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Undergraduate English Fall 2010 Course Descriptions
xV41.0125.001 History of Drama and Theatre I
Examines selected plays central to the development of Western drama, with critical emphasis on a cultural,
historical, and theatrical analysis of these works. Includes Greek and Roman drama, medieval drama, French
neoclassical drama, and theater of the European Renaissance. Topics will include ritual; the politics of theater;
popular performance practices; and the histories of genres, especially tragedy.
xV41.0130.001 Theory of Drama
Study of major issues in dramatic theory, including the nature of imitation and representation, the relationship
of text to performance, the idea of dramatic genres, and the role of the spectator. Each topic is studied
historically through analysis of classical texts such as Aristotle’s Poetics. A long section of the course is
devoted to 20th-century dramatic theorists, including Brecht, Artaud, and Grotowski. Readings include both
plays and theoretical essays.
xV41.0132.001 Drama in Performance
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.
V41.0200
Literary Interpretation
Introduction to the interpretation of literary texts. Teaches the student to talk and write about literature. Through
study of the various forms of poetry, the short story, the novel, and the drama, students develop a critical
language and approach appropriate to the experience of each work. Required of all English majors and minors.
V41.0210.001
British Literature I
The course is designed to study the development of English language and literature at selected moments
between BEOWULF and Milton’s PARADISE LOST. The fact that the prescribed anthology gives BEOWULF
in modern translation (by the poet Seamus Heaney) is a problem, but we will discuss those aspects of the poem
that have survived translation. A list of the poems and proses to be read will be given at the first class.
Text: NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, eighth edition, volume one, general editor
Stephen Greenblatt. Mid-term examination and Final examination on dates to be arranged. Two papers
required, due on dates to be decided. Recitation required.
V41.0220.001
British Literature II
This course offers an intensive introduction to major works of British literature drawn from poetry, prose,
drama, and fiction from the Restoration to the 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 identity. 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.
V41.0230.001
American Literature I
A survey of American literature and literary history, from the early colonial period to the eve of the Civil War.
The goal is to acquire a grasp of the expanding canon of American literature by reading both established,
canonical masterpieces and texts that have been traditionally considered to be marginal. Topics to be considered
include: the relation between history and cultural mythology; the rise of “literature” as a discipline unto itself;
the meaning of American individualism; the mythology of American exceptionalism; the dialectic of freedom
and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; the ideology of domesticity and its link to
the sentimental; and the nature of the “American Renaissance.” Recitation required.
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xV41.0252.001 Media History of New York
New York has played a crucial role in the history of media, and media have played a crucial role in the history
of New York. New York has been represented by media since Henry Hudson wrote his reports to the Dutch.
Media institutions have contributed centrally to its economy and social fabric, while media geographies have
shaped the experiences of city living. This course explores media representations, institutions, and geographies
across time and is organized around the collaborative production of an online guidebook to the media history of
New York.- Gitelman
xV41.0410.001 Shakespeare I
In this survey of the first half of William Shakespeare’s career as a playwright we will consider the relation
between the mingled genres of his plays (festive comedy, history, tragedy) and the social and political
conditions that shaped his developing sense of dramatic form. Critical analysis of the plays as both
performances and written works will form the fabric of this course; the connection of drama to its culture will
be the lectures’ guiding thread. Excerpts from film, television and audio versions of the plays will be shown
and discussed in class along with other visual materials. We will discuss ten great plays: Comedy of Errors,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, Titus Andronicus,
Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The requirements include two essays, short writing assignments, a
midterm exam, a final exam, and consistent attendance at both lectures and recitations. Recommended course
text: The Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. -Archer
xV41.0415.001 Colloquium: Shakespeare: Constructing Shakespeare’s Heroes
Surely no more problematic descriptor exists in the vocabulary of Western dramaturgy than "the hero," and the
dramatist responsible for most of the problems was Shakespeare. The model described by Aristotle in the
Poetics can hardly be expected to accommodate a royal barfly, an adolescent poetaster, a self-pitying heiress, a
Danish graduate student, an errant barbarian, a power-crazed assassin, a soldier who "makes no wars without
doors," and a father whose primary obsession is his daughter's virginity, but it is out of this unlikely clay that
the Shakespearean hero(ine) is created — or better say, creates him- or herself, for Shakespeare's heroes are
not born but made, sometimes in response to extraordinary circumstance, often by an act of will, through a
process that Stephen J. Greenblatt has termed "self-fashioning." The moment at which a hero emerges calls
attention to itself in a number of ways, and marks both a biographical event of great magnitude and a turning
point in the action of the play. We will read Romeo and Juliet, 1Henry 4, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet,
Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.-Horwich
V41.0500.001 Restoration and early 18th C Literature: Listening to London
This course has three main goals: i) to introduce students to major literary works of the Restoration and early
eighteenth centuries, especially works that can be challenging to read on one's own yet surprisingly enjoyable
with a little help; ii) to consider the relationship of print, writing, and oral discourse in this period, especially in
London, then the world's largest city; and iii) to introduce NYU students to valuable research resources
available to them, ranging from rare (pre-1800!) books to new electronic databases. We will read (and
sometimes listen to) a wide range of genres, including fiction, drama, poetry, satire, diaries, and journalism.
Considering the ways that literary texts represent oral discourse and sound, and exploring new scholarship in
the rapidly expanding field of "soundscape studies," we will work to reconstruct the "aural topography" of the
early modern metropolis and its intersections with the world of print. Sample texts currently under
consideration include: Samuel Pepys, Diary; William Wycherley, The Country Wife; Ned Ward, The London
Spy; Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, The Tatler and The Spectator; Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague
Year; Jonathan Swift, "A Description of a City Shower" and "A Description of the Morning"; John Gay, Trivia:
Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London and The Beggar's Opera; Eliza Haywood, Fantomina; Alexander
Pope, The Dunciad (selections); and Henry Fielding, The Author's Farce. We will supplement these verbal
texts with visual texts such as William Hogarth's Engravings depicting urban street life ("Beer Street," "Gin
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Lane," "The Enraged Musician," "Southwark Fair," and so on) and audio materials such as recordings of
ballads. At least one of our class meetings will be held in a local rare book archive such as the Fales Library
and Special Collections of Bobst Library, allowing students a rare opportunity to work with original eighteenthcentury materials and to employ this evidence in their own projects.-McDowell
V41.0525.001
Victorian Writers
This is a cross-genre course in Victorian culture that will include readings from major poets and novelists of the
period as well as non-fiction prose. The course will be organized around four topics: social justice, aesthetics
and poetics, gender, and empire. Of course these four topics will partially overlap. There will selected readings
from major figures including Tennyson, Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites (whose painting will also be
examined); Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Stevenson; Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, and excerpts from lesser known
figures.-Spear
V41.0540
Literature of the Transition
The course considers the development of modernism from its roots in the nineteenth century in relation to two
themes: the advent of the "new woman" and the culture of imperialism, which became an articulated policy in this
period. The course will engage with both fiction and non-fiction prose, poetry and drama. Readings will vary
somewhat depending on what is in print, but will likely include Wilde, Pater, Schreiner and other "new woman"
writers, Joyce, Woolf, Shaw, and Tagore. Spear
V41.0545.001
Colloquium 19ht C British Writer: Thomas Hardy
This course organizes itself around a single author, but aims to cover a wide range of topics and to achieve
a variety of different goals. We'll read five of Hardy's novels; a fair selection of short fiction; and a great
deal of poetry (with special attention to the poems on war and empire, plus the "Poems of 1912-13," the
works Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife). In addition to our general discussion of these works,
and frequent in-class close-reading sessions, Hardy's relationship to his different genres will be a major
topic; we will also pay special attention to his working methods, examining his notebooks with their
extensive recordings of items from local newspapers. We will also consider the broader question of
Hardy's connection to parallel discourses, most prominently scientific, philosophical, political and
anthropological writings. Reading the most important texts in Hardy studies, we will familiarize ourselves
with the different stages in his critical reputation, and will be particularly attentive to the pedagogical uses
of his fiction over the years (here Peter Widdowson's unusual book Hardy in History will be key). The
topic of biography – scholarly, popular, and, indeed, his own disguised autobiographies, published
posthumously under his second wife's name – will also be addressed. In addition, we will examine Hardy's
afterlife in other media, studying elements of the most interesting film and television adaptations of his
novels. Further, the course will consider literary scholarship's approach to the question of textual variants:
here Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which exists in numerous different versions, will be our special object of
study. Conventional mores, especially within mainstream magazine publishing in the late nineteenth
century, exerted considerable pressure on Hardy's desire to represent the sexual dimensions of Tess's
nature and experience: we will consider both the ramifications of the specific changes the author made to
key scenes and episodes in the novel and the general question of which Tess we should teach today.
Students will be expected to complete the following assignments: each week, a one-paged email response
to the assigned readings; two presentations – the first, a close-reading of a self-selected passage from
Hardy's prose or poetry; the second, a discussion of one of our parallel or secondary texts; two 8-10 paged
papers.
Reading List:
Hardy, Thomas.
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_____.
Far from the Madding Crowd
The Woodlanders
The Return of the Native
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_____.
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_____.
_____.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
The Withered Arm and other Stories
Selected Poems
Tomalin, Claire.
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man
A reader containing primary texts by amongst others, John Stuart Mill; Charles Darwin; Herbert
Spencer; T. H. Huxley; Max Müller; Sir James Frazer; Florence Emily Hardy (ventriloquizing her
husband) and criticism by, amongst others, Gillian Beer; Elaine Scarry; Catherine Gallagher; William
A. Cohen; Angelique Richardson; Joss Marsh; Simon Gatrell; D. H. Lawrence; Henry James; Robert
Louis Stephenson; Peter Widdowson; Virginia Woolf.-Robson
V41.0550.001
19thC American Poetry
Poetry was a ubiquitous print, manuscript, and performance genre in the nineteenth century, produced by and for
every class and age of reader. Poems were memorized and recited in school, they filled columns of newspapers and
magazines, headed chapters of novels, and were copied into autograph books and scrapbooks. In this seminar we
will try to re-enter this lost culture of poetry by reading broadly and deeply in an array of poetic forms high and
low--elegy, epic, ballad, ditty, hymn, song, ode, spiritual, etc.—attending to their original publication and
circulation. Poets may include Sigourney, Osgood, Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Schoolcraft, Cary, Harper,
Emerson, Poe, Dickinson, Jackson, Lazarus, Whitman, among others. We will also read some current essays in
historical poetry and poetics. Students will write frequent brief response essays and a final seminar paper and will
present one in-class report or performance.-Crain
V41.0600.001
Modern British and American Poetry
Readings from major modern American, British and Irish poets from the middle of the 19th C to the 1920’sspecifically, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Poets considered
generally include Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Frost, Williams and Eliot.
V41.0626.001
Colloquium: Black Women Writers of the 1940’s and 1950’s
In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her verse collection Annie Allen. Eight years earlier, For
My People brought Margaret Walker the Yale Younger Poets award. Ann Petry’s The Street became a millionseller novel upon its publication in 1946. A Raisin in the Sun’s twinned successes as a Broadway hit and winner
of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959 established Lorraine Hansberry as a playwright of note.
This second “woman’s era” in African American literature is often neglected as one compared to those of the
late 19th and 20th centuries. In this course, we will attend to this group of writers, to account for the
unprecedented critical and popular acclaim that they received during the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on the
writings of Brooks, Walker, Petry, Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paule Marshall, we will consider the
following issues:
How might we theorize the thematic and formal appeal of their works—what traditions did these writers
continue, what innovations did they establish, and why did their craft and concerns resonate so keenly with mid20th century American reading publics? What historiographies and sociologies might account for their formation
as a cultural cohort—in what friendship and professional networks did these writers circulate? Why was their
work so readily accommodated by the mainstream print venues? How did their circuits of contact and influence
differ from support systems that black women writers enjoyed (or lacked) in prior or subsequent times? When
read in sync with the governing ideals of literary culture and public intellectual life during the post-World War
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II/pre-Civil Rights Movement eras, this course aims to re-think models of black female authorship and
intellectual authority which emerge during these decades.-Goldsby
V41.0630.001
American Poetry, Twentieth Century-Present
First and foremost, poets interest us as individuals – not as members of groups or representatives of tendencies.
This course offers an opportunity to read and discuss the works of fourteen highly distinctive poets: Robert
Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell,
Robert Lowell, W.D.Snodgrass, John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, Sylvia Plath and Paul Muldoon. The emphasis will
be on reading aloud and studying individual poems or groups of poems, and getting to know these works well.
Students will be expected to choose one poet from this list for a half-term essay. At the end of the semester,
they will have the option of either revisiting the same subject for an expanded and revised version of their
essay, or choosing a second author from the same list.
Preliminary Reading List:
Students are strongly advised to purchase the Library of America editions of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and
the Shorter Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound. (They will not be expected to read Pound’s Cantos for this
course.) They are recommended to buy the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, The Collected Poems and
Plays of T.S.Eliot and the Collected Poems of W.H.Auden. These are the books they will need for the first part
of the semester. -Fenton
V41.0708.001
Post-Colonial Writer: Salman Rushdie
This course will cover the entire body of Salman Rushdie’s fiction, with a focus on his major novels. It will help
develop the critical tools with which to read Rushdie, and will contextualize him within the political and
cultural milieus in which his work was shaped and received in three continents as well as within the paradigm
of ‘postcolonial’ literature. Rushdie ‘belongs’ to different literary milieus: we will therefore ask what it means
to identify him, variously, as a sub-continental novelist, as a contemporary British-Asian writer, as a 'Third
World’ or post-colonial writer, and as an ‘international’ writer. Rushdie’s novels, especially the early
Midnight’s Children and Shame, will be read in terms of the nation, exploring such problems as post-colonial
nationhood, national histories, and the ‘allegory’ of nation. The controversy over the publication of Satanic
Verses will be considered in some detail, engaging questions like the political and theoretical implications of
freedom of speech in the western democracy, censorship and Islamic fundamentalism, and the implied
opposition between the two, leading to the larger question of the role of the writer today. Other thematic issues
emerging from his work, such as the opposition ‘East, West’, migration, minorities, diaspora, the hybridity of
cultures, and violence will also be covered. Finally, since Rushdie's narrative methods and formal techniques
are of particular interest, we will attend to the genres and devices with which his work is associated: magical
realism, allegory, epic, postmodern fragmentation, decentredness, alienation, non-linear narrative, the unreliable
narrator, autobiography and history, cinema, mimicry, satire, hybridity, 'translation', memory.
Assignments and Grading: Attendance and class participation=10 %, Weekly 100-word response papers, or
class quiz (10 best): 30%, Mid-term take-home exam (3 questions x 500 words): 30%, Final essay (10 pages,
3000 words): 30%
Reading list
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Grimus*
Midnight's Children
Shame
The Jaguar Smile*
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West: Stories
The Moor's Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath her Feet
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Fury*
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
 Imaginary Homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991
 Step Across this Line*
Please note: All texts are required except those marked with an asterisk*, which are optional.
V41.0712.001
Major Texts in Critical Theory
In this course we study key texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida and beyond. Raising theoretical
questions is not necessarily inimical to literary art. More than half the theorists studied are also poets,
dramatists, and novelists curious enough about the origins, structures, 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, expressivist, and
formalist. In the second half, we primarily study twentieth- to twenty-first-century critical schools, such as
archetypal theory, structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, reader theory, historicism, gender and sexuality theory,
deconstruction, and postmodernism. We consider pertinent literary texts in light of theoretical issues.
This is not a survey course. Readings are organized more by conceptual convergences than by chronology.
Students will write four “reaction papers” of two-three pages on preassigned topics—to be used as prompts for
discussion—and a term essay of 10-12 pages on a topic of their own choosing.
The textbook for the course is “The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism,” 2nd edition (W. W. Norton,
2010).-Lockridge
xV41.0716.001 Asian American Literature
This class offers an introduction to the history of Asian American literature, exploring the thematic, aesthetic
and political issues that it has grappled with and been convulsed by. A broad range of genres – graphic novels,
travel writing, avant-garde poetry, memoir, graffiti – will be examined, as will the relationship between
literature and other forms such as music and cinema. The construction of Asian American identity – as well as
its gleeful deconstruction – will also be a though-line of many of the texts under consideration.-Sandhu
V41.0735.001 Readings in Contemporary Literary Theory: Reading Derrida
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.- Fleming
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V41.0780.001
Introduction to Post-Colonial Studies
What does it mean to be “postcolonial”? How can we understand the mixture of cultures and peoples that seems
to define our “globalized” age? The rise of interest in the postcolonial condition has been marked by a body of
work that engages questions relating to empire and decolonization and creates new models for the analyses of
power, identity, gender, resistance, nation and Diaspora. In this class, we will examine novels, poems, political
writings and films from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and their diasporic communities. Theoretical readings will
draw from Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, M. K. Ghandi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, while fictional and cinematic
texts will include work by V. S. Naipaul, Bapsi Sidhwa, Raoul Peck, Assia Djebar, Tayeb Salih, Bharati
Mukherjee and others. Our aim will be to understand both the ways in which these texts provide new models of
analysis and have changed the traditional study of literature in the academy. Requirements: midterm paper and
final exam. Prerequisites: Literary Interpretation or equivalent Watson
xV41.0800.001
Interartistic Genres: Theater after Film
What did film do to theater? Histories tend to narrate a movement from theater to film: Stage to Screen and
Theatre to Cinema are titles of two important scholarly works that treat this problem. But what if we turn these
titles around, and think about a process from screen to stage, from cinema to theater?
To think this way goes against some standard narratives, but not against history: no form had a more powerful
impact on the development of theater in the twentieth-century than film. Just as art historians have traced a
dialectic between photography and painting – a dialectic involving problems of technological change, of formal
constraints, and of shifting media and audiences – so histories of modern theater need to acknowledge the
centrality of film in the development of theater. This seminar will trace what such an acknowledgment might
look like. Examples will span the twentieth century. We will, however, pay especially close attention to the
decades after World War Two, when film and mass culture, as example and antagonist, were vital to the
development of innovative theater.
This course will trace the historical and aesthetic problem of the relationship between theater and film by
looking closely at plays and other theater works that respond to the new forms of cinematic entertainment that
became dominant in the first part of the twentieth century. We will read works for theater by Antonin Artaud,
Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke, Adrienne Kennedy, Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, and others, and
theoretical and historical texts by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Walter Benjamin, Lisa Gitelman, Clement Greenberg,
Hans-Thies Lehmann, and others.-Harries
V41.0925/0926
Senior Honors Thesis/Colloquium
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 non-credit colloquium for thesis-writers (V41.0926). Consult the
assistant director of undergraduate studies for 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. Patell
V41.0950.001
Topics Medieval Literature -**** New Course Description effective May 2010****
This course will focus on the figure of the Virgin Mary in late medieval culture. During this period, the
discourses of Eucharistic theology, courtly love, chivalry, aristocracy, motherhood, virginity and sainthood all
converged to make this figure one of the most widely revered religious icons in the world and the inspiration for
much of the art, music and literature of the period. Chaucer dedicated some of his most brilliant work to her;
Marian piety pervades the Divine Comedy, and Mary presides over a host of religious sites and sanctuaries,
both within the Church and on the margins of society, in forest grottoes, near springs, and by rivers. We will
look not only at the important Marian texts that illumined the medieval imagination, such as the remarkable
Protoevangelion of James, early translated into old English, with its account of the young Mary before the birth
of Jesus, but at the representations of Mary in almost every medium from stained glass to manuscript
illumination, from motet to mass. Mary is also the text or subtext of several initiatives in cultural studies and
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literary theory, from The Virgin and the Dynamo by Henry Adams to Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex
and Julia Kristeva’s experimental ”Stabat Mater,” and we will sample these as well.
Reading List
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture
Marina Warner: Alone of All Her Sex
Julia Kristeva,” Stabat Mater”
Karen Saupe, ed. Middle English Marian Lyrics
Suggested resources:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/virg/hd_virg.htm
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary//
Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary
Sarah Jane Boss, Empress and Handmaid: Nature and Gender in the Cult of Mary
Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin
Charles H. Haskins, The Twelfth Century Renaissance
Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England
V41.0954.001
Topics: 19th C British Literature: The Romantics
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy
Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats are the canonical writers considered in the seminar.
Among the topics to be discussed: Blake’s revolutionary satire and mythology; the literary relationship of
William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Coleridge; Romantic autobiography; Coleridge as philosopher
of literature; Lord Byron as performance artist; Mary Shelley’s questioning of Romantic ideology; Percy
Shelley and deconstruction; Keats and cultural poetics; formal innovation in Romantic narrative and lyric;
representations of gender and class; and the Romantic canon.
Prominent schools in modern theory and criticism from archetypal, psychoanalytic, and ethical to feminist,
historicist, and deconstructive have found in Romantic writers a literature of great import. We debate a variety
of such approaches. Participants are encouraged to pursue their own critical interests.
Representative texts: Blake’s Songs, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and
America a Prophecy; Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, W. Wordsworth’s The Prelude; Dorothy
Wordworth’s Journals and selected poems; Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, the conversation poems and
mystery poems; Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan; Percy Shelley’s Alastor, Prometheus
Unbound and The Cenci; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Keats’s Odes and The Fall of Hyperion.
Participants will write four response papers of two-three pages each on topics assigned in advance and a term
essay of 10-12 pages on a topic of their choosing.-Lockridge
V41.0955.001
Topics: 20th C Brit Lit: Reading Joyce’s Ulysses
Description coming soon.
V41.0961.001
Topics: Fiction and Value in Anglo American Literature
This senior seminar provides a historical survey of successive Anglo-American models of economic value, from
the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, and examines the way that selected literary works engage these
models. Readings from the eighteenth century, which explore the labor theory of value, include Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
(selections). We explore Marx’s model of the commodity-form, which played an important role in nineteenthcentury literature and culture, through Marx’s Capital vol. I (selections), Anthony Trollope’s The Struggles of
Brown, Jones and Robinson, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The section devoted to the twentieth
century and the capital theory of value, developed by Irving Fisher, focuses on Fisher’s The Nature of Capital
and Income (selections), Max Weber’s Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism (selections), Don DeLillo’s
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White Noise, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The primary goal of this course is to help students
understand the reciprocal relationship between economic theories and literary works; I will include secondary
materials and theoretical texts if students are interested in tackling the scholarship on this topic.- Poovey
V41.0964.001 Topics: Emergent Literature: Racial Transformations
What does it mean to imagine an American subject who is neither black nor white? Asian Americans and
Latina/os constitute the two most quickly growing minority populations in the U.S. Yet our critical and popular
paradigms for thinking about race and ethnicity in the U.S. often remain tied to discourses of whiteness and
blackness. What types of “transformations” might the emergence of Asian American and Latina/o voices in
artistic and political forums index? This seminar will explore representations of racial and national formation
and cultural citizenship in prose/narrative works by Asian American and Latina/o authors from the twentieth
century. We will also read selections of contemporary cultural criticism in race theory and ethnic studies so as
to develop a contextual framework for our discussions. We will consider how conditions of labor, immigration,
racialization, sexuality, literary and aesthetic production, empire, panethnicity, diaspora and transnationalism,
and civil and human rights discourse provide opportunities and limits for articulating an emergent American
subject.-Parikh
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Topics: Genre Studies: Virginia Woolf
A comprehensive assessment of Woolf's career, emphasizing what Woolf's fiction and non-fiction share.
Woolf's technique is dialogical, making her essays and novels continuous. Woolf is interactive or
transactional, whether in her sketches and diaries, her formal essays and polemics, or in her fiction. The course
will begin with the historical contexts that situate the Bloomsbury Group as a whole, particularly aestheticism,
and the way in which Woolf's portraiture resembles that of Pater. Chronological coverage of Woolf's works will
begin with the early stories, Jacob's Room (1922), and the influence of Katherine Mansfield, followed by the
study of her canonical phase, from Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) to A
Room of One's Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938), and Between the Acts (1941)..- Meisel
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Genre Studies: American Short Story
The American short story both reveals and transcends the cultural and commercial preoccupations that surround
its creation. Once tracking the growth of magazines and inspiring countless how-to manuals, the short story has
also achieved the status of a complex art form. From Poe’s definition of the achievement of a “unity of effect”
and the revelation of “truth” as the story’s aesthetic goals, to contemporary emphases on unsettling the reader,
theories of the form reflect its creative ferment and rich diversity. The authors read will include: William
Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Tillie Olsen, Delmore Schwartz, Zora Neal
Hurston, Katharine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip
Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Gish
Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mary Gaitskill.- Hendin
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Genre Studies: NYU Mediation Lab
MIT has its famous Media Lab to "to envision the impact of emerging technologies". NYU English now has its
own laboratory/workshop--The Mediation Lab--where we will experiment with the emerging technologies of
literary study, from the electronic and algorithmic (databases and new forms of scholarship online) to the conceptual
(the history of mediation). The point of this being a “lab” rather than a “seminar” is that we will do as well as
think—and do so collaboratively rather than solely as individuals. When English Departments first formed in
Britain in the early nineteenth century, they played a key role in mediating the relationship between a changing
society and its changing technologies. Together, we will try to recover that sense of purpose—of our work working
in the world. This will be the second edition of the Lab. The students in the first edition took the institution of the
library as their focus. Email me if you would like to see a sample of what they accomplished. -Siskin
Updated: 06/14/10
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Topics: Interdisciplinary Studies: Literature and The English Language
The obvious fact that language is the medium of literature makes the connection between the study of language
and the study of literature seem entirely natural. Yet, in spite of a tremendous amount of interest in
interdisciplinary studies in recent years, linguistic approaches to literature have not figured prominently among
them. In this seminar, we will begin by considering briefly some of the reasons for this neglect, and then turn
our attention to some of the ways that the study of the English language can inform the study of literature in
English. We will briefly cover linguistic topics like the nature and origin of language, semantics, syntax,
phonology, and cognitive linguistics, and then turn our attention to a some of the many and varied ways that
linguistics has been applied to the study of literary texts. The course does not assume any prior study of
linguistics.
We will be reading British and American literary texts from a variety of historical periods, chosen either
because they have been the focus of linguistic approaches in the past or because they seem especially
appropriate for linguistic study. Authors may include Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dylan Thomas, e.
e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Golding,
Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and George Orwell. Among the critics we will read
will be writers like Roman Jakobson, Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short, Richard Ohman,
Stanley Fish, Sara Mills, Elena Semino, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Ian Lancashire, M. A. K. Halliday,
Mark Turner, and Jerome McGann.
Active participation in class discussion will be an essential aspect of this course. The work for the semester will
include one or two short linguistics exercises, a class presentation, and a substantial final paper.
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Topics: World Literature: Writing the Asia Pacific
The gleaming cityscapes of Hong Kong and Singapore, the verdant islands of Hawaii and the South Pacific, the
high-tech industrial zones of South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia: is there anything that unifies the
“Asia-Pacific”? How has the Pacific Rim been imagined by American discourses, and how do writings from the
region variously challenge limited notions of tropical islands, Cold War battle lines, or capitalist hyperdevelopment? In this senior seminar we consider stories, images and narratives emerging from the Asia-Pacific.
Topics we engage with include: competing Pacific imperialisms (Pramoedya Ananta Toer); postcolonial nationformation (Lloyd Fernando); questions of indigeneity (Alexis Wright); the Cold War and its legacies (Hwang
Sok-yong); gender, sexuality and neocolonialism (Bino A. Realuyo); diaspora (Lois Yamanaka); and the urban
experience of the Asian metropolis (Arthur Yap, Leung Ping-kwan). We will examine novels, poetry, films and
critical texts with the aim of understanding how historical events and cultural and economic flows have
connected and shaped
this diverse region, as well as how attempts to “write” the Asia-Pacific involve questions
of language, genre and literary form. Finally, through the idea of “Asia as method” (Kuan-hsing Chen) and
approaches from postcolonial and Marxist theory, students will explore broader problematics of imperialism,
diaspora, nationalism and modernity.-Watson
Updated: 06/14/10