Children s Literature

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

Introduction to Latinx Literature and Cu

Intro to Latinx Lit & Cul

In the US, Latinxs are often treated in quantitative terms—as checkmarks on census forms, or as data points in demographic surveys. However, Latinxs have always been more than mere numbers: while some have stayed rooted in traditional homelands, and while others have migrated through far-flung diasporas, all have drawn on and developed distinctive ways of imagining and inhabiting the Americas. In this course, we will explore the resulting range of literature and culture: to understand how Latinxs have resisted and/or reinforced settler colonialism and racial capitalism, we will survey two centuries of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, performance, music, visual art, and more. With our interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, we will consider why Latinidad has manifested differently in colonial territories (especially Puerto Rico), regional communities (especially the US–Mexico borderlands), and transnational diasporas (of Cubans, of Dominicans, and of a variety of Central Americans). At the same time, we will learn how Latinxs have struggled with shared issues, such as (anti-) Blackness and
(anti-)Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, citizenship and (il)legality, and economic and environmental (in)justice. During the semester, we will practice Latinx studies both collectively and individually: to enrich the professor’s lectures, the teaching assistants’ engagements, and our in-person discussions, each student will complete a reading journal, a five-page paper, a creative project, and a final exam.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Carlos Nugent
  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

Intro to Asian American Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Denise Cruz
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

Approaches to Literary Study

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

• F 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Molly Murray
  CULPA: 26 Info
• 4 points

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

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

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Margarida de Assis
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• Instructor: Alice Clapie
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• Instructor: Ramathi H Bandaranayake
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• Instructor: Lauren S Brown
  Info
• Instructor: Claudia G Grigg Edo
  Info
• 0 points

Staging Early Modern London

This lecture course examines the performances through which early modern London (c. 1558-1642) “staged” itself: at the public and private theaters, on the street in civic and royal rituals, and in popular entertainments.   In so doing, we will examine how the capital city’s sense of itself came to be shaped by its various performances – its relationship with the crown, with the country, with strangers and foreigners – and how key sites (the “liberties,” the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Thames, Covent Garden, Hyde Park) came to hold meaning for London audiences. 

We will be reading texts by dramatists including Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Middleton, and James Shirley, as well as less studied texts.

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

THE WOW , THEN AND NOW

THE WOW THEN AND NOW

What “wows” us? How is it related to both a sense of the grand and of the small? Of the sacred and the unthinkably devastating? Of the mundane and the unique? This introductory course looks at this question by means of religion (mysticism), aesthetics (the sublime), the psychedelic, and the poetic in terms of how they condition and enable these experiences, often in joint manner. We begin by navigating through a wide range of medieval mystical texts (poetry and prose) ranging in date from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth centuries and explore how wonder, transport, and awe become articulated, often through the trope of love. The second half of the course expands to situate mystery and enchantment in relation to borderline experiences in contemporary contexts. We will explore what these borderline experiences entail, what kind of meaning they promise, and how they isolate or assimilate individuals, mark people and language, inhabit and alter our embodied selves. In addition, we will see how the legacy of mysticism has permeated later traditions of enchantment and its situatedness in contemporary culture, whether it be in the prevalence of love in pop lyric, rave culture, contemporary psychedelic experiences, the sacrality of nature, the mystification of state power, or even just the role of poetry and art in filling a spiritual role in our present. Throughout our readings, we will confront the question of what mysticism and enchantment mean, what they promise and how either can be accessed, how they might center or de-center the human (affirming or displacing the Anthropocene), how women’s and men’s mystical texts compare, and how “literariness” impacts these experiences. How does poetic form or literary prose shape the nature of borderline experience – mysticism included? What do we make of the insistence on bodily experience and how does it relate to biography? Where do we find the language and tropes of mysticism in contemporary culture (psychedelics, fascist propaganda, philosophical meditation) and to what end?

Mystical texts will include works by St. Paul, St. Augustine, Origen, Beatrice of Nazareth and her hagiographer, Hadewijch of Brabant and William of St. Thierry, Marguerite d'Oignt and Guigo II, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, but also works by Huxley and Bataille; all other texts will, however, be read in modern English translation. No prerequisites necessary. Please note that even while

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia Dailey
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 3 points

American Modernism

This course approaches modernism as the varied literary responses to the cultural, technological, and political conditions of modernity in the United States.  The historical period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II forms a backdrop for consideration of such authors as Getrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes.  Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, and contemporary essays.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 3 points

BILDUNGSROMAN: THE COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL

The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, marriage and vocation. It is a form marked by conflicts and tensions: between the individual and society, between idealism and realism, rebellion and compromise, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action.

The reading list spans works from Europe and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works, with historical events, and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Lectures will address: What fosters human development and what thwarts it? What is a self and what is a life course? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? And how has this literary genre itself changed and developed over time?

This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~200 pages per week, and doing the assignments.

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• 3 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

Medieval Encounters

Though often thought of in mainstream culture as closed, conservative, and backwards, the medieval world was actually a place where the circulation of people and ideas resulted in generative encounters. This course will consider texts that brush up against the unfamiliar. We’ll read travelogues containing Western views of the East
and
Muslim views of Christian society, plus texts of questionable literary merit
and
difficult, artful poetry. Via our course readings, you’ll cross borders into strange lands with unaccountable customs, experience the possibilities of the marvelous, and interact with the afterlife and its denizens. Along the way, you’ll be having your own
medieval encounter
with worldview(s) that require contextual analysis to recuperate.

• W 8:10 a.m.-10 a.m.
• Instructor: Hannah Weaver
  Info
• 4 points

Poetry and New Media

This course examines how poets have engaged with emerging media in the postwar era. We will trace the intersections of poetry with photography, television, video, visual and concrete poetry, and digital environments, and we will consider how shifts in media reshape ideas of authorship, reading, and the materiality of language. Readings to include Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, Alison Knowles, Hollis Frampton, N.H. Pritchard, Gil Scott-Heron, Jayne Cortez, Bernadette Mayer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tan Lin, Glenn Ligon, Jordan Abel, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Nick Montfort.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Paul Stephens
  Info
• 4 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.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 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 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Mendelsohn
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

Language Rights and Wrongs

This course examines public battles over language in American and invites you to situate your linguistic history in the larger context of thesebattles. We will ask, Is Northern English more correct than Southern English? Are Black English speakers disadvantaged in the job market? Should English be our national language? What should the language of instruction be in public schools? Do nonbinary students have a right to determine the pronouns their professors use to address them? These language rights battles play out in Congress, the courts, and classrooms. At stake are voting access, employment rights, learning opportunities, and the pathway to American citizenship.

The first half of the semester will introduce you to sociolinguists’ understandings of language differences. We will put their research in conversation with the lived experiences of diverse Americans by exploring a number of literacy narratives. And as a class, we will carry out research to study the language attitudes and experiences of members of our own community. The second half of the semester features a series of case studies—legal cases, school board fights, academic battles, legislation—that will lay bare the surprising disagreements between what sociolinguists understand about language and what laypeople passionately believe about it. The goal of the course is to equip you to address language rights in ways that account for research and people’s lived experiences.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Mendelsohn
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

Queer Politics and Literature in the tim

On or about 1981, sex changed. The New York Times reported a “rare cancer observed in 41 homosexuals,” a condition that the CDC would name “AIDS” in 1982. HIV/AIDS transformed the shape of queer politics. It encouraged coalitional organizing that necessarily responded to the interlocking nature of race, gender, sexuality, and class. In this course, we will examine literature, film, visual art, performance, theory, and political actions produced during the crisis and in its wake. We will analyze the aesthetic and political strategies artists and activists used to respond to the epidemic. Our texts will be diverse, ranging from diaries and notebooks that chronicle life with AIDS to poems and memoirs that memorialize those who were lost. We will read queer theory and critical essays to enrich our primary readings. Writers and artists under consideration include Gregg Araki, Samuel R. Delany, Tory Dent, Gran Fury, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Essex Hemphill, Gary Indiana, Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, Larry Kramer, Marlon Riggs, Sarah Schulman, and David Wojnarowicz. Students will have the opportunity to visit an archive to examine artists’ journals and, as a final project, embark upon a research-based curatorial project.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Connor E Spencer
  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.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Eli Cumings
  Info
• 4 points

New Suns: Worlding in Black Speculative

New Suns: Worlding Blk Sc

This course takes Octavia E. Butler’s enigmatic expression, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” as a guide for exploring the politics of Black speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. With literary, sonic, visual, and cinematic examples, including works from Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. DuBois, Samuel Delany, Wangechi Mutu, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Saul Williams, and others, this class considers the contexts of possibility for re/imagining Black pasts, presents and futures. Paying particular attention to how Black speculative fiction creates new worlds, social orders, and entanglements, students will develop readings informed by ecocriticism, science and technology studies, feminist, and queer studies. We will consider the multiple meanings and various uses of speculation and worlding as we encounter and interpret forms of utopian, dystopian, and (post)apocalyptic thinking and practice. No prerequisites.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
  Info
• 4 points

Early American Horror

Buried alive. Driven mad with guilt. Dissolved into a vast, anonymous universe. These are some of the terrors that this undergraduate seminar will address as we explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical dimensions of early American horror. How did Puritan, Gothic, and other early American horror writers complicate cultural attitudes towards the unthinkable, the cruel, and the perverse in works of supernatural horror? What do Gothic fiction’s enduring tropes—such as haunted houses, doppelgängers, and sentient machines—reveal about the massive social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, including the expansion and intensification of slavery, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the economic transition to industrial capitalism? And what might early American horror fail to capture about these underlying political realities? Our historical attention to race, labor, and gender will enable us to reconsider canonical American horror literature and illuminate the reliance on early American literary tropes in contemporary horror films for representing the uniquely disturbing experiences of modern life.

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

Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well

Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s
Phaedo
to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them.

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

VIRGINIA WOOLF

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

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 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

The Book Review: History, Theory, Practi

What is criticism? And what (or who) is a critic? How does a critic write
now
? This seminar is an approach to these questions through an investigation of the common currency of literary-intellectual life: the book review. It is intended for young writers interested in the world of reviewing— and criticism, literary journalism, the magazine— and is three things at once: a history of 20th and 21st century criticism (exploring the work of major critics past and present); a theoretical exploration of how the literary field has been, and is now, structured; and a practicum in review-writing. Our focus will primarily be the quickly mutating life of public literary criticism in American magazines from WWII to the present. We will read figures such as Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and others, but most of our time will be spent reading significant critics of the past 5-10 years; we will also read three novelistic treatments of the lives of critics and writers; and some time will be devoted to in-person discussions with current editors and writers in NYC about the conditions of their work.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 4 points

The Afro-Feminist Novel

What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms? 

The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision.   

The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937); Ann Petry’s
The Narrows
(1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s
The Salt Eaters
(1980); Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
(1987); and Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
(2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
(1899) and Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
(1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice.

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

MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS

Ibsen, Pinter, and Parks

The course will trace the playwriting careers of Henrik Ibsen, Harold Pinter, and Suzan-Lori Parks, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their evolving aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the contested 20C trajectories of modernism and postmodernism. History in modernism and the history of modernism have become much-debated concepts, and these playwrights variously confront the challenges of looking back in time to facilitate looking forward. The course examines, in that context, the status of different kinds of history; the claims of family, friendship, and community identifications; the contributions of often disruptive intruders; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays’ potential as instruments of cultural intervention.
Application Instructions: 
E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen, Pinter, and Parks seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken (if any), 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.

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

HIST OF LITERARY CRITICISM:PLATO TO KANT

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

Gender and Resistance in Early Modern Li

This class will focus on early modern literature’s fascination with the relationship between women, gender, and political resistance in the early modern period. The works we will read together engage many of the key political analogies of the period, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. These texts also present multiple forms of resistance to gendered repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways.

Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, witchcraft and murder pamphlets, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (
Othello
,
The Winter’s Tale
, and
Gallathea
), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie Crawford
  CULPA: 24 Info
• 4 points

Technologies of Modern Drama

TECHNOLOGIES OF MOD DRAMA

This seminar will consider theatre intermedially, taking up its use of dramatic writing as one, only one, of its determining technologies. In the first half of the semester we will use a series of philosophical questions—tools vs. technologies, techne vs. medium—to consider several dimensions of modern theatricality as technologies: of gender and genre, of space and place, of the body and its performance. After spring break, we will use the terms generated to consider a series of topics specifically inflected by the design and practice of modern theatricality. Students will each write one longer essay, and will have the opportunity to receive feedback on a draft, if desired.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: William B Worthen
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

CANTERBURY TALES

(Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention. We will consider the conditions—both historical and aesthetic—that informed Chaucer’s motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period. Our ultimate project will be the assessment of the Tales at once as a self-consciously “medieval” production, keen to explore and exploit the boundaries of literary convention, and as a ground-breaking literary event, which set the stage for renaissance literature.

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

Staging the Middle Ages: Medievalism and

Medieval Opera

The Middle Ages have long been a source of inspiration for composers of opera. Since the midnineteenth century, mystery plays, troubadour lyrics, enigmatic tapestries, and Arthurian romances have all been showcased on the operatic stage; the last 30 years, in particular, have seen a spike in interest in reenergizing medieval culture for contemporary audiences. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in medieval literature and/or the history of lyric theater, this course excavates the medievalist turn in opera, from Wagner to the present day. We’ll ask questions about the nature of intermedial adaptation, the effect of staging in constructing or dispelling medieval allusion, the historically contingent politics of musical antiquarianism and revival, and the enduring appeal of the Middle Ages in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Along the way, we’ll read medieval texts from England, Germany, and Occitania, analyze recorded performances of musical works, visit medieval tapestries at the Cloisters, and take a trip to a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s
Tristan
und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• 4 points

Brave New World and Its Afterlife

Brave New World and After

This course is an intensive study of Aldous Huxley’s influential novel,
Brave New World
(1932). It aims to introduce students both to the context of Huxley’s world and the extensive reflections it spawned on the reimagining of what Anthony Burgess called “the perfectibility of man” conducted as a “scientific programme.” If
Brave New World
has entered the lexicon as a moniker for totalitarian overreach and mind conditioning, the novel merits closer examination for the unique means by which it achieves its effects, ranging from radical social engineering to the management of desire. Among the many questions the course addresses are the following: What are readers to make of the inversion of norms that identifies the World State with the acme of modernity and the “savage reservation” with a discredited past that includes concepts like the family? Does this inversion obscure the standpoints from which a critique of the World State can be made? How does Huxley unsettle the terms of analysis of the novel’s politics? 

These questions, among others, are posed as learning tools for approaching the novel, the context in which it was written, and the broader influences it exerted. The syllabus assigns several weeks of reading
Brave New World
alongside relevant secondary criticism, with a view to encouraging students to probe different critical perspectives and identify evolving paradigms that amplify the novel’s cross-disciplinary engagements. Examples of the questions that students are encouraged to address are: Can the World State’s project of control through pleasure effectively eliminate feeling while requiring sensation? Is the technocratic manipulation of time (through the organization of workers’ bodies and labor) undone by a necessary recourse to the eternity-promising drug
soma
?

How is
Brave New World
both a futuristic view of a dominant world order, which is carefully produced by social engineering and conditioning, and a depiction of a subversive counterculture, uprooting the norms transmitted across generations?  

The syllabus includes adjacent works, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We
(1924), viewed as a direct predecessor to
Brave New World
, George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), and Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
(1962). Students will read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
to determine whether its

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

PRISON LITERATURE

Prison literature—poems, plays, memoirs, novels, and songs written in prison or about prison—constitute a significant part of American literature. Prisons expose many of the systemic inequalities of American life, above all those based on racism and the enduring legacies of slavery. Using the tools of critical race theory, feminism, and class analysis, this course will explore the forms of cultural expression that have emerged in relationship to the American prison experience. Though the course will touch on the rise of convict leasing, chain gangs, and work farms as part of the penal system under Jim Crow, the main focus will be on developments in the U.S. prison system and in prison literature since the 1960s, roughly from the prison writing of George Jackson, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X to the outpouring of contemporary fiction and poetry about prison life by Jesmyn Ward, Colin Whitehead, Rachel Kushner, and Reginald Betts. This is the era of what Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow,” the rise of mass incarceration, the partial privatization of the penal system, and the growth of supermax facilities.

Among the questions we will explore together are these: What tools and techniques do writers use to construct the prison experience? What are the affordances offered by various genres (drama, autobiography, poetry, the novel) for exploring the prison system and the systems of oppression that converge at that site? Does some literature of incarceration perpetuate damaging discourses about “felons,” or does it revise and complicate stereotypes and narratives about incarcerated individuals? How do narratives involving change, conversion, growing up, or being defeated operate in various genres of prison literature? What role do mourning, witnessing, testifying, and resistance play in such writing? What is the imagined audience of various genres of prison writing, that is, for whom is it written? What ethical and political demands does such writing make on us as readers, citizens, activists?

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

MASTERS COLLOQUIUM

• Instructor: Rebecca Kastleman
  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.

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

Sociology of Literature

This graduate seminar approaches literature as a social practice—a network of relations among writers, editors, institutions, technologies, and readers. Drawing from literary studies, sociology, and anthropology, we trace the life cycle of the literary work: from the writer’s workshop and the archive, through the institutions that publish, circulate, and preserve it, to the interpretive communities and fan cultures that sustain it.

Core readings pair theoretical frameworks (Bourdieu, Becker, Williams) with empirical ethnographies and case studies (Childress, Radway, Jenkins). The course concludes by examining co-authorship and conspiracy as collective forms of storytelling that test the limits of individual authorship and belief.

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

Third Year Proseminar

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

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 1 points

U.S. Higher Education: History, Present

In this seminar we will discuss past, present, and future challenges facing colleges and universities and their constituencies.  The course may be taken for credit or audited.

Topics include the origins of the modern research university; problems of equity and access in the post-secondary educational system; the place of teaching in graduate training; the changing character of humanistic scholarship; the role of colleges and universities as engines of—or obstructions to—social mobility; past and current challenges to intellectual inquiry and academic freedom.

We will hear from visiting speakers on these topics as well as on questions regarding possible career choices for graduate students facing a shrinking market for traditional tenure-track teaching positions.

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 4 points

TEACHING WRITING:THEORY & PRAC

Prerequisites: 
the instructor’s permission. (Seminar). This course aims to contribute to your professional development as a teacher of writing. While we will focus on how to help undergraduates write argument-driven essays, the materials we will read and the teaching practices we will explore are designed to support your development as a teacher of writing across disciplines and genres. By the end of this seminar, you will learn the goals and structure of writing courses, the principles that inform their design, and the kinds of materials used in such courses. Your successful completion of this course would reflect a baseline interest in, and understanding of
, 
Writing Studies and its pedagogies, necessary preparation for any instructor in a writing program. You may take the course either for full seminar credit, which would require an extended final seminar paper, for an R credit (for doctoral candidates and MAO candidates, only), or for Pass/Fail (for MFA candidates, only). To apply: Please contact Dr. Nicole B. Wallack (
nw2108@columbia.edu
) with a short email in which you describe your previous experiences in teaching writing and/or studying writing pedagogy, your field study at Columbia, and what questions are of interest to you when you think about what it means to teach and learn writing at the college level.

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

Queer Theory

Recent scholarship in queer theory speaks of “bad education” and “ugly feelings,” “beautiful experiments” and “poor queer studies.” In this survey of mostly recent queer theoretical work we will read a range of texts that debate the use, the abuse and the uselessness of queer theory in an era of anti-intellectual policies aimed at both critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. While Lee Edelman, in
Bad Education
, insists that queer theory has nothing to teach us, Paul Preciado in
Dysphoria Mundi
proposes that the whole world is ailing from a shared dysphoria. Meanwhile, at the intersections of Afro-Pessimism and queer theory, Calvin Warren proposes that to speak of Black trans identities is impossible given the negative ontologies that pertain to Black personhood. Working through oppositions between optimism and pessimism, utopia and dystopia, good and bad feelings, beauty and ugliness, we will ask: What constitutes the ethical in queer theory and how does queer theory approach the good, the bad and the beautiful? At stake here are questions about aesthetic experimentation and politics and unpredictable links between beauty and power, alternative subjects and domination, and bodies and language.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jack Halberstam
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Gilles Deleuze: Thinking for Our Time

This course is organized as an intensive reading into works of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s work seems to becoming ever more present and influential. Scholars from various disciplines rely on his thoughts to rethink contemporary world. Deleuze’s thought is a big presence in literary theory, aesthetics, ethics, political theory, race and gender studies, affect studies, film studies, architecture, design, music and even animal studies. This influence is not easy to understand since Deleuze’s work is famously difficult and occasionally obscure; that’s because, as he himself often explained, one can’t simultaneously think and explain why he is thinking what he is thinking. High velocities of thought do not agree with a slow speed of expository writing. Thus, the task of the course will be to unpack some of the most difficult texts of Deleuze and to bring them in relation with the concepts he and Guattari proposed in
Thousand Plateaus
, perhaps their most famous and influential book. We will start with several works related to history of philosophy (to Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche) to unearth from them Deleuze’s theory of affect. We will then move to his most difficult texts, such as
Difference and Repetion
and
The Logic of Sense
, with a focus on his novel theory of subjectivity, passive synthesis, contemplation, and incorporeal events. This background will enable us to better access
Anti-Oedipus
and
Thousand Plateaus
, two texts with which we will spend significant amount of time, focused on concepts such as becoming, intensive and disjunctive syntheses, haptic space, etc. Additionally, we will pay special attention to Deleuze’s theory of baroque and concepts such as point of view and fold. After that we will move to his work in cinema, painting and literature and we will finish with
What is Philosophy
?, trying to elucidate such concepts as earth, brain and vitalism.

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

Graduate Lecture

VICTORIAN POETRY

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

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

Graduate Lecture

AMERICAN MODERNISM

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Rachel Adams
  CULPA: 16 Info
• 3 points

Graduate Lecture

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

• MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• MW 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia Dailey
  CULPA: 8 Info
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 Info
• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• 3 points