*English Cpr. Poetry Writing I
Catalog Number: 3053 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Forrest Gander
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 2–4; Spring: W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 16, 17; Spring: 7, 8
A concentrated workshop in poetry writing for those who wish to improve as poets while broadening their knowledge of contemporary American poetry.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cpw. Poetry Workshop
Catalog Number: 4606 Enrollment: Limited to 15. Limited to 15.
Jorie Graham teaches Thursday section and Peter Sacks teaches Wednesday section
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8, 15, 16, 17
Open by application to undergraduates and graduates alike. Please submit a portfolio including five poems, a letter explaining your interest in the class, and a list of relevant classes taken at Harvard or elsewhere. Class discussions will include the study of literary texts alongside work written by students.
*English Cqr. Poetry Writing II
Catalog Number: 2644 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Forrest Gander
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: W., 2–4; Spring: Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 7, 8; Spring: 16, 17
See *English Cpr above.
*English Csr. Fiction Writing I
Catalog Number: 2601 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Suzanne Berne
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 12–2; Spring: Tu., 12–2; Th., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
An introduction to the techniques and forms of fiction. Classroom discussion of student manuscripts.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Ctr. Advanced Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 7175
Brad Watson
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Tu., 2–4.
Discussion of students’ work in a workshop format.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing. Generally for students who have taken fiction workshops before.
*English Cvr. Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 1223
Jamaica Kincaid
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
A seminar/workshop. Readings include Bruno Schultz, Jean Toomer, Robert Walser, and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, among others.
Note: Submissions from experienced fiction writers are welcome.
*English Cwr. Fiction Writing II
Catalog Number: 7765 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Suzanne Berne
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Th., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
An advanced workshop for students who have had experience writing fiction. Student work will be discussed in class in a workshop format.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cyr. Nonfiction Writing
Catalog Number: 8545 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Kyoko Mori
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). M., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: 9
These workshops will provide a professional atmosphere in which apprentice writers may study their craft, by practicing it themselves, by critiquing the works-in-progress of their peers, and by studying the work of established writers in the genre. Class participants should expect to spend substantial out-of-class time on each of these pursuits. The workshop period itself takes the form of a round-table discussion, primarily of student writing, but also of the assigned readings and craft topics. By the end of our studies, workshop participants should have grasped the terms and techniques associated with various nonfictional fields (memoir, nature writing, and so on), and should be confident reading their own work and the work of others critically and with an eye to revision.
Note: Freshmen admitted only with evidence of unusual qualification. All applicants should submit a brief sample of their writing during the first week of the term.
*English Czr. Advanced Nonfiction Writing
Catalog Number: 5347 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Kyoko Mori
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
See *English Cyr.
English 10b. Major British Writers II
Catalog Number: 0550
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11 and an additional hour to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 13
An introduction to the study of British literature from the early 19th century to the present. Emphasis on lyric poetry and the novel; two modern plays are also read.
Note: Two lectures and one section meeting per week. Required of English concentrators. Open to freshmen.
[English 13. The English Bible]
Catalog Number: 6532
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
An introduction to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament with special attention to narrative modes, figures of the human and divine, ethical problems, and sacred mysteries.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 17. American Literature to 1860
Catalog Number: 3883
Sacvan Bercovitch
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
An introduction to the study of American literature, 1620-1860, from Anne Bradstreet and Benjamin Franklin to Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman. Readings include the canonical texts of the American literary renaissance by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, as well as major writings “mainstream” and “marginal” from a variety of genres, including Native American myths, captivity and slave narratives, sermons, autobiographies, and short stories.
English 20. The English Novel
Catalog Number: 7142
Jesse E. Matz
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
A study of the English novel from its birth to its prime, with readings in one history of the “rise” of the novel and various accounts of its characteristic forms and concerns. Authors will include Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Hardy, Forster, and Woolf.
[English 34. Elements of Rhetoric]
Catalog Number: 3820
James Engell
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Elements of rhetoric and style; present applications of classical rhetoric (Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero); Golden Age of Anglo-American rhetoric and prose argument (Hugh Blair, J.Q. Adams, and others) with examples from writers (Addison, Jefferson, Webster, Lincoln, and others); 20th-century rhetoric with an emphasis on public argument and political oratory (Churchill, Kennedy, King, and others); this is a practical course to improve writing and speaking skills while also drawing on significant rhetorical theories and practice.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 90cc. The Consumption of Culture
Catalog Number: 1202
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
An investigation of the relation between the rise of consumer culture and the rise of the novel. Topics include: the aesthetic and commercial value given to pleasure, representations of leisure activities (shopping, fairs, masquerade); the emergence of a public interested in the consumption of art. Texts by Behn, Pope, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, Burney, as well as selected historical and theoretical readings.
*English 90cf. Caribbean Fictions
Catalog Number: 8964
Sharmila Sen
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
The Caribbean is a place for tourists, a paradise; it is an area of contemporary poverty, a realm of natural disasters; it is the promise of sugared profit and the site of unspeakable taboo acts; it is Caliban’s fate. And perhaps it is none of these things. We shall focus on some of the current questions in Caribbean fictions, paying attention to the genealogies of such concerns and debates. Readings include works by Behn, Rhys, Naipaul, Lamming, Harris, Phillips, Condé, Cliff, and Powell among others.
*English 90cl. Comic Literature in the Middle Ages
Catalog Number: 8321
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
An introduction to various kinds of literature broadly construed as comic, including drama, fabliaux, Latin lyrics, Chaucer, Middle Scots poetry and other genres up to Rabelais and Shakespeare. Non-English works will be read in a facing-page translation. With the help of Huizinga, Bakhtin, and later critics, we will develop an understanding of what constitutes humor from this period, as well as the serious “institutions” that invite a comic reflex.
*English 90e. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Other Early Poems
Catalog Number: 8098
C. David Benson
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
We shall read the works of Chaucer excluding the Canterbury Tales. These include Chaucer’s first masterpiece and the greatest poem of romantic love in English, Troilus and Criseyde, and his early comic and experimental dream poems, including the House of Fame and Parliament of Foules. All reading is in Middle English, but no previous knowledge of it is required.
*English 90fd. Fictions of Development
Catalog Number: 5990
Douglas Mao
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Beginning in the 18th century with Goethe, but focusing thereafter on English-language texts, this seminar will consider how writers have represented the processes by which subjectivity is formed and the ways in which experience might be manipulated to produce better, or worse, human beings. The bildungsroman as refashioned by novelists like Dickens, Wharton, Joyce, and Lawrence will absorb a good deal of our attention, but we will also take up poetic texts such as Wordsworth’s Prelude, and a variety of readings in psychology, architecture, ethnography, and educational theory.
*English 90fg. Shakespearean Genres
Catalog Number: 6690
John Parker
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3.
We’ll start with his sonnets, then let the array of issues we uncover there—problems of editorial reconstruction, literary form, gender and sexuality, social station, identity in the broadest sense, historical topicality—lead us through a selection of the plays, taken from every point in his career and from each major genre in which he worked: comedy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing), tragedy (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra), history (Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V) and “romance” (The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest,
Cymbeline).
*English 90ha. Auden’s Generation
Catalog Number: 8483
Douglas Mao
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
There is no quintessential poet of the 20th century, but what would we learn by imagining W.H. Auden in this role? In this course, we will undertake intensive study of a poet rendered both distinctive and emblematic by his effort to make a place for poetry in a violent world—a world not to be excused by poetic rituals or myths. We will also devote some time to poets who influenced Auden, such as Yeats and Eliot, and to Auden’s impact on the writers of his own generation and after.
*English 90hs. Satire: Augustan and Modern
Catalog Number: 8795
Michael Shinagel
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5.
A study of satire in poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Among the authors to be read are Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Gay, Voltaire, Orwell, Brecht, Vonnegut, and West.
*English 90in. Literature, Science, and Technology in the 19th Century
Catalog Number: 4923
John M. Picker
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3.
From the unstoppable force of Frankenstein’s monster to the “unsinkable” Titanic, the literary
imagination over the 19th century found in science and technology not only new sources of inspiration but also new reasons for dread. We examine the ways science challenged literature and the notion of artistic truth at the same time that it offered new directions for artistic exploration. Topics: technology and/of the body, Darwinism and the Victorian crisis of faith, the interrelation of science and imperialism, the cultural impact of new communications technologies, and the emergence of science
fiction as a literary genre. Authors: Mary Shelley, Dickens, Darwin, Stevenson, Hardy, Stoker, and Wells.
*English 90it. The Poet in the Novel
Catalog Number: 2707
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
The most private, “difficult” and unpopular of the arts makes occasional but important appearances in the most public and popular, bringing with it questions about the social function of the imagination, kinds of literature and kinds of knowledge, the relation between high and mass culture. This course studies 20th-century novels (and films) in which poets and poetry appear as central characters and concerns: James’s The Aspern Papers, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Cocteau’s Orphée, Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool and others.
*English 90ka. The Brontës
Catalog Number: 1097
Elaine Scarry
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4.
Writings by Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as the later novels and films their work has inspired.
*English 90lb. Letters of Business and the Business of Letters: The American Literary Enterprise
Catalog Number: 8890
Richard Charles Adams
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
The literary men and women of American business, from Bartleby to Babbit, Cotton Mather and Franklin to Dreiser. We will investigate pronouncements like T.S. Eliot’s that Americans, “like to be told that they are a race of commercial buccaneers,” as well as doubts such as Teddy Roosevelt’s, that the national type might be the “glorified huckster or glorified pawnbroker.” Issues to be discussed include the advent of the professional writer and the cultural construction of the entrepreneur. The novels, stories, and criticism of Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Norris, and Wharton will be supplemented by the works of writers such as Veblen, Bellamy, Clark, and James Truslow Adams.
*English 90li. The Idea of Ireland
Catalog Number: 3142
Robert Kiely
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Literary representations of Ireland and “the Irish” in the English language. Emphasis will be on 19th- and 20th-century authors, including Synge, AE, Lady Gregory, Yeats, Joyce, Heaney, and Friel.
[*English 90lj. The Idea of Italy]
Catalog Number: 3054
Robert Kiely
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
An examination of 19th- and early-20th-century English and American representations of Italy in fiction, narrative poetry, and nonfictional prose. Authors include Byron, Ruskin, Pater, Browning, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Forster. Special attention paid to art, religion, and conceptions of Italian character.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 90lp. Literature and the Philosophy of Mind
Catalog Number: 7350
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Literature and the philosophy of mind share a number of concerns. Both attempt to create artificial representations of “intelligence” and to explore the limits of consciousness. Both are interested in the role that emotions play in reasoning about the world. Both explore the possibility that there might be such things as private or universal languages; both dwell upon the difficulties of knowing and understanding other minds. This course will consider what is to be learned when we consider literary texts (principally lyric poems) in conjunction with some of our best recent philosophical and scientific accounts of how the mind is made.
*English 90ne. Rhetoric of Belief
Catalog Number: 4681
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4.
An examination of the literature of religious, political, or ethical committment. Readings from Luther, Thoreau, Lincoln, Harriet Jacobs, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton.
*English 90rr. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Catalog Number: 8479
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
A study of the major poems of Wallace Stevens. Topics: the conceptual poem; the sequence; the American poem; the philosophic poem; “skepticism and animal faith”; poetry and the social order; minimalism and maximalism.
[*English 90rs. Yeats]
Catalog Number: 5853
Peter Sacks
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Study of the poetry of Yeats.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
[*English 90rt. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton]
Catalog Number: 6987
Barbara E. Johnson
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
The poetry of Plath and Sexton will be read and discussed along with letters, journals, and biographies. Topics to be discussed: What are the relations between an author’s life and an author’s poetry? How does biography affect criticism? Do we read the work of these poets backwards through their suicides? How do they represent the problems of being a woman, a poet, a daughter, a mother, a wife, and a “case”? How do they think about, and practice, poetic invention? How do they combine pain and wit, and rewrite existing traditions of poetic morbidity, madness, and mania?
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 90sf. Southern Folklore and Southern Literature
Catalog Number: 7497
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Chiefly an introduction to the folk literature of the South—folk tales, ballads, and similar oral and
popular genres—and to its cultural contexts. An unsystematic treatment of literary works that show interesting relations to folklore backgrounds. Special emphasis on Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist and writer.
*English 90si. Subjectivity and Identity
Catalog Number: 5711
Erik Irving Gray
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
This course will concentrate on 19th-century English explorations of the sense of self, especially
among the Romantics (Wordsworth, Byron, Keats) and their successors (Browning, Pater, Wilde).
We will also cast a glance backwards (at classical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment models of identity) and conclude with an examination of Modernist fragmentation.
*English 90sl. The Romance of Scotland
Catalog Number: 8963
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Scottish literature and the place of Scotland in the British literary imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries. Attention to the myth of the Highlands, the romance of the Jacobite rebellion, the Ossian controversy, and the figure of the bard as well as to the larger question of what role literature has in the production of national identity. Readings in poetry, travel writing, national tales, historical novels, and philosophical prose by writers such as Smith, Hume, Smollett, Johnson, Burns, Scott, and Hogg.
*English 90ss. Sonnet Sequences
Catalog Number: 6590
Erik Irving Gray
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
The amatory sonnet-sequence in England had a brief and brilliant career in the 1590s (Sidney,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and others), and then was revived in the mid-19th century (Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Meredith). We will study both groups, together with their sonnets along the way, and explore the relations between them.
*English 90tv. Time and Narrative
Catalog Number: 0717
Jesse E. Matz
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Studies fiction that experiments with the representation of time, primarily works by Sterne, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, and Rushdie, with attention to theoretical background in a range of theorists and philosophers.
*English 90tw. Transatlantic Literature
Catalog Number: 3077
John M. Picker
Half course (fall term). Th., 1–3.
This course considers concurrent trends and developments in American and British literary genres across the long 19th century. The focus will be on Transatlantic Hauntings. We will consider the development of the gothic phenomenon in texts that pose lingering questions about objectivity and the nature of perception, psychology, gender, and cross-cultural influence. Readings will include
fiction by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Henry James, and others, as well as poetry by Poe, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning.
*English 90tx. Literatures of Travel in the 18th Century
Catalog Number: 5301
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
18th-century travel writings, from fictional adventures and scientific voyages to philosophical utopias
and fantastical “true histories.” Topics include: empire and domesticity; tourism and national identity; narrative continuity and the picaresque; natural history and scientific imperialism. Writings by Behn, Defoe, Swift, Boswell, Smollett, Sterne, Cook’s Voyages, and Raynal’s History of the Two Indies.
[*English 90uj. Jewish Writers of the European and American Diaspora]
Catalog Number: 5242
Sacvan Bercovitch
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
This course centers on the meaning of Jewishness through a particular literary form: stories by Jews. The story is a major mode of community-formation, and a major theme of the Jewish Story is Diaspora, grounded in a long and varied history. This will be our focus (with a backward glance towards scriptural tradition) in exploring Jewish writers in Europe and America from Sholem Aleikhem and Kafka through Bellow and Ozick, comparing and contrasting their relation to a persisting but shifting sense of identity both as modern writers and representatives of a Diaspora people.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 90uv. Gender and Writing in Victorian Culture
Catalog Number: 8725
Leah Price
Half course (fall term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
Competing models of textual work, from The Prelude to Dracula. Readings include autobiographies,
biographies, novels, essays, reviews, ghost stories, and obituaries, by Lockhart, Browning, Martineau,
Dickens, Mayhew, Gaskell, Ruskin, Trollope, Oliphant, Gissing, Wotton, and others. Issues include: gender, intellectual property, professionalism, anonymity, clerical work, and new writing technologies.
[*English 90vl (formerly *English 276x). African-American Literary Tradition]
Catalog Number: 3536
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Explores the emergence and formal development of the African-American literary “tradition” from the 18th to the 20th century. Close reading of the canonical texts in the tradition and their structural relationships is stressed, as is the very idea of “tradition” itself. Authors include Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 90wb. William Blake
Catalog Number: 1287
Leo Damrosch
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
An intensive study of the works of William Blake, both poetic and pictorial, with attention to significant predecessors (the Bible, Boehme, Milton) and to modern critical and theoretical modes of interpretation.
*English 97. Tutorial — Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 0280
Werner Sollors and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). .
Introduction to methods of literary analysis. Selected texts in English and American literature studied along with readings in theory and criticism. Topics to include the nature and purpose of literary study, and critical approaches such as formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism, and feminism. Required of concentrators in the sophomore year.
*English 98r. Tutorial — Junior Year
Catalog Number: 3831
Werner Sollors and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Tutorial supervision in the study of English and American literature.
Note: Open to honors concentrators.
Prerequisite: Grade of B or better in English 10, an overall concentration average of B or better, and the recommendation of the sophomore tutor.
*English 99r. Tutorial—Senior Year
Catalog Number: 3901
Werner Sollors and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Tutorial supervision of an independent scholarly or critical subject.
Note: Two semesters required of honors seniors. To enroll, students must submit for approval a Thesis Proposal form, available at the Undergraduate Office, 12 Quincy Street. A student who does not complete a thesis but wishes to receive credit for one term of English 99r must submit a paper or other substantial work before the end of that term’s reading period.
Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of one semester of English 98r, completion of an undergraduate seminar (90-level) taken junior year, and Honors Committee approval of proposed thesis topic.
English 101. The History and Structure of the English Language
Catalog Number: 1987
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10.
A survey of the changes in English phonology, morphology, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary, from the earliest times to the present. Along the way we also explore such topics as attitudes toward language, the impact of political and economic changes, literacy, attitudes toward grammar, the rise of American English, language and social class, and language and gender.
Note: No previous knowledge of linguistics, Anglo Saxon, or Middle English is required.
English 102d. Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Literature from the Time of King Alfred
Catalog Number: 2761
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 16
In 9th-century England King Alfred instituted an unprecedented program of writing in Old English, in effect creating a literary tradition where none existed before. This course will introduce students to Alfred’s life and times, along with readings from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede’s History of the English People, riddles, The Seafarer, and other Old English lyrics.
English 103b. Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, and Translation
Catalog Number: 6608
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
Seamus Heaney’s recent translation of Beowulf has provoked a renewed interest in the poem among a wider audience and, among medievalists, in his principles of translation. Students will undertake their own translation of parts of Beowulf, which will form a basis of comparison with Heaney’s as well as other translations. We will also consider Heaney’s Beowulf in the context of his other poems. A series of critical essays on Heaney and on Beowulf will address topics concerning the poem and translations.
Prerequisite: A prior semester of Old English or its equivalent is required.
English 115b. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Catalog Number: 2945
C. David Benson
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
A reading of The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, with some attention to the different kinds of critical approaches that have been taken to them, and some consideration of relevant contemporary European and English writing.
English 116. Women and Medieval Literature
Catalog Number: 3625
C. David Benson
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 3.
This course will explore women in medieval literature, whether as writers, readers, or characters. We shall look at works that are pro- and antifeminist, and especially at the range of more complex engagements that women had with medieval secular and religious culture. We shall start with late classical views of women and then read such works as Eloise’s letters, Marie de France’s plays, Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies, some of Chaucer’s tales, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, Margery Kempe’s Book, and others. Readings are in translation and accessible Middle English (no previous knowledge required).
English 124d. Shakespearean Tragedy
Catalog Number: 7041
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Intensive reading of the full range of Shakespeare’s tragedies from early experiments through
masterworks like Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and beyond, with some attention also to their classical and medieval prototypes and to their modern reception/imitation as well as to their unique achievements
as expressions of their moment. We shall also consider such broad and critical issus as “What is tragedy?”, “What differentiates texts written for performance?”, and “Why has Shakespeare’s work, particularly the tragedies, been so influential?”.
English 125b. Renaissance Drama: Literature, Economics, and Religion
Catalog Number: 9652
John Parker
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
We’ll read primarily plays by Shakespeare and two contemporaries, Jonson and Marlowe, that focus on the relationship of religious conviction to financial settlements of all sorts: the final payback of a just God’s revenge, the moral status of debt, the economic contract regulating guilt, punishment and forgiveness. Readings to include Everyman, The Jew of Malta, Volpone, Bartholemew Fair, The Devil is an Ass, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure. Supplemental readings from the New Testament, Nietzsche, and Marx.
[English 130. 17th-Century Poetry and Prose]
Catalog Number: 4789
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Primary focus on the major poets Donne, Jonson, Herbert and Marvell, with attention also to other writers, men and women, the genres they practiced and their cultural milieu.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 131. Milton
Catalog Number: 8005
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
A comprehensive study of Milton’s works and their milieu. Included are his lyric poems and masque, his polemic tracts on marriage and divorce, a free press, and republican government written during the Puritan Revolution, his epics, and the tragedy Samson Agonistes. Paradise Lost will receive extended treatment.
English 140a (formerly *English 90aa). Restoration and Augustan Age Literature
Catalog Number: 8554
Leo Damrosch
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Writers from 1660 to 1740, seeking to reinvent “literature” in a post–Renaissance age. Emphasis on Restoration drama and libertine verse; the poetry of Dryden and Pope; the satires of Swift; philosophy of Locke and Berkeley; the essays of Addison; novels by Behn and DeFoe; and a wide range of non-canonical poems.
English 140b (formerly *English 90gt). The Age of Johnson
Catalog Number: 6901
James Engell
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Authors from 1740-1800 (Johnson, Burke, Boswell, Gray, Blake, Burney, Wollstonecraft, and Goldsmith). The transition from classical aesthetic and social-literary values to romantic ones. Studies a period when conventional literary forms appear less vital and new ones are forming; prose and the novel concerned with ethical questions, politics, social and literary criticism.
English 141 (formerly English 90en). The 18th-Century Novel
Catalog Number: 8683
Leah Price
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
Fictions by DeFoe, Richardson, Fielding, Lennox, Sterne, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen, with occasional readings in criticism and theory from the 18th century through the present. Issues include: genre (What differentiates novels from epics, romances, newspapers, correspondences, biography, pornography?); modernity (What was novel about the novel?); structure (How do narratives this long hold together?); identity; empathy; gender; consumerism; and pleasure.
English 146. Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment
Catalog Number: 9957
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
How 18th-century ideas of moral and physical sensibility shape categories of sex and gender. Topics include theories of sexual difference; the novel and the rise of the conjugal couple; libertine writings and the “invention of pornography.” Readings from Haywood, Richardson, Diderot, Cleland,
Sterne, Wollstonecraft, and Austen. Supplementary historical and theoretical readings from Foucault, Elias, Laqueur, and Trumbach.
[English 147n. Women and the Novel to Jane Austen]
Catalog Number: 1659
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
A study of the early novel, focusing on the roles of women—as heroines, readers, and writers—in the formation of the genre. Novels by Behn, Haywood, Burney, Edgeworth and Austen. Additional background readings on the legal, medical, intellectual and moral status of women in the long 18th century.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 150. English Romantic Poets
Catalog Number: 5274
James Engell
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Readings in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others.
English 151. The 19th-Century Novel
Catalog Number: 8396
Elaine Scarry
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
Realism and the problem of consciousness, social knowledge, mobility, the city, and the fantastic within experience. The ethos of self-construction and its recognition of childhood; the irrational, the accidental, and the unconscious. Binary structures, the biographical and the social form of fiction. Authors include: Austen, Scott, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Conrad.
English 154. Victorian Poetry
Catalog Number: 8644
Erik Gray
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
This course offers an introduction to Victorian English Poetry (1830-1900), concentrating on Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning and on their most important generic innovation, the dramatic
monologue. In the second half of the course we will survey a range of authors (Barrett Browning, Arnold, C. Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy) and poetic forms.
English 156. Gender and Nation in 19th-Century British Literature
Catalog Number: 4752
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
How do people identify with and feel attached to something as abstract and unknowable as a nation? How do literary texts participate in representing the nation and shaping national sentiment? In 19th-century Britain, answers to these questions usually involved the figure of a woman, yet the number and variety of female figures are surprising: maternal, infanticidal, all-suffering, insane, domestic, vagrant, middle-class, exotic. They are matched by as many versions of British masculinity.
The continual effort to produce and represent the nation seems to involve an ongoing struggle to define and delimit gender. We investigate the complicity of gender and nation in 19th-century British
poetry and fiction. Authors include Wordsworth, Byron, Hemans, Brontë, Tennyson, and Eliot.
English 160. 20th-Century British Novel
Catalog Number: 7052
Jesse E. Matz
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
Legacies of Modernism and Imperialism in the 20th-Century British novel, from Conrad and Woolf to Rushdie and Winterson.
English 162. Modern Drama
Catalog Number: 6039
Robert Brustein
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
The major plays of the three makers of modern drama—Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov— and the way their forms and themes influenced the world.
English 164b. 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry
Catalog Number: 1750
Douglas Mao
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
One hundred years ago, the British empire stood at the height of its power; today, Britain itself seems
poised to “devolve” into the triad of England, Scotland, and Wales. This trajectory, and the independence movements that continue to shape life in Ireland, will form a background for readings
in Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Kavanagh, Larkin, Heaney, Ni Dhomnaill, Jamie, and other poets. We
will not limit ourselves to questions of nation, however; we will also examine these poets’ fascinating and moving responses to intimacy, faith, death, war, perception, maturation, responsibility, and other matters of theme and form.
English 165. Joyce, Modernism, and Aestheticism
Catalog Number: 1827
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (fall term). M., W., F., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
Topics include: modernism; aesthetic experience; the life of art; the city; and the moment. Centering on Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses but also novels by Proust, Woolf, Forster, and Kawabata.
Note: Graduate section offered.
English 166. The Novel (and other Narratives) since World War II
Catalog Number: 1874
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
A survey of postmodern experiments in several kinds of narrative, including works by Borges, Beckett, Primo Levi, Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, García Márquez, Paul Monette, Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
English 167p. Postcolonial Narratives
Catalog Number: 2511
Sharmila Sen
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
A survey course introducing some of the key concerns, quarrels, and texts in postcolonial studies. Readings include such authors as Conrad, Achebe, Ngugi, Salih, Oyono, Harris, Dabydeen,
Kureishi, Rushdie, and Ghosh.
English 168 (formerly *English 90ai). Anglophone India
Catalog Number: 1896
Sharmila Sen
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
Where is India and how can it be contained or conjured on paper, canvas, celluloid, or concrete? While traversing a few centuries and a vast subcontinent, we shall focus on key moments, reading selected travel narratives, plays, novels, letters, political speeches (and considering even films, lithographs, and the built environment). Some of the authors to be read include Dryden, Macaulay, Canning, Kipling, Forster, Desai, Rushdie, Sidhwa, Kureishi, and Lahiri.
[English 170 (formerly *English 90jk). Puritanism in America]
Catalog Number: 8166
Sacvan Bercovitch
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Literature and culture of 17th-century New England. A study of the aesthetic, religious, intellectual and historical dimensions of American Puritan writings, with some attention to the “Puritan legacy” and to the national culture.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 171. Major American Poets
Catalog Number: 1423
Elisa New
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; Hart Crane and Marianne Moore—by attention to these three dynamic pairs we will discuss the ranges and limits of three especially rich moments in American poetic history: the Puritan migration, the American “Renaissance” and postwar Modernism. Other poets to be covered may include Wigglesworth, Piatt, Whittier,
Melville, Emerson, Eliot, and Toomer.
English 172. Rise of the American Novel
Catalog Number: 2706
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 2.
A study of the emergence of the novel as a popular genre in America, from the 18th century
through Twain. Authors include Foster, Rowson, Brown, Crevecoeur, Cooper, Irving, Melville, Stowe, Alcott, and Twain.
[English 175. American Literary Emergence]
Catalog Number: 3894
Lawrence Buell
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Intensive study of the formative period of American writing, with special attention to the Transcendentalist movement (Emerson and Thoreau), the rise of American fiction (Hawthorne, Melville, and others), the rise of American poetry (Whitman and Dickinson), and slave narrative (Douglass, Jacobs).
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 177t. American Literary Realism and Naturalism
Catalog Number: 7237
Richard Charles Adams
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
The major fiction, criticism and journalism of the movement’s champions, as well as their acolytes, will be scrutinized. Local realisms and technologies of perception will be of special interest. Authors
include Foster, Howells, James, Wharton, Crane, Frederic, Norris, Harte, Quick, Jewett, and Freeman.
English 178x. The American Novel from Dreiser to the end of the Century
Catalog Number: 2168
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (spring term). M., W., F., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
A survey of the 20th-century novel, its forms, patterns of ideas, techniques, cultural context, rivalry with film and radio, short story, and fact. Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Wharton, The House of Mirth; Jack London, Stories; Cather, A Lost Lady; Anderson, Winesburg Ohio; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms and stories; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and stories; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; Ellison, Invisible Man; Nabokov, Lolita; Bellow, Herzog; Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Delillo, White Noise.
Note: Graduate section offered.
[English 179k. American Autobiography]
Catalog Number: 4938
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
A study of autobiography in America from the Age of Revolution to the near-present. Explores aesthetic and historical dimensions of the genre; self-fashioning and refashioning in terms of religious, racial, class, and gender issues; and the relationship between individual and national identities. Authors include Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, Olaudah Equiano, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Adams, Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
English 184. Fundamentals of Lyric Poetry
Catalog Number: 8147
Peter Sacks
Half course (fall term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Basic elements of lyric poetry, both formal and thematic. Questions of lineation, prosody, stanzaic identity, free verse, syntax, matters of place, temporality, self-revision. Representations of poetic vocation, work, desire, history, nature, etc. Readings primarily from The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
English 186. Defending Poetry
Catalog Number: 0132
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
Throughout its history, poetry has been asked to apologize for its existence. We will read Classical, Early Modern and Romantic defenses in conjunction with strong lyric poems of each period; but the central goal of this course will be to consider the terms in which poetry has sought to defend and justify itself in the 20th century.
English 187d. American Literatures in Languages Other than English
Catalog Number: 4323
Marc Shell
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Considers literary traditions from the more than 200 language groups that have written and published in what is now the United States. Special attention both to literary issues involving translation, mixed languages, and polyglot literature and to political problems involving English Only, English Plus, and language wars. Primary non-anglophone American readings include Arabic slave narratives, Chinese short stories, French creole novels, German philosophical treatises, Spanish plays, Thai children’s literature, Welsh drama, and Zuni poetry. All readings are in bilingual facing-page format.
Note: Foreign Language credit may be possible by arrangement.
English 189. The Novella
Catalog Number: 4246
John M. Picker
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
In their concentration of focus, their commitment to ambiguity, and the techniques they use to
complicate perspective and emphasize selectivity, novellas become miniature testing grounds for many of the governing concerns of fiction of our time. Readings in primarily 19th- and 20th-century
British and American texts with some Continental works as well.
English 190. Major Critical Approaches
Catalog Number: 0283
James Engell
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
Major critical approaches from Aristotle’s Poetics to recent theories; efforts to analyze and define the functions of literature; social, ethical, historical, and aesthetic issues; classical heritage, Romantic theory, modernism; poststructuralism, including deconstruction and cultural critiques.
Note: Graduate section offered.
English 192n (formerly *English 90am). Language and Culture in American Modernism
Catalog Number: 0412
Yunte Huang
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
This course explores the issues of language and culture in modern American literature, suggests reading modernism as a reconceptualization of language, and relates “language” to the concept of culture, as understood in the early decades of the 20th century. Readings include Henry James, Franz Boas, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Mary Austin, and Zora Neale Hurston.
English 194. Political Theatre and the Structure of Drama
Catalog Number: 0417
Elaine Scarry
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 2.
The estranged, didactic, intellectual theatre of Brecht, and the ritualistic, emergency theatre of Artaud serve as reference points for a range of American, English, and Continental plays. The unique part played by “consent” in theatrical experience. Emphasis on the structural features of drama: establishing or violating the boundary between audience and stage; merging or separating actor and character; expanding or destroying language. Readings include Brecht, O’Neill, Artaud, Genet, Pirandello, Beckett, and such earlier authors as Euripides and Shelley.
English 199. Persons and Things
Catalog Number: 6195
Barbara E. Johnson
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
A literary, psychoanalytic, legal, and philosophical analysis of the relations between persons and things. Topics include the legal definition of “person,” Marx and Freud on fetishism, structures of personification, reification, and anthropomorphism, poetry and sculpture, object relations, artificial life, and the Pygmalion complex. Texts by Heidegger, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hardy, James, Petry, Baudelaire, Plath, Winnicott, and selected films.
[*English 204. Elegy in Old English and Old Norse]
Catalog Number: 0629
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 213. Late Medieval English Literature and Public Culture: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 8382
C. David Benson
Half course (fall term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
We explore works that transcend the familiar opposition of elite-popular, clerical-lay, male-female, and
appeal to a general national audience: the many rather than the few. We take Middle English works such as Piers Plowman, Mandeville’s Travels, and the Book of Margery Kempe and compare them with other contemporary discourses and practices such as the art in English parish churches and the civic institutions of London.
[*English 228y. Milton and His Contemporaries: Literature and Politics in the Era of Revolution (1629–1674): Seminar]
Catalog Number: 1277
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Milton’s works, poetry and prose, examined in relation to various texts—literary, subliterary, political—which refract the experience and culture of the revolutionary era in England. Contemporary texts include the poetry of Vaughan, Herrick, the Cavaliers, and Marvell, as well as histories, sermons, political tracts, letters, and biography.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
[*English 240. Poetry, Politics, and Prophecy: Graduate Seminar]
Catalog Number: 6188
James Engell
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Key texts and authors during the time when English poetry and politics were most closely and publicly linked. Party politics, cultural politics, and the connection of the two. Political satire. Sexual politics and women writers. Religion and the prophetic theme. Includes some prose. Dryden, Pope, Montagu, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Blake, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02. Open to qualified undergraduates.
*English 242. Restoration & 18th-Century Writers
Catalog Number: 9175
James Engell
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Montagu, and others; the lyric, periodical literature, satire, biography, and drama; relations of engaged literature with politics, religion, history; issues of audience, gender, class, and canon.
Note: An intensive introduction to 18th-century literature at the graduate level. Presupposes no previous acquaintance with field. Graduate students who have studied some 18th-century literature should consult with the instructor. Open to qualified honors undergraduates.
*English 253. Austen, James and the Novel of Strategy
Catalog Number: 4625
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
A range of novels by Austen and James along with works by Trollope, Conrad, and McEwan to examine and expand such concepts as plot, agency, responsibility, collective action, complete and incomplete knowledge, moves and strategies, outcomes, equilibrium, loss, and denied gain.
*English 258. Dickens and Joyce
Catalog Number: 8247
Robert Kiely
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
*English 264x. Sensation and Moral Action in Thomas Hardy
Catalog Number: 2714
Elaine Scarry
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
The novels, stories, and narrative poems of Hardy will be approached through two major subjects: the language of the senses (including readings from science and literature on blindness, deafness, and dislocations of touch) and moral agency (including a set of philosophic essays on “luck” and “action”).
Note: Open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of the instructor.
*English 272b. Major U.S. Authors: Faulkner
Catalog Number: 2282
Lawrence Buell
Half course (fall term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
An intensive reading of major works from the 1920s to the 1950s against the background of pertinent criticism and theory and the “renaissance” of southern literature and culture in Faulkner’s day.
*English 273b. American History / American Fiction
Catalog Number: 2082
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
A study of American historical fiction. Readings include historical narratives and fictive reinventions, with some attention to contemporaneous historiography. Emphasis is on fiction and history as rival narrative forms and concepts of national identity. Authors include Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Twain, James, Dreiser, Cather, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Doctorow, Morrison.
[*English 273h. Harlem Renaissance]
Catalog Number: 8788
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Examines the period of unprecedented African-American literary flowering during the 1920s and 1930s. Special attention will be given to the following: Harlem and other cultural centers; dialect in poetry and prose; the impact of women authors, editors, and critics; and the central positioning of the Harlem Renaissance in the African American literary tradition.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 275. New England: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 8241
Elisa New
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
This course introduces graduate students to classic and current debates by means of the country’s most exceptional region, New England. Readings will include texts by Winthrop, Bradford, Mather, Franklin, Hawthorne,
Melville, Dickinson, Jewett, Bishop and Lowell as well as critical readings treating such topics as autobiography and authorship, exceptionalism, history and historicism, romance, canon, regionalism, power, and pragmatism.
[*English 281. Contemporary Poetry]
Catalog Number: 8856
Peter Sacks
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Studies the work of several English language poets since the Second World War: Moore, Larkin, Bishop, Hecht, Bidart, Heaney, Ashbery, Graham, Merrill, and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 283. Describing the Lyric
Catalog Number: 1319
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Each change in period style presents a problem of description to the critic. We will consider a wide range of poetic styles, from the court styles of Elizabethan poetry through the aleatory styles of such contemporary poets as Ammons, Ashbery, and Graham, inquiring in each case which avenues of description prove productive.
[*English 289. Postmodernism: Fiction and Theories]
Catalog Number: 2667
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Readings from Beckett and Borges to Pynchon and DeLillo in conjunction with selections from Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson and others.
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
[*English 294z. On Beauty]
Catalog Number: 7277
Elaine Scarry
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
Philosophic and literary accounts of beauty from Greek through modern, including Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Castiglione, Addison, Kant, Keats, Rilke. The central descriptions of beauty; the major arguments against it (e.g., the view that it disables critical judgment, hence is politically suspect); and an examination of four objects taken to be sites of beauty (God, gardens, persons, and poems).
Note: Expected to be given in 2001–02.
*English 295b. New Historicism
Catalog Number: 2040
Stephen J. Greenblatt
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Seminar examining new historicist methods and the critiques of these methods. Readings will include theorists such as Foucault, de Certeau, and Gallagher, but the central work will involve the creation of an archive of texts and the attempt to use and test the limits of new historicism in relation
to this archive.
*English 296. Descriptive and Analytical Bibliography: Seminar
Catalog Number: 7102
Roger E. Stoddard
Half course (fall term). W., 2:30–4:30. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8, 9
By close examination of early printed books and manuscripts from Houghton Library collections, students learn how to identify, interpret, and describe physical bibliographical evidence as it is employed in historical research and textual studies.
*English 296e. The Literary Essay
Catalog Number: 8976
Marjorie Garber
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
The literary essay, in its breadth of reference and occasional form, was the forerunner of much of what is today called “cultural studies.” This seminar will consider major essayists from the 16th to the 21st centuries, with particular attention to strategies of argument, evidence, and style, and to contemporary critical writing. Montaigne, Bacon, Hazlitt, Emerson, Benjamin, Adorno, Eliot, Woolf, Barthes, Sontag, and others.
*English 302hf. Renaissance: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 2814
Marjorie Garber 7264, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), John Parker 3729, and Werner Sollors 7424, John Parker and members of the Department
Half course (throughout the year). Alternate W., at 4:15.
The Conference focuses upon theses in progress and other research topics of mutual interest. Membership limited to faculty members teaching or conducting research in Renaissance literary studies and to graduate students working in this field who have completed required course work for the Master’s degree. Enrollment is open to all such students, and is required of those who have been admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. and who intend to work on Renaissance topics.
*English 304hf. The Extended 18th Century: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6110
Leo Damrosch 2200, James Engell 8076, Michael Shinagel 7659, and Leah Price
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Focuses on theses, theses in progress, and research topics of mutual interest. Required of graduate students working, or intending to work, on the Restoration, 18th century, or Romanticism (the periods 1660–1830), and who have been admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. Open to other students working on topics in Restoration and 18th-century literature.
*English 305. Narrative (1800 to the Present): Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 4846
Philip J. Fisher 1470 and Robert Kiely 1621
The Conference focuses on theses in progress and other research topics of mutual concern. Membership limited to faculty members teaching or conducting research in 19th- and 20th-century British and American fiction and to graduate students working in the field. Enrollment is open to all such students, and is required of those who have been admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. and who intend to work in the field.
*English 306hf. 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 5268
Robert Kiely 1621, Jesse E. Matz 2169 (on leave 2001-2002), and Ann Wierda Rowland 2582
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
*English 308hf. Drama: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6909
Marjorie Garber 7264 and Elaine Scarry 2206
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Focuses on research topics related to dramatic literature, theatre, and performance. Open to all faculty members and graduate students teaching or conducting research in the field.
*English 310hfr (formerly *English 310fhr). American Literature and Culture: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6235
Lawrence Buell 2655 and Elisa New 2428
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Colloquium open to all graduate students working in the area of American literature and culture. Papers delivered by students writing seminar papers or theses, faculty members, and visiting scholars.
*English 311 (formerly *English 311hf). The Teaching of Literature: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 8208
Marjorie Garber 7264, Lynn Mary Festa 2331, Oren Jeremy Izenberg 2365, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), and Sharmila Sen 2509 (on leave spring term)
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Note: Open to all graduate students and required of all third-year graduate students.
*English 314hf. 20th-Century Literature and Cultural Theory: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 1410
Barbara E. Johnson 7626 (on leave fall term) and Sharmila Sen 2509 (on leave spring term)
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8, 9
This colloquium is open to all graduate students and faculty working in 20th-century literature and cultural theory. Topics include African-American literature, contemporary literature, drama, film and/or performance, modernism, literary and cultural theory, postcolonial studies, and postmodernism. Work in progress, as well as dissertation chapters and potential articles and conference papers, will be encouraged.
*English 397. Directed Study
Catalog Number: 6588
Members of the Department
*English 398. Direction of Doctoral Dissertations
Catalog Number: 5968
Richard Charles Adams 1665, C. David Benson 3725 (spring term only), Sacvan Bercovitch 7638 (on leave fall term), Robert Brustein 7042, Lawrence Buell 2655, Leo Damrosch 2200, Daniel G. Donoghue 1469, James Engell 8076, Philip J. Fisher 1470, Marjorie Garber 7264, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2899, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Joseph C. Harris 1089 (on leave spring term), Barbara E. Johnson 7626 (on leave fall term), Walter Kaiser 2561, Robert Kiely 1621, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), Elisa New 2428, Peter Sacks 2161 (on leave spring term), Elaine Scarry 2206, Sharmila Sen 2509 (on leave spring term), Marc Shell 3176 (on leave fall term), Michael Shinagel 7659, Werner Sollors 7424, and Helen Vendler 7226 (on leave spring term)
Note: Normally limited to students reading specifically in the field of a proposed doctoral thesis. Open only by petition to the Department; petitions should be presented during the term preceding enrollment, and must be signed by the instructor with whom the reading is to be done. All applicants for admission should first confer with the Director of Graduate Studies.
*English 399. Reading and Research
Catalog Number: 1825
Members of the Department
Note: Conducted through regular conferences and assigned writing. Limited to students reading specifically on topics not covered in regular courses. Open only by petition to the Department; petitions should be presented during the term preceding enrollment, and must be signed by the instructor with whom the reading is to be done. All applicants for admission should first confer with the Director of Graduate Studies.