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

Victorian Relations

Victorian literature, as one of its leading critics writes, is concerned above all with “
relationships
and their representation.”  Relationships between individuals, groups, or nations are of course central to literature from all periods, but they figure with particular prominence in Victorian British writing, for two reasons.  First, the Victorian period follows an era that often fetishized the solitary individual: if Romantic writers frequently focused on figures in isolation, Victorian writers responded by panning out to consider human beings primarily in their social relations.  Second, the later nineteenth century witnessed revolutions in the conceptualization of relations between different classes, races, sexes, and species.  The new ideas were not limited to philosophers or scientists but permeated public discourse to an unprecedented extent.

In this course we will study a representative sampling of Victorian writing about relationships, possibly including such topics as relations between men and women, Britons and others nationalities, humans and animals, or past and present.  In addition we will consider the relation between different literary genres as we compare the way each topic is represented in fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose.

• F 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

Pacifism and the Apocalyptic Imagination

This course examines the evolution of pacifist thought in literature from the interwar years to the dawn of the atomic age. It seeks to study the literature of twentieth-century pacifism as a response to expanding technologies of modern warfare. The course asks the following questions, among others: What shape does pacifist thought take in the atomic age, and how does it compare with interwar pacifism? What similarities or differences are discernible? What role do literary representations of modern warfare play in the evolution of pacifist thought? Does pacifism gain persuasive power through these representations, or do they lay bare its limits? How might one understand pacifism’s conceptual relation to nonviolence, anti-war resistance, and anti-militarism?

The course begins with works by pacifist writers in the interwar years: Bertrand Russell,
Why Men Fight
(1917); the correspondence between Einstein and Freud in 1932; Aldous Huxley, “What Are You Going to Do About It?” (1936) and
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936); Virginia Woolf,
Three Guineas
(1938) and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940); Vera Brittain, “Women and Peace” (1940). The course then considers the evolution of pacifism in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focusing on novels, memoirs, essays, short stories, and films, including the following works: Aldous Huxley,
Ape and Essence
(1948); M. K. Gandhi,
For Pacifists
(1949); Pearl Buck,
Command the Morning
(1959); Alfred Coppel,
Dark December
(1960); Masuji Ibuse,
Black Rain
(1965); Kenzaburo Oe
, Hiroshima Notes
(1965) and
Fire from the Ashes
, ed. (1985); Anand Patwardhan,
War and Peace
(2002, documentary); Howard Zinn (ed.),
The Power of Nonviolence
(2002).

The course encourages students to view selected films probing pacifist and anti-war themes alongside literary and philosophical texts, with a view to grasping the themes’ adaptability across various genres. Students must apply to enrol in the seminar, providing information about year, school, relevant prior coursework, and reasons for wanting to take the course. Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply; prior coursework in literature is strongly recommended.

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

THE NOVEL OF SLAVERY

In this course, we’ll be studying a subgenre of U.S. literature known as “the novel of slavery,” and we’ll be reading fictions by literary artists who attempted, in their various and distinctive ways, to come to terms with the atrocity of human bondage. In the first half of the course, we’ll read authors who wrote in the period before the legal abolition of slavery in the U.S., and whose works made direct contributions to the abolitionist cause. In the second half of the course, we’ll read authors who wrote in the years after the Civil Rights Movement, and whose works treated slavery as a historical phenomenon. But regardless of whether we’re discussing literature from the nineteenth century or the twentieth in our meetings, we’ll always be studying novels that condemn slavery as a legal, moral, and social institution; and that explore the wounds that slavery left upon individual and collective psyches; and that ask whether and how slavery’s tremendous wrongs could ever be redressed.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Austin Graham
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 3 points

Radical Poetics in Seventeenth-Century E

Donne, Herbert, Marvell

This seminar will center on the close reading of some of the most formally complex and intellectually dense lyric poetry written in English - more specifically, the work of the seventeenth-century poets generally deemed exemplary of the English “metaphysical” tradition. We will divide our time more or less equally among three figures: John Donne, the libertine-turned-priest whose poetry spans erotic and devotional extremes; George Herbert, the humble parson whose daring experiments in poetic form can seem uncannily postmodern; and finally Andrew Marvell, whose nickname—“the Chameleon”—gestures both toward the shiftiness of his political affiliations and the radical ambiguity of his poetry. Each week we will undertake the careful analysis of exhilaratingly, exhaustingly difficult poems. Our reading will also include a set of critical or historical supplements, meant to enrich and enliven our understanding of the primary texts under consideration.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Molly Murray
  CULPA: 26 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

The Thirties: Metropole and Colony

The Thirties: Metropole/C

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

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

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

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.
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dustin Stewart
  CULPA: 3 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 4:10 p.m.-6 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.

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

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

AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I

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

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Farah Griffin
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Hollywood's Counterculture Cinema: Movie

MOVIES OF THE 1970S

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

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Maura L Spiegel
  CULPA: 40 Info
• 4 points

THE ASIAN AMERICAN NOVEL

What does it mean to write an Asian American novel? In this seminar, we will explore this question by examining a range of novels written by Asian American authors. I use the term “Asian American” to underscore its political importance as an identity and community formation that consolidated in the late 1960s. These novels we will read were published from the early twentieth century to as recently as earlier this calendar year. Some are bestsellers, prize winners, or have been deemed as pivotal to the development of Asian American literature and its history. Others are not. Some are well known authors; others are newer or emergent writers. Some feature characters who are Asian or Asian American. Others explicitly questions our assumptions and expectations regarding literary and cultural representations of Asians and Asian Americans. Across their work, these authors are nevertheless held together in part by their engagement with transnational relations in Asia and North America, including U.S. expansion across to the Pacific, migration and immigration legislation, labor exclusions and political resistance, and the changing dynamics of the United States in the wake of a so-called global Asian century.

A guiding principle will inform our work: Asian American writers have long been interested in theorizing the novel as an artistic, literary, and political form. While the content of these novels will of course be important, we will also examine how Asian American writers have explicitly experimented with the
form
of the novel as a genre, including romance,
bildungsroman
, hybrid creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, postmodern palimpsest, YA novel, apocalyptic dystopia. To guide us in this goal, we will read scholars who have theorized the novel as a genre, we’ll also situate this work alongside the substantial history of Asian American literary scholarship on the novel.

• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Denise Cruz
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 6 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.

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 4 points

Adorno

One of the avatars of the Frankfurt School and a key architect of modern critical theory, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) cast a long intellectual shadow over the twentieth century and left a prolific body of work whose influence has only grown in recent decades. In this seminar, our aim will to be read some of the central works of this German thinker carefully and collaboratively in order to become conversant in some of his chief concerns, methodological interventions, and theoretical contributions. We will pay special attention to his concepts of history, politics, negativity, dialectics, literature, and aesthetic form, while also developing the habits required to engage with complex theoretical work. Given Adorno’s wide span interests and immense influence, any sustained inquiry into his work will necessarily open vistas onto contemporary critical debates. To that end, we will also be examining interventions and dialogues with Adorno by later thinkers such as Edward Said, Gillian Rose, Fred Moten, and Fumi Okiji.

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

New Classicism

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

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

THE BLUES EPISTEMOLOGY

Music invents socialities and ways of being in the world through its creation and play by communities who respond to various systems of dispossession as well as unique experiences of love and joy. It forms and is formed by new thought and new practices, in the process building alternative stories, archives, and possibilities that remain dynamic, even if rooted. This class will focus on the histories and present of the “Blues epistemology,” which geographer Clyde Woods theorized as a method of reading and analysis that brings race, culture, geography, and political economy together. We will track the epistemology’s origins, performance, and impact throughout various literatures and pay particular attention to its relation to the Blues sounds and Blues people who conceived of it and to whom it continues to call.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Shana Redmond
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

TREES

Trees shadow the human in faceless fashion. They mark of a form of deep-time (like Darwin’s tree of Life), record and respond to ecological devastation and abundance. Symbolic of the strange proximity of the divine, trees figure as alter-egos or doubles for human lives and their after lives (in figures like the trees of life and salvation, trees of wisdom and knowledge, genealogical trees, et al). 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 (Moretti).  As key sources of energy, that is, as food-procurers, wood, and coal (from the Carboniferous period), trees –as we know them today -- are direct correlates with the rise of the Anthropocene.  This course turns to trees as shadows and shade: that is to trees as coerced doubles of the human and as entry ways to an other-world that figures at the limits of thought and language. Part eco-criticism, part philosophy, this course will begin by coupling medieval literary texts with theoretical works, but will expand (and contract) to other time periods and geographic locales.  An undercurrent of the course is the relation of trees to language, knowledge, democracy, aesthetics, indigeneity, colonization, and religion.

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

INTELLECTUALS

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

• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points