| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| ENGLISH 28A | POETIC IMAGINATION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. |
| ENGLISH 28B | COMIC&TRAGIC VISION | STAFF | Discussion, three hours. Reading of selected texts to explore the ways in which these modes formulate experience. Students write several short analytic papers in each course. |
| ENGLISH 102A | BEOWULF TO CHAUCER | GEORGIANNA, L. | Lecture, three hours. Studies of works representative of historical periods of literature in English, with attention to literary history, treating at a minimum more than one author and more than one genre. |
| ENGLISH 102B | VIRTUES AND VICES | LEWIS, J. | “Thus ev’ry Part was full of Vice,/Yet the whole Mass a Paradise,” wrote the early 18th-century English satirist Bernard Mandeville, describing the extreme contrasts that characterized his own society. And it’s true: in no other culture do we find more of an obsession with gambling, drinking, debauchery, and crime. . .or more of a fascination with honor, integrity, and the possibility of human goodness. The literature we will read in this course–all of it written between 1660 and 1760–will explore these two extremes of human behavior during a period of both obsessive reform and extreme indulgence in depravity, a socially-conscious era when human ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ were no longer interpreted in terms of sin and beatitude, nor yet in terms of psychological illness and health, but rather in terms of personal character interacting with social habits and traditions. We’ll meet whores and determined virgins, compulsive liars and fatally honest truthtellers, thieves and self-appointed enemies of human depravity, libertines and patterns of charity. The big picture? A rambunctious and completely human scene whose mix of idealism, hedonism, and hypocrisy can tell us a great deal about literature’s role in defining humanity, and about our humanity itself. The reading list mixes Rochester’s and Behn’s libertine poems with Dryden’s adulatory ode “To the Pious Memory of Anne Killigrew”; Wycherley’s raunchy play The Country Wife with Pope’s admiring poetic essays “To a Lady” and to one of his best friends; John Gay’s ironic (and very musical) exposé of the London underworld, The Beggar’s Opera, with Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s controversial novel of “virtue rewarded.” We’ll end with Hogarth’s satiric images of “The Harlot’s Progress.” Course requirements include: one midterm, one final, one substantial critical essay, and one small creative contribution to the course, as well as two unannounced quizzes and the usual attendance and participation. The good, the bad, and the decidedly mixed are all welcome! |
| ENGLISH 102C | VICTORIAN LIT | TUCKER, I. | This course will explore the relations among different conception fo space that are created or come into prominence during the Victorian era: national space, Continental space, colonial space, the interiors and surfaces of bodies, domestic space, architectural space, geological space. We will read work by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill. |
| ENGLISH 102C | CLASS&TASTE 19C US | TAMARKIN, E. | This course investigates the aesthetics, ethics and epistemology of high culture in the American nineteenth century. Our readings will look at the relationship between taste and consumerism, genteel society and mass culture, class politics and public intellectualism, while exploring the way that social status in America has been historically accommodated to democratic practice. We will examine the distinctions between high and popular culture, and chart the forms and genres that become increasingly "elite" over the course of the century, with particular attention to the way images of taste speak to questions of political status. Our readings will take us from early nineteenth-century debates over institutions of culture through later representations of style and decorum and will be discussed alongside both contemporary paintings and visual materials from the popular press. Authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells. The course ends with new articulations of and responses to a specifically African American high culture in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Stephen Crane. |
| ENGLISH 102D | GENDER AND TRAUMA: POST WWII LIT | ZIMMERMAN, R. | This course will introduce students to some post-WWII U.S. drama, fiction, and non-fiction that conceptualizes trauma in psychological, historical, and political terms. Specifically, we will read literary works by Ntozake Shange, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tim O'Brien, Art Spiegelman, and Bharati Mukherjee. We will explore the particular historical traumas these texts recognize and make visible, the postmodernist literary conventions they deploy, and their preoccupations with temporality, memory, testimony, community, and social transformation. The course will also serve as an introduction to trauma theory, an emerging field in critical theory and cultural studies that seeks to rethink Freud's provocative formulations in the post-Holocaust, post-nuclear context. Texts by theorists such as Freud, Judith Lewis Herman, Cathy Caruth, Kirby Farrell, Dominic La Capra, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub offer constructs that resonate deeply with the issues and concerns of the literary texts we'll read. Grades will be based on three 5-7 page papers, occasional quizzes, and homework journals. |
| ENGLISH 103 | MUSIC WRITING | STEINTRAGER, J. | How do we render sounds into words? What does an understanding of the musical creator tell us about the creation? How can music shed light on a culture and how does culture shape music? These are some of the questions that we will address in this class. We will cover writing about several musical genres, from classical to jazz, rock and punk. And we will explore various types of journalism: biography, criticism, social history, oral history, and others. Readings will include Michael Dregni’s story of Gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt, the iconoclastic rock criticism of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus’s “secret history” of twentieth-century music and culture, and first-hand accounts of the New York and Los Angeles punk scenes. |
| ENGLISH 103 | DEFOE | VAN SANT, A. | Defoe was one of the earliest English journalists and then became one of the earliest English novelists. Before he began writing novels (at age 60), he had a quite varied "career": religious dissenter, author of controversial pamphlets, undercover agent for the government, businessman, satirist, journalist, bankrupt, prisoner. His experience of the complex political and commercial world in which he lived emerges both in multiple non-fiction genres and in his novels. His work sometimes reveals a sense of isolated embattlement, sometimes a resilient, "can-do" attitude toward contemporary problems (his Essay on Projects, for example, contains forward-looking proposals for insurance companies, women's education, and homes for the mentally disabled). He understood the parallels that could be drawn between commerce and thievery, and he knew first hand the almost fantastical chaos of prison life. Both he and his characters often normalize extremity by reporting on "just the facts" from the margins of ordinary social life, and his work frequently delineates a rudimentary desire to survive in a complicated, often hostile, environment. In this course we will read selections from his journalistic writing, his religious and political pamphlets, and his writings on trade and commerce. We will also read 2 novels (Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders) and will examine the border of "fact" and "fiction" that his work continually brings into view. Requirements: Attendance, participation, informal writing on the noteboard, 1 paper (5-7 pages), midterm and final. |
| ENGLISH 105 | AMERICAN VERNACULARS | O'CONNOR, L. | American Vernaculars explores how varieties of English shape the formation of US, class, and ethnic identities. Focusing on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1990s, we'll explore the relationship between our image of standard American English and the categories of "American," "hyphenated American" and "immigrant" What is the role of language and speaking style in social differentiation, and how are those who "speak with an accent" profiled on the printed page by writers? Paper, midterm, final. |
| ENGLISH 106 | THE 60'S IN ENGLAND | KROLL, A. | The 1960s in Britain: Myth, Mysticism and Counterculture. This course will explore both the popular and high cultural forms of art and literature of the British 1960s, particularly in relation to that era's revisionary myth-making and renewed interest in mysticism. We will begin with some background reading, including Robert Graves' The White Goddess and selections from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, then move on to a number of texts by Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, A.S. Byatt, John Fowles, as well as relevant film, music, and visual art. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HUMANIST PROSE | PFEIFFER, D. | This seminar will examine the work of some of the most important Renaissance humanists from Petrarch to Montaigne. We will pay special attention to the complex ways these authors used traditional kinds of writing (oration, historiography, political treatise, familiar letter, story, techne, and conduct manual) to reinterpret profoundly such fundamental literary concerns as the ethics of reading and writing, the social roles of truth and fiction, the psychology of education, the value of the past to the present, and the contest between the academic “disciplines.” We will focus on the formal and conceptual continuities between these various texts, including their shared indebtedness to the classical rhetorical tradition. Authors include Pico, Valla, Alberti, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, and Sidney. |
| ENGLISH 106 | HOGARTH | STEINTRAGER, J. | The eighteenth-century engraver and painter William Hogarth is the most writerly of visual artists. His depictions of high society, popular culture, local politics and an increasingly global economy are often presented in series and they have stories to tell the viewer. Further, Hogarth drew on the literature of his day, often including in his representations explicit references to authors, books, and familiar plots. In this course we will be exploring both how to “read” Hogarth and how the written word informed his art. Questions that we will consider include: What does it mean to put word into image? Where does narrative intersect with the visual and where do they depart? What can we see in Hogarth’s art that is not a part of the stories that he tells? Along with close attention to a number of Hogarth’s engravings, we will read two works that were particularly important to the artist: John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. We will also consider Hogarth’s biography in relation to the social history of eighteenth-century England. |
| ENGLISH 106 | FICTIONS OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION | FREELAND, N. | The massive technological and social changes of the industrial revolution radically transformed nineteenth-century Britain. Industrialism changed the ways people worked, played, traveled, ate, dressed, shopped, communicated— and the fictions that they produced and consumed. This course examines the ways the novel transcribed and embodied this major upheaval; we'll analyze the new subjects and themes of industrial fiction, and the formal innovations that evolved in response to a new social reality. The course includes both hyper-realist social problem
fiction, set in the factories and slums of the emerging manufacturing towns, and exaggeratedly anti-realist fantasies and dystopias of mechanization. Throughout, we'll be attentive to the legacies of the industrial revolution in contemporary fiction and cultural criticism. Requirements: participation, oral presentation, research paper, final exam. |
| ENGLISH 106 | CLOSE READING | TUCKER, I. | This course is designed as an introduction to reading poetry, fiction and drama. We will begin each of the three sections of the course by looking briefly at ways in which people have thought and written about the genre in question , with a particular eye twoard the types of knowledge,
perceptions and affects each literary form presumes and/or produces. The bulk of the cours times will be devoted to honing students' reading skills, with lots of close and intensive reading of a wide range of examples. Authors include, but are not limited to: Aristotle, Sophocles, Pirandello, Austen, Stein, O'Connor, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Celan, Ansen. |
| ENGLISH 210 | TIME, HISTORY AND THE VICTORIANS | FREELAND, N. | Walter Houghton argued that "although all ages are ages of transition, never before [the nineteenth century] had men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future. Indeed, in England that idea and the Victorian period began together." This course explores the multiple and shifting repercussions of the Victorian cult of progress and the attendant anxieties about time, history and the future. We will particularly focus on historical nostalgia and Victorian medievalism; political evolution and revolution; memory, guilt and social stasis; anthropology, archeology and race; progress, Bildung, and capitalism; and narratives of degeneration, regeneration and apocalypse. We will also consider how texts construct the time of reading, and how they manage duration, selection and sequence within their own narrative structures. John Stuart Mill described his era as "an age of transition" in which "mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. . . . Mankind are . . . divided, into those who are still what they were, and those who have changed: into the men of the present age, and the men of the past. To the former, the spirit of the age is a subject of exaltation; to the latter, of terror; to both, of eager and anxious interest." This course is designed as an attempt to explore both the eagerness and the anxiety that characterized the Victorians' response to change, and to consider the stakes and consequences of their new models of time and history. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MIDDLE ENGLISH DRAMA | ALLEN, E. | Medieval drama is religious: the earliest liturgical dramas were acted out in church ritual, and the Corpus Christi plays enacted bible stories, including the life and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, publicly in cycles that probably lasted for days. Middle English plays profoundly challenge modern expectations about religious ritual, dramatic self-consciousness, verisimilitude, and emotionality. Medieval drama was not easily distinguishable from ritual, nor were audiences completely distinct from actors. Plays became an important facet of medieval ceremonial life, integral to a culture in which festival formed community relationships and solidified religious devotion. At the same time, religious drama varies greatly in method, theological bent, affective technique, and symbology: this is not an era, or a literature, of "quiet hierarchies." In this course, we will investigate the literary, devotional, and social workings of liturgical drama, Corpus Christi plays, morality plays (allegories of virtue and vice) and saints' plays (conversion plays). We will study contemporary attitudes toward drama--those who objected to it as idolatry, and those who defended it as worship; and we will explore the drama's actual performance in city festivals. We will explore ways in which modern theories of performance by Artaud, Brecht, Victor Turner and others can help us comprehend the immensely unfamiliar parameters of medieval drama. Much of the reading will be in Middle English, but previous experience in Middle English is not expected or required. Pro-seminar: several informal papers; a short paper (5 pp); a longer paper (10 pp) or short paper with performance of a scene. Seminar: several informal papers, an oral presentation, and a 20-page seminar paper. |
| ENGLISH 210 | GLOBAL ENGLISH(ES) | O'CONNOR, L. | "Global English(es)" explores questions of language, hegemony, and identity. The course is designed to introduce students to the political, socio-linguistic, and psychocultural stakes of linguistic imperialism and "English-only" ideology and to the role of language in class and ethnic stratification. Our reading list--which draws on an eclectic range of postcolonial, translation, and sociolinguistic theory and political discourse--aims at developing theoretical paradigms and a critical vocabulary for analyzing relationships of language and power. What are the historical and political roots of the global hegemony of US English and the hold of English-only "manifest destiny" on the US-national imaginary? How does linguicism (discrimination against others on the basis of language or speaking style) and unequal access to technologies of dissemination perpetuate sociocultural inequality? Wherein lies the populist appeal of the compulsory monolingualism of "English-only" initiatives and the countervailing movements to "decolonize the mind" or "de-Anglicize" by promoting wide use of indigenous or minority languages? We'll discuss the ambivalence of linguistic profiling and verbal passing, and the impact of "the melancholia of Anglicization" (my term) on the formation of hyphenated Anglophone subjectivity. We'll examine the politics of lack, belonging, and singularity surrounding the use of vernacular Englishes and refer (in passing, I'm afraid) to models of literary creolization. We'll also discuss the politics of translation (and ESL) when "global" English is the target language and the survival of many of the world's languages is imperiled.
Requirements: regular response papers from all participants.
Pro-seminar: A head-note defining a-field-within-the-field, with a salient select annotated bibliography appended (the required "head-note" is similar to the written rationale you provide explaining your exam-list choices for the Ph.D. qualifying exams).
Seminar: research paper (3,500-4,000 words) |
| ENGLISH 210 | OBJECT RELATIONS PSYCHOANALYSIS | TERADA, R. | An introduction to and collaborative reading of the "object relations" school of psychoanalysis constellated mostly in postwar England, whose most accomplished theorists are Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott, and W.R. Bion. In this body of work, the object of love or hate is paradigmatically another person who is more or less adequately recognized by the developing child and adult; hence in object relations lie the origins of ethics and sociality, as well as of an individual's organization of the world. In many instances, anywhere from partial to total loss of and mourning for the object is the limit case for passions directed at the object (which is not to say that "grief" is mainly what there is to explore here: also triumph, rage, affectlessness, etc.). Might critical theory take up the nascent sociality and domestic scale of object relations in dialogue with the starker a priori other-centeredness of (for example) Levinas? Our course will reconstruct Freud's concept of the human object in such essays as "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," then focus on work by the three figures above, plus Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Most of these writers are notable for their eccentric literary qualities, which will also be part of our consideration. |
| ENGLISH 210 | MILTON | SILVER, V. | The course will serve to introduce most of Milton's writings, but it will also make a particular argument about them. That argument will explore the tradition of opprobrium that has followed Milton from almost the first moment he burst into print, to his becoming Samuel Johnson's Great Satan and T.S. Eliot's baleful influence, to more recent discussions which have cast him as the ultimate Dead White Male in British studies. It will attempt to explain how Milton responds, and more importantly, anticipates this vilifying in his concepts of justice, injustice, and justification, and thus to suggest the peculiar manner in which the issue of his reputation and, by extension, his iconoclasm are incorporated into his poetry as a species of irony. In pursuit of these connections, there will be a decided emphasis on Milton's tracts, in the context of 17th-century royalism, as well as some assiduous talk about the Protestant God by Martin Luther. There will also be an initial bout with the magical mentality and anti-feminism, in the form of the Malleus Maleficarum or "witches hammer," so as to evoke contrastively the distinctive character and idiom of Milton's thought.
If the course is taken as a seminar, it will entail two take-home exams, one roughly midterm, which will cover Milton's early poetry and whatever prose we've managed to cover-certainly, the 1640's tracts up to Areopagitica. The midterm is a strange one, since it requires you to bring Milton's iconoclastic arguments to bear on cinematic images. The second exam will address Paradise Lost and possibly the anti-royalist writing of the 1650's, and will be an extension of your argument in the midterm. Pro-seminar credit requires that you do the midterm exam, which will at least give you coverage in literature before 1789.
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| ENGLISH 210 | AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION | TAMARKIN, E. | This course broadly examines the literary and visual culture of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century America. Within the context of political, legal, religious and scientific works, we will ask what the Enlightenment in America meant to men and women, whites and blacks, frontiersmen and Native Americans, loyalists and patriots, the people and the state. Topics to be discussed include the difference between the American Enlightenment and its European counterparts, the Revolution's impact on the Atlantic world, ideas of secularism and spirituality, the language of rights, the emergence of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the wages of war in the age of reason. We will engage with critical and interpretive arguments for the study of the "republic of letters" and its artifacts (newspapers, pamphlets, prints) as well as institutions of Enlightenment, including museums, clubs, libraries, salons, colleges, and historical societies. Throughout the course, we will also be looking at materials and methods for literary-historical research in this period and at both the practical experience and the theoretical implications of different approaches to the archive. Our readings will include works by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Paine, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, Samson Occom, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ethan Allen, Peter Oliver, Charles Brockden Brown, and more. This course may be taken as a seminar with an oral presentation and a 20-page research essay, or as a pro-seminar with an oral presentation and a 10-page essay.
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