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.

• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

Intro to Asian American Literature

As a survey of Asian American literature, this course examines recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
The course has four learning objectives.

First, by the end of the term, you should be able to recognize and explain key aspects of Asian North American cultural and literary representations across the twentieth century.

We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. We’ll examine how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines.

The second section turns to how Asian North American authors use innovative creative strategies to resist cycles of love and fear, especially in the wake of war and conflict in Asia and alongside the rise of the model minority.

The final section examines intimacy, communities, and crisis in forms of migration, diaspora, and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the global refugee crisis to more recent developments in the wake of COVID-19.

Second, you will interpret literary strategies (what literary scholars call “formal strategies”) and their connection to the text’s argument.

A central claim for this course is that cultural productions make debatable claims and arguments, and that one of the ways they do so is through form (such as the brevity of a poetic line and its layout, different narrators or points of view in a novel, or a drama that moves back and forth in time). How do these authors use literature to respond to, critique, or revise cultural representations of Asia and Asians in America? You will learn how to unpack the argument of text, or, more precisely, what you define as the argument of each work. What cultural issue or problem does the text identify? Why? What is its argument regarding this issue? How does the work support this argument? Does it offer any solutions? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

To that end, we will consider all of these texts might be responding to, commenting on, and even working against dominant cultura

• Instructor: Denise Cruz
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

Approaches to Literary Study

Why does literature affect us as it does, why might you want to understand its history, strategies, and meaning, and how exactly do you go about that? This course won’t give you 
the
 answer, because there is no single answer. It will instead point the way toward the multitude of possible answers, giving you a variety of critical tools for exploring these questions, and deepening your powers as a thinker, reader, and writer.
            The course consists of weekly lectures by department faculty members (ENGL 2000) and small weekly seminars with advanced doctoral candidates (ENGL 2001). The lectures will introduce you to texts from across literary history and in various genres (poetry, drama, prose narrative, etc.), giving you an opportunity to learn from and get to know our renowned faculty members. The intimate seminar setting will give you an opportunity to delve further into these texts and techniques, debate their meaning with one another and an expert guide, and engage in exercises that advance your critical writing and interpretive skills, putting into practice what you’ve learned. You will encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty, your seminar leader, and the discipline at large, while learning to expand upon these approaches and make them your own.
            The course is required for English majors and minors (who should take it as early as possible in their Columbia careers), but it is for everyone: advanced students of literature or those new to literary study; committed majors or those still exploring; anyone seeking the excitement and immersion this course offers.
            (
Note
: Students who register for ENGL UN2000 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN2001.)

• Instructor: Molly Murray
  CULPA: 26 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 0 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.

• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

Marxism and Cultural Theory

This course will not offer an intensive study of the writings of Karl Marx. It’s a course in the theory of culture which emphasizes what Marxism has and has not contributed to that theory and what a better cultural theory might require. After laying out some basic propositions of Marxist thought and some issues and challenges associated with them when applied to the study of culture, it proposes to develop conceptual coordinates which will enable students to make sense of recent cultural analysis both inside and outside the Marxist orbit, including competing theories of global capitalism and financial crisis. What are the models of the world which are implicitly appealed to by critics interpreting cultural objects and practices and advocating more or less drastic social change?  What sorts of cultural interpretation do such models authorize?  What are the problematic interfaces between Marxism and other discourses of social justice, like environmentalism, and the models of interpretation to which they appeal?

• Instructor: Bruce Robbins
  CULPA: 35 Wikipedia h-index: 39 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.

• 3 points

Virginia Woolf

This course (essentially identical to the lecture course on Virginia Woolf that I have taught frequently over the past fifteen years) will focus on six novels and one non-fictional book by Virginia Woolf. It will explore multiple questions that are essential to literary study, e.g.: What does it mean to study a single author’s work in chronological sequence, finding both consistency and change? How does an author’s work change over the course of her career in response to larger historical and cultural changes? How does an author decide the course of her career in response to critical responses at the time? In addition, the course will also focus in detail on the inner logic and coherence of each of the books on the syllabus.

• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Staging Pulp

When we speak of genre in film and literature, the word summons images of fantasy, science-fiction, westerns, and horror. But, in theatre, genre instead suggests tragedy and comedy, or narrative tropes like the living room drama and the revenge play. Why this disconnect? Why is it, when compared to other mediums, plays with dragons, spaceships, cowboys, and haunted houses seem so few and far between? In this course, we will explore how theatre’s medium-specific mode of staging genre, while perhaps rare, in fact stands as a unique and invaluable tool for laying bare and deconstructing the tropes and politics of genre, complicating expectations in a way often shunned, but essential for understanding the cultural structures underpinning castles, cyborgs, and six-shooters. We will attend to fantasy, science-fiction, westerns, and horror across media, focusing on theatre as a means of disrupting our understanding of both genre and theatre, coming to our own new understanding of each as inextricably twined.

• Instructor: Charles Green
  Info
• 4 points

US Poetry of the 1960s

Arguably the most consequential decade of the postwar era, the 1960s saw American poetry become a site of radical experiment and political contestation, as longstanding assumptions of white male-dominated culture were placed under unprecedented pressure. This course traces that upheaval across movements—Beat, Black Mountain, Black Arts, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance. Poets to be studied include Allen Ginsberg, Russell Atkins, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, N.H. Pritchard, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, and Jayne Cortez. We will attend to questions of form—breath, the page, sound, performance, and the boundary between poetry and music—within the historical contexts of the Civil Rights, Black Power, feminist, gay liberation, and environmental movements.

• Instructor: Paul Stephens
  Info
• 4 points

Old New York

What was New York City like before the skyscrapers and yellow cabs with which we associate it today? This class explores the long history of New York City and its surroundings through the literatures of the many peoples who have called it home over the centuries. We will read Lenape creation stories, eyewitness accounts of Henry Hudson’s voyage, colonial pamphlets about the earliest slave revolts in North America, and literary fiction and poetry by lifelong New Yorkers including Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. We will follow Dutch explorers and traders in Manahatta, investigate the seedy underworld of blackmail and brothels in the Bowery, survey the financial revolution that turned Wall Street into a center of global capitalism, and get a glimpse of the Gilded Age in the opulent novels of manners that take us from Grand Central to Greenwich Village. To make good use of our city, students will write dispatches from various locations in New York City, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, that look for traces of the past in the present.

• Instructor: Ethan A Plaue
  Info
• 4 points

What Shakespeare Read

In this course we will read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays alongside the sources he used to compose them. We will take a deliberately wide generic perspective when it comes to these sources, reading biographies, histories, prose fiction, and poetry. Our basic aim will be to immerse ourselves in the texts Shakespeare read and responded to as he wrote his plays. Our more ambitious aim will be to gain a more precise understanding of how Shakespeare honed the nature and function of his drama in relation to and against his largely non-dramatic sources of inspiration. Questions we will consider include: What is a source? What is an adaptation? What is a play? What is a play by Shakespeare?

• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 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.

• Instructor: Maura L Spiegel
  CULPA: 40 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.

• Instructor: Austin E Quigley
  Info
• 4 points

PLATO THE RHETORICIAN

Prerequisites: Instructors permission (Seminar). Although Socrates takes a notoriously dim view of persuasion and the art that produces it, the Platonic dialogues featuring him both theorize and practice a range of rhetorical strategies that become the nuts and bolts of persuasive argumentation. This seminar will read a number of these dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Ion, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Menexenus and Republic, followed by Aristoles Rhetoric, the rhetorical manual of Platos student that provides our earliest full treatment of the art. 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.

• Instructor: Kathy H Eden
  CULPA: 19 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.

• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• Instructor: Aaron Ritzenberg
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 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.”

• 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.

• Instructor: Susan Mendelsohn
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

NATURE, RACE, AND INDIGENEITY IN THE U.S

“Nature” is one of the weirdest words in the English language—it can refer to human trait (“it is in her nature”), a nonhuman environment (“we walked in nature”), a divine power (“mother nature”), or a biological process (“nature calls”). Despite—and indeed, because of—these ambiguities, nature has played pivotal roles in the territory that has come to be known as the United States. In various guises, nature has inspired pilgrims, pioneers, and tourists. At the same time, nature has staged struggles between settlers and Natives, whites and racialized peoples, upper classes and working classes. In this seminar, we will learn how nature has brought us together and torn us apart. By engaging with a variety of media—from colonial-era captivity narratives to nineteenth-century abolitionist texts to contemporary Kumeyaay poetry—we will recover conflicting ideas of nature. And by reading in the environmental humanities—including history, anthropology, and literary criticism—we will discover how these ideas have impacted all-too-human identities and more-than-human entities. While our inquiries will take us from prehistory to the present, they will converge on the future: now that we are destroying our ecosystems, extinguishing our fellow species, and altering our atmosphere, is there still such a thing as nature? During the semester, we will navigate this tricky terrain both collectively and individually, with each undergraduate completing a four-to five-page theoretical essay, a fourteen- or fifteen-page research essay, and a natural history mini-exhibit, and with each graduate student preparing a presentation for our end-of-semester conference that they then revise as a seminar paper and/or repurpose by organizing a panel for a national conference.

• Instructor: Carlos Nugent
  Info
• 4 points

Frankenstein and Its Vicissitudes

Overview: This class will carefully and searchingly read Mary Shelley’s 1818
Frankenstein
as well as her 1831 revision, using those two texts as the seeds for a much larger investigation about what the Frankenstein paradigm brought to later American literary and cinematic culture. We’ll look at how Mary Shelley developed the genre of science fiction from nothing, wrote the first recognizable book of horror in the English cannon, pioneering literary philosophical writing in the absence of a clear hero, and used her novel as a mechanism for thinking about reproductive violence, domestic abuse, and the social problem of male loneliness. From there, we’ll examine the Frankenfilms of the 20th and 21st century—many of which are excellent, but many of which are downright offensive—to think about what Shelley’s literary and philosophical paradigm contributed to Anglo-American cinematic discourse about patriarchy, power, sex, class, God, reproduction, fascism, and feminism.

• Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 points

The Protest Novel or Books that Chan

The Protest Novel or Book

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— or what we might call Books that Change the World— 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 works from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, 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, occasionally 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; sexuality, 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.

• Instructor: Sarah Cole
  CULPA: 23 Info
• 4 points

NARRATIVE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

(Lecture). We cant talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Naim, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.

• Instructor: Joseph R Slaughter
  CULPA: 13 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 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.

• Instructor: Robert G O'Meally
  CULPA: 18 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.

• Instructor: Robert G O'Meally
  CULPA: 18 Info
• 3 points

American Transcendentalism

The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Higginson and Emily Dickinson. Through detailed analysis of Emerson’s
Essays
we will try to understand his philosophy as an effort to radically reformulate traditional concepts of identity, thinking, and everyday living, and investigate the politics that guided his philosophical efforts, especially his stance on slavery and his activism against the Cherokee removals. But we will also be interested in his thinking on dreams, visions and mental transports and in order to ask how those experiences come to model his understanding of personal identity and bodily integrity. In Thoreau, we will look closely into ideas about the art of living and his theory of architecture, as well as quotidian practices of dwelling, eating or cooking, as ways to come to terms with one’s own life. We will pay special attention to Thoreau’s understanding of thinking as walking, as well as the question of space vs. time and we will spend a lot of time figuring his theory of living as mourning. With Whitman we will attend to his new poetics and investigate its relation to forms of American Democracy. We will also want to know how the Civil War affected Whitman’s poetics both in terms of its formal strategies and its content. Finally, we will try to understand how ideas and values of transcendentalist philosophy fashion poetry of Emily Dickinson both in its form and its content. We will thus be looking at Dickinson’s famous fascicles but also into such questions as loss, avian and vegetal life and the experience of the embodied more generally.

• Instructor: Branka Arsic
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia 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.

• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Jennifer Wenzel
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 15 Info
• 4 points

World s End: 20th and 21St Century Dys

World's End: 20th and 21s

In this class, we will read a range of ambiguous utopias and dystopias (to use a term from Ursula LeGuin) and explore various models of temporality, a range of fantasies of apocalypse and a few visions of futurity. While some critics, like Frederick Jameson, propose that utopia is a “meditation on the impossible,” others like José Muñoz insist that “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Utopian and dystopian fictions tend to lead us back to the present and force confrontations with the horrors of war, the ravages of capitalist exploitation, the violence of social hierarchies and the ruinous peril of environmental decline. In the films and novels and essays we engage here, we will not be looking for answers to questions about what to do and nor should we expect to find maps to better futures. We will no doubt be confronted with dead ends, blasted landscapes and empty gestures. But we will also find elegant aesthetic expressions of ruination, inspirational confrontations with obliteration, brilliant visions of endings, breaches, bureaucratic domination, human limitation and necro-political chaos. We will search in the narratives of uprisings, zombification, cloning, nuclear disaster, refusal, solidarity, for opportunities to reimagine world, ends, futures, time, place, person, possibility, art, desire, bodies, life and death.

• Instructor: Jack Halberstam
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Modernism, Dance, and Diaspora

How do dancers, poets, and novelists use the resources of their genres to imagine new forms of embodiment and belonging? This graduate seminar brings together recent work in the fields of modernism, dance, and diaspora studies to explore the relationship between theories of movement, space, and dwelling in the literature and drama of global modernity. We will study representations of modern dance in literary works, as well as performances by modern dancers and choreographers, to consider the reciprocity and continuity of forms long associated with expressivity and social change. At the same time, we will chart how such texts become invested in strategic withholding and inexpression, or what performance scholar Tina Post has called “deadpan” aesthetics. Can there be a kind of revelation in concealment—or, conversely, a concealment in the guise of outward projection? At the level of form, how might we understand phenomena that seem to cross disciplinary lines, such as choreographic narration, kinaesthetic empathy, self-talk as social dress rehearsal, or theatrically-populated interior monologue? And how might these insights be brought to bear on the embodied and psychic experience of diaspora, that conundrum of enforced movement that can so often feel like stuckness-in-place?

Weekly readings will include a work of literature and/or dance, critical social theory, and recent literary criticism. In addition to offering students a broad introduction to critical approaches in modernism, performance and Black studies, the course has the larger aim of demonstrating innovative methods at the
intersection
of these disciplines. Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zelda Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Zadie Smith, and James Joyce alongside the performances of Serge Diaghilev, Josephine Baker, Pearl Primus, Ruth Page, Katherine Dunham and Bill T. Jones. Secondary criticism will include works by Toni Morrison, Martin Heidegger, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Anne Anlin Cheng, Katherine McKittrick and Sianne Ngai.

• Instructor: Zoe L Henry
  Info
• 4 points

Worldmaking in the Long Poem

In this seminar we will take as our topic the long poem and the worlds, exterior and interior, that it both perceives and creates. Following some initial conceptual work to pin down the genre (if that’s the right word for it) as it developed before modernism, the heart of the course comes in the close study of three main examples in their entirety:
The Seasons
by James Thomson,
The Task
by William Cowper, and
The Prelude
by William Wordsworth. These major English poems, which date to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are all about growth, and they are in truth really, really long. They just keep growing and growing. They push, you might say, against their finitude. We will confront their too-much-ness and figure out how to think and feel about it, but also how to work with it, how to ride it. From week to week we will ask how the expansiveness of these authors relates on the one hand to their smaller-scale poetic techniques and on the other to their grand social, environmental, philosophical, and spiritual ambitions. The sheer energy these works demand of their readers can (this is the gamble of the long poem) make experiencing them deeply meaningful. In their own time they became tremendously influential models, radically reshaping what poetry could do and be, and they still have much to teach critical readers and creative writers today. Interspersed among the main examples on the schedule will be a few other (shorter!) poems from the same period. Along the way, although our focus will stay on primary texts, we will sample several different works of exemplary criticism. And we will end our semester with a glance ahead to the twentieth-century long poem. Active contributions (in and out of class) to discussion, a short paper, and (of course) a long paper make up the required coursework.

• Instructor: Dustin Stewart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Lanyer, Cavendish, and Hutchinson

Lanyer, Cavendish, Hutchi

This seminar will address the major works of Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Margaret Cavendish (1623-73), and Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81). There are many differences between the three writers: one was a royalist, one a republican and one something in between; one was largely indifferent to religion and the other two were devoted Protestants; two were active in print, one only in manuscript; two were skilled linguists, and one only read English (or so she claimed). Yet they also had a surprising amount in common: all three were actively involved in the central political conflicts of their time and suffered losses, imprisonment, harassment, and/or exile because of their political views; two (Cavendish and Hutchinson) wrote accounts and defenses of (their positions in) the English civil wars (and contributed to political thought and historiography more broadly); two (also Cavendish and Hutchinson) were actively engaged with and contributed to debates in natural philosophy; and all three were astonishingly original, and creative writers of literary, philosophical and polemical texts. Students will discuss many aspects of these three writers’ work, including the books they read as well as those they wrote; the genres to which they were committed (and in which they innovated); the household, local, national and international contexts in which they worked and in which their work was received; and their interlocutors and critics. While the three authors will be the explicit focus of the class, we will also discuss the idea of “the woman writer” - one which deserves our skepticism.

• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 4 points

Third Year Proseminar

This proseminar, which meets alternate weeks for the full academic year, is required for third-year PhD students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The seminar will help you prepare for orals, develop your dissertation ideas, expand your research skills, produce articles for publication, and generally extend your professional skills. While we will read some practical “how to” literature and models, the focus will be on writing, workshopping material, and discussing process (time-management, organization, etc). Both out-of-class assignments and in-class writing exercises should serve to extend your ideas—or shake them loose—and bring you closer to a dissertation that represents your vision, makes others want to read your work, and reminds you why you care. By the end of the year, you will have a polished dissertation prospectus and should have submitted at least one article for publication (or have one close-to-ready for submission). Above all, the seminar offers a supportive community, an opportunity to try out ideas (cooked or still raw), and encouragement from your fellow scholar-writer-thinkers as you progress toward your orals and dissertation.

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

Hitchcock / Theory

In the later 20th century, Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation underwent a significant critical revaluation. No longer viewed as merely the “Master of Suspense,” he—and his work—became central objects of poststructuralist thought,  embraced not only by film theorists but by world-renowned philosophers and critical theorists. This is a course on both Hitchcock’s films and 20th- and 21st-century critical theory. In conjunction with the films, we will read key texts by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Freud, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Rancière, Tzvetan Todorov, Slavoj Žižek (and others). We will develop skills in close cinematic analysis and the parsing of theoretical texts, while exploring keywords in literary, media, and performance theory (narrative, apparatus, ideology, dispositif, subject, performativity, affect, gaze, fetish, frame, screen, theatricality, etc.).

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

Sylvia Wynter and the Question of Litera

Sylvia Wynter & Lit Metho

The work of Sylvia Wynter presents readers with a multi-disciplinary corpus, spanning plays, critical essays, interviews, a novel, poetry, and dance. In addition to her overarching critique of the idea of “Man”, Wynter’s work invites us to rethink disciplinarity, genre, and how critical practice is defined. If we take seriously the creative component of Wynter’s work, the generative capacity and urgency of poesis, how then might we envision the contours and stakes of a “literary method” in the context of her work?  By what means might we read her work, the kind of knowledge it produces by means of the literary, and the alternatives it offers us for thinking through the question of literary method? What, in short, does reading literature do? Does it reproduce complicity with or challenge the kinds of structures Wynter critiques?

Beginning with her essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’” this seminar takes seriously the question of normative forces at work under the rubric of aesthetics to better understand elements at work (poetics, performatives, epistemologies, concepts) and the philosophic, anthropo-centric, ecologic, and racialized topographies that appear. The seminar is divided into three parts: the aesthetic, the performative, and the poetic.

Above all, this course aims to generate
readings
of Wynter’s work and its complex attentions to multiple threads and tensions that constitute and animate modern knowledge.

• 4 points

INTRO TO WRITING STUDIES

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

• Instructor: Nicole Wallack
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 points

Graduate Lecture

Marxism & Cultural Theory

CLEN 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate Comparative Literature 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.

• 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.

• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

Graduate Lecture

Out of the Ordinary

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

Graduate Lecture

Virginia Woolf

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.

• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points