English and Comparative Literature

This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL W3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration, starting with the Class of 2010. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

ENGL W3001x and y Literary Texts, Critical Methods 4 pts. Prerequisites: University Writing (ENGL C1010 or F1010). Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL W3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the study of literature. Students will read works from the three major literary modes (lyric, drama, and narrative), drawn from the medieval period to the present day. They will learn the interpretative techniques required by each. They will also learn how to write scholarly papers on literature, as well as how to integrate secondary sources into their own critical writing

ENGL W3011x and y Literary Texts, Critical Methods seminar Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3011 must also register for ENGL W3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL 3001. Through discussion of specific works and through written exercises, the class will elaborate upon the topics taken up in the weekly lecture, training students in techniques of close reading and textual explication appropriate to the genres introduced in the lecture, and providing guided practice in literary-critical writing.

ENGL W3034x Canterbury Tales 3 pts.(Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention. We will consider the conditions-both historical and aesthetic-that informed Chaucer's motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period. Our ultimate project will be the assessment of the Tales at once as a self-consciously "medieval" production, keen to explore and exploit the boundaries of literary convention, and as a ground-breaking literary event, which set the stage for renaissance literature.

ENGL W3140x Race and Sexuality 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This undergraduate seminar draws upon feminist, African American, and queer theories and cultural practices to explore the relations of male masculinity and queer subjectivities. We will use literature and film, primarily, to provide a critique of normative notions of the binary oppositions of "black" and "gay" that oversimplify the complex social formations that structure racial and queer representations. We will attempt to find a way into discussions of how sexuality studies can enhance discussions of race and gender within the context of African American artistic forms. Cultural theorists include Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Karla Holloway, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, and Robyn Wiegman, Writers and filmmakers will come from diverse canons, including the black feminist tradition of Mae V. Cowdery, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dees Rees and this course will pay particular attention to the possibility of black queer texts and critical practices with an emphasis on deconstructing black masculinity through the languages of intimacy. Artists include Melvin Dixon, Thomas Allen Harris, Essex Hemphill, Issac Julien, Randall Kenan, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Marlon Riggs. One fifteen-page essay. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Marcellus Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Race and Sexuality seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3150x Novels of Immigration, Relocation, Diaspora 3 pts.(Lecture). The master narrative of the United States has always vacillated between valorizations of movement and settlement. While ours is a nation of immigrants, one which privileges its history of westward expansion and pioneering, trailblazing adventurers, we also seem to long for what Wallace Stegner called a "sense of place," a true belonging within a single locale. Each of these constructions has tended to focus on individuals with a tremendous degree of agency in terms of where and whether they go. However, it is equally important to understand the tension between movement and stasis within communities most frequently subjected to spatial upheavals. To that end, this course is designed to examine narratives of immigration, migration, relocation, and diaspora by authors of color in the United States.

CLEN W3208y Modern Comparative Fiction 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W3256x Country and City in 19th Century Novel 3 pts.(Lecture). A survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels, this course explores the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams's phrase, "knowable communities," how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent individual identity as it shapes and is shaped by physical context? In this light, we consider questions of youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism, realism and romanticism. In class, we juxtapose close readings of novels with analyses of other cultural forms (paintings, operas, popular entertainment, maps) so that we come away with a broader sense of nineteenth-century European culture as well as a working knowledge of one of its most meaningful manifestations, the novel. Readings include Balzac's Père Goriot, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Austen's Persuasion, Dickens' Oliver Twist, Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

ENGL W3263x Literature in an Age of Revolution (1603-1660) 3 pts.(Lecture). The readings for this class are a(n incomplete) survey of English literature in the period between the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We will read the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, James I, Francis Bacon, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, as well as lesser-known popular and polemical works. We will look at the formal and literary features of these texts as well as the cultural, historical, and political contexts in which they appeared. In particular we will focus on the varieties of seventeenth-century poetry; patronage and publication; Jacobean politics and drama; and the role of literature and the popular press in an era of class and religious strife and civil war.

ENGL W3276y American Fiction as American History 3 pts.(Lecture). In this course, we will join some of America's most prominent writers in looking back on the nation's past from an historical remove. We'll do so by reading historical novels, which set their plots and locate their characters in time periods that predate their composition and, in so doing, invite readers to meditate upon past events and their ripples in subsequent history. We will consider not only the commentary that these novelists seem to be making on past eras and their watershed moments, but also the ways that narrative strategies, retrospection, and our knowledge of what followed on America's historical timeline - "the relentless unforeseen," as Philip Roth has put it - shape our sense of American history today. Possible authors include Child, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Styron, Pynchon, Roth, Morrison, and Delillo, as well as various professional historians of the last two hundred years.

ENGL W3280y Tudor-Stuart Drama 3 pts.(Lecture). We will explore plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Lyly, Dekker, Beaumont, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, and Ford within the theatrical contexts in which they were first staged. Enrollment limited to 60 students. No LLL, no auditors.

ENGL W3335x Shakespeare I 3 pts.(Lecture). Shakespeare's early comedies, histories, tragedies, and poetry from Titus Andronicus to Hamlet. Note: No auditors or LLL. Enrollment is limited to 60.

ENGL W3337x Shakespeare's Poetry 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Shakespeare's Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, The Phoenix and Turtle, and A Lover's Complaint. There will be a writing assignment every week. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor James Shapiro (js73@columbia.edu) by Wednesday, April 10th, with the subject heading "Shakespeare's Poetry seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3338y Shakespeare's Tragedies in 1606 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The seminar explores the plays that Shakespeare was writing in 1606-King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra-within the literary, political, and cultural contacts of that year. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor James Shapiro (js73@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Shakespeare's Tragedies seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W3390x The Art of the Novel 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructors. (Seminar). The phrase "the art of the novel," a reminder that the ascension of the genre to the status of "high art" rather than merely popular entertainment is still relatively recent, comes from Henry James, himself both a novelist and an influential critic of the novel. The premise of this co-taught seminar is that it is intellectually productive to bring together the perspectives of the novelist and the critic, looking both at their differences and at their common questions and concerns. In addition to fiction and criticism by Orhan Pamuk, students will read novels by Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Robbins (bwr2001@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Art of the Novel seminar". In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3400x African-American Literature I 3 pts.(Lecture).

ENGL W3401y African-American Literature II 3 pts.(Lecture). An introduction to African American literary and cultural studies. In this second part of the historical survey, we will focus our attention on the politics of representation in twentieth century African American literature from Richard Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), to John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir, Brothers and Keepers (1984). How do we locate these texts within an appropriate historical and cultural context? What theories of representation best serve our needs as readers of race, gender, and class? Does it make sense to teach these works as a distinct literary tradition? Course requirements: mandatory class attendance and participation, two five-page essays, and final examination. Previous enrollment in Eng W3400X is not required.

ENGL W3414y Literary Criticism Plato to Kant 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W3505y Post-AIDS Literature 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor John Robinson-Appels (jr2168@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Post-AIDS Literature seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3701x Drama, Theatre, and Theory 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Theatre typically exceeds the claims of theory. What does this tell us about both theatre and theory? We will consider why theatre practitioners often provide the most influential theoretical perspectives, how the drama inquires into (among other things) the possibilities of theatre, and the various ways in which the social, spiritual, performative, political, and aesthetic elements of drama and theatre interact. Two papers, weekly responses, and a class presentation are required. Readings include Aristotle, Artaud, Bharata, Boal, Brecht, Brook, Castelvetro, Craig, Genet, Grotowski, Ibsen, Littlewood, Marlowe, Parks, Schechner, Shakespeare, Sowerby, Weiss, and Zeami. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Drama, Theatre, Theory seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3701x Drama, Theatre, Theory 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Theatre typically exceeds the claims of theory. What does this tell us about both theatre and theory? We will consider why theatre practitioners often provide the most influential theoretical perspectives, how the drama inquires into (among other things) the possibilities of theatre, and the various ways in which the social, spiritual, performative, political, and aesthetic elements of drama and theatre interact. Two papers, weekly responses, and a class presentation are required. Readings include Aristotle, Artaud, Bharata, Boal, Brecht, Brook, Castelvetro, Craig, Genet, Grotowski, Ibsen, Littlewood, Marlowe, Parks, Schechner, Shakespeare, Sowerby, Weiss, and Zeami. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Drama, Theatre, Theory seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3706x Gothic 3 pts.(Lecture). The end of the eighteenth century saw the birth of the literary gothic, a subgenre of romance that registered a backlash against the prescriptive realism favored by critics earlier in the century. In addition to indulging flights of sensationalistic fancy, the gothic was also an outsider's genre, dramatizing the frightening nature of everyday life, of social institutions too often taken for granted: persecuting villains stand in for tyrannical husbands, and corrupt churches for patriarchal failure; transgressive desires reveal the stifling nature of traditional gender roles and heteronormative expectations. At the same time, the gothic confronts monsters from without, for the popularity of the genre mirrors the rise of the British Empire. This seminar will explore the origins and development of the gothic (1764-1820), as well as the ways in which eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers used gothic tropes to reflect on their society. In the eighteenth century, these authors will include, among others, the progenitors of the form, Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) and Clara Reeve (The Old English Baron), continuing through Anne Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk), as well as Jane Austen's satire on the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. Early nineteenth-century texts will also include Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

ENGL W3715x Bellow, Ellison, and Roth 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). These three major post-war American novelists are each challenging and transgressive in their own way; they comprise a natural grouping given their common preoccupations that grew out of high personal regard. Bellow and Ellison were close friends and Roth was a friend of Bellow's and a great admirer of Ellison. Indeed, Roth's The Human Stain is a sustained meditation upon and homage to Ellison's Invisible Man. These shared concerns include a resistance to the pressure to be representative of one's racial or ethnic group, skepticism of the political and ideological uses of art, and fascination with how an ethnic or racial outsider makes his way into WASP American high culture. One does so by a process of initiation that proceeds less by the sacrifice demanded by assimilation and more by playing the "game" of "appropriation" in which culture is conceived as public, open and accessible to anyone, and culture goods are available to be enjoyed and re-worked for one's own creative purposes. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ross Posnock (rp2045@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Bellow, Ellison, and Roth seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3723y New York Intellectuals: Mailer, Baldwin, Arendt, Sontag 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ross Posnock (rp2045@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "New York Intellectuals seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3730x Modern Texts: Yeats, Eliot, Auden 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Selected poems, plays, and prose. Application Instructions: Leave a note (printed on paper only, absolutely not by e-mail) in Prof. Mendelson's mailbox in the English Department office, 602 Philosophy Hall. Title it "Modern Texts seminar," and provide basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. If you cannot physically deliver this to the department office, mail it (on paper) to Prof. Edward Mendelson, Mail Code 4927, Columbia University, New York NY 10027.

ENGL W3731y Paranoid Postmodernism 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Alex Rocca (agr2130@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Paranoid Postmodernism seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3732y Postmodern Poetry 3 pts.(Lecture). This class will look at major developments in experimental, innovative, and avant-garde poetry and poetics from 1950 to the present, paying attention to parallel developments in the visual arts. Surrealism, Constructivism, Black Mountain, Minimalism, Conceptualism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Flarf.

ENGL W3740x Wright, Ellison 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robert O'Meally (rgo1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Wright, Ellison seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3740y Toni Morrison 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Farah Griffin (fjg8@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Morrison seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3785y Studies in Drama: Modern Drama and the Culture of Performance 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Katherine Biers (klb2134@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Studies in Drama seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3786x New York Theatre: Performance and the Arts 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robinson-Appels (jr2168@columbia.edu) with the subject heading, "New York Theatre seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W3792x Comparative European Novel 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Jenny Davidson (jmd204@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Comparative European Novel seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3802y History of Novel II 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W3806x [ENCS] Classical Myth and English Poetry 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). T 12:10-2:00, Richard Sacks. This course will focus on the close-reading of poems composed in English which take as their contextual points of departure the mythic traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The poems studied will come from a range of periods and nationalities, as well as a range of mythic contexts, thus allowing us to explore both the kinds of questions raised by classical mythic traditions and also the ways in which such questions can inform and challenge our assumptions about various English poetic traditions. Tentative Syllabus. http://www.columbia.edu/~sacks/sacks_tentative_syllabus_classical_myth_and_english_poetry_ENCS3806.pdf Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Richard Sacks (sacks@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Classical Myth and English Poetry seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3818x Renaissance Epic and Romance in England 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This is a class on epic and romance in the English Renaissance, so while we begin with Roman epic (Virgil's Aeneid) and romance (Lucan's Pharsalia), we will be interested primarily in their Renaissance translations and uses, and in the romances and epics produced in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will be reading the three most famous romances and epics in the period - Spenser's Faerie Queen, Sidney's Arcadia, and Milton's Paradise Lost - but we will also be looking at other less well known texts and intertexts, including a play by Christopher Marlowe (Dido, Queen of Carthage), short prose romances, and a novel by Aphra Behn. Students must have taken a class in pre-1700 literature, and should write to Professor Julie Crawford (jc830@columbia.edu) indicating 1) their relevant background 2) the grounds of their interest in the class.

CLEN W3851x Sexual Personae / Sexual Performance: History, Literature, Theatre, Film, Popular Culture 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course offers a cultural and literary history of sex. We will look at a series of texts from various moments in the history of sex: the Bible, Greek drama, Renaissance erotic literature, Victorian pornography, popular film, YouTube autobiography. And we will look at the variety of spaces, genres, and media in which sex is produced, performed, and represented (visual art, literature, theatre, film, popular culture, and the performance of everyday life). The course will examine, transhistorically, such concepts as desire, pleasure, eroticism, obscenity, taboo, fetish, prostitution, pornography, the body. Reading the history of sex, sexual identity, and sexual performance (in the various senses of the word) will permit us to ask questions of contemporary relevance through a historical lens. Is sexual identity a function of sexual practice? Is it subject to change? What constitutes pornography? Should all forms of sexual expression be permitted? Students who take this class must be comfortable not only discussing the range of historical sexualities, but also looking at (sometimes difficult) images. Texts include Euripides' Bacchae, Aretino's Dialogues, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Leopold Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans (etc.), and numerous legal, religious, scientific, and visual texts. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Julie Peters (peters@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Sexual Personae / Sexual Performance seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3875x DuBois, Henry James, William James 3 pts.(Lecture). Studying these three authors together provides a fascinating angle of approach on to crucial matters in American literature and culture: the turn of the century emergence of the "intellectual" (William James coined the term in 1903) as a force of moral wisdom and justice, the simultaneous emergence of the black intellectual (led by Du Bois, a favorite student of William James's at Harvard) a figure uniquely burdened and "gifted," the development of America's one home-grown philosophy called pragmatism (developed by William James), and the literary and cultural uses of pragmatism by William's novelist brother Henry and by Du Bois in his dynamic, revisionary political career, and Henry James's development of the "novel of consciousness" that exemplifies the affirmation of human subjectivity that Du Bois called for in his epochal The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

ENGL W3920x Medieval English Texts: Gawain and the Green Knight 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). One required book: the paperback Oxford Press edition, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and Norman Davis. We will read the poem carefully, paying careful attention to its language as well as to its ideas. BE SURE TO COME TO THE FIRST CLASS.

ENGL W3924y The Apocalypse in Medieval Literature 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Audrey Walton (arw2154@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "The apocalypse in medieval literature seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3926y Medieval Dream Poetry 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). What are dreams? How do they reflect or reimagine reality? What is their relationship to human psychology? Or to spiritual experience? Are they true and reliable, or are they side effects of trivial incidents on a given day, or emergent detritus of unprocessed guilt or remorse over bad actions undertaken by the dreamer? Do dreams have prophetic value? Can they be mined to tell us something about our current sociopolitical landscape as well as our personal lives? Who has the ability or right to interpret dreams? These were all questions that medieval poets sought to answer -- or at least meditate over-- in their poetic works. Dream poetry was a major resource for doing the work of psychological philosopphy and cognitive anlaysis in the Middle Ages; it was in poetry that some of the most important philosophies of the mind emerged. In this course, we will read a series of some of the most influential dream poems composed in vernacular languages in the high and late Middle Ages, as well as some of their Latin forebears including Boethius, Cicero, Jean de Meun, Chaucer, Langland, Hoccleve. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Eleanor Johnson (ebj2117@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Medieval Dream Poetry seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W3927y Medieval Environments 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Each week's readings raise a number of questions, often intersecting and contradictory, about how the created world was understood by medieval philosophers and poets. What kinds of coherence did the material world have for religious thought, for popular magic and legend, and for medieval scientific speculation? How is human society based on and distinct from the natural world? What kinds of worldly interactions did medieval people value and abhor? In sum, what was environmental thought in these centuries, and what does it share with contemporary environmental thought? Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Susan Crane (sc2298@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Medieval Environments seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3928y Questioning Gender in the Middle Ages 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This class will explore the meaning of gender on the Middle Ages, examining how the definition of gender is implicated in theological, cultural, and scientific discourses on the nature of the body and sexuality.This course will begin by looking at representations and attitudes towards gender in the Middle Ages via literary and non-literary texts, examining the role of gender in relation to the rhetoric, philosophy, vision, nature and representations of good and evil. We will then look at how several Anglo-Saxon and later medieval texts work play with assumptions about gender and permit a surprising amount of ambiguity and inventiveness. topics will include gendering of writing, the feminization of Christ indevotional literature, attitudes towards the feminine in medieval fabliaux, gender shifting (transvestites) in the writing of the saints' lives and in devotional literature, and the mark of gender in language's way of clothing the "truth." Texts include works by Aelfric, Alan of Lille, Heldris of Cornwall, Julian of Norwich. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Patricia Dailey (pd2132@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Questioning Gender in the Middle Ages seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3931x Latina/o Countercultures 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). How does art create, challenge and reconstruct what it means to be Latina/o? In this course we will examine instances of countercultural expression in Latina/o literature, performance, and popular media. Counterculture in this context refers to political and aesthetic formations that include feminist and queer art and criticism, socialist political movements, punk, sexual cultures, the paraliterary (such as comic books, zines, and speculative fiction) and DIY (do-it-yourself) culture and publishing. We will approach latinidad--the feeling of being Latina/o--as having a fluctuating sense of value from text to text, appearing and disappearing according to the exigencies of the artist situated at a particular historical, political and cultural juncture. We will encounter moments in major Latina/o works where to be Latina/o is a conrete experience, placed at the center of the text and built up strategically to enable protest, recognition, community, and inclusion. In other, "minor" moments in Latina/o writing, latinidad will seem deconstructed down to subtle transmissions of linguistic style, poetics, humor and feeling. Texts will include novels, plays, poems, graphic novels, scholarly monographs, art, film and performance footage. In our analysis of racial representation we will draw insights from the fields of gender and sexuality/queer studies, performance studies, and literary theory. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Roy Perez (royxperez@gmail.com) with the subject heading "Latina/o Countercultures seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3941y American Theatre and Radical Politics After 1989 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Jason Fitzgerald (jtf2113@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "American Theatre seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3947y Henry Fielding 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was one of the most influential authors of the eighteenth century, a prolific novelist, playwright, and periodicalist at the center of the major literary debates of his day. This course will focus primarily on Fielding's novels, especially the comic-epics Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), and his final work, the much-maligned Amelia (1751), Fielding's self-professed retelling of Vergil's Aeneid. In order to contextualize our reading of Fielding's work, we will consider these texts in dialogue with the literary and cultural climate that produced them, including debates about the novel and romance reading. To this end, we will also read Fielding alongside the work of other important eighteenth-century writers, such as Samuel Richardson, whose novel, Pamela (1740), incited Fielding's satire, Shamela (as well as Joseph Andrews), and Eliza Haywood, an early innovator of the novelistic form. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Nicole Horejsi (njh2115@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Henry Fielding seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3948y Amatory Fiction 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Though we now think of the novel as an elite form, one to which writers of fiction routinely aspire, that was hardly the case in the early eighteenth century. The progenitors of the genre-especially Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley-were synonymous with scandal, and some of the only writers to claim, unabashedly, the title of "novelist." This seminar will examine some of the earliest works of novelistic fiction, now known to scholars as "amatory" fiction for its brazen focus on the erotics of love; these were the so-called bodice-rippers of the early eighteenth-century. Amatory fiction titillated readers, rankled critics, rendered its authors notorious, and prevented other writers of fiction, such as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, from ever describing their work as "novels." Though inspired by the noble French heroic romances of the previous century, amatory fiction's heroines were far from chaste: they indulged their passions, savvily masqueraded as women of virtue, and actively sought the attention of libertines, those eighteenth-century "bad boys" with their penchant for sexual conquest. This course will examine the popularity of amatory fiction in the first part of the eighteenth century, its subsequent disappearance from (and recuperation by) the literary canon, and its relationship to the types of fiction that succeeded it. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Nicole Horejsi (njh2115@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Amatory Fiction seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3950x Poetics of the Warrior 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This is a course of distinguished literature about warfare and warriors. Its premise goes to the intersecting criteria, literary and martial, where, in poetry, history, and oratory the disciplines of war and of discourse converge, compete, and vie together for excellence-imaginatively, affectively, formally, and consequentially-in mutual contest against annihilation and despair. Homer's Iliad heads the list of seminal and exemplary titles selected largely from ancient and classical, mediaeval and early modern sources, including Sophocles' Ajax and Philoctetes; Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Tale of the Heike, Shakespeare's Henry plays, and Paradise Lost, among others. Our poetic texts will be supplemented with histories, manuals, and speeches treating the arts and customs of the warrior, from Yuzan's Budoshoshinshu to General Patton's "The Secret of Victory," The readings are historically broad enough to prove the range of virtues, precepts, codes and rules of military character and action -likewise the compass of mythic and practical registers for depiction. Yet the visionary and virtuosic poetical discourse on warfare also excels in ways quite apart from the cultivation of aristeia, chivalry, and bushidō, so questions addressed to the closeness or disparity of the practical soldier and the poetic one, and to what extent the latter indeed elevates and inspires the former's conception of himself in times of war and peace, are questions that differ in kind from those that address the immediate and sublime effects of both the conventional and the ingenious accomplishments of literary form and style in treating military subjects. Hence, we might ask how the poet's aesthetically controlled narration of battle regains the field of conflict, internally, with coherent images of chaos (as when in Pandemonium, Milton's fallen angels invent the epic verse whose "harmony suspended hell"), restoring to the military mind its united vision of purpose, preparation, and execution, which yet might be turned outwardly into action. Toward my interest in envisioning the range of possibilities for military literature as a discipline of study, and given my wish for students to participate fully in conceiving what is possible, this course welcomes not only the novice whose interest is avid but the student knowledgeable about military topics in literature, history, and political and social philosophy, and especially the student, who, having served in the Armed Forces, can bring to the seminar table a contemporary military perspective and the fruits of practical wisdom. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Marianne Giordani (mg2644@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Poetics of the Warrior seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3951y Rhyme and Reason in the 18th century 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Joshua Swidzinski (js3683@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Rhyme and reason in the 18th century seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3952y The Brontes 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Lucy Sheehan (lls2143@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Brontes seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3955y The Bildungsroman in Europe 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar) A survey of major works in the tradition of the European Bildungsroman, from what is traditionally taken as its founding example (Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) to early 20th-century revisions to the genre. The seminar will be oriented around charting the ways in which these novels imagined, or refused to imagine, a compromise between individual aspiration and social integration. Subsidiary topics will include: the negotiation of erotic energies; the role of the nation-state in promoting or hindering individual 'development'; professionalism and selfhood; the relationship between the economic, social, and geographical mobility; the characteristic spaces of the form (family; school; 'bohemia'); alternatives to the form required by the consideration of women. Texts include works by Goethe, Balzac, Bronte, Alain-Fournier, Joyce. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Nicholas Dames (nd122@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Bildungsroman in Europe seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3958y Multimedia Blake 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Mark Phillipson (mlp55@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Multimedia Blake seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3960y 19th Century Thrillers 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This seminar investigates the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel is shaped by the forces of sensation. It asks how the melodramatic imagination probes the parameters of high narrative realism and seeks to understand how the period's great monster stories use the language of gender and racial identity to confront cultural anxieties building around industrialization, capitalism, secularism, alienation. Looking at representative samples from gothic novels of the Romantic period, the 1840's novels of female incarceration, mid-century ghost stories, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860's, and fin-de siècle psychological thrillers, we will explore how to make sense of sensation. We will come away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the intersection between the novel and popular entertainment. Readings include Austen, Radcliffe, Shelley, Bronte, Collins, Braddon, Du Maurier, Stoker, James and ghost stories by Gaskell, Le Fanu, Mulock, Dickens, Mrs. Henry Wood. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Monica Cohen (mlf1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "19C Thrillers seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3966x Literature, Culture and War in the 20th and 21st Centuries 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This is a course about war and culture, primarily in England and America. Our primary concern is to consider how literary forms have developed to make sense of modern mass wars, how wars are remembered and forgotten, and how war has been adapted to the dominant aesthetic and cultural movements of the last and current century. Our readings will derive from major wars (WWI, WWII, Vietnam) as well as smaller, more recent conflicts including those still underway. We will read both combatant and civilian writers, and will consider a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, memoir, film, cultural studies, and theory. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Sarah Cole (sc891@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Literature, Culture, and War seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3967y Radical Poetries of the American Twentieth Century 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Twentieth century American poetry is remarkable for its formal innovations; during no period have questions of the "meanings" of poetic form been so important. We will study a range of poets from 1914 to the present, focusing on writing that is formally innovative or otherwise unconventional, and prose works in which the poets reflect on practice (poetics). The class will examine the continuities and ruptures implied by the terms Modernism and Postmodernism, as well as parallel trends in the visual arts. Poets include Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, Louis Zukofsky, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, Clark Coolidge, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Harreyette Mullen, Craig Dworkin, and K. Silem Mohammed. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Michael Golston (mg2242@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Radical Poetries seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3970y Irish Prose 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Irish Prose examines a tradition of writing in Ireland, beginning with The Tain and the uses of mythology in Irish saga writing, and including Edmund Spenser's 'A View of the Present State of Ireland'. These two texts establish a tradition of the heroic and the anti-heroic in Ireland; they offer images of the country as a place ripe for epics or a culture ripe for destruction. The course then takes texts by Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Somerville and Ross, W.B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, Kate O'Brien and Samuel Beckett and traces an uneasy tradition of dramatising the broken, the alarming, the untrustworthy, the contested and the disappointed. The course looks at styles in Irish writing both invented and inherited. Most of the texts examined will be novels, but short stories, essays, travel writing and considerations of translation will also be part of the course. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Toibin (ct2544@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Irish Prose seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3970y Ibsen and Pinter 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen and Pinter seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3974x Seminar in Literary Theory 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course is a general introduction to literary theory and to the philosophies that engage with with literary texts and media. Readings will be short but dense pieces by influential theorists and literary critics, and might include works by Auerbach, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Jameson, Derrida, Kristeva, Sedgwick, White, Hansen, or Said. Final selection of readings will be determined on the basis of students' interests. Rather than cover a vast amount of material, we will be focusing on shorter essays and texts that are thematically and conceptually linked together (in positive or negative ways). This overview-however brief and inevitably incomplete- is intended to give students a sense of the larger historical frameworks that surround discussions about literature, language, and "theory" in general. Knowing how to invoke, take issue with, respond to, or even gloss these texts can be a challenge in and of itself. This course is therefore designed to help students understand and engage with the terminology and methodology of the works read so as to serve the students' own scholarship and method of inquiry. Students will be expected to do one presentation in class and write two papers. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Patricia Dailey (pdailey@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Literary Theory seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3980x Writing Machines 4 pts. Prerequisites: Instructor's permission (Seminar). In Jack London's 1906 short story "The Apostate," an exposé of child labor, the narrator notes of a young millworker: "There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate relationship with machines." Drawing on novels, short stories, dramas, and essays by American and English writers from 1880 to WWII, this course seeks to understand what it means to become "intimate with machines." How did technology shape perception, consciousness, identity, and the understanding of the human in fin de siècle literature? What were the effects of new "writing machines," like the telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter, on traditional conceptions of authorship? How did technology intersect with class, race, and gender politics? What fears and fantasies did new inventions inspire? We will discuss how writers represented the cultural and social impact of technology and why they often felt compelled to invent new literary styles, forms, and movements--such as realism, aestheticism, and modernism--in order to do so. Texts by Herman Melville, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Sophie Treadwell, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Biers (klb2134@columbia.edu) with the subject heading, "Writing Machines seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3981x Revolutions in Text and Technology 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Every text we read is a product of technological innovation, and those innovations have profound effects on our culture, politics, religions, and even the ways we conceptualize the self. The Protestant Reformation would have been very different without the printing press. And we couldn't have experienced the rise of the novel without breakthroughs in papermaking. At the same time that textual technologies open up possibilities for change, thinkers from every era caution us about their corrosive influence. Plato's Phaedrus warns that the invention of writing will destroy people's ability to memorize. And today Nicolas Carr asks whether Google is making us stupid. This course examines what arguments around technologies of text reveal about the contested grounds of literature and literacy: who has access to ideas and who controls how those ideas will be shared? In our contemporary moment, when many frame the advent of new media as a new phenomenon, this course asks students to see arguments about contemporary digital texts in light of the rhetoric of new media stretching back to the 4th century BCE. Students will study key moments in the long history of textual technologies: moments when written language, the printing press, the telegraph and radio, the typewriter, the word processor, and e-books were (or are) considered at once revolutionary, liberating, and threatening. Course assignments will give students hands-on experience with various technologies at the same time as they read the arguments others have made about them. In the process, we will study technologies for producing texts as sites of competing claims about access to literature, literacy, and power. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Susan Mendelsohn (suemendelsohn@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Revolutions in Text and Technology seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3999x and y Senior Essay 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the department. Opportunity to do an independent study project under faculty supervision. Qualified seniors must apply for admission. Please send an email to Prof. Julie Crawford at jc830@columbia.edu. Information about the program is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/ug_senioressay.htm .

ENGL W4009y [ENCS] Ancient Narrative 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W4015x Vernacular Paleography 3 pts.(Lecture). This class is designed to introduce graduate students (and some advanced undergraduates) to the paleography of English vernacular manuscripts written during the period ca. 700 -1500, with brief excursions into Latin and into French as it was written on the Continent. Students interested in a broader introduction to Latin and the national hands of the Continent should also consider taking Dr. Dutschke's Latin Paleography course, which is planned to be offered in alternate years to Prof. Baswell's. The purpose of the course is fourfold: (1) to teach students how to make informed judgments with regard to the place and date of origin, (2) to provide instruction and practice in the accurate reading and transcription of medieval scripts, (3) to learn and use the basic vocabulary of the description of scripts, and (4) to examine the manuscript book as a product of the changing society that produced it and, thus, as a primary source for the study of that society and its culture. In order to localize manuscripts in time and place it is necessary to examine aspects of the written page besides the script, such as the material on which it is written, its layout and ruling, the decoration and illustration of the text, the provenance, and binding. It is also necessary to examine the process of manuscript production itself, whether institutional, commercial, or personal. The history of book production and of decoration and illumination are thus considered part of the study of paleography, as is the history of patronage and that of libraries; the German term Handschriftenkunde well describes the subject. Manuscripts are among the most numerous and most reliable surviving witnesses to medieval social and intellectual change, and they will be examined as such.

CLEN W4021y Medieval Romance 3 pts.(Lecture).

ENGL W4130x British Literature to 1500 3 pts.(Lecture). A survey of early British writing in its cultural contexts. The course begins with Anglo-Saxon poetry, traces the changes brought to Britain by the Norman Conquest, focuses on the literature of aristocratic courts in the later Middle Ages, and ends as Caxton sets up London's first printing press. We will read Anglo-Saxon works in translation and most Middle English works in their original language. The syllabus will include Beowulf, the Lais of Marie de France, The Book of Beasts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Malory's Morte D'Arthur.

ENGL W4210x Writing Early Modern London 3 pts.(Lecture) This course explores the literature that represented, was created for, and was inspired by the city of London in the early modern period. It will encourage students to analyze the ways in which literature relates to its geographical, social, cultural, religious and political contexts -- in this case, the very specific contexts provided by a single city in the period from 1500 to 1700. It will cover such topics as London's experience in the Reformation; London's suburban expansion; the Civil War and Restoration; the Great Fire and the subsequent rebuilding; London's government, and relations with the Crown; social issues including immigration, unrest, the place of women, the place of strangers, the plague and prostitution. The course will highlight the importance of London as the hub of print publication, and as the site for the public theatre -- it will therefore deal predominantly with drama but also draw on prose pamphlets, entries, maps, diaries, prospects and poetic mock-will.

ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry 3 pts.(Lecture). This course examine major British poets of the period 1789-1830. We will be focusing especially on the poetry and poetic thoery of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. We will also be reading essays, reviews, and journal entries by such figures as Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and Dorothy Wordsworth.

ENGL W4404y Victorian Poetry 3 pts.(Lecture). This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy.

ENGL W4405x Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot 3 pts.(Lecture). A survey of the three mid-Victorian novelists most ambitious in their attempts to represent society as a complex, interactive whole. Representative fictions-Vanity Fair, Little Dorrit, Middlemarch-will be read alongside lesser-known works. Our emphasis: how these novels imagine the possible shapes of human interaction and human self-consciousness in a society governed above all not by family, or nation, or religion, but by money and its exchange. We will therefore be looking at these novelists as, in the largest sense, the storytellers of capitalism, intent on finding the right combination of themes and formal means by which to express the shape of the world capitalism creates.

ENGL W4503x Race, Gender and Poetic Form 3 pts.(Lecture). The early part of the twentieth century in Europe and America witnessed a heightened interest in the dynamics of the human body, which was conceived as a working machine and as a locus for racial, ethnic, and national identity. Students in this course will explore the intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets will include Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Stein, Lawrence, H. D., Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.

ENGL W4560x Backgrounds to Contemporary Theory 3 pts.(Lecture). In chapter 4 of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, a story is told about a confrontation between a Lord (Herr) and a Bondsman (Knecht). The story conveys how consciousness is born. This story, subsequently better known as the confrontation between Master and Slave, has been appropriated and revised again and again in figures like Marx and Nietzsche, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Fanon, Freud and Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Schmitt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler. The premise of this course is that one can understand much of which is (and isn't) most significant and interesting in contemporary cultural theory by coming to an understanding Hegel's argument, and tracing the paths by which thinkers revise and return to it as well as some of the arguments around it. This course is intended for both graduates and undergraduates. There are no prerequisites, but the material is strenuous, and students will clearly have an easier time if they start out with some idea of what the thinkers above are doing and why. Helpful preparatory readings might include Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Requirements: For undergraduates: two short papers (6-8 pages). For graduate students, either two short papers or one longer paper (12-15 pages).

ENGL W4607x American Literature 1865-1914 3 pts.(Lecture). Survey of American literature from the Civil War to World War I. This course will explore American literature and literary movements in a pivotal period that saw the emergence of many key elements of contemporary American society. We will investigate how literature responded to the transformation of everyday life by a dizzying array of new media technologies, such as film; the rise of the corporation and the financial elite; the social displacements and new freedoms brought by urbanization and consumerism; the beginnings of an American empire overseas; and a host of related cultural, political, and philosophical debates. Reading novels, short stories, and drama, we will focus on the competing representational claims--from social realism to "art for art's sake"--that emerged as authors sought to forge new aesthetic modes adequate to modernity. Texts by Henry Adams, Edward Bellamy, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frank Norris, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson.

ENGL W4621y Harlem Renaissance 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W4670x American Film Genres 3 pts.(Lecture). Some critics contend that all Hollywood film is either melodrama or morality play, no matter what its claims to the contrary; others see it as purely wish-fulfillment fantasy. This course will examine a range of genres in Hollywood film, while also scrutinizing and questioning the formation and usefulness of genre distinctions. Our orientation will be formal as well as social and historical, as we examine codes and conventions of generic illusion and verisimilitude; the look and sound of different genres; genre and acting style; the rise and fall of specific genres (the Western, the slasher film, etc.), increasing self-reflexiveness in especially such genres as noir, the musical, romantic comedy; genre-bending and postmodernity; and genre as projection and organization of public sentiment. We will also explore why certain genres are linked to political parties, as are specific styles of heroism. Genres will include: the combat movie, romantic comedy, horror, action, animation, musicals and "independent" films.

ENGL W4791y Visionary Drama 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL W4801x History of Novel I 3 pts.(Lecture). When people talk about the "rise" of the novel, where do they imagine it rose from and to? We will read some of eighteenth-century Britain's major canonical fictions alongside short critical selections that provide vocabularies for talking about the techniques of realism and the connections between literature, history and culture; other topics for discussion include identity, sex, families, politics- in short, all the good stuff. Requirements: Five out of six two-page ungraded writing assignments (a cross between a reading journal entry and a mini-essay, with one or two options for creative assignments; they are due the day they are assigned, and extensions won't be granted, but you are exempted from submitting one of the six), and resubmission of all of these assignments in a portfolio at the end of the semester; and a take-home final exam.

JAZZ W4900y Jazz and the Literary Imagination 3 pts.(Lecture)

ENGL G4995x Special Topics in Modern Literature: Reading Lacan 3 pts.(Seminar). An intensive reading of selections from Lacan´s Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation with Shakespeare´s Hamlet; Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis with Sophocles´s Antigone, Seminar VIII: The Transference with Plato´s Symposium; and Seminar XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality:The Limits of Love and Knowledge with Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras. Emphasis on the relevance of Lacan's thought to contemporary literature, culture, and neuroscience, and to questions about happiness, democracy, and peace.