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 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Alan Stewart
  CULPA: 14 h-index: 13 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 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Denise Cruz
  CULPA: 8 h-index: 6 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.

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

Approaches to Literary Study Seminar

Approaches to Lit Study S

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

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• None None-None
• 0 points

British Literature to 1500

This course will introduce some of the most fascinating texts of the first eight hundred years of English literature, from the period of Anglo-Saxon rule through the Hundred Years’ War and beyond—roughly, 700–1500 CE. We’ll hit on some texts you’ve heard of – 
Beowulf
 and selections from Chaucer’s 
Canterbury Tales
 – while leaving time for some you may not have encountered – Marie de France’s 
Lais
 and Margery of Kempe’s 
Book
. Along the way, we’ll also hone skills of reading, writing, and oral expression crucial to appreciating and discussing literature in nuanced, supple ways.

If you take this course, you’ll discover how medieval literature is both a mirror and a foil to modern literature. You’ll explore the plurilingual and cross-cultural nature of medieval literary production and improve (or acquire!) your knowledge of Middle English. Plus, you’ll flex your writing muscles with three papers (one of which can be replaced by a creative project, if you like) and discussion posts where you’ll have the chance to pursue your own interests.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Hannah Weaver
  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 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Erik Gray
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

The Nineteenth-Century European Novel

19th-Century European Nov

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

• TR 6:10 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Nicholas Dames
  CULPA: 35 Info
• 3 points

Writing Photography

Why does literature turn to photography? In 1931, Walter Benjamin prophesied that “captions would become the essential component of pictures” — but just as much as text has accompanied photographs, literary works for the past 150 years have not only commented on, but also incorporated photographs as part of their creative project. Over the course of the semester, we will look at a set of literary texts (with an emphasis on poetry) in which photography plays a central part, from Breton’s surrealist novel
Nadja
to Eve Ewing’s
1919
, an exploration of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. Together, we will ask how writing and photography can work together to document history, construct new kinds of intimacies between author, subject, and audience, and play with the limits of creative form. We will also take a field trip to the Guggenheim’s Taryn Simon exhibit, to see how a contemporary artist uses the interplay of text and image to comment on our world today. The course has no prerequisites, and fulfills the New Media, Poetry, and Comparative requirements for the English major.

Over the course of the semester, we will journey through a series of paired texts, touching on themes of the city, experimentation, intimacy, war, and archive. As we go from pair to pair, we will begin to hear echoes of these themes resonate across works we read earlier on and works we are just encountering, from Jacob A. Riis’s 1890s record of New York slums and André Breton’s surreal 1920s Paris, to Hervé Guibert’s fragile domestic spaces and Don Mee Choi’s reappropriation of her father’s photographs. We will end with the film
The Unbearable Lightness 
of Being
, which brings together some of the strands running through our syllabus: the personal and the political, the gaze and the viewer, the past and the future.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Alina Shubina
  Info
• 4 points

Writing Machines and Machinic Literature

Writing Machines & Machin

At a moment when ChatGPT is transforming our relationship to writing, this class explores the place of the machine in the history of literature as fear, fantasy, and creative function: from literary representations of writing machines to automated textual production. Contemporary anxieties about machines usurping creativity will be shown to have ancient origins. We will move from Plato’s suspicion of inscription to Annie Dorsen’s AI-generated productions of Hamlet, via a survey of twentieth-century avant-garde attempts to write like a machine, from Modernist automatic writing and Dadaist cut-ups to postmodern hypertext. We will cover movements including Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Fluxus, and Oulipo, reading works by Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Italo Calvino, John Cage, Alison Knowles, David Foster Wallace, and more. We will also read texts written by machines, including RACTER, ELIZA, PARRY and Claude. As well as reading, we will be playing early video games, chatting to some of the first chatbots, viewing machinic artworks, and listening to constraint-driven music. This class will widen our knowledge and critical faculties as readers, but also as writers: we will experiment with automatic writing, use games and constraints to generate text, and reflect on collaborating with writing machines.

There are no prerequisites for this course.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Claudia G Grigg Edo
  Info
• 4 points

Austen and Her Antecedents

In the eighteenth century, a new and sensational kind of entertainment appeared: the novel. Disparaged and revered, this revolutionary form of storytelling soon subordinated other artistic genres and remains the single most important influence on modern-day film and television. To puzzle out how this came to be, we will place the development of the novel in the long eighteenth century within the history of art, philosophy, science, psychology, literary theory, sociology –even dance history-- by using four of Jane Austen’s novels to explore the narrative ingredients of what we recognize today as romantic comedy: adventure, the novel of manners, sentimentality, and gothic melodrama. (In addition to Jane Austen, readings will include Defoe, Diderot, Haywood, Mackenzie, Radcliffe, and the anonymous author of
The Woman of Colour.
)

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Monica F Cohen
  CULPA: 8 Info
• 4 points

How the Ancients Argued: The Global Rhet

Long before Aristotle’s Rhetoric and far from Athens and Rome, rhetoricians were teaching people how to communicate powerfully in politics, the law, and the street. This course surveys the ancient rhetorics of Egypt, China, the Americas, and the Arab world. We will examine a body of primary texts from 2,300 B.C.E. to 1,500 C.E. that teach people to wield language effectively.

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

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

LIT & AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. (Seminar).

Who is a citizen? How has the notion of citizenship changed in American history? Questions of American citizenship—who can claim it and what it entails—have been fiercely contested since the founding of the United States. Scholars have articulated various ways of conceptualizing citizenship: as a formal legal status; as a collection of state-protected rights; as political activity; and as a form of identity and solidarity. In this seminar, we’ll explore the role that literature and literary criticism have played in both shaping and responding to the narratives and civic myths that determine what it means to be an American citizen.

Because literature dwells in the ambiguity and ambivalence that legal definitions seek to avoid, an examination of literature across American history can illuminate otherwise-hidden aspects of citizenship. We’ll see that the American promise of citizenship—the idea that citizens of the United States can experience personal sovereignty—has been compromised and unfulfilled for many; definitions of citizenship have often exerted economic, religious, racial, and sexual power.

By looking at literature that wrestles with questions of citizenship, we will strive to uncover the ways that legal, abstract notions of citizenship reveal themselves in the everyday lives of individuals. We will investigate how literary texts shape citizens, whose lives may be determined not only by political boundaries and legal definitions but also by emotional affiliations and psychological allegiances. As we read American literary texts alongside political theory and historical writing, we’ll ask a number of questions about the relationship between literature and citizenship, including:


What is the political power of literature?

How does writing call into being certain kinds of citizens? Who is included and who is left out?

How are texts political agents?

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

Literatures of the Americas before 1492

Lits of Americas before 1

This course surveys the literatures of the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. Proceeding from Inca political histories to Aztec poetry and philosophy to Ojibwe sacred narratives, this course offers students the opportunity to study and discuss some of the most significant and challenging literary works of the pre-Columbian Americas. Reading closely and in translation, we will consider the difficult questions posed by these texts, such as: What is the world? What is the human’s place in it? How does one find that place? And how does one lose it? Because many of these texts were transcribed during the colonial period, we will trouble the boundary line of “1492” by examining issues of translation, tradition, periodization, hybridization, appropriation, and resurgence. Throughout the semester, we will also explore recent engagements with Indigenous literary and philosophical traditions by reading contemporary poetry and scholarship by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, David Damrosch, Louise Erdrich, Jack D. Forbes, Edgar Garcia, Beth Piatote, Arthur Sze, Cecilia Vicuña, Gerald Vizenor, and Sylvia Wynter.

• M 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Ethan A Plaue
  Info
• 4 points

Auden

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

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

The Thirties: Metropole and Colony

The Thirties: Metropole/C

This course focuses on the tumultuous 1930s, which witnessed the growth of anticolonial movements, the coming to power of totalitarian and fascist regimes, and calls for internationalism and a new world vision, among other major developments. Even as fascism laid down its roots in parts of Europe, the struggle for independence from European colonial rule accelerated in Asia and Africa, and former subjects engaged with ideas and images about the shape of their new nations, in essays, fiction, poetry, and theater. Supporters and critics of nationalism existed on both sides of the metropole-colony divide, as calls for internationalism sought to stem the rising tide of ethnocentric thinking and racial particularism in parts of Europe as well as the colonies. Ostensibly a gesture of resistance against imperial control, anti-colonialism also sparked debates about re-visioning gender relations, the place of minorities in the nation, religious difference and secularism, and models of world unity, among other issues. The course aims to consider the intersection of these debates with resistance to 1930s fascism: Did anti- fascist resistance in the metropole draw inspiration from anticolonial struggles? Conversely, did the spectre of fascism and authoritarianism present a cautionary tale to the project of nation-building in former colonies?

We will read works from both the metropole and the colonies to track the crisscrossing of ideas, beginning with writers whose works foreshadowed the convulsive events of the 1930s and beyond (H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Rabindranath Tagore), then moving on to writers who published some of their greatest work in the 1930s (Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, M.K. Gandhi, Raja Rao, C.L.R. James), and concluding with an author who reassessed the events of the 1930s from a later perspective (George Lamming).

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

ROMANTIC MARGINS

British literature of the Romantic period, from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth
century, displays a fascination with what is on the margins. This manifests itself most
memorably in the unprecedented focus on socially marginalized figures – the beggars,
madmen, abandoned women, and solitary wanderers who populate the pages of Romantic
poetry and fiction. The author too is often figured as an outsider in this period, someone
whose authority derives specifically from his or her position of marginality, looking in
from the fringes. Geographically, the peripheries of the island of Great Britain (Wales
and especially Scotland) were major sites of literary experimentation in the Romantic era,
while the south coast of England attracted particular interest because of the constant
threat of invasion from France during these years. And of course Romantic writers
famously exploited textual margins: many of the major literary works of the period make
innovative use of footnotes, glosses, and other paratextual apparatus. This course
considers these various aspects of Romantic marginality and the intersections between
them. In addition to the work of more canonical authors (William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley), we will be reading poems, novels, essays,
and letters by writers, especially women, whose work has historically been marginalized.

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

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• F 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Aaron Ritzenberg
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 4 Info
• Instructor: Sharon Marcus
  CULPA: 8 Wikipedia h-index: 19 Info
• 3 points

LITERATURE AND OIL

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Jennifer Wenzel
  CULPA: 3 h-index: 15 Info
• 3 points

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II

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

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Zoe L Henry
  Info
• 3 points

REVOLUTION IN/ON THE CARIBBEAN

Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the Cuban Revolution (1959-1976). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize politics through language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Reinaldo Arenas, Michelle Cliff, and V.S. Naipaul, among others. We will also read essays by Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Paul Breslin, A. James Arnold, Phyllis Taoua, Robin D.G. Kelley, Brad Epps, Kimberle Lopez, Bruce King, Maria Elena Lima, Yoani Sánchez, and Audre Lorde. In addition, we will listen to a variety of music by Caribbean and African American musicians that take revolution as its theme in form and/or content.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner
  CULPA: 18 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

The Undead: Revenance in Literature and

Revenance in Literature &

Zombies are everywhere. All over literature, film, and television. To be fair, zombies have been cinematically popular since 1932, but they are really having a moment right now. Moreover, whereas lots of zombie films in the 80s and 90s were low-brow and shlocky, the zombie genre—in both film and TV—has recently made a name for itself as an elite, highly philosophical, and often highly moving genre. So what’s the story? How and why did that happen? Why are zombies so hot right now? Why are major television studios pouring money into megaseries like
The Last of Us
or
The Walking Dead?
           

In this class, we will examine the history of the literature and cinema of the undead. By “undead” we will mean embodied revenants who come back to some kind of life or simulacrum of life after death. So, no ghosts, but lots of zombies, ghouls,
draugar,
vampires, and some cyborgs. Through these revenants and undead “monsters,” writers and filmmakers have asked questions about what it means to be a person, who gets to claim the status of a “human,” and what it says about our relationship to the past, present, and future that the dead keep on rising from their graves. As we’ll see, the zombie genre is extremely varied and internally diverse, but it has been, for as long as it has existed, an important genre for thinking through forms of inequality, violence, dehumanization, and existential dread.

I warn you: there is material on this syllabus that is revolting in many different ways. So buckle your seatbelt. If you’re not up for some serious gore, some very offensive ideas, and some troubling philosophies, you may want to take another class.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Eleanor Johnson
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 points

JAZZ & THE LITERARY IMAGINATN

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

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

Resistance Literature

This course will explore the historical category of Resistance Literature, its theory and practice, its transnational expansion, and its ongoing relevance today. Originally proposed by Palestinian author and political activist Ghassan Kanafani in 1967, “Resistance Literature” named an activist practice of writing that sought to challenge discriminatory state practices, social policies, power structures and lived injustices, as well as to reshape the ideological frameworks that enabled official political structures of oppression in the institutional forms of colonialism (settler and otherwise), neocolonialism, authoritarianism,
apartheid
, systemic racisms, ethnonationalisms, gendered exclusions, and religious discrimination. Examining diverse genres such as novels, poetry, plays, memoirs, films, we will analyze the literary and political strategies, motifs, and modes by which authors around the world over the past century have attempted to use their art to resist oppression, to mobilize public opinion, and to advocate for social change. Collectively, we will attempt to identify literary and formal commonalities across these literatures to identify generic characteristics of Resistance Literature that might distinguish it from Literature in general.

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

Material / Texts

This class will introduce graduate students to the field of material texts and probe its expanding limits. Since the 1990s, study of the so-called “material text” has been a growing methodology in literary studies, particularly (though certainly not exclusively) in premodern and early modern fields. The “material text” is usually defined as the text plus the writing surface, binding, collocated texts, marginal jottings, illustrations, and any other paratexts that might accompany them: in other words, “the whole book.” The thesis of the study of material texts is that full understanding of literary works can only come about by taking these elements into account along with the text itself. This basic argument has generated a huge amount of productive scholarship that engages closely with manuscripts and printed matter, and it’s where our course will begin.

You may have noticed that the title of this course features a forward slash. In that forward slash is the thesis we will explore together for the bulk of the semester: that it is time for a more expansive definition of the “material text” that encompasses things that are, materially speaking, non-bookish. Yet many of these artefacts are part of the same bodies of narrative as the texts literary scholars lovingly appreciate. The course asks, then, how literary history is inflected by drawing on more expansive material as potential text. The test case for this question, which we will explore together, will be the corpus of medieval and early modern narrative tapestries. But you will be invited throughout the course to apply its methods to your own field of interest, particularly through your book review and your seminar paper. Moreover, though the course centers on medieval literature and textiles with inscriptions in English, French, and Latin, it also aims to instill the critical skills of literary criticism: debate, comparison, and keen-eyed evaluation of others’ arguments, both in class discussions and written assignments. 

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

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

Edouard Glissant

This class is conceived as a series of sustained close readings of Édouard Glissant’s oeuvre—his poetry, novels, manifestoes, treatises, and philosophical essays. Over the last decade in particular, Glissant’s work has become increasingly central across an extraordinary range of disciplines, including literary theory, critical theory, critical race theory, performance studies, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies—as witnessed, for example, by collections of essays by Australian Aboriginal scholars engaging his thought—and even fields such as architecture and design, as demonstrated by recent exhibitions devoted to his work.

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

Black Radicalism & the Archive

This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of knowledge production among politically radical African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read some of the key texts of the Black Radical Tradition with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and to the ways that the exigencies of revolutionary social transformation have provoked methodological innovation in historiography. The course is not only meant to serve as an introduction to that tradition of thought, however, but more pointedly as a consideration of the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive. To this end the class will meet in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and students will be expected to pursue their own hands-on research in some of the relevant holdings at Columbia, including the papers of Hubert Harrison, Alexander Gumby, C. L. R. James, Yuri Kochiyama, and Amiri Baraka. While we will use a variety of archival materials (including scrapbooks, manuscript drafts, typescripts, handwritten notes and outlines, diaries, correspondence, audio and video recordings, photographs, etc.) to contextualize these authors’ published work, our main aim in turning to the collections will be to approach these intellectuals as collectors and archivists themselves, in a manner that highlights their archival practice—their own commitment to historical documentation, classification, and preservation—as integral to their political radicalism.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Brent H Edwards
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia 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.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 1 points

Materializing Modern Drama and Performan

Materializing Mod Drma&Pe

This course will situate modern dramatic writing at the intersection of several kinds of inquiry focusing the distinctive material conditions of modern dramatic production and theatrical/theoretical critique. One line of thinking will take up the question of booking the play, rendering the play as a printed object to be read, a network of practices we will trace from Bernard Shaw’s desire for a blackened box of dialogue on the page through the idea of a “poetic” drama, to Stein, Beckett, Pinter, Smith, Wellman, and Parks. In tandem, though, we will also be tracing that other materiality outside the text, constituting the text, or a text, as an instrument for use in the richly ideological field of stage production: the problem play in the naturalistic box; episodic revision in the alienating apparatus of epic theatre, the refusal of the “masterpiece” in the dis/embodiment of cruelty, and the script as code in the era of digital reproducibility. Here, we will also bring some of the classic texts of modern dramatic, literary, performance, and technological theory to bear on the drama’s potential intermediation of the literary and the theatrical.

This course, then, will provide both an introduction to an important dimension of performance theory, and an overview of modern drama; it would be a suggestive complement for students working in early modern drama (source of many of the textual issues that continue to animate dramatic writing), as well as for students interested in an introduction to performance theory, and modernism/modern drama.

Seminar meets weekly; there is a brief (one-paragraph) weekly post, and one longer essay. Students are encouraged to use the writing for this course to develop longer range issues (i.e., I’ve had philosophy students who are more interested in the philosophical texts on performance than the dramatic texts, that’s fine; early modern drama students who want to bring some of the thinking about modern problems (text, performance, theory) back to earlier concerns, fine; and so on.

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

THE MOVING BODY

How do stage and screen use movement to further the meaning of texts? What relationships emerge between motion and emotion, between kinesis and empathy, and how do those relationships vary across different body types and identities, and even across the movement repertories of animals and objects? How does the moving body evade theoretical frameworks that seek to arrest it? To answer such questions in two historically specific ways, this seminar zigzags between early modernity and the last century to survey major performance genres in each that make pronounced use of movement. In addition to plays, we will study dumb shows and silent film, masques and ballets, “dramatick operas” and
tanztheater
, fairs and freak shows, civic pageants and protest theater, animal baiting and circuses, “motion men” and motion capture. We will draw in particular upon the insights of phenomenology, performance theory, and critical dance studies, as well as affect, animal, critical race, and disability studies. We will examine motion at the scale of individual and collective embodiments, and in actions that range from gestures to dance steps. Major figures studied include Amiri Baraka, Pina Bausch, Charlie Chaplin, Merce Cunningham, Asadata Dafora, William Davenant, Thomas Dekker, John Dryden, Eiko & Koma, Mat Fraser, Thomas Heywood, Bill T. Jones, Ben Jonson, Young Jean Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Marius Petipa, William Shakespeare, and Luis Valdez.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Seth S Williams
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

Academic Careers Workshop

This course is open to all graduate students in English and Comparative Literature in year 5 and beyond. The course, which students may take for R-credit, has several aims. It will help you: sharpen the focus of your dissertation and clarify the nature of its contribution; expand your scholarly profile, illuminating the breadth of what you have to offer academic life; and launch activities that can make your potential contributions visible and legible. We will look closely at the kinds of materials you will circulate on the job market: cover letters, 
CVs
, teaching statements, research statements, portfolios showing “evidence of teaching effectiveness,” and more. We will workshop these in the seminar, while also practicing the oral forms you will encounter in the job market: interviews, presentations, job talks. At the same time, one of the central aims of the seminar is to help you develop your sense of who you are as a scholar, teacher, and member of the profession more broadly, expand the universe of professional possibilities, and highlight the richness of your potential contributions.
        Preparing yourself for the academic job market can be emotionally wrenching, but it can also be exciting. The seminar will serve not only as a workshop but as a supportive community of scholars, teachers, readers, and writers helping one another envision the work they might do and, at the same time, remember why it matters.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Julie S Peters
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points