Children s Literature

This is a historical survey of literature (mostly narrative) intended primarily for children, which will explore not only the pleasures of imagination but the varieties of narrative and lyric form, as well as the ways in which story-telling gives shape to individual and cultural identity.  Drawing on anonymous folk tale from a range of cultures, as well as a variety of literary works produced from the late 17th century to the present, we’ll attend to the ways in which changing forms of children’s literature reflect changing understandings of children and childhood, while trying not to overlook psychological and formal structures that might persist across this history.  Readings of the primary works will be supplemented by a variety of critical approaches—psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, and structuralist—that scholars have employed to understand the variety and appeal of children’s literature.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: James E Adams
  CULPA: 12 Info
• 3 points

Shakespeare II

This course covers the second half of William Shakespeare’s career, attending to the major dramatic genres in which he wrote. It will combine careful attention to the plays’ poetic richness with a focus on their theatrical inventiveness, using filmed productions of many of the plays to explore their staging possibilities. At the same time, we will use the plays as thematic springboards to explore the cultural forces – pertaining to, among others things, politics, class, religion, gender, and race – that shaped the moment in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 3 points

Approaches to Literary Study

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2000 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN2001. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.

• F 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• 4 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 0 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 0 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001).  Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction).  Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers.  ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor.  While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 0 points

TRADE AND TRAFFIC WITH EARLY MODERN ENGL

TRADE AND TRAFFIC EARLY M

This lecture course explores England’s sense of itself in relation to the rest of the world in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It will examine the hopes and fears provoked by the trade and traffic between the English and other peoples, both inside and outside the country’s borders, and raise questions of economics, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, immigration, and slavery.  The central materials are familiar and unfamiliar English plays, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Massinger, John Fletcher, and others, which we will study alongside economic treatises, acts and proclamations, and travel narratives.

• MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 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, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and many others, we will situate our discussions around key issues including: the development of new ideas about individualism and community; industrialization and ecology (changes in nature and in the very conception of “nature”); and slavery and abolition.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph Albernaz
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

VICTORIAN POETRY

(Lecture). This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

Restoration & 18th Cent D

Plays and other theatrical experiences in England from 1660-1780, with attention to a wide range of social, cultural and formal questions. We will discuss performance history and theories of acting as well as politics, sex, Shakespeare adaptation, the presentation of self and a number of other topics that remain relevant today. Students with a practical interest in theater are encouraged to enroll, and no prior background in theater or in eighteenth-century literature and culture is expected or required.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Jenny M Davidson
  CULPA: 19 Info
• 3 points

Early Horror

This course will examine the origins and evolutions of horror literature from ancient Babylon to the Early Modern period. We will be examining consistent tropes that span long periods of time, as well as local innovations and idiosyncracies that are particular to a given culture at a given moment. We will be asking what makes for horror—that is, how does horror literature work, and what is it trying to do—as well as why horror is such an enduring modality.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 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.

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

Places for Poetry

This seminar asks how poetry claims places. The poets come mostly from Britain or its former colonies. The poems range from the seventeenth century all the way to the present day, with the majority (around two-thirds of the schedule) drawn from the long eighteenth century. In that period, an age of increased urbanization inside Britain’s borders and increased mobility around its expanding empire, the main distinction that organized cultural conversations about place was the divide between the town and the country. But poems about the virtues of rural life often spoke from a distressed urban perspective, and poems about the dynamism of the city frequently described it from the viewpoint of an outsider or newcomer. What the eighteenth century can teach us about the poetry of place, then, is that it might secretly be poetry of movement, poetry about how one seemingly stable location (or type of location) might pick up and go somewhere else. Starting from this insight, we will wrestle with larger questions about how shareable the poetry of place can be. Does staying faithful to a single place—its grainy specificity, its deep history, its rich tradition—risk making a poem unintelligible elsewhere? To what extent does a place-based poem need to shed its local attachments and try to speak a more universal language? How can a poem communicate its rootedness with people who don’t have roots in the same spot? When is a poem an extension of place, and when is it an escape from it?

Instead of proceeding chronologically, our weekly seminar will largely be arranged by settings that various English, Scottish, Irish, Caribbean, Anglo-Indian, and American poets have evoked. For the first ten weeks of the term, we will move from one type of place to another: from country houses to city streets, perhaps, or battlefields to bridges, hills to dales, walking paths to railway stations, outer islands to outer space. For the final few weeks, we will shift our organization and sample several major poets of place—one or two from the eighteenth century, one or two from the following centuries. Your final project for the class will imaginatively map the poetry of one of the places that you claim or one of the places that claims you.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Dustin Stewart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

John Keats

John Keats (1795–1821) is one of the most beloved of all English writers, a poet of intense sensitivity, imagination, and generosity.  In this class we will read work from across Keats’s brief, meteoric career, devoting significant attention to his early poems as well as to the pieces from his 1820
Poems
for which he is best known.  We will also read a large selection of Keats’s letters, as well as poems, letters, and reviews by Keats’s contemporaries, in addition to a sampling of modern criticism.

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

Archives and Afterlives in Postcolonial

What are archives and why are they a common feature of postcolonial stories? What are the different forms of archives that we encounter in postcolonial narratives and what aesthetic effects do they have on these narratives? By looking at archives that are found in literary texts and literary texts that are found in archives, we will study the different ways that the term 'archive' can be understood: as documents deemed important for posterity, as ephemeral collections of ‘small things’ in surprising shapes and spaces, and as metaphor for the ways in which time and knowledge are organized and experienced. We will consider how archives act as sites where the afterlives of unjust racial pasts persist into the present and take forms both old and new. We will discuss the role of archives in literary pursuits of racial justice as sites that both enable discovery and necessitate loss. As a word that sits on the borders between life and afterlife, past and future, ‘fact’ and fantasy, colonial and postcolonial, 'archive' is a resonant keyword through which many urgent concerns in the study of race and Empire today can be examined. Through our work for this course, we will ask: How might we as literary scholars of the postcolonial respond creatively to the traces and absences of the archive? We will explore archival afterlives in postcolonial works from the 20th and 21st centuries across a range of media including novels, poetry, film. We will also develop some initial forays into hands-on archival research at Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and seek out institutional as well as informal archives that lie beyond Morningside Heights. No prerequisites.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Anirbaan Banerjee
  Info
• 4 points

Afro-Asian Literary Imaginaries

In a gesture of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and spurred on by a wave of anti-Asian violence ignited by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,
Asian American artists and activists recently revived the slogan “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.” Behind this slogan lies a long history of solidarity and
collaboration between members of the Asian and African diasporas who saw their struggles against racial oppression, both on a domestic and global scale, as
deeply intertwined. This course explores the literary dimensions of this rich yet often overlooked history, whose greatest thinkers were often also writers
themselves. Through the study of poetry, novels, drama, and memoir, we will trace the development of “Afro-Asian” literary imaginaries from the early twentieth
century to the present. Far from adopting a uniform approach to the subject, the texts we read will vary in form and content, ranging from the romantic, to the
experimental, to the critical. Our reading throughout the course will be anchored in key historical moments in the history of Black and Asian solidarity and conflict,
from pre-war anti-colonial movements, to the Third World Liberation strikes of the 1960s, to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Together, we will ask what the unique
role of literature has been within this history, and explore the possibilities that literature holds for imagining cross-racial solidarity in our contemporary moment.

• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Mieko I Anders
  Info
• 4 points

Race, Religion, and Early Modernity

Race, Religion, Early Mod

“Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are both products of modernity.”
—Theodore Vial

In this course, we will turn the clock back to
early
modernity, exploring the entanglement of concepts of racial and religious difference in the texts and cultural products of early modern England. Beginning in sixteenth century England, we will explore how a distinctive English Protestant identity was fashioned in relation to various religious and racial others, most notably the Jew, the Ottoman “Turk”, and the Black African. We will then turn to the literatures of encounter, exploring how the categories of race and religion were articulated in travel narratives, ethnographic accounts, and political polemic. Finally, we will turn to the writings of Afro-descended and Indigenous Christians, exploring how religious self-fashioning was performed by these racialized subjects.

Conversations throughout the semester will be attentive to the specificities of the period, whilst also serving to recontextualise and unsettle contemporary categories of racial and religious difference. Seminar readings will primarily consist of primary sources from the period including poetry, prose and drama from England and, in the latter part of the semester, its colonies. These will be supplemented with a variety of textual and non-textual materials, including works of art, historical documents, period-specific scholarship, and contemporary theory.

Keywords: race, religion, empire, travel, colonialism, enslavement, conversion.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Eli Cumings
  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.

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

U.S. Poetry in the Expanded Field Since

U.S. Poetry Since 1960

This course explores postwar poets’ extensive experimentation with new media and hybrid genres. The visual arts and the sonic arts—as well as computer-generated writing—offered inspiration to poets who understood themselves to be working in a context broader than conventional lyric poetry. Poets to be discussed include John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Larry Eigner, Jayne Cortez, Norman Pritchard, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Lilian-Yvonne Bertram. We will also discuss theoretical accounts of the “expanded field” of intermedia arts and cross-genre writing. No prior knowledge of postwar poetry or art is presumed.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Paul Stephens
  Info
• 4 points

GREAT SHORT WORKS OF AMERICAN PROSE

The aim of this course is to read closely and slowly short prose masterworks written in the United States between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, and to consider them in disciplined discussion. Most of the assigned works are fiction, but some are public addresses or lyrical or polemical essays. We will read with attention to questions of audience and purpose: for whom were they written and with what aim in mind: to promote a cause, make a case for personal or political action, provoke pleasure, or some combination of all of these aims? We will consider the lives and times of the authors but will focus chiefly on the aesthetic and argumentative structure of the works themselves.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Andrew Delbanco
  CULPA: 19 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Comics, Health, and Embodiment

Deformed, grotesque, super/transhuman and otherwise extraordinary bodies have always been a central feature of comics.  However, the past ten years have seen a surge of graphic narratives that deal directly with experiences of health and illness, and that are recognized as having significant literary value.  This course will focus on graphic narratives about healthcare, illness, and disability with particular attention to questions of embodied identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and age.  Primary texts will include the work of Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, CeCe Bell, David Small, Allie Brosch, and Ellen Fourney.  We will study the vocabulary, conventions, and formal properties of graphic literature, asking how images and text work together to create narrative.  We will consider whether graphic narrative might be especially well suited to representations of bodily difference; how illness/disability can disrupt conventional ideas about gender and sexuality; how experiences of the body as a source of pain, stigmatization, and shame intersect with the sexualized body; and how illness and disability queer conventional sexual arrangements, identities, and attachments.  While studying the construction of character, narrative, framing, color, and relationship between visual and print material on the page, students will also produce their own graphic narratives.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 4 points

Auden

Poems and prose by W. H. Auden, at length and in depth. To apply for this seminar, send a brief email message to 
edward.mendelson@columbia.edu
 that includes: your year (senior, junior, etc.), the names of some English courses you have taken, and one sentence saying why you want to take the course.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Edward Mendelson
  CULPA: 64 Wikipedia 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

Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative

Lab Lit, Weird Sci, & Spe

This course will focus on literary fiction and film about science, scientists, and scientific culture.  We’ll ask how and why writers have wanted to represent the sciences and how their work is inspired, in turn, by innovations in scientific knowledge of their time.  This is not a class on genre fiction.  Unlike a science fiction class, we will cover narratives in a variety of genres—some highly speculative, and some in a more realist vein—thinking about how literary form is related to content.  We start with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, often considered the first work of science fiction, before moving to works from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including H.G. Welles’s
The Island of Dr. Moreau,
George Schulyer’s
Black No More
, Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith
, Carl Sagan’s
Contact
, Richard Powers’s
Overstory
, and the short stories of Ted Chiang.  We will also watch such films as James Whale’s
Frankenstein
, Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
, Andrew Niccol’s
Gattaca
, and Yorgos Lanthemos’s
Poor Things
. 

In addition to asking how science and scientists are represented in these narratives, we’ll also discuss the cultural impact of such scientific innovations as the discovery of electricity, cell theory, eugenics and racial science, vaccines and immunology, space travel, new reproductive technologies, gene editing and more.  A STEM background is not required, but students will be expected to have curiosity and motivation to learn about science, as well as its narrative representation.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 4 points

Trees

Trees shadow the human in faceless fashion. They mark of a form of deep-time AN record and respond to ecological devastation and abundance. Symbolic of the strange proximity of the divine in numerous different religious and literary traditions, trees figure as alter-egos or doubles for human lives and after-lives (in figures like the trees of life and salvation, trees of wisdom and knowledge, genealogical trees). As prostheses of thought and knowledge, they become synonymous with structure and form, supports for linguistic and other genres of mapping, and markers of organization and reading. As key sources of energy, trees –as we know them today -- are direct correlates with the rise of the Anthropocene. Trees are thus both shadows and shade: that is, they are coerced doubles of the human and as entry ways to an other-world that figure at the limits of our ways of defining thought and language.

By foregrounding how deeply embedded trees are in world-wide forms of self-definition and cultural expression, this course proposes a deeper understanding of the way in which the environment is a limit-figure in the humanities’ relation to its “natural” others. This course assumes that the “real” and the “literary” are not opposed to one another, but are intimately co-substantial. To think “climate” or “environment” is not merely a matter of the sciences, rather, it is through looking at how the humanities situates “the tree” as a means of self-definition that we can have a more thorough understanding of our current ecological, political, and social climate.

Foregrounding an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, this course includes material from eco-criticism, philosophy, religion, art history, indigenous and cultural and post-colonial studies. It will begin by coupling medieval literary texts with theoretical works, but will expand (and contract) to other time periods and geographic locales.

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

Climate Fictions

This course will consider numerous kinds of climate fictions, including, but not limited to, the recent literary category of prose fiction known as “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. In this course, “climate fictions” also refers to a range of ideas, assumptions, cultural narratives, and hypotheses about the Earth’s climate: in other words, frameworks constructed by humans
1
for thinking about (or not thinking about) the climatic conditions of our planetary home. These fictions might include such debatable propositions as “humans can’t change the climate,” “there’s nothing we can do about climate change,” “climate change is something that will happen in the future,” “climate change is something that will happen far away,” or “climate change is only about the weather.” “Climate fictions” also include scenarios and projections of a near-future, climate-changed world, whether those offered by scientists, by writers, or by ordinary people as they contemplate the possible trajectories of their lives and the lives of their descendants.

Thinking among these versions of “climate fictions,” we’ll consider the role of literature and the literary imagination in fashioning, interpreting, and inhabiting them. What work does the imagination do in the world, in grappling both with the worlds that humans have made, and with the boundary parameters of the Earth system that have shaped life on this planet as we have known it? How do cultural and narrative assumptions shape the work of scientists and policy-makers? How can prose fiction help readers engage with the challenges of knowledge, emotion, anticipation, judgement, and action that a warming world will require? How can climate fictions of all sorts help readers try on modes of living and other futures that we do or don’t want—or lull them into thinking that such anticipation is unnecessary or futile?

Thinking together about these questions, we will use the reading list and the seminar meetings to hone our skills of noticing, extrapolating, speculating, proposing, listening, disagreeing, concurring, and cooperating in the difficult work of confronting fear and doubt and of finding a path toward truth and perhaps even hope. You will be asked to read carefully and curiously, to test your ideas in regular informal writing and weekly seminar discussion, and to develop more polished thoughts (or dreams!) in

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jennifer Wenzel
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 15 Info
• 4 points

BEOWULF

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem
Beowulf
.  We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship.  As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts.

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

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE

ENGLISH TRANSLTNS OF THE

English translations of the Bible from Tyndale to the present.

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

FILM NARRATIVE (SEMINAR)

FILM NOIR

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

This course will examine the noir tradition in American film between 1941 and 1959. We begin with noir's origins in two turn-of-the-century literary works about Empire, Inc and the divided self of the modern era, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Stevenson's " Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". We will consider the international roots of Hollywood noir, many of whose directors were European refugees from Hitler, and its depictions of the femme fatale, l'homme fatale, and the world métropole, particularly NYC and LA. Readings will include Marxist, postcolonial, and gender theory, and film history. Films will include "The Killers", "Double Indemnity", "The Big Heat", "The Lodger", "Gilda", "Sunset Blvd", "Sweet Smell of Success", and "Vertigo".

Application instructions: Email Professor Ann Douglas (
ad34@columbia.edu
) with the subject heading "Film Noir application". 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

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.

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

Reading the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1803), in which the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony threw off their chains and defeated the European colonial powers, was a seismic event in modernity. As an “unthinkable” revolution that was silenced by later (according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot) history yet was ubiquitously discussed at the time, the Haitian Revolution calls into question the very meaning of an “event” and challenges the fundamental organizing terms of the modern era. In this class, we will study this revolution, its representations, and its legacies into the present. We’ll pay special attention to the archive that records the experiences of the Haitian revolutionaries themselves, from poems, songs, and plays to political texts, and we’ll also be interested in reactions from Romantic-era writers in Europe like William Wordsworth and Victor Hugo. How was the revolution written and expressed by its participants, and what can we learn from the depictions it solicitated in those reading about the event from afar? In the last weeks, the course will also take up important historical, literary, and philosophical treatments of the Haitian Revolution in the twentieth-century.

This course is open to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students. As a 4000-level seminar, you’ll be expected to produce a research paper related to the course material at the conclusion. Some reading knowledge of French would be helpful but is not required.

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

Erasmian Humanism

Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536), arguably the single most influential public intellectual of the sixteenth century, was responsible for the educational and religious reforms that changed European culture in the early modern period and that are in many quarters still with us today. This course will feature the rhetorical assumptions and methods that shaped these reforms with an eye to the commonalities that narrowed the gap between the exercises of the schoolmaster, the efforts of the preacher, and the accomplishments of the literary artist.

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

Ralph Ellison

In this seminar we will read virtually everything by Ralph Ellison—leaving aside for now the posthumous “novel” published as
Three Days Before the Shooting.
We will concentrate on this writer’s highly influential insights and perspectives as an essayist, short story writer, and novelist. We also will investigate his recently discovered work as a photographer, and his uses of “photographic imagery” in his writing. Above all we will delve deeply into his aesthetic values as well as his political philosophy or--to use a keystone Ellisonian word--his
stances.
As we read Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction (and look at his photographs), let us be watchful for Ellison’s positions on current cultural/critical questions: parody and pastiche; sound technologies and art (musical and literary); “planned dislocations of the senses”; the importance of place—region, city or country, nation; internationality; complex definitions of individuality and community; race; vernacular art and culture; and the role of the politically engaged artist. How to track a line from Ellison’s early Marxism to his later more centrist political positions? What do today’s readers make of his strong American nationalism? How have political conservatives made use of Ellison? Beyond “stances,” what are the key terms for unpacking the world according to Ellison?

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

ADVANCED OLD ENGLISH

The course description will remain the same.

• Instructor: Patricia Dailey
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 4 points

JAZZ & THE LITERARY IMAGINATN

This course will focus on the interwoven nature of jazz and literature throughout the 20th and early 21st century. We will consider the ways that jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures, from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to African American drama and contemporary fiction. Our readings and musical selections highlight creative ideas and practices generated through the formal and thematic convergences of jazz and literature, allowing us to explore questions such as: How do writers capture the sounds and feelings of different musical forms within fictional and non-fictional prose? In what ways might both music and literature (and/or their points of intersection) represent ideas of black identity and consciousness? How can certain musical concepts and terms of analysis (improvisation, rhythm, syncopation, harmony) be applied to practices of writing? How does music suggest modes of social interaction or political potential to be articulated in language?

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

Writers on Writing: Fictions, Theories,

This seminar examines how 20th and 21st century writers have staged in their fiction, nonfiction, and multi-genre works ideas about why, how, and for whom they write. What do writers have to say in their essays and public talks about the strategies they use to sit down to their writing, when everything else in the world seems to be requiring their attention elsewhere? How is the figure of the writer and their often-fraught relationship with their work depicted in fictional accounts and in the complex retrospection of memoir and essays? In what ways do writers tether their goals for their work to the needs and experiences of others in communities of which they are a part or that they wish to reach? The course begins with essays and talks that answer the question, “Why I Write” by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, bell hooks, Stephen King as well as philosophical explorations through Helene Cixcous’s
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
. These ideas about writers’ motivations will provide launching points for how each of us can begin to theorize our own motives as writers. We will use these ideas as a frame for reading novels that center the figure of the writer including Yōko Ogawa’s
The Memory Police
, Macedonio Fernández’s
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
, Jenny Offill’s
The Department of Speculation
, and Colm Tóibín’s
The Master
. Through the work of essayists and memoirists, Samulet Delaney, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, we will track how writers wrestle with the political, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of their identity as writers. Our final weeks will invite us to explore writerly advice and strategies for getting the work done. We will listen to podcasts featuring historians, such as Drafting the Past, explore revision strategies in John McPhee’s
Draft 4
, consider our writerly routines with excerpts from Maria Popova’s literary blog, The Marginalian and distill ideas about the work of research and writing from talks and essays by writers who have influenced each of us at Columbia and beyond. Students will produce their own autotheory of writing to accompany a piece in any genre that they will be drafting over the course of the semester.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicole Wallack
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 points

MASTERS COLLOQUIUM

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

Medieval Translation and the Vernacular

Med Translation and Verna

What was the role of translation within medieval literary culture? How did translations among vernacular and cosmopolitan languages contribute to establishing those categories? This graduate seminar will marshal translation theory and practice, medieval and modern, to investigate language use and translation in the medieval West. With reference to current debates in the field, we will ask what ideas about translation and translations themselves can tell us about the multilingual ecosystem of Europe from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. We’ll read some of the most well-known works of medieval literature as well as more obscure texts. Though the course centers on medieval literature in English, French, and Latin, it also aims to instill the critical skills of literary criticism: debate, comparison, and keen-eyed evaluation of others’ arguments, both in class discussions and written assignments. Students will be invited to write a final paper that connects the investigations of the course to their own areas of interest.

Reading knowledge of (Old) French, Latin, and Middle English will come in handy, as will any other foreign language competencies – but these are not prerequisites.

• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Hannah Weaver
  Info
• 4 points

RADICAL COMPOSITIONS

The course will examine literary experiments in prose and poetics by twentieth century and contemporary writers. These explorations in narrative, documentary poetics, visual graphics, textual assemblage, archival fabulation, and autotheory are critical to writing the experiences of the undocumented, the colonized, the blackened, the subaltern, the queer, the interstitial, and the disposable and to unlearning our ways of thinking and writing.  Topics range from documenting the undocumented to histories of colonial war and bombing, from autofiction to fourth person narration.

This is a combination seminar-workshop course invites its participants to study and to produce works of radical composition. How do critical questions shape and engender new modalities of writing? How have writers radically challenged notions of genre, disciplinary frames, representational possibilities, and reading practices? What techniques have they deployed or disregarded and what other mediums have they drawn from to produce these works? How have these works produced radical new forms of knowledge, documentation, or the book-as-object?

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 4 points

PERFORMANCE THEORY

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: William B Worthen
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Narrative

This graduate course offers an in-depth exploration of contemporary narrative theory, examining how stories function across different genres, media, and cultural contexts. Students should expect significant engagement with scholarship on narrative, borrowing from research in literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, film and game studies. Topics covered include story, plot, schema, time, space, character, agency, setting, frame, event, and action while also addressing the role of narrative in shaping personal and collective identities.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Dennis Tenen
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

Film, Media, and Law

This course starts with three premises. Law plays a significant role in shaping the expressive media that represent our world to us. Those media in turn shape law and our experience of it, effectively forming us as legal subjects. But law and media may also act as conflicting domains of judgment, —spaces for the enactment of alternative visions of truth, authority, and justice. The course approaches questions of the relationship between these domains from the perspective of the humanities and social theory. This is not a class in which you will learn entertainment law, media regulation, or intellectual property as fields of legal practice. It is for those who wish to think historically, critically, and theoretically about film, media, and law.

As a workshop, the course has two aims: to explore new work on film, media, and law in conversation with scholars who are at the cutting edge of the field; and to collectively develop our own work in this vein. The guest scholars who will share their recent work with us represent the field’s diversity and richness. Their scholarship emerges from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, art and architecture, history, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, theatre and performance, and (of course) film and media studies and law. What they share is a commitment to thinking about how law and media reflect, inflect, or challenge each other. The class will also serve as a workshop for developing student projects and professional skills with an eye to conference participation, thesis development, and possible publication. The last session will be dedicated to a mini-conference / workshop / celebratory finale in which students present their projects.

Enrollment is limited, but graduate students in any field and at any stage of study are welcome (as auditors or for credit), along with any other members of the scholarly community interested in attending.

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

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND DECOLONIZATION

This course will examine the major debates, contested genealogies, epistemic and political interventions, and possible futures of the body of writing that has come to be known as postcolonial theory. We will examine the relationships between postcolonial theory and other theoretical formations, including post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, subaltern studies, Third Worldism, Global South Studies, and Decolonial Theory. We will also consider what counts as “theory” in postcolonial theory: in what ways have novels, memoirs, or revolutionary manifestos, for example, offered seminal, generalizable statements about the (settler) colonial and postcolonial condition? How can we understand the relationship between the rise of postcolonial studies in the United States and the role of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era? How do postcolonial theory and its insights about European and American imperialism contribute to analyses of contemporary globalization?

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Joseph R Slaughter
  CULPA: 13 h-index: 13 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.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Aaron Ritzenberg
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 4 Info
• 4 points