New York University
Department of English
Spring 2013 Course Lists and Descriptions
X= Cross-listed Course
ENGL-UA 121.001
The Novelette
MW, 4:55-6:10PM
Instructor: Marks, Sylvia
Satisfies advanced elective requirement for
the English Major
What is the novelette: a novella, a long short story, a short novel, or something else? In order to understand
and appreciate this genre, we will be studying such classics as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the
Baskervilles, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451. Each week we will do a close reading of a novella; we will also read a novel in weekly installments.
During the course of the semester a short story will be examined as a point of comparison. There will be
three short papers and in-class writing on assigned topics.
x-ENGL-UA 132.001
Drama in Performance
W, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: TBA
Satisfies advanced elective requirement for
the English Major
Combines the study of drama as literary text with the study of theatre as its three-dimensional translation, both
theoretically and practically. Drawing on the rich theatrical resources of New York City, approximately 12
plays are seen, covering classical to contemporary and traditional to experimental theatre. On occasion, films
or videotapes of plays are used to supplement live performances. Readings include plays and essays in theory
and criticism.
ENGL-UA 163.001
World Literature in English:
Postmodernism and the Anglophone Novel
MW, 12:30-1:45PM
Instructor: Gajarawala
Satisfies advanced elective requirement for
the English Major—Juniors and Seniors
Only.
What, and where, is the postmodern? This course will be an exploration of the politics and aesthetics of the
Anglophone novel in the last decade. What are the varied forms of experimentalism that structure the novel
in India, in Africa, in the Caribbean? Beginning with Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson’s analysis,
Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we will take up the question of postmodernism through a
sustained exploration of recent cultural production that engages in these debates. We will also consider the
range of critiques of the terms modernism/postmodernism from the perspective of postcolonial and cultural
studies. Some texts we will consider: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small
Things, Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof, Mohsin Hamid’s Mothsmoke, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, Don Delillo’s
Falling Man, Chris Abani’s Graceland, J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission.
ENGL-UA 181.001
Modernism and the City:
New York and London
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructors: Deer/Waters
Satisfies advanced elective requirement for
the English Major
This course will explore the cultural dynamics of transatlantic modernism as seen through the lens of urban
experience. Focusing on London and New York as centers of gravity for modernist culture, we will explore
the reciprocal relationship between modernism and the city: how was modernism shaped by the urban
experience and how, in turn, did modernism help to mold our conception of the modern city? The course will
explore the parallels and contrasts among a variety of forms including literature, film, art, music, stressing the
uneven developments of the period, with special attention paid to the tension between highbrow and popular
forms. We will investigate patterns of migration and diasporic movement from London, to Paris, to New
York, and examine the relationship between the modernist metropolis and other modernist spaces such as
rural areas and underdeveloped regions, the suburbs, and colonial metropolises and territories, and homefronts
during two World Wars. The course will read modernist texts as both response to and symptom of the crises
of modernity unleashed by urbanization, immigration, war, imperialism, revolution, shifts in gender roles, race
relations, and class conflict. We will consider the claims of the modernists to represent the dominant cultural
response to the age alongside the transformations of literary realism, the rise of mass culture and advertising,
and revolutionary changes in modern architecture and in technologies of mass communications like film,
documentary, radio and popular music.
Major Readings will include: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton), T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land
(Yale), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner), James Joyce, Dubliners (Norton), Carl van Vechten,
Nigger Heaven (Illinois), Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift), Virginia Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway (annotated edition, Harvest Books). Other readings will include shorter selections from the work of
H.G. Wells, WEB Dubois, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, the First World War poets, Ezra Pound, Vera
Brittain, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Alain Locke, Louise Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Tillie Olsen, Jean Rhys, George Orwell, and WH Auden. We will also explore visual and musical selections
from New York Dada, the Armory Show, Jazz and Bebop, WPA Photography, Music Hall, the British
Documentary movement, and selected films from the period. Recitation required.
ENGL-UA 190.001
Topics in 20th C Lit: Post Apartheid South
African Literatures and Cultures
MW, 12:30-1:45PM
Instructor: Hoffmeyer
South Africa has always been a country that raises global questions. The anti-apartheid struggle spawned an
international movement that grappled with questions of race and justice. The term apartheid itself has become
a potent and portable sign to stigmatize extreme forms of oppression in different parts of the world.
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
for the English Major.
After its transition to democracy in 1994, the country has confronted a range of serious problems: persistent
inequality, HIV/Aids, crime, rampant consumerism, xenophobia. These challenges raise pressing global issues:
how to deal with catastrophic pasts; what to do with the wreckages of utopia. South Africa also speaks to new
global futures emerging from the global south or ex-third world, dominated by India and China. As an
important player in this arena, South Africa provides a vantage point from which to think about these
developments.
This course will cover a range of contemporary South African cultural forms that explore these themes. Texts
include
Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to our Hillbrow
JM Coetzee, Disgrace
Ingrid de Kok, selection of poetry
Zulu Love Letter (film)
Chimurenga (literary magazine www.chimurenga.co.za)
Blacks Only Comedy Show (selections on YouTube)
Die Antwoord (rap-rave group www.dieantwoord.com)
ENGL-UA 200.001, 002
Literary Interpretation
Instructor: Votava
This seminar is designed as an immersive introduction to the intense pleasures and labors of literary analysis.
As we read, discuss, and write about texts from diverse historical periods and genres, and also sample a
selection of critical approaches, we will pay close attention to how literature engages our minds and bodies as
readers and as scholars. Our unit on poetry will focus on close reading practices, with classes on sound and
sense, poetic vision, poetic feeling, and the “lower” senses, while we consider poetic forms from the sonnet to
free verse. We will then examine the multisensory medium of theater, as we read (and experience in video
performance) both early modern and postmodern versions of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s, and Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. We will, additionally, view these plays from a variety of theoretical
perspectives. Our investigation of the short narrative will move from the apparent empirical simplicity of the
detective story, to unpacking the publication and reception history of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper.”
Finally, we will turn to a controversial and densely intertextual example of the late modern novel, Nabokov’s
Lolita. Over the course of the semester you will become familiar with the specialized language of literary study,
as you also strengthen your close reading, discussion, presentation, writing, editing and revising skills.
ENGL-UA 200.003, 004
Literary interpretation
Instructor: O’Malley
This course introduces students to the principles and practices of literary analysis. We will read, discuss, and
write about poems, plays, short stories and novels. We will also become acquainted with literary criticism, both
for its methods of approach as well as examples of the academic essay. Students will work on honing their
analytical skills, especially close reading; present their ideas in oral and written form; and become familiar with
the methodologies of literary criticism. Reading will include a selection of poetry; James Joyce's Dubliners;
William Shakespeare's King Lear; and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; as well as several pieces of literary criticism.
ENGL-UA 200.005, 006
Literary Interpretation
Instructor: Fisher
This course introduces students to basic methods of academic literary study. We will read deeply in a small
number of English-language works from a range of genres: poetry, drama, and fiction. Students will work on
strengthening their close reading, discussion, presentation, writing and revising skills, knowledge and use of
literary terminology, and all the methods for translating the pleasures and labors of reading into those of
analyzing, discussing, and writing about literature.
In developing the skills and methods of literary interpretation, we will also ask broader questions about the
meaning and purpose of literature itself. How and why do we read? What are the social, political, and ethical
dimensions of reading? In this section of Literary Interpretation we will pay special attention to American
literature, and consider the ways in which different literary forms demand different ways of reading. Authors
include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor, David Foster Wallace, Nella Larsen. Vladimir Nabokov,
and Tennessee Williams.
ENGL-UA 200.007
Literary Interpretation
Instructor: Spear
This course surveys the major genres of literature through the lens of the pastoral tradition and responses to it,
whether expansions of its territory or anti-pastoral --satiric or ironic counterstatement. The readings are
mostly chronological within each genre. We start with poetry using Stephen Adams Poetic Design as a guide to
poetic forms with pastoral content to be downloaded from various web sites, most often Toronto’s RPO
(Representative Poetry Online), which has reliable editing. After poetry we will explore fiction: Alice in
Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, and drama: As You Like It, The Country Wife, The Draughtsman’s Contract
(film) and Arcadia. In addition to a paper on each genre and a final paper, one posting per week on the
Discussion Board for the course on Blackboard is required. It may be a response to a reading, a question, or a
response to another posting. I will monitor the postings and comment occasionally.
ENGL-UA 200.008
Literary Interpretation
Instructor: Guillory
This is an introductory level course in the reading of literary forms, including poetry, prose narrative, drama,
and the essay. Readings will include a selection of poems from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, short stories by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Brian Aldiss, Jane Austen’s Emma, Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice, and essays to be selected. The aim of the course is to train students in strategies for reading literature
closely and for writing persuasive and informed essays about literary works.
ENGL-UA 0210.001
British literature I
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Halpern
Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of
representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
Recitation required.
ENGL-UA 220.001
British literature II
TR, 09:30-10:45AM
Instructor: Freedgood
This course offers an intensive introduction to major works of British literature drawn from poetry, prose,
fiction and drama from the Restoration to the early 20th Century. We will consider how these writers
responded to the conflicts and continuities of their culture, paying close attention to their explorations of
questions of genre, power and the status of literary writing. Through lectures, class discussion, written
responses, and longer essay assignments, students will master the fundamentals of literary history and critical
reading and writing.
Recitation required.
ENGL-UA 230.001
American literature I
TR, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Crain
This course surveys the literature of colonial Anglo-America and the early national United States, from
seventeenth-century engagements with “the New World” to the literature of the “American Renaissance” on
the eve of the Civil War. We will read high and low literary genres, the sermons, lyrics, captivity narratives,
literacy primers, autobiographies, journals, tales and novels that arose in response to the historical pressures of
migration, of encounters between cultures, of independence from England, of slavery and abolition, of Indian
“removal.” Along the way, we will consider the status of children in a historically and demographically young
nation; the expansion of the print marketplace and the spread of literacy; the rise of sentimentality and
domestic ideology; and the drive to create a national literature.
Major texts:
Smith, The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity
Edwards, Personal Narrative
Franklin, Autobiography
Jefferson, “Declaration of Independence”
Paine, Common Sense
Rowson, Charlotte Temple
Douglass, Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
Thoreau, Walden
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Melville, Moby Dick
Poetry of Bradstreet, Taylor, Sigourney, Bryant, Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson
Tales of Irving, Poe, Hawthorne
Essays by Emerson
Recitation required.
ENGL-UA 251.001
Twentieth to Twenty-first Century African
American Literature
MW, 2:00-3:15PM
Instructor: Posmentier
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
In 2011, critic Ken Warren declared that "the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature
… has already come to an end." This highly controversial death announcement raises questions at the heart of
this course: What aesthetic traditions define modern and contemporary African American literature, and what
political and economic circumstances shape its history and future? When and where does “African American
Literature” begin and end? What is African American literature in the so-called “post-racial” age of Obama?
With these questions as a driving force, we will identify some of the signal features of African American
literary tradition(s), from the origins of the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. We will situate African
American literature in local, national and global contexts, rethink the gender paradigms that have structured
the canon, and identify some of the connections between black and Anglo-American literature.
Through weekly Blackboard posts, class discussions, creative assignments, and formal essays, students will
learn to analyze the formal and rhetorical strategies of poetry, fiction and drama while also exploring the
historical and cultural circumstances in which these works were produced. Field trips, performances and/or
visits from contemporary writers may supplement our readings and discussions. Possible readings include:
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Sapphire’s Push,
and poetry by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, The Last Poets and contemporary hip hop artists.
x-ENGL-UA 252.001
Topics: The Consolation of Philosophy:
Boethius and Boethian Literature in the
middle ages
M, 9:30-12:00PM
Instructor: Momma
Satisfies the pre-1800 Requirement
x-ENGL-UA 252.002
Topics: Ancient and Renaissance Festivity:
Its Literary, Dramatic and Social Forms
F, 11:00-1:45PM
Instructor: Wofford
Satisfies the Pre-1800 requirement
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is Fortune so cruel? Is our fate predetermined? If so, is
there any point in exercising our free will? How can we ever be happy? Can philosophy help us get through
difficult times? These are some of the questions raised in The Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue written by the
Roman philosopher Boethius (c.480-524/6), while staying in prison and waiting for King Theoderic’s order
for his execution. Boethius’s Consolation touched the hearts of many readers in the Middle Ages (and beyond)
and influenced the work of numerous writers and philosophers from this period. In the Divine Comedy, for
example, Dante places Boethius in the Fifth Heaven. His Consolation was translated by, among others, King
Alfred (848/9–899), Chaucer (c.1340–1400), and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603). In our course, we will
consider questions raised by Boethius by close-reading The Consolation of Philosophy side by side with (mostly)
medieval adaptations of and responses to Boethius and Boethian themes, such as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,
the Death of King Arthur; and The Seafarer and other Old English elegies. We will also consult philosophical works
that influenced Boethius: e.g. Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine.
This class will investigate the role of festive custom and holiday release, and the kinds of performance and
literary form that they enable or frustrate, in ancient Greece and Rome, and in Renaissance Europe, with a
20th century Caribbean postlude. Why does festivity sometimes lead to political revolt and at other times does
not? Why does the "carnivalesque" often include festive abuse as well as celebration? We will look at theories
of festivity and release, at the dionysiac, at the human/animal union in festivity, and at the role of the classical
period in shaping Renaissance and even modern ideas of festivity, irony and the festive worship of the gods.
We will also explore the effect of the Protestant suppression of festive holiday and theatricality in
Shakespeare’s England, and at the tensions inherent in festivity between excess and moderation, between the
saturnalia and the philosophical symposium. The class will begin with classical festivity, with Plato's
“Symposium,” Euripides' The Bacchae, selections from Ovid's Fasti and the Metamorphoses, and Apuleius' Golden
Ass. Readings from the Renaissance will include: Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel; Shakespeare, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV; Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale. Concluding with carnival
practices in the circum-Atlantic world, we will take as examples the film Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro, directed by
Marcel Camus), New Orleans carnival and Jazz Funerals, and Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, the
Timeless People (1969) in order to see how these older traditions shape modern experience.
x-ENGL-UA 320.001
Chaucer Colloquium
MW, 12:30-1:45PM
Instructor: Cannon
Satisfies the Pre-1800 Requirement
This course offers a thorough survey of Chaucer's poetry, with particular attention to 'Troilus and Criseyde'
and 'The Canterbury Tales'. We will begin with a workshop on Chaucer's language, and look, as we go, at
some of the more interesting aspects of his style. Our goal is to be able to Chaucer's poetry, not only with
pleasure, but closely. More generally, we will pay some attention to important insights offered in the criticism
of Chaucer, and see, as well, what kind of light Chaucer's own reading might shed on the shape of his own
texts. Our main task will be to tease out what is particularly 'Chaucerian' in individual works and all the works
we read taken together. The pay off will be an enjoyment of Chaucer's writing in exactly those particulars that
have made it so lasting.
x-ENGL-UA 411.001
Shakespeare Survey II
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Archer
Satisfies the Pre-1800 Requirement
In this course, we will read many of Shakespeare’s principal seventeenth-century plays, which were first
performed during a time of social and political alteration in a rapidly-expanding world. As King James
succeeded Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare and his acting company coped with the evolving tastes and changing
concerns of the London audience. The Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King in his new Parliament marked
the delayed start of a new century. Political violence, competing religious ideas, crime and criminality, new
roles for women, the nature of kingship, racial difference and the prospect of empire were all part of the
Jacobean scene. Shakespeare adapted the main dramatic genres of comedy and tragedy to address his time, and
he helped invent tragicomedy to accommodate its strange mixture of anxiety and confidence. Excerpts from
film, television and audio performances will be played and discussed in class along with other visual materials.
We will explore eight plays, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Macbeth. The
requirements include two essays, two exams, and consistent attendance at both lectures and recitations. The
course text is The Norton Shakespeare, but other scholarly editions of the plays are permitted.
x-ENGL-UA 415.001
Colloquium: Shakespeare
TR, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Guillory
Satisfies the Pre-1800 Requirement
Intensive reading of six to eight plays of Shakespeare chosen from among the comedies, tragedies, and
histories, with attention to formal, historical, and performance questions.
ENGL-UA 420.001
Renaissance Drama: Theater and the
Senses
**May also be listed under English Drama
to 1642**
T, 3:30-6:10PM
Instructor: Jennie Votava
Satisfies the Pre-1800 or advanced elective
requirement
This course examines the key roles of the senses in the literary form of drama and the institution and practices
of theater in early modern London. As we read late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English
comedies, tragedies, and romances, as well as one court masque, by authors including Marlowe, Kyd,
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, Beaumont, and Webster, we will explore three sets of questions.
First, as we attempt to “excavate” the venues and conditions of these plays’ original performances, we will
inquire how the seemingly lost sensory worlds experienced by early modern actors and audiences might leave
“traces” in the texts that have been passed down to us. We will also survey the specific sensory concerns of
the different genres: from city comedy’s depictions of the sights, sounds, and no-doubt powerful smells of
Renaissance London, to the violent visual and tactile spectacles of revenge plays, to the extremities of
emotional and physical experience portrayed in the tragedy, King Lear. Finally, by reading early modern prose
commentaries about the five senses, and tracts for and against the stage, we will investigate broader cultural
attitudes toward the theater and the sensorium, and consider how drama both reflects and resists these
attitudes, and perhaps even transforms them.
ENGL-UA 440.001
17th C English Literature:
16th-17th C English Prose
MW, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: Horwich
Satisfies the Pre-1800 Requirement
The 17th century in England (which began, practically speaking, in 1603, when Elizabeth I died and James I
acceded to the throne) was, in many respects, the precursor of the 20th. The “early modern period” reached
its end-stage in the self-referentiality and ironic world-view of Metaphysical poetry (Donne, Crashaw, and
Marvell), the “New Philosophy” (materialism and empirical science, embodied in the writings of Sir Francis
Bacon), the later “problem plays” of Shakespeare and those of his Jacobean successors (we will read a comedy
by Shakespeare and a tragedy by John Webster), and in what is arguably the greatest epic poem in English,
Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which we will read selections. The single text for the course is The Norton
Anthology, 9th ed., Vol. 1.
x-ENGL-UA 450.001
Colloquium: Milton
MW, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: Halpern
Satisfies the Pre-1800 Requirement
This course offers a survey of Milton’s major works in poetry and prose. We will read from Milton’s early
volume, the 1645 Poems (including On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, A Masque and
Lycidas), with an eye toward the young Milton’s conception of a poetic career, his approach to literary tradition,
and his early religious and political commitments. Selections from the prose works will allow us to see Milton
as controversialist, addressing issues of marriage and divorce, republicanism, church government, and freedom
of the press. We will conclude with Milton’s major poetic works: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson
Agonistes. Throughout we will attend to Milton’s engagement with radical thought, religion and politics, his
interests in science and philosophy, his role in the English Revolution and Restoration, and his attitudes
toward sexuality and gender. Critical readings will supplement literary selections on most days.
ENGL-UA 501.001
Mid and Later 18th C Literature
T, 2:00-4:45PM
Instructor: McDowell
Satisfies the Pre-1800 requirement
This course will introduce students to major literary works of the mid- and later eighteenth-century. We will
read travel narratives, literary biography, poetry, drama, and fiction by authors such as Samuel Johnson, James
Boswell, James Macpherson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. We will supplement
these written texts with contemporary visual materials such as William Hogarth's Engravings. Typical concerns
will include the role of literary texts (especially travel writing) in forging the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland; poetry and oral culture; sentimentalism, social satire, and the comedy of manners; and the
development of literary biography and the novel. At least one of our class meetings will be held in a local
special collections library such as the Fales Library and Special Collections of Bobst Library and the New York
Public Library, allowing students a rare opportunity to work with three hundred year-old materials.
Sample books under consideration:
Ronald Black, ed., To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James
Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, School for Scandal and Other Plays
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and/or Sense and Sensibility
William Hogarth, Selected Engravings, ed. Shesgreen
Plus substantial additional materials to be printed from our Blackboard course site
***REVISED NOVEMBER 27, 2012***
ENGL-UA 530.001
English Novel in the 19th Century
TR, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Catherine Robson
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
This course on the English Novel in the Nineteenth Century will focus on a selection of the works of Charles
Dickens and Thomas Hardy. To a certain degree it will function as two "single author" courses bolted
together; we will therefore be surveying the full arc of these writers' literary careers; their biographies; their
critical receptions, early and late; and so forth. We'll also look very closely at our chosen novels, giving special
attention to the question of narration. The three Dickens novels are strategically selected so that we can think
precisely about this novelist's conception of the first-person narrator: David Copperfield and Great
Expectations present us with two of Victorian literature's most complex fictional autobiographers, while Bleak
House provides the peculiar phenomenon of a story divided between two narrators whose exact relation to
each other is never explained – one, Esther Summerson, who tells her life-story in chronological retrospect
and the other, an unlocated third-person voice, who speaks consistently (and perplexingly) in the present
tense. For reasons that I hope we'll spend a great deal of time establishing, Hardy resolutely avoids firstperson narrators or autobiographical fictions in his full-length novels. Our study of Far from the Madding
Crowd, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure will focus upon what Hardy's
heterodiegetic narration reveals about this author's understanding of what it is possible to know about the lives
of others. To shine a different kind of light on this same question, we'll also look at Hardy's poetry to
consider how and why this writer makes use of "I" in his other major literary genre.
Expect to make two class presentations (one, a close reading of a short section of one of our primary texts; the
other, on a critical article or chapter of a scholarly work), and to write a number of short papers, one of which
will be expanded for the course's final essay.
TEXTS:
ENGL-UA 545.001
Colloq: 19th C Writer:
Gothic Melodrama and Sensation Fiction
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Vargo
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
Dickens, Charles.
David Copperfield
_______.
Bleak House
_______.
Great Expectations
Hardy, Thomas.
Far from the Madding Crowd
_____.
The Woodlanders
_____.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
_____.
Jude the Obscure
_____.
Selected Poems
Much of nineteenth-century British culture celebrates a set of affirmative values: the primacy of reason, the
sovereignty of the individual, the idea that scientific knowledge will improve the world, and a belief in
economic growth and political development. This course looks at a counter literary tradition, which portrays
the nightmare inversion of those same values. Gothic novels, Victorian melodrama, and sensation fiction (so
named for the extreme reactions it provoked in readers) depict individuals ruled by untamed emotion instead
of rationality. They describe a present in thrall to the “tyranny of the past” instead of one which looks
confidently towards the future. In the place of social consensus, they record catastrophic conflict, a culture in
crisis. Novels and plays of violence, passion, crime, power, and fear, this literature acts as the monstrous
double to the nineteenth-century dream of progress. Probable readings include: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Joseph Conrad’s The
Heart of Darkness, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Douglass Jerrold’s Black Ey’d
Susan, Ernest Jones’s Woman’s Wrongs, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, George Dibdin Pitt’s The String of Pearls,
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
ENGL-UA 605.001
British Novel in the 20th Century:
Empire and Emigration
TR, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: O’Malley
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
The early years of the twentieth century witnessed the peak and decline of Britain's global empire. The
modernist experiments of those years engage in this process in profound ways, both thematically and
formally. After the second world war, and the subsequent independence movements across the crumbling
empire, British culture faced a profound challenge to its national identity as waves of immigrants
from newly-autonomous nations arrived on English soil. This course will investigate these two related
processes, first with "British" modernism--writers like Joyce or Beckett trouble the term--and then
with the postmodern and immigrant-informed writings of more recent years. Writers may include Joseph
Conrad, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi,
William Trevor, Zadie Smith.
x-ENGL-UA 625.001
Colloquium: Joyce
MW, 12:30PM-1:45PM
Instructor: Bender
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
For more information, please contact the Irish Studies Department.
ENGL-UA 626.001
Colloquium: Modern American Writer:
Bootstrap Fictions? Social Mobilities in the
United States
TR, 2:00-3:15PM
Instructor: Fisher
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
One of the central conceits of American culture is the notion of the self-made individual: the belief that any
citizen may rise from rags to riches simply by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. But is a little hard work all
it takes to rise in America? How do we explain the persistent fixation on downward mobility in American
literature, from investigations into “how the other half lives” to narratives of racial passing, slumming, and
undercover social exploration? What can narratives of social mobility—upward, downward, and across—tell
us about race, class, and gender in American culture? This seminar will pursue these questions by examining
literary and historical representations of social mobility in American culture from the nineteenth century to the
present day. Working comparatively across a range of genres, including novels, stories, reform tracts, etiquette
manuals, journalism, photography, film, and television, we will examine the various representations of social
mobility that support a so-called “bootstrap culture” in the United States. Topics will include: assimilation and
passing, the politics of capitalism, fictions of identity, self-invention and self-making, makeover stories, the
American dream, slumming, undercover investigation, activism and collective organizing, and the role of
literature as an instrument of social change.
Course requirements will include active participation in class discussion and on the class blog, one oral
presentation, three short papers, and one longer paper. Possible readings include novels by Fanny Fern,
Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith, and
Jamaica Kincaid; nonfiction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jacob Riis, Jane Addams,
Booker T. Washington, John Howard Griffin, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Richard Rodriguez; a selection of films
(Sullivan’s Travels; Now, Voyager; Imitation of Life) and a television show (Undercover Boss).
ENGL-UA 626.002
Colloquium: Modern American Writer:
Indic Traditions and American Culture
from Emerson to the Beats
TR, 9:30-10:45AM
Instructor: Kearns
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
This course will consider the American experience of what has sometimes been called “the oriental
renaissance,” the remarkable nineteenth and twentieth century influx into Europe and the New World of a set
of eastern traditions of ancient wisdom, spiritual practice and sacred writing so different as to challenge
existing western paradigms in religion, philosophy, literature and popular culture as well. By the time of the
transcendentalists, the major texts of these traditions had already begun to be translated, and these translations
were eagerly embraced by American poets and intellectuals from then on through the sixties and beyond.
American philosophers such as Josiah Royce and William James also became interested in eastern thought, and
later still popular culture embraced both the spirituality and the cultures of India, sometimes with profound
misapprehension and sometimes with great insight. Eventually, the influence of India and the far east
transformed not only western culture but the western sense of self as well, if only by relativizing what had
hitherto seemed absolute. In this course, we will trace the trajectory of this movement and look closely at
some major figures whose work it shaped: Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman; William James and Josiah Royce;
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder.
ENGL-UA 635.001
American fiction, 1900-1945
TR, 3:30-04:45
Instructor: Hendin
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
American fiction in this period embodies the variety and anxiety of an era of rapid change. How writers and
critics attempted to define and respond to the idea of the “new” or the “transformed” illuminates specific
works of literary art and the cultural contexts in which they were created. In literary practice and critical
discourse, passages from realism to naturalism to modernism and the reinvention of forms in an era of variety
and synthesis help shape the imagination of domestic and political reality. Through readings in fiction and
selected critical essays, this course explores an aesthetic of change forged by working artists and analyzed by
critics. The course is intended as a survey of forms and practices with an emphasis on modernism and
contemporary, eclectic style.
ENGL-UA 640.001
American Novels of the 1950s
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Twitchell
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
Popular representations of the 1950s portray the decade as an age of consensus and conformity, but the
literature of the era tells a different story. In this course we will pursue a deeper understanding of the social,
cultural, and political issues of the 1950s, while tracking the formal experimentations in which its authors were
increasingly engaged. Topics to be discussed include the constraints of suburban life, Cold War paranoia,
counterculturalism, race, and gender. Authors include J.D. Salinger, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arthur Miller,
Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Richard Yates, Sylvia Plath, Chester Himes, James
Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.
ENGL-UA 645.001
Faulkner and Hemingway
F, 11:00-1:45PM
Instructor: Twitchell
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
An intensive study that reads the works of two key American novelists in their historical, cultural, and literary
context. Topics will include race, violence, masculinity, war, modernism/modernity, the construction of
history, and the far-reaching implications of literary style. Works by Hemingway include In Our Time, The Sun
Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls; works by Faulkner include The Sound and the Fury,
Sanctuary, Light in August, and Sanctuary.
ENGL-UA 712.001
Major texts and critical theory
T, 3:30-6:10PM
Instructor: Lockridge
Satisfies critical theory requirement
In this course we study key texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida. Raising theoretical questions is not
necessarily inimical to literary art. More than half these theorists are also poets, dramatists, and novelists
curious enough about the origin, structure, and purposes of literature to raise such questions themselves.
We begin with Plato’s attack on poets in The Republic. Much subsequent theoretical discussion, from Aristotle
and Longinus to Sidney and Shelley, is an attempt to answer Plato, who may have hoped to be refuted.
In the first half of the semester, we focus on four major types of theory: mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and
formalist. In the second half, we study twentieth-century critical schools, such as Russian and American
formalism, archetypal criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist critical theory, queer theory,
reader theory, deconstruction, postmodernism, and historicism. We consider pertinent literary texts in light of
theoretical issues.
The textbook for the course is The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch (W.W. Norton,
2001).
ENGL-UA 714.001
Topics: Romantic/ Victorian:
Decadence: Desire and the Double
TR, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: Thain
Satisfies the advanced elective requirement
‘Art for art’s sake’ was the motto for a group of writers (most famously, Oscar Wilde) who scandalised society,
and whose pursuit of beauty was seen to be at the expense of morality. Exploring in detail the concepts of
‘decadence’ and ‘aestheticism’, and drawing for comparison on opposing movements (particularly Victorian
popular literature) which help to define it and reflect on it, this course examines a late-nineteenth-century
period of British literature crucial to the formation of modern aesthetics.
Topics central to our understanding of ‘decadence’ and ‘aestheticism’, and which structure the course, include:
beauty, degeneration, class, nation, sexuality, the body, and sensation. These will be explored through the
concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘the double’ which will help anchor and focus our consideration of a diverse range of
literary impulses, and will facilitate comparisons across texts and other art works
Texts studied will include:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and selected essays; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry and paintings; short
stories from Daughters of Decadence, edited by Elaine Showalter; A course pack of poetry; Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; E. M. Forster,
Howard’s End.
x-ENGL-UA 715.001
Literature and Psychology: Memory
T, 2:00-4:45PM
Instructor: Rust
**Course No. has been changed to ENGLUA 800.004**
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
The questions “What is memory?” and “What is forgetting?” have intrigued thinkers for millennia. Thanks to
the written records that serve as our cultural memory, we know that memory has been a topic of inquiry at
least since those records began. Today’s philosophers, psychologists, and literary scholars are continuing to
hone the concept of the self as it was understood by John Locke, David Hume, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
among others, as a dynamic tension between memory and consciousness. Together this work pursues such
questions as “How is memory embodied?” How and why do we forget? What is the connection between
memory and the self--and with language and story-telling-- and with moral and ethical reasoning? What events
are best forgotten and how do we go about forgetting them? The proliferation of memorials of war and
conflict today has led some cultural critics to wonder if so much remembering gums up the salve of forgetting
so necessary for the healing process of forgiving. The course is structured around six units: Life Memories,
The Idea of Memory, The Science of Memory, The Art of Memory, Cultural Memory, and Forgetting.
Readings represent the full spectrum of western thinking about memory, from Plato to the Pew Research
Center’s report on memory and the internet. It is hoped that in addition to learning a great deal about memory
and forgetting as academic topics, students will come away from the course having gained new insights into
the workings of their own memories and having developed a personal practice of memory that will serve their
growth as individuals long after their memories of the course itself have dimmed.
xENGL-UA 724.001
Italian American life in Literature
TR, 11:00-12:15
Instructor: Hendin
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
Italian American writers have expressed their heritage and their engagement in American life in vivid fiction or
poetry that reflects their changing status and concerns. From narratives of immigration to current work by
"assimilated" writers, the course explores the depiction of Italian American identity. Addressing and
challenging stereotypes, the course explores depictions in film and television as well as the changing family
relationships, sexual mores, and political and social concerns evident in fiction and poetry. Situating the field
of Italian American Studies in the context of contemporary ethnic studies, this course highlights its
contribution to American literature.
ENGL-UA 735.001
Reading in Contemporary Lit Theory:
Reading Derrida
MW, 9:30-10:45AM
Instructor: Fleming
Satisfies the Critical Theory requirement
This course will assume no prior knowledge of Derrida's thought: its aim is to provide students with the
experience of reading Derrida’s writing in a close and sustained manner. The first half of the course will
focus on two early works, 'Of Grammatology' and 'Writing and Difference,' which we will study in
conjunction with the texts (by Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Freud, Levinas, Hegel and others) that
Derrida addresses there. The second half of the course will be concerned with Derrida’s later writings as these
address the topics of literature, politics, and psychoanalysis. Requirements are engaged and
informed participation in class discussion (which is to say it will be necessary to do the reading for each class),
one short paper, and one long final paper.
x-ENGL-UA 735.002
Readings in Contemporary Lit Theory:
Planetary Criticism/Death
Drive/Aesthetics of Catastrophe
R, 2:00-4:45PM
Instructor: Apter
Satisfies the Critical Theory requirement
This course will examine theories of the death drive in the aesthetics of catastrophism drawing on classic texts
by Freud, Italo Svevo, Melanie Klein, Lacan, Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras, as well as recent work on
worlds as places of catastrophe, dystopia, planetary dysphoria (depression), and earthly extinction (Ray
Brassier’s “nihil unbound,” Eugene Thacker’s “dark pantheism”). The aim will be to emphasize psychical
processes in diagnoses of planetarity, while trying to avoid a heavy-handed reliance on allegories of World
System or the Planet or Capital that impute subjective personalities to political entities and geographic
phantasms. We will experiment with an “ecology” of what Melanie Klein called “the depressive position,” as
it suffuses every aspect of everyday life.
Sample Critical Readings:
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Why War?
Lacan on Freudian Death Drive (sections: Book II, Seminar of JL and Ethics, Sem. VII)
Melanie Klein, on the depressive position
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Selection, Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds
Selection, Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound
Selection, Eugene Thacker, Dark Pantheism
Selection from Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason and Rage and Time
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline
Fredric Jameson on “Dystopia”
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter”
Fiction:
Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
Christophe Ransmayr, The Last World
Samuel Delany, Dhalgren
Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia
Films:
Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville
Terrence Malick, Badlands
Lars von Trier, Melancholia
ENGL-UA 749.001
Queer Literature: JAMES BALDWIN:
Race, Sexuality, and American Culture
TR, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: Boggs
Satisfies the Advanced Elective
Requirement
James Baldwin is widely remembered today as a prose stylist whose language is infused with the sermonic
cadences of the Harlem church, a civil rights activist, a black American expatriate in Paris, a friend to
celebrities from Nina Simone to Marlon Brando as well as a celebrity of significant proportions himself. He is
also increasingly regarded as one of the most important queer writers of the last century. This colloquium
explores Baldwin’s life and work with particular attention to the ways his fiction and essays at once critique
and reimagine the politics of race, sexuality, and nation in postwar America. While the focus will be on
Baldwin, we will pair his writings with a consideration of the work of a number of writers and artists who
influenced him or were influenced by him, including Richard Wright, Beauford Delaney, Jean Genet, Norman
Mailer, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. Along the way, we will also consider how Baldwin’s work anticipated
many of the key insights of queer theory and provided the foundational texts for what is now called black
queer studies.
Likely texts include Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room,
Another Country, If Beale Street Could Talk; Jean Genet, Funeral Rites; Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An
Introduction; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself; Dwight McBride, ed. James Baldwin
Now; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Quincy Troupe, ed. James Baldwin:
The Legacy; Richard Wright, Native Son
xENGL-UA 761.001
For more information, please contact the Irish Studies Department.
Topics Irish Lit:Irish Literature and
Migration: England, Australia, the US and
Ireland
MW, 9:30-10:45AM
Instructor: Almeida
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
xENGL-UA 761.002
Topics Irish Lit: Enlightenment and
Ideology: Ireland in the Digital Archive
MW, 11:00-12:15PM
Instructor: Waters
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
xENGL-UA 761.003
Topics Irish Lit: : Globalization and Irish
Drama
TR, 9:30-10:45AM
Instructor: Londe
Satisfies advanced elective requirement
ENGL-UA 800.001
Topics: Critical Theory: Literature and the
Life Sciences
W, 3:30-6:10PM
Satisfies the critical theory requirement
For more information, please contact the Irish Studies Department.
For more information, please contact the Irish Studies Department.
Investigates the interplay of “Life” in literature and Literary Theory with the conceptions of life developed in
the “Life Sciences” and Human Evolutionary Biology in particular. Literary texts are not only part of a literary
history, but they offer also crucial insight into epistemological questions and the history of science; they are
paradigmatic instances of Historical Epistemology. The seminar explores necessity and possibility of a new
literary history vis-à-vis the challenge of Historical Epistemology.
The seminar proceeds from a presentation of recent theories of life (from Whitehead via Canguilhem and
Bachelard to Evelyn Fox Keller, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Isabelle Stengers) to the discussion of
paradigmatic instances of literary history (Shakespeare via Milton, Keats and Darwin to Eliot, Joyce and
Pynchon).
Basic theory texts to begin with:
A.N. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, Cambridge UP 1920.
Georges Canguilhem, Selected Writings, Zone Books 1994.
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? Cambridge UP 1967.
Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life, Harvard UP 2002.
ENGL-UA 800.002
Topics: Cross Cultural Encounters on the
Renaissance Stage
MW, 3:30-4:45PM
Instructor: Forman
Satisfies the pre-1800 Requirement
The Renaissance witnessed both an explosion in theatrical innovation and an increasingly global world--the
beginnings of global trade, the “discovery” of the New World, and bouts of both conflict and cooperation
among the world’s powers. By reading plays that stage encounters between Europeans from different
countries and of different religions, between Europeans and the Ottoman Empire, among natives of “India,”
and among Europeans, Native Americans, and African slaves, we will explore how and why the stage became
such a significant site for the representation of cross-cultural encounters. Some questions we will explore
include: how do these plays represent conflict—between self and other and over goods and territory—and
what possibilities for reconciliation do they imagine? How do these plays understand the differences
encountered as a result of travel, trade, and exploration? Why did the theatre develop a fascination with the
exotic (for example, with cannibals and pirates)? In what ways did what it means to be European, Christian, or
even a good wife or husband get defined and altered by these encounters? In keeping with the theme of
encounters, this course will stage a number of creative encounters from the period: between works from
different European nations; between plays and the prose works with which they were in dialogue; and between
written and visual materials, for example, engravings of the New World and its inhabitants. In the cases where
translations exist, we will also read accounts of how non-Europeans viewed Europe. Likely authors include,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cervantes, Montaigne, Behn, Fletcher, DeBry, and Massinger.
ENGL-UA 0925/0926
Senior Honors Thesis/Colloquium
Restricted to Honors Students Only.
To complete the honors program, the student must write a thesis under the supervision of a faculty director in
this individual tutorial course. The student chooses a topic (normally at the beginning of the senior year) and is
guided through the research and writing by weekly conferences with the thesis director. Students enrolled in
the thesis course are also expected to attend the colloquium for thesis-writers (V41.0926). Consult the director
of honors concerning the selection of a topic and a thesis director. Information about the length, format, and
due date of the thesis is available on the department’s website.
x-ENGL-UA 950.001
Topics: Medieval Literature:
Medieval Women’s Writing
T, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: Dinshaw
Satisfies the Senior Seminar Requirement
OR Pre-1800 requirement
This course will concern writings by, for, and about women, written in English in the late medieval period.
Our goal will be to observe the interrelations between texts and lived lives—or even what we might call the
medieval textual production of women. In pursuing such a goal, our central texts will be the exuberant Book of
Margery Kempe, a book that is in crucial ways made up of and by other books. We will read works Margery read
(listened to) and works that can be argued to have structured her own life, including saints' lives, devotional
works, and mystical treatises. Surrounding the Book with other relevant texts, we will also read documents
concerning heresy, household letters, and medical treatises on women's problems, among other texts. Expect
long readings, in both Middle English and modern English translation.
Some experience in reading the Middle English language (in Brit Lit 1 or equivalent) is a prerequisite for the
course. Seminar members in groups of two will be required to choose a major text on the syllabus and become
experts on it, particularly on its relation to the Book of Margery Kempe. A seminar presentation on this research
will be required, as well as weekly response papers and a final 12-15-page paper on a topic developed in
consultation with the instructor.
ENGL-UA 951.001
Topics: Renaissance Literature: Early
Modern Women Writers
W, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: Feroli
Satisfies the Senior Seminar Requirement
This course will examine the varied contributions women made in print and manuscript to the intellectual life
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. While traditionally seen as a period devoid of female-authored
texts, a growing scholarly canon demonstrates that women’s writings played a significant role in early modern
politics and culture. As we will see, a diverse group of women (including members of the aristocracy and the
middling sort, spies and prophets, and the Queen of England herself) produced texts in a wide range of poetic
and prose genres.
The course will pay close attention to the key developments in intellectual and political history that shaped this
body of writing, including: the Reformation, the influence of a female monarch, the English Revolution, the
rise of the new science, and colonial expansion. In addition, we will explore the relationships of these women
to the material conditions of writing and publication. With respect to early modern literary culture, we will
consider the following: the influence of literary circles and religious sects, print versus manuscript publication,
collaboratively authored texts, and the roles of transcribers and editors.
The principal authors and genres the course will consider are as follows:
Poetry: Anne Lock, Elizabeth I, Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer,
Anne Bradstreet, and Katherine Phillips
Martyr-writing: Anne Askew
Drama: Elizabeth Cary
Prophecy: Eleanor Davies, Grace Carrie, and Anna Trapnel
Quaker Polemic: Martha Simmonds and James Nayler, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, and Katharine Evans
and Sarah Chevers
Civil War Memoirs: Anne Halkett and Lucy Hutchinson
Captivity Narrative: Mary Rowlandson
Prose Fiction: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
ENGL-UA 953.001
Topics: 18th C British Literature:
Satire and Social Commentary in
Eighteenth Century British Literature
R, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: McDowell
Satisfies the Senior Seminar Requirement
As last year's exhibition Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine at the Metropolitan Museum
suggests, authors and artists have been using satire to advance personal, political, and social arguments since
well before the beginnings of "English literature." This course will give students an opportunity to read,
discuss, and write about major texts of the so-called "golden age of English satire." After an introduction to
representative theoretical statements and critical truisms about satire, we will focus on the development of this
genre or mode and on the sometimes profound disconnect between celebrated theoretical statements (17th to
21st century) and actual social practice. Questions we'll consider include: what is satire, and what is its social
function? Is it a moral art, or a rhetorical one? What is and isn't funny? Can satire transcend its historical
moment? Should we expect it to? If the goal of satire is reform, does it work? Supplementing our reading of
canonical literary texts with our own research into eighteenth-century popular culture and with critical readings
from Simon Dickie's Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (2011),
we will pay special attention to the unsentimental underside of eighteenth-century "polite" culture and to the
ethical dilemmas of laughing at other people. At least one of our class meetings will be held in a local special
collections library such as the Fales Library and Special Collections of Bobst Library or the New York Public
Library, allowing students an opportunity to view and work with three hundred year-old materials.
Requirements: meticulous attendance, seriously engaged participation in discussions, a short digital archives
assignment, two formal (i.e. polished) papers, and informal writing via our Blackboard course site throughout
the semester. Authors include Horace, Juvenal, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry
Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Jane Austen.
ENGL-UA 961.001
Topics: 19th C American Lit:
Reading Henry James
W, 2:00-4:45PM
Instructor: Crain
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
This seminar will foreground the experience of reading Henry James--yours, mine, ours; the experience of his
first readers, his own re-reading for the 1907-9 New York Edition, the ways in which reading and readers (of
texts, but also of people, situations) are constituted and represented in the works. We will combine our close
attention to vocabulary and tropes, to sentences and scenes, and to what goes unwritten in James’s deferrals
and blanks, his “succession[s] of flights and drops,” with attention to the material conditions that produce our
readings. What difference does the book-in-hand make, in varying editions and revisions? What material
conditions prompted James’s famous stylistic turns from the early magazine tales to the late novels? Ghost
tales will guide our thinking about reading effects and the trope of prosopopoeia (making the absent present,
the trope of reading, after all), while James’s late mid-life novel (What Maisie Knew) and tales of childhood will
help us think about scenes of instruction.
We’ll meet in Fales Library and make use of editions of tales and novels in book and periodical formats.
Student work: weekly posts about passages for class discussion: one oral presentation; one short essay; final
research essay
Works (supplemented by pdfs and online texts):
Tales of Henry James, Norton
What Maisie Knew, Penguin
The Portrait of a Lady, Penguin
The Ambassadors, Penguin
The Turn of the Screw, Norton
ENGL-UA 965.001
Topics: Transatlantic Literature:
Placeless Modernism
T, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: Shaw
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
This class considers case studies in a global history of modernism in relation to two competing models of
place: the ethnographic turn toward place that began in the late eighteenth century and continues in a wide
array of projects today and, on the other hand, the idea of frictionless internationalism manifest in early
twentieth-century modernism, and perhaps most of all in the slightly later concrete poetry movement. There
will be particular emphasis on poetry, much of which we will read closely in class. Examples will come from
Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil, Scotland, Ireland, England, The United States, Russia, Germany,
France, The Francophone Caribbean (Martinique), Switzerland, Greece, Italy, and Iraq.
ENGL-UA 970.001
Topics: Critical Theory: Working with
Archives: Theory and Practice
R, 2:00-4:45
Instructor: Freedgood/Margaret Long
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
In this interdisciplinary course, team-taught by a literature professor and a visual artist, we will examine
archives and the ideas of knowledge that organize them. We will study a series of artists and writers who have
used archives to question the power relations embedded in them, including Lisa Robertson, Sam Durant,
Walid Ra’ad (The Atlas Group), Ilya Kabokov and Raqs Media Collective. These artists have used existing
archives, mined internet data, or invented their own archives to produce new ideas about storing, reading, and
retrieving knowledge. We’ll also read major theorists of the archive, including Foucault, Derrida, and Walter
Benjamin, as well as specialists like Ann Cvetkovich on queer archives, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the
colonial archive, Allan Sekula and Akram Zaatari on photographic archives, and Jacqueline Goldsby and
Elizabeth McHenry on tracking down African-American archival material. A final project will involve creative
archival research on a subject of students’ choosing: a poem, a photograph, a family heirloom, a souvenir, or
other subject/object of interest.
ENGL-UA 970.002
Topics: Critical Theory: Reading Freud
M, 12:00-2:15PM
Instructor: Fleming
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
‘Freud is our prose-poet of the heart’s desire to break’ – Mark Edmundson
‘Freud was never all that keen about being a therapist. He preferred being a writer and writing about why he
preferred being a writer’ – Adam Phillips
This seminar will focus on Freud’s writings, with particular attention to those that have proved of enduring
interest to students of literature. Our aim is to encounter Freud’s daring and intricate thought in its own
terms: no prior knowledge of this thought will be assumed. Texts be read may include The interpretation of
Dreams (1900), ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ [Dora] (1905), ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’
(1905), ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming,’ (1907), ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Fiver Year Old Boy’ [Little
Hans] (1909], ‘Family Romances,’ (1909), ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,’ (1910), ‘The History of
an Infantile Neurosis’ [the Wolf Man] (1910), ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’ (1913), ‘The Uncanny,’
(1919), ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1920) and ‘Psychoanalysis and
Telepathy’ (1921). Where possible we will be using the new English translations edited for Penguin by Adam
Phillips. Requirements are one short (5 page) paper, one longer (12 page paper), and regular attendance at and
informed participation in the seminar.
ENGL-UA 973.001
Topics: Interdisciplinary Studies: Literature
and the English language
M, 11:00-01:45PM
Instructor: Hoover
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
The obvious fact that language is the medium of literature makes the connection between the study of
language and the study of literature seem inevitable. Yet, in spite of a tremendous amount of interest in
interdisciplinary studies in recent years, language-centered approaches to literature have not figured very
prominently among them. In this seminar, we will begin by considering some of the reasons that many
modern approaches to literature seem to ignore the language of the texts they study, to the extent that it is not
difficult to find critical discussions of literature that barely mention the text itself. We will then turn our
attention briefly to the nature and origin of language itself. Finally, and mainly, we will explore some of the
many and varied ways that the study of the English language can inform and enhance the study of literature in
English.
Tentative Reading list:
Literary Texts:
Golding, William. The Inheritors. New York: Harcourt, 1963.
Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Chrest, 1987.
Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (online).
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (online).
Thomas, Dylan. Assorted poetry (online).
cummings, e. e. Assorted poetry (online).
Dickinson, Emily. Assorted poetry (online).
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Critical Texts:
Leech, Geoffrey and Michael Short. Style in Fiction. 2nd ed. London: Addison-Wesley, 2007.
Geoffrey Sampson. The Language Instinct Debate. London: Continuum, 2005.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959 (online).
Weber, Jean J. The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present. London: Arnold, 1996 (on reserve).
Hoover, David L. Language and Style in The Inheritors (Blackboard).
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2001 (online).
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. University Of Chicago Press: 2003.
Assorted online articles.
Active participation in class discussion will be an essential aspect of this course. The work for the semester will
include one or two short language exercises, a class presentation, and a substantial final paper.
ENGL-UA 973.002
Topics: Interdisciplinary Studies:
Hydropoetics: Art, Water, Activism
M, 2:00-4:45PM
Instructor: Sandhu
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
“Water is the master verb: an act of perpetual relation.” (Roni Horn, 2000)
“One of the most unexpected biases of modern thought is terracentrism: the idea that history only happens
on land” (Marcus Rediker, 2012)
Human beings are over 70 per cent water. 90 per cent of international produce moves via water. And yet,
both in public discourse as well as in the humanities where nations and continents are dominant forms of
analysis, water represents a kind of terra incognita. If it is true, as Roni Horn has suggested, that “water
receives you, affirms you, shows you who you are”, then this class offers a vital lens for zooming in on some
of the key issues in contemporary global culture.
Necessarily interdisciplinary in nature – materials to be examined will span poetry, science fiction, graphic
novels, cinema, dance music, visual arts, photography – this is also a cross-hemispheric class covering work
from or fringing China, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. Paying equal attention to
water as a politically contested entity and as a perennially seductive locus for the artistic imagination, it will
explore, among other topics, the poetics of piracy, monstrosity, labour, class conflict, gendered self-fashioning,
racial transformation, climate change, port cultures, aquatic globalization.
The class will also pose many questions of a willfully speculative nature: In what ways can we see water as an
experimental text? What might it mean to treat water as a “thinking space”? What are the alternative
pedagogies that water offers?
ENGL-UA 975.001
Topics: World Literature
W, 9:30-12:15PM
Instructor: Watson
Satisfies the senior seminar requirement
This course explores the contemporary literatures of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region, with a
focus on indigenous, migrant and diasporic writing. Challenging reductive readings of the region as merely
home of beaches and tropical islands, we’ll pay attention to the way writers have responded to the complex
processes of colonialism, diaspora and migration that have fundamentally shaped this part of the world. In
addition to novels, essays and films from Australia and New Zealand, we will encounter Anglophone works
from Malaysia, Singapore and the Pacific islands. Through careful analysis of these texts, we will consider: how
issues of race and indigeneity have been central to various discourses of nationalism; relationships between
place, territory and identity; the project of multiculturalism in different contexts; and, finally, themes and
forms of recent writing that responds to ideas of a “globalizing” Asia-Pacific. Assigned texts will likely include
works by Alexis Wright, David Malouf, Brian Castro, Lee Tamahori, Lee Kok Liang, Arthur Yap, Adib Khan
and others. In addition to honing critical thinking, reading and writing skills, students will develop a critical
vocabulary for analyzing the problematics of postcolonialism, race, diaspora, indigeneity, nationalism and
gender. Short response papers, final research paper and presentation.