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.
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.
-
Instructor:
Eman Elhadad
Info -
Instructor:
Andy Jo
Info -
Instructor:
Shanelle E Kim
Info -
Instructor:
Evelyn A Macpherson
Info -
Instructor:
James T Neisen
Info - 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
Romantic Poetry
This course examines major British poets of the period 1789-1830. We will be focusing especially on the poetry and poetic theory of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. We will also be reading essays, reviews, and journal entries by such figures as Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The class is open to all undergraduate; first-year students and non-English majors are welcome. Graduate students interested in taking the course should email the professor.
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
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
New Suns: Worlding in Black Speculative
New Suns: Worlding Blk Sc
This course takes Octavia E. Butler’s enigmatic expression, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” as a guide for exploring the politics of Black speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. With literary, sonic, visual, and cinematic examples, including works from Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. DuBois, Samuel Delany, Wangechi Mutu, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Saul Williams, and others, this class considers the contexts of possibility for re/imagining Black pasts, presents and futures. Paying particular attention to how Black speculative fiction creates new worlds, social orders, and entanglements, students will develop readings informed by ecocriticism, science and technology studies, feminist, and queer studies. We will consider the multiple meanings and various uses of speculation and worlding as we encounter and interpret forms of utopian, dystopian, and (post)apocalyptic thinking and practice. No prerequisites.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
-
Instructor:
C. Riley Snorton
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
Transpacific Personalities: The Personal
Since the 1974 publication of the first anthology of Asian American writing, Aiiieeeee!, the field of Asian American Studies has been pulled in two different directions, simultaneously trying to articulate a coherent identity of, and place for, Asian American subjects while also articulating this coherence in relation to immigrant labor and history.
This introductory course will survey the way this tension, between personal coherence and collective historical experience, formally characterizes Asian American media and literature since the 1970s, in which the form of the personal essay is critically expanded and brought into conflict with the racialized history of Asian American immigrant experience. Beginning with Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1994) and Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005), this course will furnish students with an understanding of both the successive exclusion acts applied to different waves of East and Southeast Asian immigration to the United States, as well as the ways these exclusion acts produced, and were produced by, expanding forms of anti-Asian American racism. This framework of economic policy and racial form will then be used as a lens to investigate prominent texts across the Asian American canon (as well as outside of this canon) by authors such as Frank Chin, MaxineHong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Theresa Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Wilfrido Nolledo, and Elaine Castillo.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Chris Kelly
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
-
Instructor:
Joseph Albernaz
CULPA: 4
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.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 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, Marguerite Duras and North African feminists to create a gendered and class-sensitive 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 Deeva Gupta
dg3242@columbia.edu
, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
gcs4@columbia.edu
and Tomi Haxhi
th2666@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
Graduate Lecture
World Fiction Since 1965
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Bruce Robbins
CULPA: 35
Wikipedia
h-index: 39
Info
- 3 points
Graduate Lecture
Drama Before Shakespeare
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Alan Stewart
CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info - 3 points
Graduate Lecture
AMERICAN MODERNISM
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Ross Posnock
CULPA: 14
Info
- 3 points
Graduate Lecture
Hist of the English Novel
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
James E Adams
CULPA: 12
Info
- 3 points
Graduate Lecture
Intro to Old English
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Patricia Dailey
CULPA: 8
Info
- 3 points
Graduate Lecture
Mysticism&Medieval Drama
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
-
Instructor:
Eleanor Johnson
CULPA: 20
Info
- 3 points
Graduate Lecture
ROMANTIC POETRY
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
Graduate Lecture
ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.
- 3 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 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Julie S Peters
CULPA: 5
Info
- 4 points