LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing. This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL UN3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken as early as possible in a students career. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

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

LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM)

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3011 must also register for ENGL UN3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL UN3001. The seminar both elaborates upon the topics taken up in the lecture and introduces other theories and methodologies. It also focuses on training students to integrate the terms, techniques, and critical approaches covered in both parts of the course into their own critical writing, building up from brief close readings to longer research papers.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Shanelle E Kim
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• Instructor: Alina Shubina
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• Instructor: Ali Yalgin
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• Instructor: Andrea P Penman-Lomeli
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• Instructor: Aidan S Levy
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 0 points

Ulysses

The seminar will look at the structure of the novel, its plan, with special attention paid to ‘The Odyssey’, but also to the variations in tone in the book, the parodies and elaborate games becoming more complex as the book proceeds. We will examine a number of Irish texts that are relevant to the making of ‘Ulysses’, including Robert Emmett’s speech from the dock, Yeats’s ‘The Countess Cathleen’ and Lady Gregory translations from Irish folk-tales.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Colm Toibin
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

ENGLISH LITERATURE 1500-1600

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Kathy H Eden
  CULPA: 19 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

BRITISH LITERATURE 1900-1950

Brit 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

SHAKESPEARE II

(Lecture). Shakespeare II examines plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, primarily a selection of his major tragedies and his later comedies (or “romances”).

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

Unruly Women in Early Modern Drama

Unruly Women in EarlyMod

Concentrating on the drama of early modern England, this course will focus on women who behave badly. Some of these characters cheat, lie, and murder, while others perfect the guise of seeming compliance; some brazenly flout the structures that aim to contain them, while others are subtler in their subversion. We will use these plays to investigate what is by turns exciting, threatening, and frightening about these unruly women, paying attention to the ways that they are punished and sometimes rewarded. We will also attend to the resources of theatrical form, especially the early modern use of boy actors to play women’s parts, to ask how the conditions of staging uphold or undercut the plays’ ideological messages. Finally, we will supplement our reading of this drama with other historical and cultural texts from this period—pamphlets, advice literature, poems, court cases, and ballads—in order to get a better sense of the plays in relation to early modern gender, sexual, and political norms, many of which were crucially different from our own.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lauren E Robertson
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

HOW WRITERS THINK

The spell cast by a captivating novel or elegant research can lead us to imagine that great writing is a product of the author's innate genius. In reality, the best writing is a product of certain not-very-intuitive practices. This course lifts the veil that obscures what happens in the minds of the best writers. We will examine models of writing development from research in composition studies, cognitive psychology, genre studies, linguistics, ESL studies, and educational psychology. Our classroom will operate as a laboratory for experimenting with the practices that the research identifies. Students will test out strategies that prepare them for advanced undergraduate research, graduate school writing, teaching, editing, and collaborative writing in professional settings. The course is one way to prepare for applying for a job as a peer writing fellow in Columbia’s Writing Center.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Nicole Wallack
  CULPA: 7 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

Out of Her Mind: American Women Writing,

American Women Writing 17

This course explores how American women writers who suffered from depression, disability, bodily pain, or social marginalization, used the environment and its literary representations to redefine the categories of gender, ability, and personhood. Prior to their inclusion into the public sphere through the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment which in 1920 granted women the right to vote, American artists had to be particularly resourceful in devising apt strategies to counter the political and aesthetic demands that had historically dispossessed them of the voice, power, and body. This course focuses on the women writers who conceptualized their own surroundings (home, house, marriage, country, land, island and the natural world) as an agent that actively and decisively participates in the construction and dissolution of personal identity. In doing so, they attempted to annul the separation of the public (politics) and the private (home) as respective male and female spheres, and in this way they contributed, ahead of their own time, to the suffragist debates. Our task in this course will be to go beyond the traditional critical dismissal of these emancipatory strategies as eccentric or “merely aesthetic” and therefore inconsequential. Instead, we will take seriously Rowlandson’s frontier diet, Fuller’s peculiar cure for her migraines, Wheatley’s oblique references to the Middle Passage, Jewett’s islands, Ša’s time-travel, Thaxter’s oceans, Hurston’s hurricanes, and Sansay’s scathing portrayal of political revolutions. We will read these portrayals as aesthetic decisions that had—and continue to have—profound political consequences: by externalizing and depersonalizing what is commonly understood to be internal and intimate, the authors we read collapse the distinction between inside and outside, between the private and public—the distinction that traditionally excluded women from participation in the public life, in policy- and decision-making.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Vesna Kuiken
  Info
• 4 points

AMERICAN LITERATURE & CULTURE

MOD AMER LIT: BEAT GENERATION

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. (Seminar). Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) with the subject heading The Beat Generation. 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 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Ann Douglas
  CULPA: 10 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.

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

American Transcendentalism

The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman 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.

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

LITERARY NONFICTION

This course is about “creative” or “literary nonfiction”: writing that deploys techniques usually associated with literature to tell stories about actual events, people, or things. Over the course of the seminar, we will investigate the nature of the genre, looking closely at the work of some of its greatest practitioners to analyze how they convey their meaning and achieve their effects. We will ask why writers might choose to use literary techniques to write nonfiction, and discuss the ethical issues the genre raises. At the same time, the seminar is a place for you to develop your work in a supportive and thoughtful community of readers and writers.

Application instructions: to apply, please email Professor Peters (peters@columbia.edu) the following: name, year, school, major, a few sentences on why you want to take the course, and a short piece representing your writing at its best. (It may be fiction or nonfiction, and there is no minimum or maximum length, but choose a piece whose first few sentences show the quality of your writing!)

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

The Lost Generation

In this course we’ll study literature by “The Lost Generation,” the celebrated cohort of U.S. writers who came of age during the First World War and went on to publish their major works during the heady days of The Jazz Age and the doldrums of The Great Depression. The authors we’ll read will include Barnes, Dos Passos, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, Loos, McKay, and Toomer, and we’ll talk about their relations to the major aesthetic movements of the 1920s and 1930s: Modernism, The Harlem Renaissance, and The Literary Left. Our primary focus, however, will be on how these writers depicted and expressed the alienation of the young during this period. We’ll be learning about a rising generation of Americans who felt out of step with their times and ill-suited to their places, and we’ll be reading books about rootlessness and expatriation, masking and passing, apathy and radicalism, loneliness and misanthropy, repression and derangement, and several other preoccupations of these drifting, wandering, “lost” artists.

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

A Pre-History of Science Fiction

This undergraduate seminar course traces a possible pre-history of the genre we now know as science fiction.  While science fiction is routinely tracked back to the nineteenth century, often to
Frankenstein
or
The Last Man
by Mary Shelley, this course looks at some earlier literary writings that share certain features of modern science fiction: utopian and dystopian societies, space travel, lunar travel, time travel, the mad experimental scientist, and unknown peoples or creatures. While the center of this course features texts associated with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century (by Bacon, Kepler, Godwin, and Cavendish), it ranges back to the second century Lucian of Sarosota, and forward to the early nineteenth century with novels by Shelley.

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

INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). As the great imperial powers of Britain, France, and Belgium, among others, ceded self-rule to the colonies they once controlled, formerly colonized subjects engaged in passionate discussion about the shape of their new nations not only in essays and pamphlets but also in fiction, poetry, and theatre. Despite the common goal of independence, the heated debates showed that the postcolonial future was still up for grabs, as the boundary lines between and within nations were once again redrawn. Even such cherished notions as nationalism were disputed, and thinkers like the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore sounded the alarm about the pitfalls of narrow ethnocentric thinking. Their call for a philosophy of internationalism went against the grain of ethnic and racial particularism, which had begun to take on the character of national myth. The conflict of perspectives showed how deep were the divisions among the various groups vying to define the goals of the postcolonial nation, even as they all sought common cause in liberation from colonial rule. Nowhere was this truer than in India. The land that the British rulers viewed as a test case for the implementation of new social philosophies took it upon itself to probe their implications for the future citizenry of a free, democratic republic. We will read works by Indian writers responding to decolonization and, later, globalization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Beginning as a movement against imperial control, anti-colonialism also generated new discussions about gender relations, secularism and religious difference, the place of minorities in the nation, the effects of partition on national identity, among other issues. With the help of literary works and historical accounts, this course will explore the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society in a globalized era without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. Writers on the syllabus include Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Mahasweta Devi, Bapsi Sidwa, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu ) with the subject heading Indian Writing in English 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.

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

Troilus and Criseyde

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

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

Global Adaptations of Shakespeare

Shakespeare is often considered a touchstone of “universal” values and ideas, and yet his work has been robustly adapted/rewritten/blown apart/creatively appropriated by people across the world who remake his plays to serve their own visions. This course will introduce some of the debates about adaptation and appropriation in modern Shakespeare studies by looking at three plays—Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Twelfth Night—and some of the many adaptations springing from those works. Who owns Shakespeare? How radically can a play be refashioned and still be considered in conversation with his work? Is it useful to divide adaptations into those that resist or write back against Shakespeare and those that display a less conflicted relationship to his authority? What political work do adaptations do in the contexts in which they were written? What happens to those local roots and contexts when productions and films enter global networks of distribution and interpretation? How does a change in medium, say from theater to film to comic book, affect the appropriation process? We will take up these questions in regard to adaptations created in regions as different as India, Iraq, Mali, and Canada. No prior Shakespeare coursework is required, though some knowledge of his plays is preferable. Assignments include two short papers, an oral presentation, and brief weekly responses to each adaptation.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Jean E Howard
  CULPA: 12 Info
• 4 points

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS (SEM)

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

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

Jane Austen

This seminar offers intensive study of the career of Jane Austen, including important recent criticism.  We’ll be especially interested in the relations between narrative form and the social dynamics represented in her fiction.  We’ll try to cover all six of the (completed) novels, but we can adjust our pace in response to the interests of seminar members.

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

MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS

IBSEN AND PINTER

The course will trace the pattern of the evolving theatrical careers of Henrik Ibsen and Harold Pinter, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their emerging aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the trajectories of modernism and postmodernism and examining, in that context, the emblematic use of stage sets and tableaux; the intense scrutiny of families, friendships, and disruptive intruders; the experiments with temporality, multi-linearity, and split staging; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays' potential as instruments of cultural intervention. Two papers are required, 5-7 pages and 10-12 pages, with weekly brief responses, and a class presentation. Readings include major plays of both writers and key statements on modernism and postmodernism.
  Application Instructions: 
E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen and Pinter 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 SENIOR ESSAY

Prerequisites: the departments permission. This course is open only to those who have applied and been accepted into the departments senior essay program. For information about the program, including deadline for application, please visit http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/senior-essay-program.

• Instructor: Molly Murray
  CULPA: 26 Info
• 3 points

POETRY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

This course will focus on twentieth century poetry written by authors of African descent in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The readings will allow us to cover some of the most significant poetry written during the major black literary movements of the century, including the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and the Black Arts movement. In particular, the course will be designed around a selection of
books
of poetry by black writers. We will thus spend a substantial amount of time reading each poet in depth, as well as discussing various strategies for constructing a volume of poetry: thematic or chronological arrangements, extended formal structures (suites, series, or montages), historical poetry, attempts to imitate another medium (particularly black music) in writing, etc. We will use the readings to consider approaches to the theorization of a diasporic poetics, as well as to discuss the key issues at stake in the tradition including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Brent H Edwards
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Swift and the Moderns

Deep immersion in the satirical writings of Jonathan Swift, whose bleak representations of the human animal feel profoundly modern despite Swift’s wishful alignment with a world of the classics besieged by modernity.  The initial sweep of the class brings to life the battle between ancient and modern learning that raged in Europe c. 1700 by way of prose satires including “The Battel of the Books,” “An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity” and the indescribable text – arguably the most interesting and complex thing written in English in the entire eighteenth century –
A Tale of a Tub
. Additional readings include selections from Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Descartes, Rochester, Pope, La Mettrie. The middle third of the class centers Swift’s best-known book-length satire,
Gulliver’s Travels
, attending closely the formal workings of irony and the satirical mode but also contextualizing Swift’s writing with selections from Thucydides, Montaigne, Rousseau, Gibbon, Freud, Orwell, Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Scarry. The final third, an exploration of Swift’s twentieth-century legacies, begins with “A Modest Proposal” and related texts by Defoe and Malthus, then focuses on language, violence and representation in works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Primo Levi, Kurt Vonnegut and W. G. Sebald. No prerequisites other than a commitment to reading Swift seriously, writing short frequent assignments and making yourself wholly intellectually and emotionally present in class.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 3 points

ENGLISH LITERATURE 1600-1660

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

WORLD'S END: 20th/21st CENTURY DYSTOPIAN

No future, there’s no future, no future for you…or me…What happens after the end of the future? If England’s dreaming in 1977 looked like a dead-end, how do we dream of futures in a moment so much closer to the reality of worlds’ end? 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.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Jack Halberstam
  Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Romanticism

This course is designed as an overview of major texts (in poetry and prose), contexts, and themes in British Romanticism. The movement of Romanticism was born in the ferment of revolution, and developed alongside so many of the familiar features of the modern world—features for which Romanticism provides a vantage point for insight and critique. As we read authors including William Blake, Jane Austen, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and many others, we will situate our discussions around the following key issues: the development of individualism and new formations of community; industrialization and ecology (changes in nature and in the very conception of “nature”); and slavery and abolition.

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

Young Romance

The literary mode we call “romance” has been enormously popular and influential from its origins in Hellenistic antiquity to current science fiction, and at all levels of textual ambition from popular culture to canonical literature.  Within this mass of material, one constant element is romance’s encounter with boundaries.  This course will explore such boundary moments in texts from the 5th to the 20th centuries: boundaries and transgressions of desire (romances of marriage and adultery), of time (the reimagining of antiquity), of national foundation, of geography (settings in a fantasy east), of gender, and of class, indeed the boundary of the human and the monstrous.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher C Baswell
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 3 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.

• MW 5:40 p.m.-6:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph R Slaughter
  CULPA: 13 h-index: 13 Info
• 3 points

Victorian Faith, Form, and Poetry

Faith and the troubling of faith were defining features of life in Victorian Britain, and many of
the greatest poems of the period are fully understandable only in light of contemporary religious
debates. In this course we will study those poems and those debates, considering how
developments both in science and in biblical textual scholarship led to a loosening of the old
forms and rituals of Christian worship on one hand, and to a rededication to those forms on the
other. We will read a selection of the most influential Victorian poets, some canonical and some
now overlooked – including Keble, Newman, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning,
Tennyson, Swinburne, and Hopkins – together with the writings of contemporary theologians
(Paley, Strauss, Feuerbach) and scientists (Lyell, Chambers, Darwin). The course is intended for
advanced undergraduates, preferably with some background in some aspect of its content, and
for graduate students (who may arrange with the professor to ensure that the course fulfills
degree requirements). Undergraduates should apply to the professor (e.gray@columbia.edu)
with a 1-2 paragraph email describing themselves (including relevant courses taken) and their
interest in the course. Graduate students are asked to email the professor to express their interest,
in order to help determine probable enrollment.

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

AMERICAN LITERATURE-POST 1945

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Ross Posnock
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 3 points

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II

(Lecture). This survey of African American literature focuses on language, history, and culture. What are the contours of African American literary history? How do race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect within the politics of African American culture? What can we expect to learn from these literary works? Why does our literature matter to student of social change? This lecture course will attempt to provide answers to these questions, as we begin with Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Richard Wrights Native Son (1940) and end with Melvin Dixons Loves Instruments (1995) with many stops along the way. We will discuss poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fictional prose. Ohter authors include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcom X, Ntzozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. There are no prerequisites for this course. The formal assignments are two five-page essays and a final examination. Class participation will be graded.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Farah Griffin
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Literature in the Age of AI

In this course we will consider the long history of literature composed with, for, and by machines. Our reading list will start with Ramon Llull, the thirteenth-century combinatorial mystic, and continue with readings from Gottfried Leibniz, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Butler. We will read "Plot Robots" instrumental to the writing of Hollywood scripts and pulp fiction of the 1920s, the avant-garde poetry of Dada and OULIPO, computer-generated love letters written by Alan Turing, and novels created by the first generation of artificial intelligence researchers in the 1950s and 60s. The course will conclude at the present moment, with an exploration of machine learning techniques of the sort used by Siri, Alexa, and other contemporary chat bots.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Dennis Tenen
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 3 Info
• 3 points

The Literary History of Atrocity

The Literary Hist of Atro

Sometime around the publication of Garcia Marquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, novelists who wanted to make a claim to ethical and historical seriousness began to include a scene of extreme violence that, like the banana worker massacre in Garcia Marquez, seemed to offer a definitive guide to the moral landscape of the modern world. This course will explore both the modern literature that was inspired by Garcia Marquez’s example and the literature that led up to this extraordinary moment—for example, the literature dealing with the Holocaust, with the dropping of the atomic bomb, with the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, and with the Allied bombing of the German cities. It will also ask how extraordinary this moment in fact was, looked at from the perspective of literature as a whole, by inspecting earlier examples of atrocities committed in classical antiquity, in the Crusades, against Native Americans and (in Tolstoy) against the indigenous inhabitants of the Caucasus. Before the concept of the non-combatant had been defined, could there be a concept of the atrocity? Could a culture accuse itself of misconduct toward the members of some other culture? In posing these and related questions, the course offers itself as a major but untold chapter both in world literature and in the moral history of humankind.

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

19TH CENTURY EUROPEAN NOVEL

The European novel in the era of its cultural dominance.  Key concerns: the modern metropolis (London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois narrative (
parvenus
, adulterers, adolescents, consumers) and bourgeois consciousness (nostalgia, 
ressentiment
, sentimentalism, ennui); the impact of journalism, science, economics. Authors to be drawn from: Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

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

HISTORY OF HORROR

This course will take a
longue durée
approach to one of the most widely-attested, and least studied, genres in the western canon: horror. We will take as an orienting assumption the idea that horror is a serious genre, capable of deep and sustained cultural, political, and historical critique, despite its contemporary status as “pulpy” or “pop culture.” We will ask what horror is as an affective and cognitive state, and we will also ask what horror means as a genre. We will ask how horror gets registered in narrative, drama, and in poetic form, and we will address how horror evolves over the centuries. Indeed, the course will range widely, beginning in the early 14th century, and ending in the second decade of the 21st. We will explore multiple different sub-genres of horror, ranging from lyric poetry to film, to explore how horror afforded authors with a highly flexible and experimental means of thinking through enduring questions about human life, linguistic meaning, social connectedness, connectedness with The Beyond, scientific inquiry, and violence. We will explore a series of through-lines: most notably that of cultural otherness, with Jewishness as a particularly archetypal other, thus the pronounced treatment of Jewish literature throughout the course. Other through-lines will include the ideas of placelessness, violence toward women, perverse Christian ritual, and the uncanny valley that separates humans from non-humans. Ultimately, we will try to map out the kinds of social, political, and historical work that horror can do.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• 3 points

MASTERS COLLOQUIUM

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

FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT IN THE LITERATURE

FREEDOM & CONSTRAINT-EARL

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English writers debated the nature of freedom on a number of fronts:  in politics, proponents of the individual rights of the subject challenged monarchical authority; in religion, antinomian Protestants challenged the limits of liturgy and church hierarchy; in the household, advocates of “companionate marriage” challenged the traditional subordination of women, and libertine writers challenged restrictive sexual mores (all of these challenges, needless to say, were met with counter-challenges).  This seminar will read works of English poetry and prose in dialogue with multiple, intersecting, and occasionally conflicting contemporary theories of liberty and its limits.  A central aim of this course will be to trace this engagement formally, generically, and structurally – that is, we will consider freedom and unfreedom as principles of aesthetics and poetics, as well as politics and ethics.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Molly Murray
  CULPA: 26 Info
• 4 points

Ambitions and Accomplishments of Contemp

One ambition of the so-called “big ambitious novel”—a genre often described as masculine—has been to introduce society's public or historical dimension into the novel, a genre which has often been seen (and not without reason) as better suited to representing private emotional and familial relationships. That was the complaint of critic James Wood about Zadie Smith’s debut novel
White Teeth
in 2000.  In Smith, it was arguably not just an ambition, but an accomplishment, and the same can be said of American fiction during the last two decades. The formal innovations it has required and the thematic impulses it has mobilized repay close critical attention. Giving them that attention, and figuring out the right sort of attention, is the primary goal of this seminar. Along with it, however, the seminar also aims to extend the list of this fiction’s forms and contents, connecting back to recent classics like Pynchon and Foster Wallace but also looking hard at recent fiction which seems to be breaking new ground, morally and politically, formally and tonally.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Bruce Robbins
  CULPA: 35 Wikipedia h-index: 39 Info
• 4 points

Chorus and Collectivity

For whom does the dramatic chorus speak? In this graduate seminar, we track the figure of the chorus in drama, theater, and performance from antiquity to modernity, investigating how the chorus represents collectivity and enacts new social forms onstage. The chorus, as we’ll find, can be an instrument of tyranny or of transformation, depending on the members who comprise it – whether they are an assembly of elders (Sophocles’s Antigone), a gathering of survivors (Euripides’s The Trojan Women), a cadre of revolutionaries (Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother), a crowd of athletes 2 (Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play), or a digital network of chattering AI machines (Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer). Our seminar attends to how the chorus shifts across historical, geographic, and cultural contexts: from ancient Athens to postwar Germany, and from American mass culture to decolonizing movements in the Caribbean, the chorus has proven to be a remarkably flexible and resilient element of live art. The course offers graduate students a broad introduction to canonical works of dramatic literature both ancient and modern, while also featuring lesser-known plays and productions by emerging artists. For the first two-thirds of the term, our sessions will juxtapose a dramatic text with a work of social theory (by thinkers including Nietzsche, Simmel, and Goffman), as well as at least one scholarly essay. Our broader goal in the course is to develop fluency in critical methods at the intersection of drama, philosophy, and social theory. In this course, that is, we approach theater as not only responsive to traditions of social thought, but also generative of new social practices and collective habits of body and mind. In addition to regular weekly assignments, students will complete one short essay and one seminar-length paper at the end of the term.

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

Clarissa

Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's
Clarissa
took eighteenth-century readers by storm; it has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the period. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel
Pamela
and one of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through
Clarissa
in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading; topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. etc.

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

Literature and Temporality: Reading, Wri

In his classic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E.P. Thompson argued that the transition to industrial modernity in the decades around 1800 marked a shift in the very experience and “inward notion of time.” This graduate seminar will take the elasticity of time—in both its experience and its expression—as a starting point to explore a host of aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions related to temporality. While we’ll have one foot in the long Romantic period and the age of revolutions (the era Thompson discusses), the course will, as it only appropriate, range over time periods and milieus up to the present. The class will have a strong theoretical component, visiting a number of important theorist and paradigms (e.g., Marx, Benjamin, Wynter), but will also investigate literature as a distinct mode of
telling
time, with particular attention to poetry and drama. Conceptual terrain we might explore includes revolt and revolution, festivity and the ordinary, genre and history, work and slavery, collectivity and individuation, seasonality and ecology, and more.

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

Writing the Irish Revolution: Yeats, Syn

‘Writing the Irish Revolution’ is a course that sets out to interrogate what the literature of witness could mean, how it could range from O’Casey’s plays – some of which were performed even as the violence raged outside a theatre run by Lady Gregory and Yeats – to Yeats’s own poems that were filled with both argument and ambivalence. And could range also from private diaries written in the heat of the moment to subsequent testimony composed with deliberation.

The course examines one strand in the Irish Revolution that was the Irish Literary Renaissance, and it studies how literary texts – poems, translations, plays, travel writing – created an atmosphere in Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century that led in ways both direct and oblique to insurrection. The outcome of such scrutiny should include a recognition of the porous, unstable nature of the literary text in a colonial crisis, in a time of deep political ferment.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Colm Toibin
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

August Wilson

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

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

THE EPISTEMOLGY OF EDWARD SAID

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Stathis Gourgouris
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

LITERARY-CULTURAL HISTORY

US HIGHER ED:HIST & PROSPECTS

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 4 points

American Sympathy

This seminar will examine the complex relationship between literature and emotion, focusing especially on sympathy—a word contested by historians, philosophers, and critics. In a country shaped by individualism and capitalism, what role does sympathy play in politics and the literary imagination? By studying sympathy in American literature—focusing especially on 19th-century sentimentalism—we’ll examine how works written to portray and evoke feeling functioned as powerful social and political forces. We’ll read some of the most popular American fiction ever written as well as more obscure works, and we’ll study the philosophy that informed a sentimental worldview. We’ll explore the legacy of American sentimentalism, studying the backlash against sentimental literature and investigating the ways that sentimental tropes lasted into the twentieth century and beyond. Throughout the course, we’ll read from philosophers and critics who debate the political potential of sympathy—arguing to what extent sympathy releases revolutionary force or fosters political quietism.

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

Reading Political Fiction

This course will attempt to confront the question of political fiction in its broadest scope by reading texts at the two ends of the spectrum: the majesty of W.E.B Du Bois's epic style in his final fiction: the Black Flame Trilogy; and the disseminated incoherence reactive to extreme violence in Diamela Eltit's 
The Fourth World
, for which we will have her friend Jean Franco's 
The Rise and Fall of the Lettered City 
as critical support.  Together, we will also try to think of our reading practice as required by the texts, rather than a means to control them.  Class presentations will be focused on documentary research.  The final colloquium will be focused on attracting the imaginative attention of classmates as audience.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Gayatri C Spivak
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

TEACHING WRITING:THEORY & PRAC

Prerequisites: the instructors permission. (Seminar). This course aims to contribute to your professional development while preparing you to teach University Writing, Columbia’s required first-year writing course. By the end of this course, you should have a basic grasp of the goals and structure of University Writing, the principles that inform its design, and the kinds of materials used in the course. While the course has an immediate goal—to prepare you for your fall teaching assignment—it aims simultaneously to enrich your teaching in the broadest sense. Your fall University Writing syllabus, as well as your lesson plans and homework assignments for the first eight classes, are due for review on August 1, 2016. This course will give you opportunity to prepare these materials throughout this semester with the support of the UWP directors, senior instructors, and advising lecturers. This course is the first of your ongoing professional development obligations as a UW instructor. You must successfully complete G6913 to teach in the UWP. Every subsequent semester, you will be required to attend a staff orientation, attend at least one workshop, and meet with your mentor and advising UWP director. All instructors new to the UWP must take this 1-credit, ungraded course during the fall of their first year of teaching. The course is intended to guide instructors through their first semester and emphasizes the practical application of the knowledge and expertise developed in G6913. Successful completion of the course is required for continuation as a UWP instructor.

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