LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing. This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL UN3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken as early as possible in a students career. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

• T 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM)

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3011 must also register for ENGL UN3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL UN3001. The seminar both elaborates upon the topics taken up in the lecture and introduces other theories and methodologies. It also focuses on training students to integrate the terms, techniques, and critical approaches covered in both parts of the course into their own critical writing, building up from brief close readings to longer research papers.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Megan T Lonsinger
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• Instructor: Connor E Spencer
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• Instructor: Julia T Bannon
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• Instructor: Amy S Barenboim
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• Instructor: Grant D Miner
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• 0 points

ALDOUS HUXLEY

The course proposes to examine the major works of Aldous Huxley as vital contributions to the emerging 20th century canon of modernism, internationalism, pacifism, spiritualism, and the psychology of modern consciousness. Critical studies of Huxley have typically split his work into two phases—social satire and mysticism—that roughly correspond to Huxley’s perceived oscillation between cynicism and religiosity. This course proposes a less disjunctive approach to his writings. Huxley’s starkly dystopian vision in Brave New World often overshadowed his earnest endeavors to find a meeting point between mainstream Western thought and the philosophical traditions of the non-Western world, particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism. His early novels, including Brave New World, bear traces of his deep-seated spiritual quest, even as his works were steeped in critiques of the ominous trends towards regimentation and authoritarian control of the social body. As a novelist of ideas, Huxley gave voice to the most vexing intellectual and moral conflicts of his time, refusing to retreat into the solipsism of experimental writing while at the same time searching for wholeness in Eastern meditative systems. This course probes Huxley’s writings from a multitude of angles, examining his works (both fiction and nonfiction) in the context of evolutionary, secular thought, while also reading them as strivings towards models of world peace inspired, to some extent, by mystical thought. The latter invoked concepts drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought, alongside Christian mysticism and Taoism, in an eclectic practice that Huxley called “the perennial philosophy.” Organized chronologically, course readings include Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Perennial Philosophy (1944), Ape and Essence (1948), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Doors of Perception (1954), The Genius and the Goddess (1955), Island (1962), and The Divine Within (1992). This course will be of importance especially to students interested in the intersections of 20th century British modernist literature and non-Western philosophical and religious systems, as well as more generally to students interested in an intensive study of one of the 20th century’s most prolific authors.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gauri Viswanathan
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

African American Literature: The Essay

AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT: ESS

According to literary critic Cheryl A. Wall, African American writers have done their most influential work in the essay form. Using Wall’s scholarship as a starting point, this course explores essays by a distinguished group of writers from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison to consider the centrality of this understudied form to African American writing.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Farah Griffin
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

MYSTICISM

This course covers a wide range of male- and female-authored mystical texts (poetry and prose) ranging in date from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth centuries and provides an introduction to some of the major medieval Christian mystical texts in the Western tradition. In addition, we will see how the legacy of mysticism has permeated later philosophical traditions and contemporary culture, whether it be in Descartes’ meditations, contemporary narratives of psychedelic experiences, or in representations of outsiders in film. Throughout our readings, we will confront the question of what mysticism means, how women’s and men’s mystical texts compare, and how “literariness” impacts mystical experience. How does poetic form or literary prose shape the nature of mystical experience? What do we make of the insistence on bodily experience and on the appearance of biography? How does it relate to the role of exemplarity, pedagogy, hermeneutics, or to narrative in general? Where do we find the language and tropes of mysticism in contemporary culture and to what end?
 
Texts will include works by St. Paul, St. Augustine, Origen, Beatrice of Nazareth and her hagiographer, Hadewijch of Brabant and William of St. Thierry, Bonaventure and Angela of Foligno, Marguerite d'Oignt and Guigo II, St. Francis and St. Claire, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, St. Juan de la Cruz and Teresa of Avila Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton and Richard Rolle. Middle English texts (Julian, Rolle, Hilton, and Margery) will be available in Middle English; all other texts will, however, be read in modern English translation. No prerequisites necessary. Assignments will include: two written papers (6 pp) and weekly responses to prompts.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Patricia Dailey
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 3 points

Jazz Fictions

In the prologue to
Invisible Man
, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the invisible rhythm the narrator hears in the music of Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” James Baldwin shared Ellison’s compulsion: “I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound.” This intensive seminar considers how African American writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present engaged with the jazz tradition to make music of invisibility. How does fiction address the political issues and aesthetic challenges raised by jazz and jazz musicians? How do writers translate the invisible rhythms of jazz into jazz fiction? Novelists include Rudolph Fisher, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Aidan S Levy
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Poetry and Philosophy

Since Plato, poets and philosophers have been at odds as often as they have cross-pollinated. How should we think about the relation between these two discourses? In this seminar we will put the following dictum of Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the test:  “No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.” We will read philosophical poetry, poetic philosophy, and texts that don’t seem to quite fit in any genre. What makes certain poets particularly inspiring to philosophers, and vice versa? How does each group appropriate the tools of the other for their own purposes? We will be especially interested in the question of how poetic language offers a mode of thinking that may be philosophical in character, but is also fundamentally different from the conceptual and argumentative constraints of philosophy as it is usually conceived.

The first part of the class will be focused on the Romantic period, especially the two central philosophical Romantic poets: William Wordsworth and Friedrich Hölderlin. In the second part of the class, we will read several contemporary poets who are redefining the philosophical power of poetry in our time. Our focus will be on deep thinking, and slow, close reading.

In addition to two papers, you will choose between a presentation, a commentary, or writing a poem for a more creative assignment.

All readings will be provided in English, but having studied German will be useful.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph Albernaz
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

SHAKESPEARE I

(Lecture). This course will cover the histories, comedies, tragedies, and poetry of Shakespeare’s early career. We will examine the cultural and historical conditions that informed Shakespeare’s drama and poetry; in the case of drama, we will also consider the formal constraints and opportunities of the early modern English commercial theater. We will attend to Shakespeare’s biography while considering his work in relation to that of his contemporaries. Ultimately, we will aim to situate the production of Shakespeare’s early career within the highly collaborative, competitive, and experimental theatrical and literary cultures of late sixteenth-century England.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: James Stephen Shapiro
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• 3 points

AUSTEN, ELIOT, JAMES

A study of the work of three writers most often credited with developing the narrative techniques of the modern Anglo-American novel, who also produced some of their culture’s most influential stories of female autonomy. What do the choices of young women in the nineteenth century— their ability to exercise freedoms, the forces that balk or frustrate those freedoms, even their choices to relinquish them— have to do with the ways that novels are shaped, with the technical devices and edicts (free indirect discourse, ‘show don’t tell,’ etc.) that become dominant in the novel’s form? One or two texts by each author read carefully, with attention to relevant critical discussions of recent decades.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

Odd Women in Victorian England

Victorian England remains known for its rigid definitions of femininity, but it also produced a remarkable number of “odd women”: female outlaws, eccentrics, and activists including spinsters, feminists, working women, women who desired other women, and people assigned female at birth who lived as men.

This undergraduate seminar will explore the pains and pleasures of gender non-conformity through the lens of nineteenth-century literary works, historical documents, and foundational theories of gender and sexuality.

Readings will include the diaries of Anne Lister, a wealthy Yorkshire lesbian libertine; a slander trial involving accusations of lesbianism at a Scottish all-girls school; the diaries of Hannah Munby, a London servant whose upper-class lover fetishized her physical strength; the autobiography of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who traveled the world; and fiction, including Charlotte Bronte’s novel *Villette; *Margaret Oliphant’s novel *Miss Marjoribanks; *Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”; and Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire tale “Carmilla.”

Application instructions: E-mail Professor Marcus (sm2247@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• 4 points

Language Rights and Wrongs

This course examines public battles over language in American and invites you to situate your linguistic history in the larger context of thesebattles. We will ask, Is Northern English more correct than Southern English? Are Black English speakers disadvantaged in the job market? Should English be our national language? What should the language of instruction be in public schools? Do nonbinary students have a right to determine the pronouns their professors use to address them? These language rights battles play out in Congress, the courts, and classrooms. At stake are voting access, employment rights, learning opportunities, and the pathway to American citizenship.

The first half of the semester will introduce you to sociolinguists’ understandings of language differences. We will put their research in conversation with the lived experiences of diverse Americans by exploring a number of literacy narratives. And as a class, we will carry out research to study the language attitudes and experiences of members of our own community. The second half of the semester features a series of case studies—legal cases, school board fights, academic battles, legislation—that will lay bare the surprising disagreements between what sociolinguists understand about language and what laypeople passionately believe about it. The goal of the course is to equip you to address language rights in ways that account for research and people’s lived experiences.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Susan Mendelsohn
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

The Novel after the Age of Literature

The Novel after Age of Li

What is the value of literature today, amid dire predictions about its waning cultural authority and shrinking popularity? In this seminar, we'll explore this question by studying major variants of the contemporary novel that are responding to the cultural, social, and economic forces restructuring literary culture, while also learning about the corporations, institutions, and readers who mediate their production, circulation, and reception. 

Based on the novel's relative social prevalence from the 1800s on in Britain and America, literary scholars have often ascribed grand effects to the fonn: it has shaped modern ideas about the self, organized people's sense of national belonging, and even fueled protests that prompted political change. Can we say as much today? Access to traditional literary culture, while it has always been exclusive based on race, gender, and class, appears to be contracting due to the ongoing erosion of its socioeconomic suppmts: affordable education, well-funded publishing, secure paid work, and ample leisure time. Meanwhile, novels exist in an increasingly crowded media field that includes television, film, video games, and social media, all of which may be said to have a greater hold on our limited attention. How has the novel adapted to these conditions? How should we adapt our understanding of the novel in response? 

This course begins with two cases from the British tradition to explore ideas about the form and function of the novel across what scholars have called the period of"literary dominance": Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005). The changing form and function of the novel will then be examined through analysis of four major trends in twenty-first­century literary culture: the rise of hybrid literary-genre fiction (Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel); the feminization of literary work (Colleen Hoover and Delia Owens); the proliferation of autofiction (Ocean Vuong and Patricia Lockwood); and evolutions in the metaliterary novel (Isabel Waidner and Ruth Ozeki). Through class discussion, literary-critical writing, and a literary-sociological project, where students will analyze the way readers talk about novels online, this course develops interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate the many forms that novels and novel-reading (including via audiobook) are taking today. 

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Patrick Anson
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• 4 points

Silence and Screaming: the Sound of Afri

Sound of African American

Why and when do we scream or remain silent? Do we scream out of joy or in terror? Do we remain silent out of respect or fear? Perhaps more importantly, who screams (or who do we scream at), and who remains silent? And how do we register those sonic utterances in between the extremes of screaming and silence, the groans, moans, coughs, and grunts that resist transcription? This course develops out of the convergence between the study of African American Literature and Sound Studies to examine the affective and political resonances of these auditory modes. In this course we will think about how screaming, silence, and utterances are embodied auditory practices marked by race, gender, and sexuality that the artists on this syllabus transcribe into text, music, and image. These three auditory modes, screaming, silence, and utterance, share the commonality of being difficult to transcribe into written text and of being difficult to understand: they resist singularity and definition. In this course we will examine how writers, composers, performers, and directors engage in the ambivalences of these auditory modes. Our goal is not to remove that ambivalence, to clearly or definitively decide what something means, but to investigate the multiplicity contained within that ambivalence. No prerequisites. 

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Alex C Valin
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• 4 points

INTRO TO ASIAN AMERICAN LIT & CULTURE

This course is a survey of Asian North American literature and its contexts. To focus our discussion, the course centers on examining recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. The second section of the course will focus on how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines; to the development of the model minority mythology during the Cold War. The final section will examine intimacies and exclusions in contemporary forms of migration, diaspora, and community communities.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Denise Cruz
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

DRAMA, THEATRE AND THEORY

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission. (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. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list, from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Austin E Quigley
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• 4 points

Memes, Metaphors, and Performances

Memes, Metaphors, Perform

From millenary ritual songs to deep fried Wojaks, memes have always been an integral part of how we transfer cultural information. Since their mainstream widespread in 2008, memes have shifted from being mere online entertainment to a tool for disseminating worldviews and modes of understanding. In recent years, memes have shown to have the capacity to affect political elections. Understanding these cultural objects has become a pressing task, allowing the development of the research field of memetics. By outsourcing their reproducibility to the user, memes provide us with an opportunity to question our own social structures. In this course we’ll take a deep dive into the liminal world of memes, using metaphor and performance theory. We’ll explore their conceptual origins, discuss cultural memetic examples throughout history, and apply that understanding to our current political landscape. Since current memes are designed to take advantage of the different social media algorithms, new formats emerge all the time. In each class we’ll discuss a text or a movie alongside a meme format, and use the assigned theoretical framework to close-read memes and their cultural consequences. How can we use them as an effective tool in today’s realist capitalism? How does our role as users affect the social media algorithm and its tightly controlled echo chambers? Each participant will engage with these questions via weekly discussions and writing explorations. By the end of the semester, everybody will develop a personal project, exploring the ideas we’ve seen.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Eduardo Pavez Goye
  Info
• 4 points

The Thirties: Metropole and Colony

The Thirties: Metropole/C

This course focuses on the tumultuous 1930s, which witnessed the growth of anticolonial movements, the coming to power of totalitarian and fascist regimes, and calls for internationalism and a new world vision, among other major developments. Even as fascism laid down its roots in parts of Europe, the struggle for independence from European colonial rule accelerated in Asia and Africa, and former subjects engaged with ideas and images about the shape of their new nations, in essays, fiction, poetry, and theater. Supporters and critics of nationalism existed on both sides of the metropole-colony divide, as calls for internationalism sought to stem the rising tide of ethnocentric thinking and racial particularism in parts of Europe as well as the colonies. Ostensibly a gesture of resistance against imperial control, anti-colonialism also sparked debates about re-visioning gender relations, the place of minorities in the nation, religious difference and secularism, and models of world unity, among other issues. The course aims to consider the intersection of these debates with resistance to 1930s fascism: Did anti- fascist resistance in the metropole draw inspiration from anticolonial struggles? Conversely, did the spectre of fascism and authoritarianism present a cautionary tale to the project of nation-building in former colonies?

We will read works from both the metropole and the colonies to track the crisscrossing of ideas, beginning with writers whose works foreshadowed the convulsive events of the 1930s and beyond (H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Rabindranath Tagore), then moving on to writers who published some of their greatest work in the 1930s (Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, M.K. Gandhi, Raja Rao, C.L.R. James), and concluding with an author who reassessed the events of the 1930s from a later perspective (George Lamming).

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gauri Viswanathan
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

The Rich are Different from Us : We

Wealth in American Litera

To say “wealth” is to say “class,” which is also to say “manners” and “snobbery,” and, especially in America, is to say vaulting “ambition.” This course examines how the amassing of wealth --individual & corporate-- creates class tensions and social manners over the course of a century. And we will conduct this examination aware that to make these matters explicit disturbs some basic American habits of mind that prefer fictions of egalitarianism.
As Lionel Trilling observed in 1950:
“Americans appear to believe that to touch accurately on the matter of class, to take full note of snobbery, is somehow to demean themselves…We don’t deny that we have classes and snobbery, but we seem to hold it indelicate to take precise cognizance of these phenomena. As if we felt that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled.”   

Among the topics/figures to be studied: the “New Woman” divorcee (Wharton), the social climbing arriviste (Fitzgerald), the pathologies of wealth (Chesnutt, Fitzgerald), the Black elite (Chesnutt, West), corporate capitalism as it colonizes the human body (Powers), wealth and post modernism (Diaz).  

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

Trees

Trees shadow the human in faceless fashion. They mark of a form of deep-time AN record and respond to ecological devastation and abundance. Symbolic of the strange proximity of the divine in numerous different religious and literary traditions, trees figure as alter-egos or doubles for human lives and after-lives (in figures like the trees of life and salvation, trees of wisdom and knowledge, genealogical trees). As prostheses of thought and knowledge, they become synonymous with structure and form, supports for linguistic and other genres of mapping, and markers of organization and reading. As key sources of energy, trees –as we know them today -- are direct correlates with the rise of the Anthropocene. Trees are thus both shadows and shade: that is, they are coerced doubles of the human and as entry ways to an other-world that figure at the limits of our ways of defining thought and language.

By foregrounding how deeply embedded trees are in world-wide forms of self-definition and cultural expression, this course proposes a deeper understanding of the way in which the environment is a limit-figure in the humanities’ relation to its “natural” others. This course assumes that the “real” and the “literary” are not opposed to one another, but are intimately co-substantial. To think “climate” or “environment” is not merely a matter of the sciences, rather, it is through looking at how the humanities situates “the tree” as a means of self-definition that we can have a more thorough understanding of our current ecological, political, and social climate.

Foregrounding an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, this course includes material from eco-criticism, philosophy, religion, art history, indigenous and cultural and post-colonial studies. It will begin by coupling medieval literary texts with theoretical works, but will expand (and contract) to other time periods and geographic locales.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia Dailey
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR ESSAY RESEARCH METHODS

SENIOR ESSAY SEMINAR

The senior essay research methods seminar, offered in several sections in the fall semester, lays out the basic building blocks of literary and cultural studies. What kinds of questions do literary and cultural critics ask, and what kinds of evidence do they invoke to support their arguments? What formal properties characterize pieces of criticism that we find especially interesting and/or successful? How do critics balance the desire to say something fresh vis-a-vis the desire to say something sensible and true? What mix of traditional and innovative tools will best serve you as a critical writer? Voice, narrative, form, language, history, theory and the practice known as “close reading” will be considered in a selection of exemplary critical readings. Readings will also include “how-to” selections from recent guides including Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I Write the Book, Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style and Aaron Ritzenberg and Sue Mendelsohn’s How Scholars Write.

The methods seminar is designed to prepare those students who choose to write a senior essay to complete a substantial independent project in the subsequent semester. Individual assignments will help you discover, define and refine a topic; design and pursue a realistic yet thrilling research program or set of protocols; practice “close reading” an object (not necessarily verbal or textual) of interest; work with critical sources to develop your skills of description and argument; outline your project; build out several sections of the project in more detail; and come up with a timeline for your spring semester work. In keeping with the iterative nature of scholarly research and writing, the emphasis is more on process than on product, but you will end the semester with a clear plan for your essay itself as well as for the tasks you will execute to achieve that vision the following semester.

The methods seminar is required of all students who wish to write a senior essay in their final semester.  Students who enroll in the methods seminar and decide not to pursue a senior essay in the spring will still receive credit for the fall course.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Rebecca C Pawel
  Info
• 3 points

New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, H

The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine
Partisan Review
on Astor Place.  Although usually regarded as male dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time.  Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary;  Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection
The Company She Keeps
; Susan Sontag’s debut
Against Interpretation
(1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book
On Photography
(1977) she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

Dramatic Breakups

Modern drama keeps on breaking up. From the moment a stage door slammed shut on a failed marriage in Henrik Ibsen’s 
A Doll House
 (1879), dramatic breakups no longer seemed the purview of tragedy, but rather a harbinger of new social potentialities. Modern stages helped to invent the notion of the romantic breakup that we have received today, and yet love was not all that shattered in the modern theater. After rupturing romances, modern playwrights went on to fracture families, upend political institutions, demolish scenic spaces, and ultimately, explode the form of drama itself. This course provides an introduction to twentieth and twenty-first century theater by surveying the many things that it breaks: hearts, homes, ideologies, and dramatic forms. We will examine the contention that drama, as a form in which conflict and transformation are vividly enacted, provides a critical lens for examining the dissolution of relationships at a wide range of scales, including the national, imperial, and ecological. In our encounters with diverse dramatic materials from the late nineteenth century to the present, we will explore how, when, and towards what end drama reimagined itself as “modern.” Students will read approximately two plays each week and will have the option to present a creative response to our course materials at the conclusion of the semester.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Rebecca Kastleman
  Info
• 3 points

BEOWULF

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem
Beowulf
.  We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship.  As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: David M Yerkes
  CULPA: 41 Info
• 4 points

What Is Art For?: Modernism and the Prob

WHAT IS ART FOR?

What is art for? Are art objects – poems or paintings, plays or prose fiction – similar in kind to everyday things like shopping lists or shopping malls? When we decide that a poem is good, is that the same sort of judgment as when we say that a tool is useful? What Oscar Wilde mean when he says a novel can never be immoral, no matter its content?

The standard philosophical line is to say that, for thousands of years, such questions would have made no sense. For generations, there was no hard line between art and life—between, for instance, making beautiful things and worshipping gods. And yet, so the story goes, at some point during the eighteenth century artists and intellectuals began to suggest that our experiences of art (and, maybe, the meaning of art itself) are separate fro, the religious, social, ethical, or economic contexts in which artworks get made. For these Enlightenment thinkers, art is
autonomous
—that is, as Immanuel Kant famously argued, the very purpose of an artwork is that it has no purpose beyond being itself.

This seminar picks up this story in the late 19th century, stitching together a story about European and American modernism by considering various answers to the question: What is art for?

Modernist artists are famous for fomenting revolutions in form and value. But did those revolutions attack the idea of aesthetic autonomy or entrench it? The right answers are “yes” and “neither.” Our seminar will map the split character of modernist attitudes towards aesthetic autonomy. To prepare we’ll read some classic and new works of aesthetic philosophy; survey a variety of modernist assaults on autonomous form, as well as different attempts to formalize the breach between art and life; and conclude by thinking about autonomy, contemporary writing, and the afterlives of the modernist avant-gardes. Our conversations will interest students with an interest in the philosophy of art, literary theory, British and American literature, and the history and futures of modernist culture.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Matthew Hart
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE

ENGLISH TRANSLTNS OF THE

English translations of the Bible from Tyndale to the present.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: David M Yerkes
  CULPA: 41 Info
• 4 points

Movement and Feeling

This seminar explores a deep imaginative connection between motion and emotion. The reading list places autobiographical, fictional, and poetic accounts of physical movement through the world alongside literary and philosophical treatments of sympathetic feeling for other people in that world. The course starts with a hypothesis. It proposes that travel and sympathy are structurally interrelated, each producing the other. The literary scripts for journeying to new places are also guides for developing an expanded repertoire of emotion, and the literary scripts for becoming a deeply feeling person double as travelogues or quest narratives.

To test this hypothesis, we’ll focus on writings from the eighteenth century, a period when sympathy took shape as a serious philosophical subject and when, as the British Empire expanded, Britons and people in contact with them encountered new forms of mobility. Sometimes movement was freely chosen, as in travel undertaken for leisure or self-discovery, but much of the time it was mandated by hardship or violence. The laboring classes at home found themselves increasingly displaced and itinerant while millions of African people abroad were enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean. It was in the eighteenth century, in fact, that Britain became the biggest slaving nation in the world, even as its thinkers were preoccupied with a new vocabulary of sentiment and the social virtue of politeness.

Racialization, the complex process in which categories of racial difference emerge and are activated, will be a recurring theme in our seminar. In several of our texts, to be a racialized body is to be a body on the move, but it’s also to be a faraway body, in transit from one distant place to another. For British writers, racialized bodies could either invite imaginative sympathy from afar or test sympathy’s geographical limits. Some Black authors, as we’ll see, picked up on this dynamic and creatively reworked it. The course culminates in the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved Black British abolitionist. Equiano suggests that his own history of physical and spiritual movement allows him to feel more deeply and more widely than his white readership can.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Dustin Stewart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

WRITING ACROSS MEDIA

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Brent H Edwards
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Milton, Colonization, Revolution

Milton/Colonization/Revol

This course will look at the major works of the poet, polemicist, and revolutionary John Milton in the context of seventeenth-century English intellectual, religious, political, military and colonial events. In addition to reading Milton’s shorter poems, major prose (including
Areopagitica
), and the full text of
Paradise Lost,
we will look at the authors and agents whose activities and writings helped to create the conditions in which he wrote: poets and agitators, natural scientists and utopians, sectarians and prophets, colonists and enslavers, revolutionaries and regicides. The class will pay particular attention to political debates about freedom and tyranny and to the colonial efforts (particularly in Virginia, Ireland and Barbados) that subtended both the English revolution and Milton’s own work.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 3 points

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: James E Adams
  CULPA: 12 Info
• 3 points

AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I

(Lecture). This lecture course is intended as the first half of the basic survey in African-American literature. By conducting close readings of selected song lyrics, slave narratives, fiction, poetry, and autobiography, we will focus on major writers in the context of cultural history. In so doing, we will explore the development of the African- American literary tradition. Writers include, but are not limited to, Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, Harper, Dunbar, Chestnutt, Washington, Du Bois, and Larsen. Course requirements: class attendance, an in-class midterm exam, a five-page paper, and a final exam.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Robert G O'Meally
  CULPA: 18 Info
• 3 points

REVOLUTION IN/ON THE CARIBBEAN

Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the Cuban Revolution (1959-1976). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize politics through language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Reinaldo Arenas, Michelle Cliff, and V.S. Naipaul, among others. We will also read essays by Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Paul Breslin, A. James Arnold, Phyllis Taoua, Robin D.G. Kelley, Brad Epps, Kimberle Lopez, Bruce King, Maria Elena Lima, Yoani Sánchez, and Audre Lorde. In addition, we will listen to a variety of music by Caribbean and African American musicians that take revolution as its theme in form and/or content.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner
  CULPA: 18 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Hollywood's Counterculture Cinema: Movie

MOVIES OF THE 1970S

You will be asked to watch a lot of movies for this course. Some of the films will be assigned primarily to provide background and will receive only glancing attention in class; others (as indicated) will be the focus of our discussion. Your postings on Courseworks will draw from both categories of assigned films.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Maura L Spiegel
  CULPA: 40 Info
• 4 points

Early Modern Theater

This course investigates the boldly experimental world of the early modern English theater. The opening of London’s commercial playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century fundamentally changed the nature of popular entertainment, offering eager spectators an array of secular drama for the first time in English history. We will read a range of playwrights and dramatic genres, asking how these plays both responded to each other and intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined English early modernity. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to the ways that conditions of early modern staging influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring admiration and adoration as they realized these plays onstage, became London’s very first celebrities.

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

18th Century Comparative Novel

18th C Comparative Novel

This course encompasses a series of readings in the eighteenth-century European novel. Style, narratology, the “rise” of realism and the history of novel criticism will all figure in our discussions; the seminar offers a theoretical rather than a thoroughly historical survey, and should serve as groundwork for considering questions about style and the novel in other periods and national traditions.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 4 points

CANTERBURY TALES

(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.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 points

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND WORLD LITERAT

What does it mean to treat culture, literature, and identity as forms of property? This course will look at the current debates around cultural appropriation in relation to the expanding field of world literature. In many ways, the two discourses seem at odds: the ethno-proprietary claims that underpin most arguments against cultural appropriation seem to conflict with the more cosmopolitan pretenses of world literature. Nonetheless, both discourses rely on some basic premises that treat culture and cultural productions as forms of property and expressions of identity (itself often treated as a form of property). “Appropriation” is a particularly rich lens for looking at processes and conceptions of worlding and globalization, because some version of the idea is central to historical theories of labor, economic production, land claims, colonialism, authorship, literary translation, and language acquisition. This is not a course in “world literature” as such; we will examine a half dozen case studies of literary/cultural texts that have been chosen for the ways in which they open up different aspects of the problematics of reducing culture to an econometric logic of property relations in the world today.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph R Slaughter
  CULPA: 13 h-index: 13 Info
• 4 points

Mythological Romanticism: Gods and Monst

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the explosion of Romanticism: a sweeping cultural movement that developed alongside—and deeply impacted—revolutions in politics, philosophy, industry, and the arts. Romanticism not only spanned multiple media (literature, visual art, music), but also was in essential ways a trans-national phenomenon, with rich cultural cross-pollinations among a number of countries and languages.

This course will introduce literary Romanticism as what William Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age,” primarily in the comparative contexts of Great Britain, Germany, and France. We will explore similar themes and concerns in some of the major writers in these traditions, and also ask what makes each “Romanticism” singular to its time and place. One particular thread for our inquiry will concern how writers confronted crisis and creativity in the religious sphere during a time of political upheaval. From the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a “new mythology,” to William Blake’s “Bible of Hell,” to Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus” and Victor Hugo’s wrestling with God and Satan, what new gods and monsters come to the fore in Romanticism, and what is their legacy today?

While our main focus will remain on Britain, Germany, and France, we will also glance at Romantic currents and legacies in other places and times. All readings will be provided in English translation, but students with reading knowledge of French and/or German are welcome (and encouraged!) to read texts in the original languages.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph Albernaz
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

American Modernism

This course approaches modernism as the varied literary responses to the cultural, technological, and political conditions of modernity in the United States.  The historical period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II forms a backdrop for consideration of such authors as Getrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes.  Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, and contemporary essays. 

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 3 points

THE BILDUNGSROMAN: COMING OF AGE IN THE

The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, and the tensions between individual and society, idealism and realism, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action.

The reading list spans coming-of-age novels from Germany, France, England, and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works; with historical events; and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

The course will address questions that include: what is society, what is a self, and what is the shape of a human life? What fosters human development and what thwarts it? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? The earliest novels of development focused on the dilemmas faced by white, middle-class men; how have subsequent works represented the challenges that non-dominant subjects encounter?

This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~300 pages per week.

• TR 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• 3 points

MASTERS SEMINAR

Prerequisites: Departments permission. This course (required for all first-year graduate students in the English Department) introduces students to scholarly methodologies in the study of literature and culture. The Masters Seminar operates in tandem with the Masters Colloquium ENGL G5005, and requires short writing assignments over the course of the semester and extensive in-class participation. There are two sections of this course.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jennifer Wenzel
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 15 Info
• Instructor: Dustin Stewart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Amy Hungerford
  Info
• 4 points

MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXTS SEMINAR

MEDIEVAL DISABILITIES

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher C Baswell
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 4 points

New Classicism

This graduate seminar is an investigation and interrogation of the English Renaissance. It will offer grounding in the nineteenth-century emergence of the Renaissance as a cultural and conceptual category, as well as the prevailing scholarly understanding of how sixteenth-century writers, poets, and playwrights negotiated their estrangement from the classical past. But the course will also aim, more urgently, to forge new pathways in classical reception studies. To what uses, we will ask, did English writers put their classical sources, and what imagined ideas about antiquity did they generate as a result? How did that engagement with classical sources shape emergent ideas about gender, race, and class? And though the course will center on the literary production of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century England, it will also cast a wide geographical net, seeking out the Renaissances and classical pasts that have been neglected in the focus on the European revival of ancient Greece and Rome. Attending to a variety of critical methodologies, this seminar will bring together a range of literary forms, including drama, epic, poetry, and civic spectacle, from a range of places, including England, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.  

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

Plantation Literatures of the Early Amer

Plantation Lit. of Early

Teaching “plantation literature” can mean many things. We could, for instance start with the Plymouth Plantation writings, and spend much of our time on US Southern plantations. But, because a Jamaican economist, George Beckford, has summed up a common understanding of it, throughout our class we will keep in mind his definition of “plantation America” as having its locus in the Caribbean: “this region,” Beckford posited, “is generally regarded as the classic plantation area. So much so that social anthropologists, have described the region as a culture sphere.” According to this understanding, “plantation America” is a cultural zone whose history is related to the establishment not of societies, but of plantation production units. As Sylvia Wynter famously put it, “the Caribbean area is the classic plantation area since many of its units were ‘planted’ with people, not in order to form societies, but to carry on plantations whose aim was to produce single crops for the market.” Due to the centrality of this region, our class will focus mostly on early Caribbean plantation writing. In the 17th and 18th centuries – the time span our course will cover – these writings were produced mostly by planters/slave owners, such as Aphra Benn, James Granger or Matthew Gregory Lewis. However, in these early Caribbean archives we will try to hear voices that differ from those of the planters; cultivating an archival eye for what these texts may tell us about the enslaved, their habitats and ecosystems, their cosmologies, epistemic practices, medical archives and novel worldviews as they changed and emerged in the syncretic space of the plantation system. In addition to looking closely into the writings of the “plantation zone” in this strict sense, we will expand our understanding of plantation to include attempts at establishing plantations (de Vaca), as well as writing on cultural zones where the “plantation” was organized not around the vegetal, but around the mineral and the metallic (mining gold and silver in Latin America and the Caribbean). And because plantation/mining zones were also based on a certain state of mind (on a certain philosophy and its fictions) we will look in new ways at the founding plantation fiction,
Robinson Crusoe
. And finally, since the people “planted” on plantations in these early times rarely had an occasion to write their minds – their worldviews

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Branka Arsic
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Law and Humanities Workshop

Law and humanities is one of the most exciting domains of scholarship today, generating a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation among scholars of law, humanities, and the humanistic social sciences, drawing on fields as diverse as anthropology, art and architecture, film and media, history, human rights, literature, music, performance, philosophy, political theory, religion, sociology (etc). In this class, we will explore the work of scholars at the cutting edge of the field: work that reaches across the field and represents its diversity and richness. The class will also serve as a workshop for developing student projects and professional skills, with an eye to conference participation, thesis development, and possible publication.

We will devote the first two sessions to discussing the field, looking at its history and at current developments, exploring the tools of our different disciplines, and pondering the promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research. A series of distinguished guest scholars (a few of whom were once students in this class!) will attend subsequent sessions, circulating published and in-progress work to the class and describing their current projects. Several students will serve as respondents each week, and the class as a whole will have an opportunity to engage with our guests’ work and perhaps change its course. The last sessions will be dedicated to a mini-conference in which students will circulate and present their projects and we will celebrate our achievements. Graduate students in any field and at any stage of study welcome, along with any other members of the scholarly community interested in attending.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

Formal Methods in Text Analysis I

Formal Methods Text Analy

This course on method in literary studies will introduce graduate students to the principles of formal (as opposed to speculative) analysis. More than an emphasis on “form” or “computation,” formal analysis requires the development of theoretical commitments, vulnerable, at the outset, to empirical verification (being wrong). Many questions in the social sciences and the humanities can benefit from formal analysis grounded in the particularities of language. The attention to low-order single-document textual building blocks (“formal features”)—word, sentence, paragraph, story—will sharpen our intuitions about higher-order phenomena, such as agency, power, authority, style, race, gender, or influence. How complex cultural dynamics can be broken down into components, and then reassembled into models yielding scholarly insight—that’s the topic of this class. Comparison between documents, over time, and across many texts will comprise Part II of the course.

Though all of the methods introduced can be done by pen and paper, the course will serve as a gentle introduction to Python programming, using industry-standard tools for text processing. No prior experience required to participate.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dennis Tenen
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

INTRO TO WRITING STUDIES

Anyone who pursues a career as a college faculty member will teach writing—either formally, in a writing class, or informally, as we work with students who are new to our disciplines. However, many graduate students in the humanities have received no substantive training in the burgeoning field of writing studies. In English, career opportunities in writing studies have outpaced other field areas. The MLA’s 2016-2017 jobs list reported that 851 positions were advertised in English, 10% fewer than the previous year. Of those jobs, 217 were in writing studies, 187 were in British literature, and 172 were in American literature. Given that writing studies positions are also advertised elsewhere, the gap is likely larger. This seminar will explore key debates in writing studies research and teaching methodologies, program development, and disciplinary and institutional status. Writing studies is the newest name for “rhetoric and composition,” a field which declared its existence in the mid-1960s, and draws its praxes and theories from classical rhetoric, applied linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology, literary criticism, civic education, creative writing, and progressive pedagogy. Scholarship in writing studies since the 1960s has sought to deepen our understanding of how transactions work among writers, readers, and texts. Writing studies prompts us to track how standards for “good” or “appropriate” academic writing change over time, and how the teaching of writing responds to social, political, institutional, and disciplinary forces. The readings in this course will help us to articulate our own philosophies of writing and shape approaches to pedagogy in our own fields. Topis will include the following: how writers develop; intellectual practices that foster community among learners; the ethics and politics of textual transactions, including assessment; students’ rights to their own language; literacy acquisition across media; working in transnational and translingual spaces; genre and rhetorical theory; fostering knowledge and skills transfer; the impact of intersectionality on pedagogy and program design; and labor justice. We will read works by foundational writing studies scholars including John Dewey, Wayne Booth, bell hooks, Victor Villaneuva, Jr. A. Suresh Canagarajah, and the current president of the Modern Language Association, Anne Ruggles Gere. Participants will have the opportunity to ask how writing studies can deepen the understanding of writing in our fields, regardless

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nicole Wallack
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 points

Queer Theory

Recent scholarship in queer theory speaks of “bad education” and “ugly feelings,” “beautiful experiments” and “poor queer studies.” In this survey of mostly recent queer theoretical work we will read a range of texts that debate the use, the abuse and the uselessness of queer theory in an era of anti-intellectual policies aimed at both critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. While Lee Edelman, in
Bad Education
, insists that queer theory has nothing to teach us, Paul Preciado in
Dysphoria Mundi
proposes that the whole world is ailing from a shared dysphoria. Meanwhile, at the intersections of Afro-Pessimism and queer theory, Calvin Warren proposes that to speak of Black trans identities is impossible given the negative ontologies that pertain to Black personhood. Working through oppositions between optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia, good and bad feelings, beauty and ugliness, we will ask: What constitutes the ethical in queer theory and how does queer theory approach the good, the bad and the beautiful? At stake here are questions about aesthetic experimentation and politics and unpredictable links between beauty and power, alternative subjects and domination, and bodies and language.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Jack Halberstam
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points