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.
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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.
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Instructor:
Julie Crawford
CULPA: 24
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.
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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.
- None None-None
- 0 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.
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:
Ross Posnock
CULPA: 14
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
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
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
New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, H
The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine
Partisan Review
on Astor Place. Although usually regarded as male dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time. Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary; Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection
The Company She Keeps
; Susan Sontag’s debut
Against Interpretation
(1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book
On Photography
(1977) she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Ross Posnock
CULPA: 14
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
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
MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS
The course will trace the pattern of the evolving theatrical careers of Henrik Ibsen and Harold Pinter, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their emerging aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the trajectories of modernism and postmodernism and examining, in that context, the emblematic use of stage sets and tableaux; the intense scrutiny of families, friendships, and disruptive intruders; the experiments with temporality, multi-linearity, and split staging; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays' potential as instruments of cultural intervention. Two papers are required, 5-7 pages and 10-12 pages, with weekly brief responses, and a class presentation. Readings include major plays of both writers and key statements on modernism and postmodernism.
Application Instructions:
E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen and Pinter seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.
Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Austin E Quigley
Info - 4 points
THE SENIOR ESSAY
Prerequisites: the departments permission. This course is open only to those who have applied and been accepted into the departments senior essay program. For information about the program, including deadline for application, please visit http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/senior-essay-program.
- M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Jenny M Davidson
CULPA: 19
Info
- 3 points
HIST OF LITERARY CRITICISM:PLATO TO KANT
-
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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Instructor:
Ross Posnock
CULPA: 14
Info
- 3 points