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

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: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 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.
• 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 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 0 points

English Literature 1500-1600: Literature

English Lit. 1500-1600

This lecture course examines sixteenth-century English literature in the light of the new religious, social and political challenges of the period.  Texts, primarily poetry and prose, include lyric poetry by Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and John Donne; sonnet sequences by Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare; early narrative works by William Baldwin and George Gascoigne; works of early English literary criticism; travel writings by Walter Ralegh and Thomas Harriot; as well as longer texts including More’s
Utopia.

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

British Literature 1900-1950

British Lit. 1900-1950

This is a survey course on great works of British literature from around 1900 through around 1950, starting with the late-Victorian world of Thomas Hardy, extending through the
fin-de-siècle
worlds of Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, then into the modernist landscape of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and ending with the late-modernist vision of Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden. The course includes a wide range of social, political, psychological, and literary concerns, and delves deeply into political and moral questions that are always urgent but which took specific forms during this period.

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

Writing AI

The rise of artificial intelligence is transforming how we write, edit, and communicate, in every field of human activity. This course explores the ways AI is reshaping writing practices, from creative storytelling and journalism to technical writing and scholarship.

Students will engage with AI-powered writing tools to understand their capabilities and limitations, examining how they can enhance creativity, streamline workflows, and support research. Discussions will address ethical concerns, such as plagiarism, bias, and misinformation, while hands-on exercises will help students develop strategies for using AI effectively without losing the human, critical element of writing.

• 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.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

Post-1945 American Literature

Post-1945 American Lit.

This course surveys major works of American literature written since 1945. It will situate the analysis of literature against a backdrop that includes key historical events.  We will also consider major literary and artistic movements.  Lectures will emphasize literature in its cultural/historical context, but will also attend to its formal/aesthetic properties. Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and literary and cultural criticism.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 3 points

Early Modern Theater

This course investigates the boldly experimental world of the early modern English theater. The opening of London’s commercial playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century fundamentally changed the nature of popular entertainment, offering eager spectators an array of secular drama for the first time in English history. The playwrights who wrote for these theaters collaborated and competed with each other to produce the bombastic heroes of tragedy, the upstart social climbers of city comedy, and the adventurers of romance, reimagining the possibilities of stage performance in the process. We will read a range of playwrights and dramatic genres in this course, asking how these plays not only spoke to each other, but intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined early modernity. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to the ways that the conditions of early modern stagecraft influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring playgoers’ admiration and adoration, became London’s very first celebrities.

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

How the Ancients Argued: The Global Rhet

Long before Aristotle’s Rhetoric and far from Athens and Rome, rhetoricians were teaching people how to communicate powerfully in politics, the law, and the street. This course surveys the ancient rhetorics of Egypt, China, the Americas, and the Arab world. We will examine a body of primary texts from 2,300 B.C.E. to 1,500 C.E. that teach people to wield language effectively.

• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Mendelsohn
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 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

Theatre and Science in the Age of Evolut

Theatre & Science in Age

From Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God to the horror of the trenches, the turn of the twentieth century appears as a moment when the status of the human needed total reconsideration. Such philosophical and cultural anxieties make their way on stage provocatively in this period. This course dives deeply into the vast, diverse, and complex theatre cultures of London and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, framing it in light of the period’s deep tensions about the human condition propelled by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. We will read theatre textually, materially, and in conversation with scientific discourses of the time, covering a range of social, political, biopolitical, and existentialist questions.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Alice Clapie
  Info
• 4 points

Christopher Marlowe

This seminar course will take a deep dive into the complete works of Christopher Marlowe, the short-lived but massively influential playwright and poet of the 1580s and 1590s.  Marlowe is best known for his innovative plays, including
Tamburlaine
(in two parts),
The Jew of Malta
,
Doctor Faustus
, and
Edward II
.   We will examine these alongside the lesser known
The Massacre at Paris
and
Dido Queen of Carthage,
his poetry (including the erotic “epyllion”
Hero and Leander
), his translations from Lucan and Ovid, and the archival traces of his controversial life.  

Admission to the seminar will be by application; preference will be given to English majors in their senior and junior years, but all are welcome to apply.

• T 8:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 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.
• 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

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic

This course offers an overview of twentieth-century literary modernism through the lens of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of Black artistic and intellectual flourishing loosely concentrated in New York City. Formal innovation, explorations of interiority, the autonomy of the artist, and political radicalism were all hallmarks of the works of Black Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, as they similarly came to define those of artists across the U.K. and Europe. We will begin by foregrounding the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, reading manifestos, retrospective overviews, and signal texts of the period. In what ways—either complementary or competing—did Black artists conceptualize cultural modernity and political legibility? How did Black women understand themselves within these fraught, often masculine frameworks? We will then turn our attention abroad to consider surprising resonances between such authors as Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf; Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot; Wallace Thurman and James Joyce. In the final third of the semester, we will discuss continuities and departures between the Harlem Renaissance and the
Négritude
movement in Paris, a city sometimes referred to as the capital of the Black Atlantic. The course ultimately invites students to think about modernist literatures from a transatlantic, multiracial, and diasporic perspective, appreciating similarities without glossing over important points of tension and conflict.

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

Early American Poetry and Poetics

What was American poetry before Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman? In this advanced undergraduate seminar, we will survey the diverse poetic forms and traditions from the British North American colonies to Dickinson’s and Whitman’s Civil War-era writings. Most class sessions will be devoted to the poetry of a single author, including the Puritan epics of Anne Bradstreet, the colonial satires of Ebenezer Cooke, the antislavery ballads of George Moses Horton, the Ojibwe verse of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and the historical lyrics of Herman Melville. Our course will consider historically-specific theories of poetry and ask how these theories lead to varying conceptions of the aesthetic merit and spiritual and/or social purpose of poetry. Through discussion-based close readings, we will approach these poems with an eye toward the capacities of their formal qualities for absorbing and reflecting the social and political issues of early America.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ethan A Plaue
  Info
• 4 points

Modern Tragedy

Tragedy is a compact form that poses monumental questions. As a dramatic genre, it purports to help us make sense of mourning, justice, sacrifice, acts of bearing witness, citizenship, tyranny, suffering, and grief. Following its emergence in ancient Athens, tragic drama – and, more diffusely, the idea of the “tragic” – has shaped European theater stages for millennia, while also giving rise to a potent philosophical tradition. This seminar picks up with conversations on tragedy around the year 1800, focusing especially on European and American drama of the long twentieth century. In modernity, as we will find, the role of tragedy was fiercely contested: some dramatists and theorists claimed that tragedy could not (or should not) be “modern,” while others assigned it pride of place in the emergent cultures and politics of modernity. Together we will explore these tensions in the works of such playwrights as Goethe, Ibsen, Treadwell, Brecht, Soyinka, and Churchill, as we consider whether tragedy is best understood as form, function, or feeling. In tracing the stories of this genre through many of its canonical modern formations, we will crystallize an understanding of modern tragedy’s affordances, aims, audiences, and effects. Students will engage closely with theories of tragedy in an initial short paper; in addition to this assignment, they will have the option of writing two shorter essays or one longer seminar paper. Students at all levels are welcome to apply. Prior experience reading drama critically is welcome but is not required.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rebecca Kastleman
  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.
• 4 points

JAZZ AND AMERICAN CULTURE

(Lecture). An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of the influence of jazz on the visual arts, literature, and film. The course will also provide an introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies. We will begin with Ralph Ellisons suggestive proposition that many aspects of American life are jazz-shaped. How then might we define this music called jazz? What are its aesthetic ingredients and forms? What have been its characteristic sounds? How can we move toward a definition that sufficiently complicates the usual formulas of call-response, improvisation, and swing to encompass musical styles that are very different but which nonetheless are typically classified as jazz? With this ongoing problem of musical definition in mind, we will examine works in literature, painting, photography, and film, which may be defined as jazz works or ones that are jazz-shaped.” What is jazz-like about these works? Whats jazz-like about the ways they were produced? And how, to get to the other problem in the courses title, is jazz American? What is the relationship of art to nation? What is the logic of American exceptionalism? What do we make of the many international dimensions of jazz music such as its many non-American practitioners? And what do representations of jazz artists in literature and film tell us about what people have thought about the music?

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• 3 points

AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I

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

• TR 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 Industrial Novel

This seminar offers intensive study of “the industrial novel,” a body of mid-Victorian fiction responding to the economic volatility and class conflict that accompanied the rise of industrial production.  In little more than a decade, treatments of this broad concern by a number of major novelists converged in a set of distinctive formal strategies, yet the relatively brief prominence of the form underscores an unusually direct connection with contemporary political anxieties.  The industrial novel presses against the increasingly domestic preoccupations of mid-Victorian fiction, so familiar in “the marriage plot,” but it thereby throws those preoccupations into sharp relief, and more broadly illuminates the construction of Victorian domesticity.   We’ll be especially interested in the intersections of gender and class, the interplay of socio-economic history and narrative form, and the political dimensions of the mid-Victorian novel.  Finally, the topic poses large questions about genre and literary history: does “the industrial novel” denote a genre, and why apply that tag to works that rarely depict industrial labor?   Why not the “social problem” novel, the “domestic novel in Northern dress,” or even “the novel of insurrection”?  Major authors include Disraeli, Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, Dickens, and George Eliot; we’ll also gather in some of the political economy of John Stuart Mill and Marx, as well as the social commentary of Carlyle and Engels.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: James E Adams
  CULPA: 12 Info
• 4 points

HISTORY OF HORROR CINEMA

As has become very obvious in American culture in the past twenty years or so, horror is having a moment. This is particularly true in American cinema, where horror tends to cost less and earn more for film producers than almost any other subgenre. The rise of horror has also, of course, been affected by the rise of perceived and real threats to public and individual safety—pandemics, government malfeasance, ecological catastrophe, etc. But the recent surge of popularity in horror doesn’t mean it’s a “new” genre; far from it, the horror genre extends as far back in American film history as film itself as a medium. This course will look at the entire history of horror cinema, focusing on American film. We will start before the era of the “talkie” movie, and will move forward, taking exemplary films from each decade, until we reach about 2020. The course will think about genre, subgenre, and formal elements of filmic analysis, and will also consider elements of American history and culture that inform and inflect the more concrete, material elements of film.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• 3 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

Global East Asian Performance

What is East Asian performance? Are films like
Blade Runner
(1982) and
Ghost in the Shell
(2017) East Asian? Do platforms like TikTok automatically bring an East Asian aesthetics, if not politics, to the content presented? This class considers the global circulation of East Asian cultures in the modern era from the perspectives of theatre and performance studies. Major countries and areas under discussion include China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan, with occasional references to Asian America and the Sinophone.

• F 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Yizhou Huang
  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 2:10 p.m.-4 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

Graduate Lecture

English Lit. 1500-1600

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

British Lit. 1900-1950

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: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia 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.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

Graduate Lecture

Post-1945 American Lit.

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 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 3 points

Graduate Lecture

Early Modern Theater

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