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
  Info
• 3 points

Aspects of the Novel

The novel is the dominant literary form of the last three centuries; its variations are numberless, its spread global. What can be said then about what a novel is, or how a novel works? What are some of the ways the form of the novel has been understood? This course is an introduction to the study of the novel as a formal and cultural phenomenon, taking in examples from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, while attending to major landmarks in the “theory of the novel.”

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

Approaches to Literary Study

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2000 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN2001. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.   

• F 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.   

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 0 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.   

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 0 points

British Literature to 1500

This course will introduce some of the most fascinating texts of the first eight hundred years of English literature, from the period of Anglo-Saxon rule through the Hundred Years’ War and beyond—roughly, 700–1500 CE. We’ll hit on some texts you’ve heard of – 
Beowulf
 and selections from Chaucer’s 
Canterbury Tales
 – while leaving time for some you may not have encountered – Marie de France’s 
Lais
 and Margery of Kempe’s 
Book
. Along the way, we’ll also hone skills of reading, writing, and oral expression crucial to appreciating and discussing literature in nuanced, supple ways.

If you take this course, you’ll discover how medieval literature is both a mirror and a foil to modern literature. You’ll explore the plurilingual and cross-cultural nature of medieval literary production and improve (or acquire!) your knowledge of Middle English. Plus, you’ll flex your writing muscles with three papers (one of which can be replaced by a creative project, if you like) and discussion posts where you’ll have the chance to pursue your own interests.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Hannah Weaver
  Info
• 3 points

Introduction to Old English

ENGL GU4091 Introduction to Old English will be renumbered to ENGL UN2091 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998.

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

Drama Before Shakespeare

This lecture course focuses on the many different forms of drama that emerged in England in the decades before William Shakespeare started writing. The drama of sixteenth-century England found its stages in a bewildering variety of venues: the city streets, boys’ grammar schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court, the royal court, civic halls, private households, and inns. This course will introduce students to a range of plays in all genres (tragedies, comedy, history), and use these plays to explore aspects of Elizabeth theatre, including the playhouses, companies, repertory, playwriting, and the printing of plays.  No knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays is required.

• MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

Out of the Ordinary: Aesthetics, Power,

Aesthetics, Power, Bodies

This course examines twentieth-century literature, film, and music in order to explore the many and complex ways that beauty, power, and bodily identity co-articulate experiences that lie beyond the ordinary. Reading novels, essays, and poetry alongside musical interludes, we will think about bodies, power, and beauty together. This class explores the wide beyond, the other side of the everyday, the hum of being that can be discerned only in certain musical performances, the terror and pleasure that course through certain works of fiction, and the fragmented self that fails to cohere in extraordinary acts of memoir. From these pieces and unfinished conversations, we intend to collaboratively develop fresh insights on the nature of beauty and identity under increasingly draconian and profit-driven forms of knowledge and power.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• 3 points

Eco-Poetry from the Romantics to the Pre

Wordsworth famously wrote that “Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her,” but is the reverse true?

This course will explore the entanglement of literature and the environment from two vantage points: the first is Romantic-era England, which coincided with the onset of the industrial revolution that put the earth on a course of mass extinction and climate change. The second is the period from around 1980 to the present, after the birth of the modern environmental movement, when the devastating effects of human activity on the earth became an unavoidable subject for many poets. After spending time with both canonical and overlooked Romantic nature poetry (including Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Shelley, John Clare), we will turn in the second half of the semester to a global group of contemporary eco-poets variously taking up, transforming, deflecting, or unraveling Romantic-era ideas of “Nature” in light of contemporary environmental crises and the age of the Anthropocene.

The course will focus on close reading and discussion of poems, but will also introduce some elementary concepts, concerns, and practices of what is called “eco-criticism,” a relatively recent mode of reading literature first developed by scholars of Romanticism. Some questions we may consider include: How might poetic language be particularly attuned to intimations of ecological change and collapse? How do and how should poetic forms and traditions shift in the wake of environmental crisis? How might poems help us cultivate arts of noticing, forms of resistance, and modes of dwelling in common with non-human life? Reading contemporary poets like Will Alexander and Etel Adnan, we will also explore how literature can connect with various scales and dimensions of existence, including the seasonal, the elemental, the planetary, and even the cosmic. Along the way, we will critically explore how both ecology and poetic practice are inflected by issues of race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism.

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

Romantic Poetry

ENGL GU4402 Romantic Poetry will be renumbered to ENGL UN2402 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

World Fiction Since 1965

In the period since 1965, fiction has become global in a new sense and with a new intensity. Writers from different national traditions have been avidly reading each other, wherever they happen to come from, and they often resist national and regional labels altogether. If you ask the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah whether the precocious child of Maps was inspired by Salman Rushdie´s Midnight´s Children, he will answer (at least he did when I asked him) that he and Rushdie both were inspired by Sterne´s Tristram Shandy and Grass´s The Tin Drum. At the same time, the human experiences around which novelists organize their fiction are often themselves global, explicitly and powerfully but also mysteriously. Our critical language is in some ways just trying to catch up with innovative modes of storytelling that attempt to be responsible to the global scale of interconnectedness on which, as we only rarely manage to realize, we all live. Authors will include some of the following: Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Elena Ferrante, and Zadie Smith.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Bruce Robbins
  CULPA: 35 Wikipedia h-index: 39 Info
• 3 points

Mysticism and Medieval Drama

ENGL GU4791 Mysticism and Medieval Drama will be renumbered to ENGL UN2791 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998.

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

History of English Novel II

ENGL GU4802 History of English Novel II will be renumbered to ENGL UN2802 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: James E Adams
  CULPA: 12 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: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 3 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.

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

The Family in Film and Memoir

FAMILY FICTIONS

This course will examine films and a few memoirs that center on family narratives, family cultures, cultural legacies and customs inherited through generations, generational dynamics, childhood memory, and ideas of
home
as a utopian/dystopian and oneiric space.   Explorations of memory, imagination and childhood make-believe will interface with readings in psychoanalysis, attachment theory, phenomenology and in the social history of this polymorphous institution.
 
Authors will include Gaston Bachelard, Alison Bechdel, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Doty, Vivian Gornick, Lorraine Hansberry, Maggie Nelson and D.W. Winnicott; and films by Sean Baker, Alfonso Cuaron, Greta Gerwig, Lance Hammer, Barry Jenkins, Jennifer Kent, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinart, Lucretia Martel, Mike Mills, Sarah Polley, Charlotte Wells, Andrei Zvyagintsev and others.

Seminar application instructions: Email Professor Spiegel (mls37@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Family in Film & Memoir Seminar." In your message, include your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken. All students are automatically placed on a waitlist, from which the instructor will in due course admit students as spaces become available.

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

Melville s Fiction

Deep reading by way of the deep sea: a semester of full immersion in
Moby-Dick
.  We will also read three of Melville’s short fictions, some literary responses to Melville and various pieces of criticism and contexts, but we’ll approach Melville’s fiction less as scholars than as passionate novel-readers and literary interpreters. We will actually read
Moby-Dick
twice together, once at the beginning and once at the end of the class.  By focusing on the work of a single author, you’ll have the chance to develop serious familiarity with Melville’s style and fictional worlds as well as to consider what it means to prioritize depth over breadth in literary encounters.

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

Black Women Writing the City

During the twentieth century in the U.S., millions of Black Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, ushering in new forms of sensory and social experience. This course focuses on Black women’s relationship to the modern city, from the
fin de siècle,
through the Civil Rights Era, to the present-day. Across a variety of genres and contexts—including novels, poetry, plays, memoir, journalism, diaries, manifestos, spoken word and travelogues—Black writers have imagined and theorized femininity through the ever-shifting contours of the metropolis. While traditional accounts of urban modernity tend to take a masculine frame, our course will remain grounded in contemporary queer and feminist critique, asking: how do the physical, material, and architectural dimensions of the city impact
women’s
conceptions of selfhood? How do semi-public, semi-private spaces, such as cafes, offices, nightclubs, and cabarets, enable (or fail to enable) community and group belonging? How might such spaces nurture queer of color communities specifically? What forms of economic racism and segregation did women of color encounter, and what strategies did they deploy to counteract them? Is it possible for a Black woman to remain “private in public”? What kinds of industrial and technological developments enhanced women’s independence and financial freedoms, and which, like state surveillance, ultimately impeded—and continue to impede—their ability to survive and flourish? 

Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Shay Youngblood, Sarah Broom and Raven Leilani, supplemented by short critical readings by such writers as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman. Combining theoretical and literary analysis with regular fieldwork in New York City—including visits to the Schomburg Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem—the seminar ultimately encourages students to think creatively and rigorously about their own relationship to race, gender, and urban experience.  

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Zoe L Henry
  Info
• 4 points

FAULKNER

In this course, we’ll be studying novels, stories, and screenplays from the major phase of William Faulkner’s career, from 1929 to 1946. Our primary topic will be Faulkner’s vision of American history, and especially of American racial history: we’ll be asking what his fictions have to say about the antebellum/“New” South; the Civil War and Reconstruction; the issues of slavery, emancipation, and civil rights; and the many ways in which the conflicts and traumas of the American past continue to shape and burden the American present. But we’ll consider other aspects of Faulkner’s work, too: his contributions to modernist aesthetics, his investigations of psychology and subjectivity, his exploration of class and gender dynamics, his depiction of the natural world, and his understanding of the relationship between literature and the popular arts.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Austin Graham
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 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
  Info
• 4 points

Reenactment and Performance in 20th & 21

Has reenactment, or the practice of “restaging a historical or biographical event” reached an end?  While the idea of historically replicating a past event is quite passé, reenactment is everywhere from verbatim theatrical tribunals to biopics. This class will ask critical questions regarding reenactment as a performance act that crosses temporal, cultural, and discipline-specific boundaries and polarities.  Investigating reenactment’s dynamics, potentials, and failures, we will examine battle reenactments, international theatrical tribunals, Indigenous performance, visits to nuclear disaster sites, autobiographical performance, and method actors. The final project will give the option of developing a research essay or crafting a creative portfolio. No prerequisites. 

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ali Yalgin
  Info
• 4 points

HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON

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

Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well

Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s
Phaedo
to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them.

Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with 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.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kathy H Eden
  CULPA: 19 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

VIRGINIA WOOLF

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

AMER LIT & CORPORATE CULTURE

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Aaron Ritzenberg
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 4 Info
• 4 points

Caribbean Radicalisms in New York, 1890-

New York City has been closely linked to the Caribbean from at least the seventeenth century. Presently, nearly 25% of its inhabitants are of Caribbean descent. In addition, according to a 2021 New York City Office of Immigrants report, five of the top countries of origin of the city's new immigrants were born in a Caribbean country: Dominican Republic (421,920, number 1), Jamaica (165,260, number 3), Guyana (136,180, number 4); Trinidad and Tobago (85,680, number 8), and Haiti (78,250, number 9). In addition, Puerto Ricans, who are colonial migrants, number 1.2 million or 9% of the city’s population.

During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York City was a pivotal space for Caribbean radical praxis understood here as political action and thought shaped by the Caribbean experiences of enslavement, coloniality, and diaspora. These interventions deeply transformed not only New York but multiple other contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Europe, and a broad range of movements including anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer. To better understand the impact of Caribbean radical figures and thought in New York and beyond, we will examine texts from a broad range of writers and thinkers, including Jesús Colón, Julia de Burgos, Hubert Harrison, Alexis June Jordan, Audre Lorde, José Martí, Malcolm X, Manuel Ramos Otero, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Arthur Schomburg.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner
  CULPA: 18 Wikipedia 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.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 3 points

The Political Novel

Is the political novel a genre? It depends on your understanding both of politics and of the novel. If politics means parties, elections, and governing, then few novels of high quality would qualify. If on the other hand “the personal is the political,” as the slogan of the women’s movement has it, then almost everything the novel deals with is politics, and few novels would not qualify. This seminar will try to navigate between these extremes, focusing on novels that center on the question of how society is and ought to be constituted. Since this question is often posed ambitiously in so-called “genre fiction” like thrillers and sci-fi, which is not always honored as “literature,” it will include some examples of those genres as well as uncontroversial works of the highest literary value like Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and Camus’s “The Plague.”

 

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Bruce Robbins
  CULPA: 35 Wikipedia h-index: 39 Info
• 4 points

Troilus and Criseyde

The intellectual goals of the course are to understand the manuscript evidence for the text and to be able to read Chaucer with precision: precision as to the grammatical structure, vocabulary, rhymes, and meter of the text. Being such an enlightened, close reader will help students in many, if not all, of their other courses, and will be invaluable to them in most any job they will ever have thereafter.

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

INTRO TO CLASSICAL RHETORIC

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). This course examines rhetorical theory from its roots in ancient Greece and Rome and reanimates the great debates about language that emerged in times of national expansion and cultural upheaval. We will situate the texts of Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others in their historical contexts to illuminate ongoing conversations about the role of words and images in the negotiation of persuasion, meaning making, and the formation of the public. In the process, we will discover that the arguments of classical rhetoric play out all around us today. Readings from thinkers like Judith Butler, Richard McKeon, Robert Pirsig, and Bruno Latour echo the ancients in their debates about hate speech regulation, the purpose of higher education, and the ability of the sciences to arrive at truth. We will discover that rhetoricians who are writing during eras of unprecedented expansion of democracies, colonization, and empire have a great deal to say about the workings of language in our globalizing, digitizing age. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Sue Mendelsohn (sem2181@columbia.edu) by April 11 with the subject heading Rhetoric 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.

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

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS

The class will read the poem 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary meritThe class will read the poem 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary merit.

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

ROMANTICISM & FREEDOM

“Freedom” was perhaps the central watchword of Romantic-era Britain, yet this concept remains notoriously difficult to pin down. Taking a cue from the sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, who writes that “freedom is one those of values better experienced than defined,” this seminar will explore the variegated experiences of freedom and its opposites in the literature of British Romanticism. Romanticism unfolds alongside major revolutions in America, France, and Haiti, and we will begin by examining how the differing conceptions of freedom offered in the wake of these revolutions and their receptions galvanized writers and thinkers in Britain. From here, we will probe the expressions, possibilities, implications, and limits of freedom as outlined in various domains: political, individual, aesthetic, economic, philosophical, religious, and beyond. In situating Romanticism alongside developments like revolution, the rise of globalization, and the Atlantic slave trade, we will be particularly interested in confronting how the explosion of claims to freedom in this period emerges together with and in response to the proliferation of enslaved, colonized, and otherwise constrained or hindered bodies.

 

As we read poems, novels, slave narratives, philosophical essays, political tracts and documents, and more, a fundamental question for the course will concern the relation between binary terms: to what extent, and how, do notions of freedom in Romanticism depend on the necessary exclusion of the unfree? Since the Romantic age sees the birth of concepts of freedom still prevalent in our own day, this course will offer an opportunity to reflect critically on the present. To that end, we will take up some contemporary theoretical analyses and critiques of freedom, both directly in relation to Romanticism and reaching beyond. 

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph Albernaz
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

LITERATURE AND OIL

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Jennifer Wenzel
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 15 Info
• 3 points

Gender and Resistance in Early Modern Li

This class will focus on early modern literature’s fascination with the relationship between women, gender, and political resistance in the early modern period. The works we will read together engage many of the key political analogies of the period, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. These texts also present multiple forms of resistance to gendered repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways.

Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, witchcraft and murder pamphlets, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (
Othello
,
The Winter’s Tale
, and
Gallathea
), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 4 points

August Wilson

In this seminar we will read the complete published plays of August Wilson along with significant unpublished and obscurely published plays, prose, and poetry. The centerpieces of this course will be what Wilson termed his “century cycle” of plays: each work focusing on the circumstances of Black Americans during a decade of the twentieth century. As we consider these historical framings, we also will explore closely on what Wilson identified as the “four B’s” that influenced his art most emphatically: Bessie Smith (sometimes he called this first B the Blues), Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, and Jorge Luis Borges. Accordingly, as we consider theoretical questions of cross-disciplinary conversations in art, we will study songs by Bessie Smith (and broad questions of the music and literary form), plays, prose, and poetry of Baraka (particularly in the context of Wilson’s early Black Arts Movement works), the paintings of Bearden, and the poetry and prose (along with a few lectures and transcribed interviews) of Borges. We will use archival resources (online as well as “hard copy” material, some of it at Columbia) to explore Wilson’s pathways as a writer, particularly as they crisscrossed the tracks of his “four B’s.” Along the way we will examine several drawings and paintings (from his University of Pittsburgh archives) as we delve into the rhythmical shapes, textures, and colors he used on paper and canvas as well as in his plays. Visitors to the class will include Wilson’s musical director Dwight Andrews and at least one of his regular actors.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Robert G O'Meally
  CULPA: 18 Info
• 4 points

Source Texts of Postcolonial Vision

Source Text of Postcoloni

We will read texts by Memmi, Du Bois, and Leila Ahmed to create a gendered sense of the origins of postcolonial thinking. We will draw a definition of postcolonial hope before the actual emergence of
postcolonial nation-states. A 1-page response to the text to be read will be required the previous day. No midterm paper. The final paper will be an oral presentation in a colloquium. ICLS students will be expected to read Memmi in French. No incompletes. Admission by interview. 20% participation, 20% papers, 60% presentation.

Seminar Instructions: Interviews will be in August. Email Timothy Henderson (th3108@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Source Texts of Postcolonial Vision." 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.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Gayatri C Spivak
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Resistance Literature

This course will explore the historical category of Resistance Literature, its theory and practice, its transnational expansion, and its ongoing relevance today. Originally proposed by Palestinian author and political activist Ghassan Kanafani in 1967, “Resistance Literature” named an activist practice of writing that sought to challenge discriminatory state practices, social policies, power structures and lived injustices, as well as to reshape the ideological frameworks that enabled official political structures of oppression in the institutional forms of colonialism (settler and otherwise), neocolonialism, authoritarianism,
apartheid
, systemic racisms, ethnonationalisms, gendered exclusions, and religious discrimination. Examining diverse genres such as novels, poetry, plays, memoirs, films, we will analyze the literary and political strategies, motifs, and modes by which authors around the world over the past century have attempted to use their art to resist oppression, to mobilize public opinion, and to advocate for social change. Collectively, we will attempt to identify literary and formal commonalities across these literatures to identify generic characteristics of Resistance Literature that might distinguish it from Literature in general.

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

ESSAYISM

In the second decade of the 21 st century there is more critical attention than ever before on the essay as a literary genre and a cultural practice that crosses media, registers, disciplines, and contexts. The concept of “essayism” was redefined by the Robert Musil in his unfinished modernist novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930) from a style of literature to a form of thinking in writing: “For an essay is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favourable occasion be elevated to the status of truth or that might just as easily be recognized as error … ; an essay is the unique and unalterable form that a man’s inner life takes in a decisive thought.” In this course will explore how essays can increase readers’ andwriters’ tolerance for the existential tension and uncertainty we experience both within ourselves
as well as in the worlds we inhabit. As Cheryl Wall argues, essays also give their practitioners meaningful work to do with their private musings and public concerns in a form that thrives on intellectual as well as formal experimentation. The course is organized to examine how practitioners across media have enacted essayism in their own work and how theorists have continued to explore its aesthetic effects and ethical power.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicole Wallack
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 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.

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

MIDDLE ENGLISH TEXTS SEMINAR

ENGLAND'S ANTIQUITIES

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher C Baswell
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 4 points

EARLY MODERN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE IN ENGLA

EARLY MOD MANUSCRIPT CULT

The early modern period is often heralded as the age of print, when new ideas were disseminated by the press on a grander scale than ever before.  But it was also still very much a world in which many texts were written by hand, circulated and copied in manuscript, with their own distinctive culture.  This graduate seminar is designed to introduce students to important features of the manuscript culture of early modern England (roughly 1550-1700) with an emphasis on literary and para-literary genres.  Its focus will be a series of case studies in various aspects of manuscript culture – genres (letters, libels, playbooks, verse), material means of collecting (letterbooks, miscellanies) and dissemination and conservation (scribal publication, copying, filing and archiving).  A basic training in paleography of the period will be provided.  The course will make use primarily of electronic resources to which Columbia has subscriptions (including Perdita, Luna, British Literary Manuscripts Online, The Cecil Papers, State Papers Online, etc.) with some work with the holdings of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  Each week will feature a case study, featuring (among others) writings by Philip Sidney, John Donne, Hester Pulter, and John Milton.              

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• 4 points

The Protest Novel

This course asks a simple question: what kind of action (political, social, instrumental) can a novel take? In the seminar, we will consider the tradition of protest fiction, taking stock of how the novel has embraced the overt aim of creating change. Our goal as a class will be to set our own terms for what a protest novel is, was, should be, or might be, and to consider both the reach and limitations of this tradition. The terrain is broad, covering 19 th -21 st century works, with a center of gravity in the early-mid 20th century, and engaging a range of topics on which novels have sought to make change. The course is organized thematically and chronologically, with works (mostly English language) from the U.S., England, Ireland, Canada, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Each week we will read a novel (some novels are spread across two weeks), paired with other materials, such as visual works, other literary materials, theoretical readings, etc. Themes to which these activist works are geared include: slavery and abolition; working conditions; gender and patriarchy; war, peace, and revolution; race and racism; incarceration; and environmental crisis. This is a discussion seminar, and each student is expected to participate in every class meeting.

The primary written work for the course is a final project, on a subject of your choosing. A 15-page seminar paper is the norm. Given our activist theme and orientation toward creative uses of literature, however, your final project may take other forms. Weekly reading responses, posted to the Canvas page, are also required. In addition, after the first two weeks, we will begin each class with a short student presentation on the material (an outline is also required, to be shared with the group). Your grade for the course will be determined as follows: final paper (30%); presentation and outline (20%); class participation and reading responses (50%). Please note the heavy weight toward classroom participation
and reading responses. If participating in class is not comfortable for you, please see me early on and we can work out some alternatives. The goal for our classroom is to be inclusive and to stimulate a positive, active learning environment for all.

The following books will be read in full and ordered at Book Culture, 112 th St between Broadway and Amsterdam. Other, shorter readings are listed on the syllabus, or will be added during the term, and can be acquired online.
Chinua Achebe,
Things Fall Apart
Mulk Raj Anand,
Unt

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sarah Cole
  CULPA: 23 Info
• 4 points

CONTEMPORARY ECOLOGICAL THEORY

There are numerous ways to approach ecological theory in our current Anthropocene moment. One could address ecological literary criticism, or energy studies, or ecological feminism to name only a few possibilities. But this class won’t go down any of those potential paths. Instead, we will focus on a cluster of philosophical and theoretical texts that have grounded contemporary ecological thinking. Our question will consist less in reading about specific problems of contemporary climate change (such as, for instance, the carbon imprint) than focusing on the ecological as a way of thinking and being, mobilizing a whole range of concepts that enable and guide such a thinking. They will include: the rhizome, chaos, nomadology, the concept of the island, archipelagic thinking, the perspectival, relational, oceanic, etc. We will also look very closely into ecological ontologies that emerge in the work of thinkers like Glissant and Ferdinand, which are beholden to an experience of specific geographical locales (the Caribbean) and specific histories (slavery, colonialism, postcolonialism). In the last section of the class we will move – via the work of Brazilian philosophical anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – to the ecological thinking of the Amerindian peoples. Their ecological thinking is, of course, ancient, but the recent transcription of oral teachings make it a very relevant source for all of those who are searching – as we will be doing – for a mode of thinking that moves away from the philosophical traditions of the West, which have significantly contributed to the emergence of the Anthropocene in the first place.

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

RESISTANCE THEORY AND EARLY MODERN LITER

RESISTANCE THEORY EARLY M

This class will focus on premodern theories of political resistance and the ways in which literary texts engage and reimagine them. In particular, we will focus on many of the key political analogies of the period with a gendered dimension, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. We will consider the ways in which early modern poems and plays present multiple forms of resistance to repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways.

Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (
Macbeth
,
Othello
,
The Winter’s Tale
, and
Gallathea
), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 4 points

Disability Studies Now

Disability studies is no longer a brand-new field.  What are its generations, key debates, and current preoccupations?  This course looks to answer these questions by reading recent works in the field.  Works on the syllabus will include new works of scholarship, particularly those that examine intersections with such fields as critical race studies, ecocriticism, and the ethics of care.  We will also consider works of embodied theory that use life writing and creative nonfiction (in a variety of forms:  prose and poetry, film, comics, visual arts) to produce and refine knowledge about disability.  Writing assignments will reflect our reading methods by encouraging students to take disability as an occasion to experiment with the forms, as well as the content, of critical writing.  

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 4 points

Academic Careers Workshop

This course is open to all graduate students in English and Comparative Literature who have passed their oral exams. The course, which students may take for R-credit, has several aims. It will help you: sharpen the focus of your dissertation and clarify the nature of its contribution; expand your scholarly profile, illuminating the breadth of what you have to offer academic life; and launch activities that can make your potential contributions visible and legible. We will look closely at the kinds of materials you will circulate on the job market: cover letters,
CV
s, teaching statements, research statements, DEI statements, teaching portfolios, and more. We will workshop these in the seminar, while also practicing the oral forms you will encounter in the job market: interviews, presentations, job talks. At the same time, one of the central aims of the seminar is to help you develop your sense of who you are as a scholar, teacher, and member of the profession more broadly, whether you are just post-orals or about to defend your dissertation. Thus, throughout the semester we will engage in exercises such as elevator pitches or the production of creative, collaborative, and / or public humanities projects that will help you expand the universe of professional possibilities and highlight the richness of your potential contributions.

Preparing yourself for the academic job market can be emotionally wrenching, but it can also be exciting. The seminar will serve not only as a workshop but also as a supportive community of scholars, teachers, readers, and writers helping one another envision the work they might do and, at the same time, remember why it matters.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points