*English Cpr. Poetry Writing I
Catalog Number: 3053 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Douglas A. Powell
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: M., 1–3; Spring: M., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 6, 7; Spring: 6, 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.
Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks (spring term)
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: W., 1–4; Spring: W., 1–4 (Graham); or W., 1–3 (Sacks). EXAM GROUP: Fall: 13, 14; Spring: 6, 7, 8
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.
Douglas A. Powell
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 1–3; Spring: Tu., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 15, 16; Spring: 15, 16, 17
See *English Cpr above.
*English Crr. Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 1893 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Brad Watson
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 2–4; Spring: M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 16, 17; Spring: 7, 8
Discussion of students’ work in a workshop format.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Csr. Fiction Writing I
Catalog Number: 2601 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Patricia E. Powell
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
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). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
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.
Patricia E. Powell
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
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., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
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., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: 9
See *English Cyr.
*English Yzr. Play Writing
Catalog Number: 4466 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Adrienne Kennedy
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Each student is required to complete a one act play. The first weeks are spent exploring imagery, language and the imagination through exercises. We also read selected playwrights...Chekhov, Beckett, Pinter and others.
English 10ax. Major British Writers I
Catalog Number: 8342
John Parker
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12 and an additional hour to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 14
Same scope as 10a, satisfies same concentration requirement, but not Core Literature and Arts A requirement.
Note: Two lectures and one section meeting per week. Required of English concentrators. Open to freshmen.
English 10b. Major British Writers II
Catalog Number: 0550
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10, and an additional hour to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
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. Counts as Literature and Arts A credit.
English 10bx. Major British Writers II
Catalog Number: 4653
Erik Irving Gray and Douglas Mao
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 10 and an additional hour to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 3
Same scope as 10b, satisfies same concentration requirement, but not Core Literature and Arts A requirement.
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). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
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.
English 17. American Literature to 1860
Catalog Number: 3883
Elisa New
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
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
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
A survey of the English novel from its origins to the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on different critical accounts of its “rise” and form. Novels by Defoe, Behn, Richardson, Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Conrad, Woolf.
English 34. Elements of Rhetoric
Catalog Number: 3820
James Engell
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
Classical rhetorical theory, as originating with Aristotle, in contemporary applications. The nature of rhetoric in modern culture; practical examples drawn from American history and literature 1765 to present; written exercises and (class size permitting) attention to public speaking; briefly treats the history and educational importance of rhetoric in the West; stresses theory and practice as inseparable; non-concentrators encouraged.
[*English 90cf. Caribbean Fictions]
Catalog Number: 8964
Sharmila Sen
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
*English 90cg. A Fascination with Purity: The Gawain Poet
Catalog Number: 2243
Nicholas Watson
Half course (fall term). W., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 5, 6
This course studies four poems probably written by the author of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which also include Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. The poems all treat purity as an aesthetic and a moral goal. How do these goals relate to each other? Is poetry, like human living, necessarily impure? Exploring the Gawain-poet’s sophisticated meditations on such questions, we will also consider their wider significance for thinking about literature.
*English 90cy. The Medieval Lyric
Catalog Number: 7477
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
The lyric is a genre often overlooked in surveys of Medieval literature, but as a group medieval lyrics present a diverse array of styles, influences, and subject matter. Much of the reading will come from Middle English, supplemented by Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Old English, Provençal and other early vernacular poems in translation. Attention will be given, where possible, to the historical and manuscript contexts.
*English 90dy. Necessary Lies: Visions, Novelty, and Fiction in Late-Medieval Literature
Catalog Number: 4894
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
If the transcendent cannot be known or named, is lying the only way to talk about it? This course investigates how various genres of visionary writing view the world and their own claims to be true: ghost stories, journeys through this world and the next, demonic apparitions, divine revelations, literary fictions. Texts include Chaucer’s House of Fame, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, The Ghost of Guido, and John Morigny’s newly discovered Liber visionum.
[*English 90hs. Satire: Augustan and Modern]
Catalog Number: 8795
Michael Shinagel
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
*English 90hv. Sexing Victorian Fiction
Catalog Number: 0225
Leah Price
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Sex and money, reading and shopping, work and marriage, domestic realism and imperial fantasy, unsexed women and unmanned men, feminism and anti-feminism, single-sex communities and same-sex desire. Short stories and long novels by Austen, Brontë, Gaskell, Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Oliphant, and Conan Doyle, as well as essays by Ruskin, Mill, Trollope, and others.
*English 90in. Literature and Science in the 19th Century
Catalog Number: 4923
John M. Picker
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
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 90ka. The Brontës
Catalog Number: 1097
Elaine Scarry
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Writings by Emily, Anne, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as the later novels and films their work has inspired.
*English 90kw. The American Civil War
Catalog Number: 1957
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Studies in the literature of the American Civil War, from letters, speeches, poetry, and photography to diaries, stories, and novels. Considers aesthetic, historical, and intellectual dimensions, and focuses in particular on national and sectional identities; the transition from romanticism to realism; generic modes in relation to gendered, class, racial, regional, and religious issues; and meanings of slavery and freedom. Authors include Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Whitman, Melville, Mary Chesnut, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Bierce, Crane, Tourgee, and others.
*English 90lj. The Idea of Italy
Catalog Number: 3054
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
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.
*English 90mf. Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
Catalog Number: 6041
Michael Shinagel
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
An examination of major novels by these early masters of fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, Pamela, Clarissa, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones.
*English 90rp. Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century
Catalog Number: 8623
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
An intensive study of the texts and contexts of a few 20th-century literary cases - the Gaelic Revival, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, and the “Language” poets - in which poets have aspired both to be a social group (whether understood as a “movement,” a “scene,” a “magic workshop,” a band of friends or lovers) and to use poetry to reconstruct social formations in crisis.
*English 90rs. Yeats
Catalog Number: 5853
Peter Sacks
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Study of the poetry of Yeats.
[*English 90sl. The Romance of Scotland ]
Catalog Number: 8963
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
*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). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
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 90ui. The Indian Novel in English
Catalog Number: 4187
Sharmila Sen
Half course (fall term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
The Indian novel in English has been castigated for Babu English, for elite preoccupations, and for purveying spicy postcolonial chic. It also appears with dizzying frequency in bookstore windows, on syllabi, and at the top of literary prize lists. While charting the evolution of the Indian English novel from nineteenth-century “false starts” to the late twentieth-century boom period, we shall read such authors as Ali, Chatterjee, Chaudhuri, Desai, Ghosh, Narayan, Roy, Rushdie, and Syal.
[*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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
[*English 90un. Gender and Nation in 19th-Century British Literature]
Catalog Number: 8823
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
This course investigates the entanglement of gender and nation in 19th-century British poetry and fiction, paying particular attention to literature’s role in the production and representation of both. Authors will include Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Tennyson, Eliot and Stoker.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
*English 90wd. Dickens and George Eliot
Catalog Number: 5789
Leah Price
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Country and city, realism and melodrama, anonymity and notoriety, modernity and nostalgia, the structure of narrative and the shape of society. For the sake of variety - and pacing - the longer fiction (The Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield, Middlemarch and Bleak House) will be interspersed with speeches, essays, reviews, letters, ghost stories and newspaper articles by and about these two very different novelists
*English 90wp. Black Playwrights of the World
Catalog Number: 7257
Adrienne Kennedy
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3.
A survey of the drama of the most significant 20th-century Black authors from two hemispheres, with a focus on texts of plays and their cultural contexts. Readings include works by Matura, Shange, Baraka, Soyinka, Walcott, Hughes, Césaire, Hansberry, Fuller, and other playwrights.
[*English 90xa. Postmodernism: Fiction and Theories]
Catalog Number: 1783
Robert Kiely
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
An exploration of novels published after World War II and film interpretations. Texts to be considered will include Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, The Tin Drum, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and The English Patient.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
English 185 (formerly *English 90uw). Wit and Humor
Catalog Number: 3941
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Emphasizing wit and humor rather than “comedy” as classically understood, the seminar will consider selected texts and films (including, for example, Aristophanes, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Woody Allen, and Monty Python), and pay particular attention to theoretical writings by psychologists, sociologists, and critics who have tried to explain why people laugh, want to laugh, and pay to be made to laugh.
Note: Non-English Department students welcome.
*English 97. Seminar—Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 0280
Elisa New and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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
Elisa New and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Individual 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
Elisa New (fall term) 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 102. Early Bible Translations
Catalog Number: 2303
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., 10–11:30. EXAM GROUP: 12, 13
Large portions of the Latin Bible were translated into Old English in the centuries before 1066. Some efforts, like that of Aelfric (10th century), were cautious and painstakingly literal because of the anxiety associated with any departure from the Latin text. Others, however, moved with great interpretative freedom, especially those that exploited the conventions of Old English poetry, so that Moses, for example, leads his people across a desert that looks much like the forests of northern Europe, and Satan is a rebel warrior chieftan (somewhat resembling Milton’s Satan).
English 103f. Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Before Love
Catalog Number: 8069
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
What we call “courtly love” started off as a literary convention in the high Middle Ages, one which has since influenced western culture in profound ways. But how was love imagined and conducted in the earlier Middle Ages? How was it represented in literature? Readings will explore a variety of emotional attachments between people, not only heterosexual relations. Translations from Old English poetry will form the basis of weekly discussions, supplemented by secondary readings.
English 115b. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Catalog Number: 2945
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 3. EXAM GROUP: 17
A study of the most famous work of English literature before Shakespeare, both as a work of art and as a product of its place (London) and time (the 1390’s).
[English 124d. Shakespearean Tragedy]
Catalog Number: 7041
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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 issues as “What is tragedy?”, “What differentiates texts written for performance?”, and “Why has Shakespeare’s work, particularly the tragedies, been so influential?”.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
English 124g (formerly *English 90fg). Shakespearean Genres
Catalog Number: 6690
John Parker
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 3. EXAM GROUP: 17
Over the course of the semester we’ll read a broad selection of Shakespeare’s 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 125b. Renaissance Drama: Literature, Economics, and Religion
Catalog Number: 9652
John Parker
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
To examine how in Shakespeare’s lifetime a secular, commercial aesthetic grew out of and replaced drama’s earlier role as an illustration of Christian truths. We’ll explore the relationship of religious conviction to financial settlements of all sorts: the final pay-back of a just God’s revenge, the moral status of debt, the economic contract regulating guilt, punishment and forgiveness. Readings drawn from Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, the York Mystery cycle, plus Everyman and Mankind.
English 130. 17th-Century Poetry and Prose
Catalog Number: 4789
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
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.
English 141. The 18th-Century Novel
Catalog Number: 8683
Leah Price
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., 2–3:30. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
The rise of the novel, seen through eighteenth-century fiction by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, plus films (Tom Jones, Sense and Sensibility, Dangerous Liaisons), paintings, engravings, magazine articles, and excerpts from literary and social theory. Issues include genre (what differentiates novels from epics, romances, newspapers, correspondences, biography, pornography?), modernity (what was novel about the novel?), gender, reading, and pleasure.
Note: Counts as pre-1800 credit.
English 147n. Women and the Novel to Jane Austen
Catalog Number: 1659
Lynn Mary Festa
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
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.
English 149. Gothic
Catalog Number: 7198
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
Readings in the Gothic traditions of British and American literature. Examines how Gothic texts challenge traditional accounts of subjectivity and individual agency, domesticity and property, familial and national history. Establishes conventions of the genre with 18th and 19th-century novels, before addressing 20th-century adaptations of the gothic in literature and film. Readings include Lewis, Shelley, Brontë, Poe, James, Stoker, Faulkner, DuMaurier, King, and Carter. Films include Psycho, The Shining, and Blair Witch Project.
English 150. British Romantic Poetry
Catalog Number: 5274
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Readings in the poetry of Smith, Blake, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Hemans, Shelley, and Keats.
English 151. The British Novel from Austen to Conrad in its European Context
Catalog Number: 8396
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Rise and Fall of the Romantic self. Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther; Scott, Old Mortality; Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre; Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Conrad, Lord Jim. The novel of society. Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Eliot, Middlemarch; Dickens, Oliver Twist; Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground; Zola, L’Assommoir; Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
English 154. Victorian Poetry
Catalog Number: 8644
Erik Gray
Half course (spring 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 160. 20th-Century British Novel
Catalog Number: 7052
Douglas Mao
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
The 20th-century novel in Britain and the former British empire. Imperial anxieties, wartime casualties, modernist ironies, postmodern ecstasies. Dilemmas of prose narrative in the age of film and television; predicaments of the individual in a time of mass movements; problems of national discourse in an internationalizing world. Authors may include Conrad, Forster, West, Woolf, Beckett, Lessing, Rushdie, Welsh, Winterson, P. Fitzgerald, Z. Smith.
English 162b. American and British Theatre
Catalog Number: 0745
Elaine Scarry
Half course (spring term). M., W., 11–12:30. EXAM GROUP: 4, 5
Theatre of poetry, transport, and menace: plays written between 1902 and 2002 by British (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Osborne, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill) and American (O’Neill, Williams, Albee, Kennedy, Norman, Wilson, Mamet) playwrights.
English 165. Joyce, Modernism, and Aestheticism
Catalog Number: 1827
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (fall term). M., W., F., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
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 165b. Conrad and V.S. Naipaul: Genealogies of the Global Imagination
Catalog Number: 1668
Homi K. Bhabha
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
The novels of Conrad and Naipaul have a particular relevance to contemporary discourses on global culture. For both writers, the experience of Empire was as much an ethical and aesthetic project as it was an economic or political venture. Our study will focus on their reflections on the problematic project of joining diverse cultures and distant territories in a global network and on the role of figurative language and fictional forms in imagining community and communication on a global scale.
[English 166. The Novel (and other Narratives) since World War II ]
Catalog Number: 1874
Robert Kiely
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
English 167p. Postcolonial Narratives
Catalog Number: 2511
Sharmila Sen
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
This course is an investigation of the major concerns, paradigms, and quarrels within postcolonial literary studies. While reading authors such as Achebe, Conrad, Dabydeen, Dangarembga, Ghosh, Phillips, Rushdie, and Salih, we shall pay close attention to the continuities and the discontinuities of the postcolonial experience as represented in literary texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia.
[English 170. 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 2002–03.
English 173b. American Poetry 1945 to Present
Catalog Number: 3680
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 3. EXAM GROUP: 17
Readings in American poetry after World War II. Authors include Lowell, Ginsberg, Bishop, Oppen, Plath, O’Hara, Ashbery, Bidart, Grossman, Palmer, Howe and others
[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 2002–03.
English 175h. American History/American Fiction
Catalog Number: 8277
John Stauffer
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 3. EXAM GROUP: 17
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 176a. American Protest Literature
Catalog Number: 4234
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
An examination of protest literature in the United States from the American Revolution to the rise of Hip Hop. We explore how various modes of protest function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological texts within their cultural context. Texts include photographs, speeches, music (folk, jazz, rap), and writings by Thomas Paine, Garrison, Stowe, Thoreau, Whitman, Douglass, Bellamy, Ida Wells Garnet, Gilman, Goldman, McKay, Hughes, Debs, Steinbeck, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Lorde, Friedan, Hoffman, others.
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., 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 181. Introduction to Literary Theory]
Catalog Number: 2096
Barbara E. Johnson
Half course (fall term). Hours to be arranged.
The course will focus on several recurring questions: mimesis (Plato, Auerbach, Derrida, Said), figure (Aristotle, Jakobson, Lacan), post-colonialism (du Bellay, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Spivak), language (Aquinas, Mallarmé, Saussure, Gates), authorship (Woolf, Foucault, Barthes, Gilbert & Gubar), media and the means of representation (Lessing, Freud, Benjamin, Moulthrop). By juxtaposing older texts with twentieth-century texts, we will analyse historical differences along with recurring questions.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
English 182b. Orality and Literacy: From Beowulf to Dylan (and beyond)
Catalog Number: 9169
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
Theories of oral literature and oral mentality; the oral/literate interface; cultures of “vocality”; media and their messages (Ong, Lord, McLuhan,etc.). Genres such as epic, ballad, spirituals, blues, and country. Special attention to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music; the folk revival of the 1960s; the “No Depression” revival of the 1990s; and the African-American tradition leading to contemporary rap. Additional material by Greil Marcus, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Coen brothers.
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 185b. Race and Allegory]
Catalog Number: 0337
Barbara E. Johnson
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Allegory has been described as a “dark conceit” that hides its meaning beneath a “veil”. Yet “black” and “white” often function in Western allegorical texts as if they immediately connote “evil” and “good.” The contradiction between the “darkness” that is rhetorically privileged and the “blackness” that is often condemned cannot fail to have an impact on the development of explicit racial discourses and literary movements. We will study works by Du Bois, Harper, Larsen, Freud, Hurston, Césaire, Fanon, Baraka, and the film Suture.
Note: Expected to be given in 2002–03.
English 187d. American Literatures in Languages Other than English
Catalog Number: 4323
Marc Shell
Half course (fall term). Th., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: 18
Considers literary traditions from the more than 200 language groups that have written and published in what is now the US. 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 Zuñi poetry. All readings are in bilingual facing-page format.
Note: Foreign Language credit may be possible by arrangement.
English 188b. American Literature in the Age of Transpacific Imagination
Catalog Number: 9078
Yunte Huang
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
A rethinking of the multicultural, polyvocal nature of American literature against the palimpsestic backdrop of American history. We envision the Pacific as the new geopolitical center of the world in the 21st century and see the US as a Pacific nation. We explore works that imagine the Pacific in the past 150 years or so, works that represent both canonical American and Asian American literature (Melville, Twain, Adams, Pound, Kingston, Cha, Mukhurjee, Hagedorn).
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). Hours to be arranged.
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: Expected to be given in 2002–03. Graduate section offered.
*English 224c. Problems in Shakespearean Interpretation: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2216
Marjorie Garber
Half course (spring term). Tu., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
Issues and contexts in the contemporary theory and criticism of Shakespeare. A detailed consideration of several major plays. Special attention to questions opened by new historicism, materialism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, cultural studies, and other ways of reading and interpreting.
*English 228y. Milton and His Contemporaries: Literature and Politics in the Era of Revolution (1629–1674): Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 1277
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
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.
*English 234. The Poetry of John Keats: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2514
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
A study of most of the poetry, focussing on influences, genre-changes, poetics, and the Keatsian lexicon.
*English 239. Romanticism and the Problem of History: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2693
Ann Wierda Rowland
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
This proseminar will pair major Romantic texts with important critical work around the influential question of “history” in Romantic literature and criticism.
*English 240. Poetry, Politics, and Prophecy: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 6188
James Engell
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Poetry and politics closely, publicly linked. Party politics, cultural politics, political satire. Sexual politics, women writers. Religion and modern prophecy. Dryden, Pope, Montagu, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Blake, and others.
Note: Open to qualified undergraduates.
*English 276x (formerly *English 90vl). African-American Literary Tradition: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 3536
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Half course (spring term). M., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 5, 6
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 Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.
*English 281b. The 1930’s: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2600
Douglas Mao
Half course (fall term). Th., at 12, Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
Currently one of literary study’s hottest terrains, the Thirties crackle with unrest, catastrophe, and extraordinary innovations in form. A range of authors from proletarian to highbrow, including Auden, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, Stevens, Williams.
*English 290b (formerly *English 90lp). Literature and the Philosophy of Mind: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 7350
Oren Jeremy Izenberg
Half course (spring term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
We will consider the mind’s artifacts (principally lyric poems) alongside recent philosophical and scientific accounts of the mind itself. Topics will include: private and universal languages, the rationality of emotions, collective identity, intelligence (artificial and real), “other minds.”
*English 291b. Language Disorders and the Literary Tradition: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 7688
Marc Shell
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
What is a language disorder? Who defines it? Is it a disability? We study stuttering (Moses, Billy Budd), accent (Pygmalion), perseveration (Shakespeare), semi-lingualism (Power of Silence), mixed languages (Finnegans Wake), speechlessness (Johnny’s Got His Gun), dyslexia (Yeats), and American Sign Language as well as theoretical texts.
*English 292. Issues in the Study of American Literature: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 1618
Werner Sollors
Half course (spring term). W., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 5, 6
Comparative readings in literature of the United States in an international context, discussions of critical and theoretical work, and an examination of pioneering and more recent literary history.
*English 293. Solitary Reading and the Theory of the Novel: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 4166
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
A phenomenological study of novels and paintings; reading and seeing as aesthetic modes; segmented and prolonged attention; solitary and social experiences of works of art; intimacy and non-reciprocal superimposition, enchantment, occupied consciousness.
Note: Open to qualified undergraduates.
*English 294z. On Beauty: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 7277
Elaine Scarry
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
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).
*English 296. Descriptive and Analytical Bibliography: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 7102
Roger E. Stoddard
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
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 298. Literary Theory in the Life of Literature: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 3464
Homi K. Bhabha
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
Interactions between concepts central to literary theory - genre and ‘textuality’, writing and ‘difference’, ethics and interpretation, narrative and cultural translation - and literature embodying such concerns. Barthes, Habermas, Derrida, Lacan; Carey, Forster, Ghosh, Morrison, Rushdie, others.
*English 302hf. Renaissance: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 2814
Marjorie Garber 7264, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450, and John Parker 3729
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.
Note: Enrollment is open to all such students, and is required of those who have been admitted to candidacy for the PhD 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, Lynn Festa 2331, and Leah Price 3501, and Michael Shinagel 7659
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Focuses on theses, theses in progress, and research topics of mutual interest.
Note: 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 PhD. 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 (on leave spring term)
The Conference focuses on theses in progress and other research topics of mutual concern.
Note: 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 PhD and who intend to work in the field.
*English 306hf. 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 5268
Erik Irving Gray 3726, Oren Jeremy Izenberg 2365, Robert Kiely 1621, Douglas Mao 3727, Jesse E. Matz 2169, Leah Price 3501, 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. American Literature and Culture: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6235
Lawrence Buell 2655 (on leave spring term), Elisa New 2428 (on leave spring term), and Werner Sollors 7424
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, Douglas Mao 3727 and staff
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
Homi K. Bhaba 4100, Barbara E. Johnson 7626, 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
Sacvan Bercovitch 7638 (on leave fall term), Homi K. Bhabha 4100 (on leave fall term), Robert Brustein 7042 (on leave 2002-03), Lawrence Buell 2655 (on leave spring term), Leo Damrosch 2200 (on leave fall term), Daniel G. Donoghue 1469, James Engell 8076, Philip J. Fisher 1470, Marjorie Garber 7264, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2899, Jorie Graham 2358, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Joseph C. Harris 1089, Barbara E. Johnson 7626 (on leave 2001-02), Walter Kaiser 2561 (on leave 2001-02), Robert Kiely 1621 (on leave spring term), Barbara K. Lewalski 7450, Elisa New 2428 (on leave spring term), Derek A. Pearsall 1093, Peter Sacks 2161, Elaine Scarry 2206, Marc Shell 3176, Michael Shinagel 7659, Werner Sollors 7424, John Stauffer 1006, Helen Vendler 7226 (on leave spring term), and Nicholas Watson 3851
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.