading espoused by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts and Ways of Reading and the reaction against this approach by Peter Elbow and others. We will also consider more recent controversies such as possible connections between composition and postcolonial studies—one manifestation of the social turn in comp studies. Readings for the seminar will be based on students’ interests and drawn from relevant journal articles as well as two anthologies, Cross-Talk in Comp Theory (2 nd edition) edited by Victor Villanueva (2003) and Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies edited by Andrea Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane (2004).

Early in the semester, students will identify a controversy they would like to research. After reading key sources in the scholarly literature and discussing their topic of interest with classmates, students will be asked to approach this issue from a new angle in the form of a journal article, which will serve as the final paper for the seminar. Students will spend considerable class time meeting in small research/writing groups to choose relevant background readings, explore appropriate venues for publication, serve as peer reviewers for other students, and gradually draft a response to a particular controversy. Blackboard will be used to facilitate discussion between class sessions. Students who would like to suggest topics or readings for this seminar should contact rebecca.mlynarczyk@gmail.com.

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ENGL 75000. “Colonial and Federal American Literature.” David Reynolds. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 2:00PM-4:00PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 82000). [CRN 10141].

This course covers the formative phase of American literature, from early writings of exploration through Puritanism to the American Enlightenment. Among the topics considered are encounters between European settlers and ethnic “others” in writings of exploration and settlement; the culture, theology, aesthetics of Puritanism; the evolution of American religion; African Americans and slavery; women’s writings; shifting definitions of nationhood ; literary self-fashioning in journals and autobiographies; revolutionary writings that fueled separation from England; and the rise of American poetry and fiction. We examine the entire range of early American writings, canonical and noncanonical, with full ethnic and gender representation as well as consideration of transnational and postcolonial themes. Among the writers considered are Anne Bradstreet, John Winthrop, William Bradford, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheately, Thomas Jefferson, St. Jean de Crèvecouer, John and Abigail Adams, Olaudah Equiano, Britton Hammon, and Charles Brocken Brown. Active participation in class discussion is encouraged. A 15-page term paper is required.

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ENGL 80600. “Biblical Narratology.” David Richter. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 10142].

"Biblical Narratology" is an oxymoron. Contemporary narrative theory was created to operate on the complexities of works like Absalom, Absalom! rather than 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 it was 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 some of the various theoretical methods that have been recently used to interpret it, primarily from the two main camps of contemporary narrative theory, the structuralist/semiotic school descended from Gérard Genette and the rhetorical-formalist school descended from the late Wayne C. Booth. But we will also be looking into feminist, queer, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial readings. Our principal narrative texts will be those in Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Jonah, Mark, and Luke. The literary critics and narrative theorists whose ideas we will be trying out will start with Erich Auerbach, and include, among others, Frank Kermode, Roland Barthes, Mieke Bal, Phyllis Trible, Terry Eagleton, Meir Sternberg, Robert Alter, Stephen Moore, Avivah Zornberg, Robert Kawashima, and Emmanuel Levinas; our chief whipping boys will be Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye.

Class plan:  Each week has critical readings and biblical readings for theory and practice.  Students who are doing oral reports will lead discussion on the readings of the week, having perhaps gotten further into the particular writers than the brief selections that will be required of the rest of the class.  Having looked into the particular critics and their methods of analysis, we will then move to a text they don’t talk about and try out this method on the new text.  In other words, first method, then madness; some weeks it will be the other way around. Four-credit students will also complete a term paper.

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ENGL 91000. “Dissertation Workshop.” Michael Sargent. 0 credits. Thursday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10124].

Open to level 2 and 3 students only. This seminar covers techniques of dissertation writing, research, analysis, and documentation. Students at the prospectus stage or the chapter stage will work on their own projects and read each other’s work under the professor’s guidance. In addition, the course explores avenues toward publishing students’ work in scholarly journals or as book-length monographs.

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ENGL 84500. “Victorian Bodies.” Talia Schaffer. 2/4 credits. Monday 11:45AM-1:45PM. (cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 10143].

This course investigates the field of disability studies, exploring such notions as the freak, passing, and normativity. We will start with theoretical work by Lennard Davis, Marlene Tromp, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Robert McRuer, and others. But we will go on to ask how much the insights of disability studies can work with the very different understanding of the body in the British nineteenth century, and aim to reconstruct disability theory through this historical study. We will look at Victorian disabled bodies and the cultural understanding of disability as a higher state, sanctified by suffering. We will also explore what the Victorians apparently regarded as problematically healthy, excessive bodies (especially women’s bodies) and narrative attempts to restrain or retrain them. The course will include fiction by centrally canonical and popular novelists including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Lucas Malet. These novels, narrated by or centered upon disabled characters, offer intriguing models of the ideal body in the nineteenth century. The course may also explore constructions of the body in varieties of Victorian fashion (especially the corset); the vogue for ‘muscular Christinaity’; and the dandiacal aesthetic body of the fin de siècle. Our aim will be to develop a new understanding of disability theory that can take account of Victorian models of desireable bodies, and to challenge contemporary assumptions about identity, spectacle, and eroticism regarding the disabled body by confronting such ideas with cultural alternatives. Presentation, blog, and research paper.

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ENGL 84200. “Freedom and Necessity: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives 1750-1820.” Alexander Schlutz. 2/4 credits. Monday 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 10144].

During the long eighteenth century, the philosophical and literary debate over the freedom of the human will pits necessitarians against libertarians, empiricists and materialists against idealists and transcendentalists. It marks the Enlightenment and Romanticism equally and allows for an assessment of the continuities and discontinuities between the two periods. The problem of human freedom is also a driving force behind Immanuel Kant's critical project, which hinges on Kant's positioning of the power of aesthetic judgment as the bridge between the empirical laws of nature and the moral laws of human freedom. Via Kant's Critique of Judgment, where the questions of human freedom and morality become aesthetic questions, the centrality of art and aesthetics in the Romantic period emerges on the background of the eighteenth-century debate over the freedom of the will.

We will discuss philosophical positions from Hume and Godwin to Kant and Schelling in order to examine the development of the debate over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century and to gain a better understanding of its turn to aesthetics in the Romantic period. To investigate how this aesthetic turn manifests itself in literary practice we will focus on the texts of P.B. Shelley and Friedrich Schiller, two authors for whom the question of freedom and necessity is of particular importance and who probe the role of art and poetry for the moral improvement of humankind in paradigmatic fashion.

Classwork will include oral presentations and a final research paper.

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ENGL 85000. “Contemporary Multicultural American Novel.” Neal Tolchin. 2/4 credits. Friday 11:45AM-1:45PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 81500 and WSCP 81000). [CRN 10145].

 From N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968) to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988), Oscar Hijuelos's Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter ofMaladies (1999) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), all 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; Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir A Place to Stand recounts his transformation from an illiterate felon into a poet while in prison. 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, African American readings may include authors Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Walter Mosley. 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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ENGL 75600. “Afro-American Literature During a Turbulent Period: The 1960s.” Jerry Watts. 2/4 credits. Wednesday 6:30PM-8:30PM. (cross-listed with ASCP 82000 and WSCP 81000). [CRN 10146].

The 1960s was a decade of change, tension and introspection for all Americans, but particularly for black Americans. In effect, the 1960s saw black Americans obtain the status as full legal citizens of the United States (i.e., the right to vote). For many blacks, particularly black Southerners, it was a period of enormous hopefulness. Yet, the 1960s also saw the rise of black anger and despair in response to the deeply entrenched racial inequalities that were not eased by newly obtained legal rights. Blacks, particularly those in the North and West came to the realization that legal equality that was then being marketed to blacks as "freedom" had very limited impact on the quality of their lives. After all, blacks in the North and West had long possessed legal equality and yet they remained second-class citizens. We will read texts that speak to the various strains of thought arising from black America. The readings should include essays by James Baldwin, political speeches by Martin King as well as the speeches and writings from Black Power advocates ala Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka. We will read works from the Black Arts Movement ala Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal. Debates over "black aesthetics," the proper audience for black writing, the influence (or lack of influence) of Africa; tensions between masculinity and black female subordination; and the legitimacy of open homophobia will also be addressed.

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ENGL 75700. “Black Postmodernism: African American Fiction since the 1970s.” Barbara Webb. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 4:15PM-6:15PM. (cross-listed with WSCP 81000) [CRN 10147].

A study of the poetics and politics of postmodernism in the fiction of African American writers since the 1970s. Although the last three decades of the twentieth century were undoubtedly the most productive and innovative period in the development of African American literature and literary criticism, it was also a period of extreme social and cultural fragmentation in African American communities. In this course we will examine how African American writers have addressed the problems of literary representation when faced with increased commodification of culture and knowledge, the proliferation of new forms of literacy and orality, and the breakdown of traditional forms of community. Our readings will also include some selections not usually considered postmodernist but that address similar concerns about identity, culture, writing and possibilities for social change. We will read selected essays by theorists of postmodernism such as Hutcheon, Jameson, and Bhabha as well as essays by literary critics and cultural theorists who have been involved in ongoing discussions about the relevance of postmodernism for African Americans at the turn of the 21st century such as bell hooks, Cornel West, W. Lawrence Hogue, Wahneema Lubiano, and Madhu Dubey. Primary texts: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Clarence Major, My Amputations; Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters; John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday; Samuel R. Delaney, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; Gayle Jones, The Healing, and Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist. 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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ENGL 80700. “After the Bible: Saints Legends in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity.” E. Gordon Whatley. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 10149].

Hagiography (i.e. writings about the saints) is probably the most successful narrative mode in European literary history, flourishing uninterrupted from the 2nd to the early-16th century, far surpassing secular narrative and lyric genres in quantity of extant compositions and manuscript copies. Only in recent decades, however, has this rich and influential corpus of texts begun to engage the attention of a wider critical community; it still lacks an authoritative modern discussion or theory.

This course will explore the main hagiographic sub-genres (acta apocrypha, vita, passio, miracula, inventio) through a selection of representative saints' legends originally composed in Greek and Latin, and medieval English verse and prose. Representative readings will be selected from the following:- early “apocryphal gospels” and "acts" (Virgin Mary, Andrew, Paul & Thecla); the "passions" of early martyrs, both historical and dubious (Polycarp, Perpetua & Felicity, Agnes, Cecilia, and George), and later martyrs such as the English King Edmund of East Anglia, and Archbishop Thomas Becket; the "lives" of “confessor” saints: Anthony (desert hermit), Martin (missionary bishop), Benedict (monk, monastic founder), Radegunde (nun, monastic founder), Christina of Markyate (English recluse and abbess), and Francis of Assisi (“the last Christan”); individual "miracle" tales (Andrew, Virgin Mary, Erkenwald of London, Augustine of Canterbury); the “invention” and “translation” of relics (Swithun of Winchester). Also included, for comparison’s sake, will be some partial selections from pre-medieval works traditionally regarded as “biography” (Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar, Augustine of Hippo’s autobiography), and some post medieval texts, including an opera and early movie. While the authors of many of the classic hagiographical sources are anonymous, among the known authors of our selections are (in roughly chronological order) Athanasius, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Venantius Fortunatus, Baudonivia, Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, Ælfric of Eynsham, Bonaventura, Jacopo da Voragine, Chaucer, Lydgate, Dryden, Flaubert, France, and de Mille.

While it will be convenient for some texts to be purchased from, e.g. Amazon, the majority of our texts, most of them quite short, will be available on the Internet, or in Blackboard as pdf files, and occasionally on Library Reserve. Although many of the readings are available in modern (or early modern) translations, there will be a few encounters with Middle English, but help will be available for non-medievalists. Some opportunities for work with original manuscripts.

Class members will present brief, occasional reports on our primary texts and relevant secondary sources throughout the first eleven weeks of the course; during the last three weeks they will report on, and write up, a longer, focused study of a hagiographic text of their choice.

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ENGL 84100. “Readings in the Romantic Lyric.” Joshua Wilner. 2/4 credits. Tuesday 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 10148].

Each meeting of the seminar will focus on a different Romantic lyric (or a small set of lyrics, e.g. the Lucy poems) that has been a focus of critical debate. Our object will be to read these poems intensively while also engaging with multiple critical approaches to the reading of lyric. The relationship of lyric as a genre or mode to Romanticism as a theoretical-historical category will be a recurrent concern, as will the relation of the cited or remembered (or misremembered) text to the critical discourse that gathers around it. Among the poets we will read: Byron, Coleridge, Dickinson, Keats, Shelley, Smith and Wordsworth. Among the critics: Abrams, Bloom, de Man, Cameron, Ferguson, Hartman, Levinson, McGann, Vendler.

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ENGL 79010. “Sophists to Systems: Rhetoric’s Past, Composition’s Present, English’s Future.” Jessica Yood. 2/4 credits. Thursday 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 10150].

Whether because it's in crisis, under siege, or in transition, "English" is a field ripe for redrafting. This course opens with the premise that new directions for our discipline are waiting to be written.

The place of writing and rhetoric is central to the making of any discipline, and vital for re-making a field. The course begins by looking at the "rhetorical tradition" as it has been understood within English departments in general and the teaching of writing in particular. We will reconnect to ideas found in major texts in classical, medieval, early modern, and 18th, 19th, and 20th century rhetorics. This overview of the rhetorical tradition will be framed within the context of contemporary rhetoric and composition studies and in particular relation to new, interdisciplinary work in social theory. Concepts in systems theory—autopoetics, complexity, emergence, reflexivity-—will be linked to rhetorical ideas—sophism, logos, paradox, invention—as well as to heuristics common to composition classrooms—“process,” collaborative learning, reflection, revision.

Requirements include an abstract to be submitted for next year’s MLA or CCCC national meetings, a course syllabus, a presentation, and a final project. Course readings will be drawn from Gorgias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, De Pizan, Bacon, De La Cruz, Campbell, Blair, Fish, Booth, Gates, Kyburz, Yancey, S. Miller, Luhmann, Rasch, Derrida, Foster. A good overview of systems theory as it will be discussed in this course can be found in Ira Livingston’s Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics (Illinois UP, 2006) and Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity (Pittsburgh UP, 2007).

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Dissertation Supervision

CRN Instructor
00401 Alcalay Ammiel
00719 Alexander Meena
00078 Bonaparte Felicia
00299 Bowen Barbara
00243 Brenkman John
00148 Brownstein Rachel
00402 Burger Glenn
00137 Caws Mary Ann
00282 Coleman William Emmet
00077 Cullen Patrick
00255 Danziger Marlies
01030 Dawson Ashley
00246 De Jongh James
00264 Di Salvo Jacqueline
00080 Dickstein Morris
00571 DiGangi Mario
00758 Dolan Marc
00403 Elsky Martin
00202 Epstein Edmund
01032 Faherty Duncan
00064 Fletcher Angus
00565 Greetham David
00404 Hall N. John
00405 Hayes Thomas
00890 Hintz Carrie
00581 Hitchcock Peter
01031 Hoeller Hildegard
00298 Humpherys Anne
01088 Israel Nico
00618 Joseph Gerhard
00118 Kaplan Fred
00893 Kaye Richard
00147 Kelly William
00760 Kelvin Norman
00378 Koestenbaum Wayne
00287 Kruger Steven
00182 Marcus Jane Connor
00167 McCoy Richard
00245 McKenna Catherine
00823 Milhous Judith
00063 Miller Nancy
00983 Mlynarczyk Rebecca
00330 Otte George
00583 Parker Blanford
00591 Perl Sondra
00577 Reid-Pharr Robert
00221 Reynolds David
00146 Richardson Joan
00388 Richter David
00406 Sargent Michael
00407 Savran David
00408 Schaffer Talia
00274 Shor Ira
00570 Stone Donald
00782 Suggs Jon-Christian
00076 Timko Michael
00135 Tolchin Neal
00889 Vardy Alan
00751 Wallace Michele
00409 Watts Jerry
00325 Webb Barbara
00308 Westrem Scott
00203 Whatley E. Gordon
00688 Wilner Joshua
00075 Wittreich Joseph
00891 Yousef Nancy

 

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