*English Calr. Dramatic Screenwriting II
Catalog Number: 1240 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Daniel J. Rubin
Half course (spring term). W., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7, 8
This course will build up writing muscles of students seriously interested in screenwriting. Students will write and re-write scenes; alter and develop characters; solve story problems; re-write dialogue; give and receive pitches; do film analysis; workshop written materials; perform exercises related to the actual work done by professional screenwriters. By the end of the course students will have completed several short film scripts and the first act of an original feature length script.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Camr. Advanced Playwriting 2: Production Workshop
Catalog Number: 2555 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Christine Mary Evans
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16, 17
This workshop-based course is for advanced playwrights who have already completed a full-length or one-act play. Students will write a new play, developed through several drafts in a collaborative process that models professional practice. Each student will be paired with a director, actors, and a graduate dramaturge from the Advanced Institute of Theatre Training (I.A.T.T.), culminating in rehearsed public readings of the plays as part of the annual Harvard Playwrights’ Festival.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Capr. Advanced Poetry Workshop
Catalog Number: 6523 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jorie Graham
Half course (spring term). W., 4–7 p.m.; W., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 9
Open by application to both undergraduates and graduates. Please submit a portfolio including a letter of interest, ten poems, and a list of classes (taken at Harvard or elsewhere) that seem to have bearing on your enterprise. Class lasts 3 hours and includes the study of poetic practice in conjunction with the discussion of student work.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Cawr. Advanced Poetry Workshop - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 19931 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Joanna G. Klink
Half course (fall term). W., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7, 8
Open by application to undergraduates and graduates. This is an advanced workshop devoted to critical analysis and revision of poems. We will discuss student work in light of central problems in poetics, with particular emphasis on the relationship between voice (evidence of human presence) and description (evidence of world).
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Ckr. Introduction to Playwriting
Catalog Number: 6781 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Christine Mary Evans
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). M., 2–5. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8, 9
Plays, unusual beasts in the world of writing, are design templates for live performance. Therefore, learning to think architecturally is a vital part of the playwright’s craft. This workshop-based course introduces students to a range of structural and aesthetic approaches to playwriting—always with live performance in mind. It combines intensive weekly writing and discussion of student work with play analysis and dramatic theory. All students will complete a one-act play and several shorter pieces.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Clr. Dramatic Screenwriting I
Catalog Number: 6121 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Daniel J. Rubin
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: M., 4-7 p.m.; W., 4-7 p.m.; Spring: M., 1-4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 9; Spring: 6, 7, 8
This workshop introduces the art, craft, and business of screenwriting. Students will complete short scripts and off-beat writing exercises focused on dramatic structure, character development, dialogue, theme, and tone; students will also analyze films and screenplays. By exploring visual storytelling, personal versus commercial sensibilities, and alternative approaches to script creation through the writing of short screenplays, students will acquire the tools, skills, and confidence to create feature film scripts.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Cnfr. Introduction to Creative Nonfiction
Catalog Number: 6740 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Darcy Frey
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 9
Whether in essay, memoir or reportage, creative nonfiction employs many of the same literary techniques as fiction: narrative structure, character development, scene-setting, extended dialogue, emphasis on voice and point of view. In addition to workshopping student writing, we discuss examples of the genre by writers such as Virginia Woolf, William Maxwell, Joan Didion, and John McPhee. Assignments include two 10-15 page narratives, an extensive revision, and typed critiques of classmates’ work.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Cnnr. Advanced Creative Nonfiction
Catalog Number: 2121 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Darcy Frey
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Th., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 18
In any long-form nonfiction (essay, memoir, travelogue, journalism), there are countless ways of structuring and telling a true story. In this workshop, students examine various techniques for giving nonfiction material dramatic and suspenseful energy: chronology, argument, juxtaposition, retrospection, evolving revelation. In addition to workshopping student writing, we discuss examples of the genre by writers such as Julia Blackburn, Truman Capote, Spalding Gray, and Janet Malcolm. Assignments include two 10-15 page narratives, an extensive revision, and typed critiques of classmates’ work.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
English Cpdr. Topics in Poetics: Description - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 35038
Joanna G. Klink
Half course (spring term). W., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7, 8
Open by application to undergraduates and graduates. Poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers are welcome. What is an image? What is an "exactly perceived" detail? What kinds of authority do poets draw from accurate descriptive language? To better understand the range of expressive possibilities (and technical strategies) involved in description, we will devote the semester to reading and otherwise inhabiting the precise sensory visions of Keats, Hopkins, Bishop, Roethke, Ammons, and others. Imitations, exercises, and some workshop.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Cpkr. Poetry Workshop
Catalog Number: 9817 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Joanna G. Klink
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Tu., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16, 17
Open by application to undergraduates and graduates. This is a poetry workshop involving critical analysis of student work as well as reading and discussion of poems by established poets. On a weekly basis we will examine student poems and the practical issues in poetics (descriptive language, syntax, diction, etc.) they bring to light. Be prepared to do imitations; some memorization may also be required.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Crr. Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 1893 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Bret A. Johnston
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 4–7 p.m. EXAM GROUP: 9
An introduction to fundamental aspects (technical and conceptual) of writing fiction, beginning with short exercises and moving toward the completion and revision of original work. Readings include Munro, Welty, Diaz, Lahiri, and others, and explore how practicing writers negotiate character, narrative structure, setting, voice, etc. Individual reading assignments are also devised on a per project basis. As the term continues, increasing amounts of time are devoted to the discussion of student work.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English Ctr. Advanced Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 7175 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Bret A. Johnston
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Th., 4–7 p.m. EXAM GROUP: 18
Writers will become familiar with more sophisticated aspects (technical and conceptual) of writing fiction, beginning with short exercises and moving toward the completion and revision of original work. Readings include Munro, Welty, Diaz, Lahiri, and others, and we will explore how practicing writers negotiate character, narrative structure, setting, voice, etc. Individual reading assignments are also devised on a per project basis. As the term continues, increasing amounts of time are devoted to the discussion of student work. Students in this course will be expected to revise work often and to a very high standard.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
English Cwar. Advanced Fiction Workshop - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 88347 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Amy Hempel
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 15, 16, 17
Members of the advanced fiction workshop will aim to raise their levels of performance on the page, largely through guided revisions and continued reading to see the ways outstanding writers solved similar problems. Two complete stories with revisions are required during the term, as well as weekly critiques of colleagues’ work.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
English Cwfr. Introductory Fiction Workshop - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 21718 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Amy Hempel
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: M., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 6, 7, 8
An introduction to the short story with emphasis on amplifying the idea of what a story can be. We will look at a range of contemporary narrative strategies that exploit--in the best sense of the word--voice, character, place, logic, and (always) language. Readings will include Barry Hannah, Tillie Olsen, Leonard Michaels, Mark Richard, Mary Robison, Yasunari Kawabata, and selected poets. Short assignments will aim to strengthen writing at the sentence level, and suggest personal ways into the largest concerns. Students should expect to complete and revise two stories, and be prepared to discuss the work of colleagues each week.
Note: Admission based on submitted samples of writing. For information on specific application requirements, please see the English Department’s Creative Writing web page.
*English 41. Arrivals: Culture Wars 700-1700 - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 74158 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
James Simpson
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., 10–11:30. EXAM GROUP: 12
Across the period 700-1700 the shapes of British culture were absorbed from different centers of Western Europe. These cultural forms are conflicted among themselves, and conflicted across time. This course will delineate theprincipal cultural forces (e.g. religious, political, social) that shaped England in particular. We will look to the ways in which those vibrant yet opposed forces find expression in the shape, or form, of literary works.
*English 42. Arrivals: Identity, Community, Nation, Canon 700-1700 - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 10234 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
A study of central genres of Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern literature in tandem with the development of ideas of nation and community, with a special emphasis on poetic narratives. Key texts include Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and The Pilgrim’s Progress.
*English 50. Poets: Ode, Elegy, Epigram, Fragment, Song - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 23427 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Forms, modes, and ways of thinking about lyric poetry and its competitors from the Romantic period up to our own; with examples from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Emily Brontë, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Moore, Ashbery, Armantrout, and Muldoon.
*English 51. Poets: Ballads, Sonnets, Literary History, and Poetic Form - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 80359 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Peter Sacks
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
This course will study a range of ballads and sonnets from the Fourteenth to the Twenty-First Century. We will explore questions of poetic form and literary history within two of the most enduring yet continuously evolving kinds of poetry in English and in other languages.
*English 53. Poets: British Lyric Poetry - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 98171 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
We will study sonnets by major writers and consider other lyric genres (the complaint, the emblem poem, the ode, the epistolary lyric, the nature poem, etc.).
English 54 (formerly English 150). Poets: English Romantic Poets
Catalog Number: 5274
James Engell
Half course (fall term). M., W., F., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
Readings in Blake, Baillie, Coleridge, Clare, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Lyric and narrative forms. Close aesthetic readings linked to thematic considerations. Social and political contexts. Romanticism as an artistic movement and cultural era.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
*English 60. Diffusions: Fictions of America - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 65252 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Elisa New
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
This course will treat "America" as it was imagined and re-imagined by successive waves of Europeans, Africans and their descendants, exploring how evolving fictions of America’s purpose, changing notions of America’s geography and conflicting ideas of American "character" informed the emerging literary tradition. From Thomas Morton though Nathaniel Hawthorne, Olaudah Equiano to William Faulkner, Boston to the Caribbean and Puritanism to Modernism, this course will range widely. Course meets for a third hour on Wednesdays in sections led by Elisa New and Raquel Kennon.
*English 61. Diffusions: Not on Native Grounds - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 22636 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Werner Sollors
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4 . EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Readings in works by American authors that are set outside the United States. Crossing boundaries, culture shock, expatriate and exotic dreams and nightmares, distant mirrors and revelations about "home," linguistic and class disorientation, glimpses of cosmopolitanism, and other topics.
Note: Course meets for a third hour on Thursdays in sections led by Werner Sollors and Nicholas Donofrio.
*English 62. Diffusions: Castaways and Renegades - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 37743 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
John Stauffer
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
This course traces the extraordinary rise of American literature from the nation’s founding through the early twentieth century. Focusing on the "outsider," we examine how American literature gave definition to a culture that was distinct from Europe. Along the way we explore a number of themes: the dilemma of democratic ideals co-existing with slavery and oppression; women as symbols of America; and the relationship between domestic and national fictions. Authors include Irving, Douglass, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, James, Twain, Chesnutt, Wharton, others.
*English 70. Shakespeares: Text, Performance, Film - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 70662 Enrollment: Limited to 27.
Julie Peters
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Shakespeare in performance, film, and other media from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Focusing on five plays, we’ll develop tools for the close reading of scene, image, action, expression, and camera work. Premises: that textual interpretation (reading rhetoric, narrative structure, character, symbolic subtext) is inseparable from performance interpretation, and that both are deepened by an understanding of literary and performance history. Lecture and discussion supplemented by workshop-type exercises (theatre history, adaptation, staging scenes, etc.)
*English 90ap. Theology, Aesthetics, and History: Protestantism in American Literature
Catalog Number: 5850 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jason W. Stevens
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
This course will cover American texts from the Puritan settlement through the present, with emphasis on the twentieth century. We will explore the rapid growth of Protestantism into a cultural logic which has been variously revised, conserved, caricatured, repudiated, and resurrected over the course of the American past. Authors include Jonathan Edwards, William Ellery Channing, Hawthorne, Emerson, Catherine Sedgewick, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, Flannery O’Connor, Marilynne Robinson, and James Baldwin.
*English 90at. The American Transcendentalists
Catalog Number: 4748 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
An intensive examination of the movement, with particular attention to its literary side and to major figures: Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Some attention too will be paid to precursors and legacy, e.g. Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, etc.
Note: Preference given to English concentrators.
*English 90bw. William Blake
Catalog Number: 1287 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Leo Damrosch
Half course (fall term). Tu., 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 90cw. Conrad and Woolf - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 15644 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter C. Nohrnberg
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Major works by two modernist masters who pushed the frontiers of narrative form in startlingly original and often divergent directions. The philosophical and political implications of their novels will be a central preoccupation of our comparative approach.
*English 90ea. Elegies in English - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 83064 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Joanne van der Woude
Half course (fall term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
This course considers both formal highpoints and modern experiments in mourning poetry. We will look at motives for writing elegiac verse, such as poetic competition, personal trauma, and grief, while discussing how to depict absence and even trying to write our own poems. Readings take a thematic approach, studying elegies on animals, elegies on children etc., but also including elegiac novels, music, and film. Authors include Milton, Shelley, Hardy, Yeats, and Lowell.
*English 90f (formerly English 174f). Faulkner: The Major Works
Catalog Number: 2652 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jason W. Stevens
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
William Faulkner may be the greatest American novelist of the 20th Century. This course examines his fiction in the contexts of modernism, Southern Gothic, naturalism, race relations, and religion. Texts will include The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Go Down Moses, and the Snopes Trilogy.
*English 90hb. Four Shakespeare plays - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 59051 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Marc Shell
Half course (fall term). Tu., 1–3.
This is a survey course of Shakespeare plays.
*English 90hs. Satire: Augustan and Modern
Catalog Number: 8795 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Michael Shinagel
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
A study of satire in poetry, prose fiction, and drama. Authors covered are Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Gay, Voltaire, Orwell, Brecht, Vonnegut, and West.
*English 90ka. The Brontës
Catalog Number: 1097 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
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 inspired.
*English 90lv. Consciousness from Austen to Woolf
Catalog Number: 3200 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
James Wood
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
A look at the complex ways in which writers represent their characters’ thought in texts by Austen, Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Giovanni Verga, and Woolf. More broadly, traces the development of stream-of-consciousness, from Austen’s incipient mastery of free indirect style, through Flaubert’s more sophisticated use of it, to Woolf’s full-blown inner monologues, seeing this development as not merely a fact of English and American literature, but as a phenomenon of world literature and an element of our modernity.
*English 90op (formerly English 186c). On Reading Poetry
Catalog Number: 5289 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jorie Graham
Half course (spring term). Th., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: 18
Explores what work poems undertake and what work they therefore ask of the reader. We examine one primary poem (by a different poet) each week. Two short papers and some supplementary reading required.
Note: Preference given to English concentrators.
*English 90ow. Oscar Wilde: Artist, Martyr, Celebrity
Catalog Number: 4506 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Matthew Kaiser
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
"I have nothing to declare," Wilde reputedly informed a U.S. customs agent in 1882, "except my genius." So began his famous tour of America. We will examine the plays, philosophical writings,
poetry, journalism, literary criticism, and fiction of the nineteenth century’s most flamboyant and playful writer. We also explore Wilde’s life and legend, his literary influences, critics, and his rebirth in the twentieth century as a modern "gay martyr."
[*English 90pb. Dramatic Structure and Analysis]
Catalog Number: 4661 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Robert Scanlan
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Introduces the Plot-Bead technique for analyzing and/or constructing artistic forms that are performance events. Several artworks, most of them plays, but some poems and one musical composition, are studied in detail in the light of depth action analysis and codification of the artifact’s time-form in a plot-bead diagram. The roots of these analytical techniques (which have practical utility for artists) are Aristotelian, but are reflected in 21st-century practice.
Note: Expected to be given in 2010–11.
*English 90qb. 21st-Century American Poetry - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 28046 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Books by relatively new American Poets whose work rewards sustained attention, likely including Angie Estes, Ange Mlinko, Terrance Hayes, Liz Waldner, Allan Peterson, Tracy Philpot, Jasper Bernes, D.A. Powell.
*English 90qc. Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov
Catalog Number: 3194 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Elizabeth Dyrud Lyman
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
An in-depth look at the three most influential voices in dramatic literature at the birth of "The New Drama." Focuses on the plays themselves—their literary and dramatic innovations, their philosophical and cultural preoccupations, and the new stylistic and interpretative challenges they posed. By reading generously from varied moments in each artist’s corpus, we’ll deepen our understanding of the impact and rupture created by these giants of the modern stage.
*English 90qd. Philip Larkin unless John Ashbery
Catalog Number: 0108 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Recent events within "air’s other side" (Rilke). Poetic and counter-poetic language; syntax and its alternatives; form and the varieties of inform; sense and reticence; voice, personhood and their absence; poems, prose and intermediate possibilities. Major and representative works by both authors will be given close, imaginative, analytic attention.
*English 90qe. Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill, & Frayn
Catalog Number: 9595 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Elizabeth Dyrud Lyman
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
An in-depth look at the four most influential British playwrights of the late twentieth century. Readings include generous selections of each author’s plays, as well as novels, screenplays, journalism, and essays. Emphasis is on recurring themes that haunt these authors’ works, and the innovative techniques they develop to convey them.
*English 90qf. Stevens and Pound - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 98962 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Leland P. de la Durantaye
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
The American poets Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound have come to represent separate and distincty ides of poetry. The aim of this seminar is to arrive at a richer understanding of Modernist poetry through these singular exemplars.
*English 90qi. 20th-Century Irish Literature
Catalog Number: 2661 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter C. Nohrnberg
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
A survey of plays, poetry, essays and fiction written from the beginning of the Irish Revival to the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Authors include Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, Friel, Trevor, and Heaney. Readings will focus on the preoccupation of these writers with Irish history, myth, and the literary construction of a national identity.
*English 90qn. Navigating Ulysses
Catalog Number: 8643 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter C. Nohrnberg
Half course (spring term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
James Joyce’s modernist epic supplemented by works of secondary criticism. Attention directed to formal aspects of this difficult work as well as to its thematic engagement with important issues of its time, including: Irish nationalism and British colonialism, feminism, and the rise of advertising and consumer culture.
*English 90qo. T.S. Eliot - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 28837 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter Sacks
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
This course will study the poetry of T.S. Eliot, while also attending to selections of his critical and dramatic writings.
*English 90sa. The Idea of a Theatre - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 95466 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Robert Scanlan
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12.
This seminar explores what theatre has meant, as a medium, throughout history, in any of its many cultural settings. Starting with the ancient Greeks (Oedipus Rex), we will study six major "theatres" and how each represented "the idea of a theatre" in its time and place. Terence’s Eunuchus, several cantos from Dante’s Purgatorio, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Racine’s Andromaque, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night provide our focal moments.
[*English 90sb. Samuel Beckett’s Plays and Prose]
Catalog Number: 3487 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Robert Scanlan
Half course (fall term). W., 2–5. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8, 9
Studies systematically the arc of Samuel Beckett’s literary career, with particular emphasis on Beckett’s stage and video plays. The course proposes the idea of a “stable habitation for the Self” as one way of understanding both Beckett’s thematic matière and his astonishing aesthetic innovations in three media: stage, page, and video screen. Video resources supplement reading and discussion of texts, and local productions of the plays are studied when available.
Note: Expected to be given in 2010–11.
*English 90te. Twisted Epic - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 85642 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Galena Eduardova Hashhozheva
Half course (spring term). M., W., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 4, 5
The Renaissance had a literary dream: the dream of a grand modern epic that would equal the Iliad and the Aeneid. Yet in reality, narrative poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was anything but a dutiful imitation of classical epic. English poets gave many a creative twist to the ancient genre: they perverted, mocked, curtailed, romanticized, and eroticized it. Authors include Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton.
*English 90tv. Adventures with Robert Louis Stevenson - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 71453 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Matthew Kaiser
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
The author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson was a prolific poet, essayist, travel writer, and master of the short story. Cut short by lung disease, his bohemian life was as adventurous and romantic as his fiction. Follow his meandering path from Edinburgh to France, from California to the South Pacific, where his literary interests turned anthropological, and where death was waiting.
*English 90wb. Jameses and Jameseans
Catalog Number: 6768 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Elisa New
Half course (fall term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
First half of the course: Henry James: readings to include The Portrait of a Lady, The Spoils of Poynton, The Turn of the Screw and The Golden Bowl as well as representative shorter fictions. Second half of the course: William James, readings in Pragmatism, The Will to Believe and Principles of Psychology plus works by key modernist and pragmatist heirs, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth.
*English 90xa. Crime and Law: Drama, Film, and Performance - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 34247 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Julie Peters
Half course (fall term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Crime and law are at once paradigmatic subjects for film and drama and - often self-consciously - performance arts in themselves. Reflecting on the fraught relationship between real crime and law and their aesthetic representation, we’ll look at how performance affects such substantive legal issues as murder and culpability, freedom of expression, torture, punishment, justice after atrocity. Legal cases and trial transcripts (Salem to Abu Ghraib), plays and films (Merchant of Venice, Anatomy of a Murder), etc.
*English 90xz. The Art of the Essay - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 32333 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Leland P. de la Durantaye
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
We will study famous essayists from Montaigne to Johnson, from Hazlitt to Emerson, from Guy Davenport to David Foster Wallace. We will study essays by writers more famous for their work in other genres such as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Nabokov, as well as ancient and modern masters in the genre. Students will be asked to try their hands at a diverse series of essay types.
*English 90zy. Literature After Race - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 79441 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Hua H. Hsu (Vassar )
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
A survey of late twentieth century works by authors attempting to imagine identities "beyond" race and ethnicity. Possible authors include: Colson Whitehead, Chang-rae Lee, Walter Mosley, Nam Le, Junot Diaz, Monique Truong and Araki Yasusada.
*English 90zz. Mapping Identity - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 12812 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Hua H. Hsu (Vassar )
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
A consideration of how "space" mediates notions of identity. Possible authors include: Frederick Douglass, W.G. Sebald, Tayeb Salih, Junot Diaz and Jessica Hagedorn. We will also examine more theoretical works by Arendt, Jameson, Soja and the "radical cartography" movement.
*English 98r. Tutorial—Junior Year
Catalog Number: 3831
Daniel G. Donoghue and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: Fall: 7, 8
Supervised small group tutorial in the study of literature in English.
Note: Limited to honors concentrators.
*English 99r. Tutorial—Senior Year
Catalog Number: 3901
Daniel G. Donoghue and members of the Department
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
Supervised individual tutorial in an independent scholarly or critical subject.
Note: Two terms required of all thesis honors seniors. To enroll, students must submit for approval a Thesis Proposal.
Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of one term of English 98r, completion of an undergraduate seminar (90-level) taken in the junior year or earlier, and faculty approval of proposed thesis topic.
English 103f. Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Before Love
Catalog Number: 8069
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
Some time aroung the twelfth century, Europeans began to fall in love—or so literary and cultural histories tell us. But what was love like before love? How were passionate attachments represented in literature? Building on the grammatical knowledge acquired in English 102, we translate various Old English texts concerning erotic relations. Secondary reading is supplemented by other medieval texts in translation.
Note: The sequence of Eng 102 and 103 can fulfill either the college’s foreign language requirement or the English Department’s Honors foreign literature requirement.
Prerequisite: Honors grade in English 102 or the equivalent.
English 104. Epic, romance, and saga: orality and literary history - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 41239
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
Genre will be the tool of a (para)literary history of the major oral and oral derived narrative forms of Early Medieval Europe, but genre and orality/literacy must also be analyzed. Reading (in English translation) includes: Hildebrandslied and other herioc lays, Beowulf, selected chansons de geste, including Roland, the Nibelungenlied (in selections), Waltharius, romances and sagas on the Tristan theme, and among Icelandic sagas Njals saga and Laxdoela saga. Concluding with the oral epic today: the Karakalpak Edige.
English 119. Magic, Carnival, Sacrament, and Other Theatrical Illusions: European Renaissance Drama and Spectacle - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 85769
Julie Peters
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Spectacle, make-believe, and other forms of alternative reality in the European Renaissance. Explores theatre as magical and spiritual practice; carnival, charivari, and everyday cross-dressing; beggary, prostitution, and other street improvisations; court masque, imperial pageant, and public torture as disciplinary technique; sacrament, conversion, and other forms of illusionism and self-transformation. Texts include films, visual images, theatrical documents, festival books, commedia dell’arte scenarios, and plays by Shakespeare’s greatest near-contemporaries (Machiavelli, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Moliére, etc.).
English 121. Shakespeare After Hamlet
Catalog Number: 2100
Gordon Teskey
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
Written at the midpoint of Shakespeare’s career (1600-01), Hamlet marks the culmination of an experiment in representing the inner life with remarkable human sympathy. Hamlet also marks the beginning, in the comedies as much as in the famous tragedies, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, of a new and disturbing interest in the human mysteries of sadism, power, eroticism and loss.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 122. Love and Its Alterations in the Renaissance Imagination - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 49227
Galena Eduardova Hashhozheva
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," wrote Shakespeare. Perhaps. Even so, the concept and the imagery of love underwent many alterations in Renaissance literature due to genre, to changing circumstances, and to changing morals. Looking back on the poetry of love in the Renaissance, it appears less like Shakespeare’s image of unaltering constancy than it does like Spenser’s allegorical tapestries showing the Olympian gods changed by lust into a thousand forms.
English 128. Theater, Dream, Shakespeare - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 82273
Marjorie Garber and Diane Paulus
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4; W., at 3. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
This course considers theories of dream and theater from Shakespeare’s time to the modern era. We will also read three Shakespearean dream plays - A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale - in immediate conjunction with the ART fall season of productions based on those plays. We will ask how concepts like source, adaptation, translation, and performance function in theater as well as in dream, and examine how such concepts apply to Shakespeare.
Note: When taken for credit, this course fulfills the departmental Shakespeares Common Ground Course requirement.
This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the General Education requirement for Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, or the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 130. 17th-Century Poetry and Prose
Catalog Number: 4789
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13
Examines a wide range of poets and prose writers, men and women, in a cultural milieu (1600-1660) extraordinarily rich in literary achievement and intellectual ferment. Primary attention to four major poets Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and Marvell and to the development of genres (love poetry, religious meditation, essay, others) for analyzing the literary self.
English 131. John Milton: An Introduction to His Life and Poetry
Catalog Number: 8005
Galena Eduardova Hashhozheva
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 1.
Milton held that a great poet "ought himself to be a true poem, that is, acomposition, and pattern of the best and honorablest things." We will study Milton’s active public life and literary work as a continuous, absorbing poemfrom the promising beginnings in his college years to the lofty verse of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes in his late years. Some attention will also be devoted to his polemical prose.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 141. The 18th-Century Novel
Catalog Number: 8683
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
The rise of the novel, seen through eighteenth-century fiction by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, plus films, paintings, and 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. Lecture-discussion format.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 154. Literature and Sexuality
Catalog Number: 5928
Matthew Kaiser
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
Over the last 300 years, "sexuality" has gradually displaced "soul," "mind," and "character" as the most essential and salient ingredient in modern subjectivity, as the "truth" of the self. How has Western literature grappled with, embraced, or stubbornly resisted the sexualization of subjectivity? From Freud to Foucault, Venus in Furs to Story of O, D. H. Lawrence to Dennis Cooper, we will map the uneasy alliance between--and intertwining histories of--literature and sexuality.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 156. Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture
Catalog Number: 4752
Matthew Kaiser
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
The Victorian middle classes were both titillated and repelled by transgression and abnormality: from Jack the Ripper to the Elephant Man, from venereal disease to self-murder. In an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty, the Victorians aggressively policed-and clandestinely crossed-increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. Across a range of literary genres, we will map the nineteenth-century British obsession with crime and horror, with phenomena that rattle one’s sense of self.
Note: This course, when taken for letter grade, meets the Core are requirement for Literature and Arts C.
English 157. The Classic Phase of the Novel
Catalog Number: 4786
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
A set of major works of art produced at the peak of the novel’s centrality as a literary form: Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Buddenbrooks, L’Assommoir. Society, family, generational novels and the negations of crime and adultery; consciousness and the organization of narrative experience; the novel of ideas and scientific programs; realism, naturalism, aestheticism and the interruptions of the imaginary.
Note: Graduate Section. This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 159. The Reflection of Reality: Novels of the 19th and 20th-Century
Catalog Number: 4598
Leland P. de la Durantaye
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
This course will focus on the reflection and refraction of reality in modern novels of the last century and a half. A number of famous novels will be carefully studied for their conception of reality, and the best means of conveying that reality to the reader. We will read novels by Flaubert, George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and Ian McEwan.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the General Education requirement for Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding or the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 160c. Modern British Fiction: Conrad to Beckett
Catalog Number: 7772
Peter C. Nohrnberg
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
A survey of major works of British fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century by Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Ford, West, Woolf, Joyce, Butts and Greene, among others. Topics include: innovations in narrative form and style, the representation of individual consciousness and identity, responses to imperialism, the Great War and mass culture.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 165. Joyce, Modernism, and Aestheticism
Catalog Number: 1827
Philip J. Fisher
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Topics include: modernism; aesthetic experience; the life of art; the city; and novelistic form; the moment and memory within temporal experiences. Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses; Proust, Swann’s Way; and Within a Budding Grove; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; Kawabata, Snow Country. Writings of Pater, Simmel, T.S. Eliot, and sections from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
Note: Graduate section offered. This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 166x. The Postcolonial Classic
Catalog Number: 4236
Homi K. Bhabha
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
This lecture course explores the idea of a classic work in the postcolonial, global era. It surveys literary, cultural, and political works that illustrate the relationship between aesthetic values and questions of cultural citizenship. Works read may include Gandhi, Fanon, Sartre, Mandela, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, John Coetzee.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 167. Stevens, Plath, Lowell - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 46649
Helen Vendler
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
How do poets form their style? An examination of the earliest and latest works of three poets comparing their awkward beginnings to their mature style and their endings.
English 168d. Postwar American and British Fiction
Catalog Number: 8250
James Wood
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
Examines a range of works, including novels and stories by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Henry Green, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Martin Amis. Attempts to situate these books in their larger historical traditions, while emphasizing that we are reading a living literature. Some of the selected authors may visit and address our class.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 173. Southern Literature and Culture in the United States
Catalog Number: 6162
John Stauffer and Jason W. Stevens
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
This interdisciplinary course examines the rich tradition of Southern literature and culture in the US from slavery to the present. We construe culture widely to mean the ways of life as represented by fiction, biography, poetry, cinema, music, theater, photography, historiography, and religion. At least since the antebellum period, the South has defined itself in a defensive and sometimes belligerent posture in relation to the US. We explore the South, as imagined by Southerners, and focus on how the art of this region functions ideologically, rhetorically, aesthetically, and religiously in order to imagine constructions of Southern and national identities.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts C.
This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the General Education requirement for Culture and Belief.
English 174. The Rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 76863 Enrollment: Limited to 32.
Instructor to be determined
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Critical examination of Lincoln’s speeches and selected writings, from the 1838 Lyceum Address to the last public address in April 1865. Exploration of Lincoln’s rhetorical principles and practices.
English 175. Great American Speeches and Speakers - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 25341 Enrollment: Limited to 50.
Instructor to be determined
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Critical Study of approximately 60-75 landmark texts selected from the history of the American public discourse, including texts of historical significance and texts that reveal exemplary rhetorical practices.
English 179. American Drama Since 1945 - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 43944
Robert Scanlan
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
A lecture course surveying the shifting socio-historical context of American playwriting after WWII. Playwrights covered include Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Arthur Kopit, Neil Simon, The Living Theater, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, Maria Irene Fornes, Eve Ensler, Tony Kushner, Chuck Mee, Paula Vogel, August Wilson, John Guare, Lynn Nottage, and many others.
English 180. Modern American Crime Narratives
Catalog Number: 4468
Jason W. Stevens
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
We will cover American crime narratives, emphasizing the hard-boiled and noir fiction that flourished between the Jazz Age and the Cold War as well as the police procedural and the true crime novel. Popular texts will be approached as examples of craft art which have provided paradigms for major American authors, including Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Sources will include films such as The Godfather, Blade Runner, and The Dark Knight.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 181. Asian American Literature - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 64334
Hua H. Hsu (Vassar )
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
A survey of the literary works produced by Asians in the United States, from poetry carved on the walls of immigration detention centers and turn of the century travel literature to postmodern novels, experimental poetry and self-published manifestos. Possible authors include: Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Chang-rae Lee, David Henry Hwang, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nam Le and Adrian Tomine.
English 182. Science Fiction
Catalog Number: 3189
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
High points, innovations, and explorations in science fiction as a prose genre from the late 19th century to the present: likely readings include Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert A. Heinlein, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Cordwainer Smith, Richard Powers, and more. (Not a course in television or film.)
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 187. Native American Literary Traditions
Catalog Number: 3570
Lisa T. Brooks
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
Introduction to the Native literatures of North America, focusing on the interpretation of oral traditions, political prose, fiction and poetry through indigenous cultural and historical frameworks. Includes a wide range of readings, from the Mayan Popol Vuh and the Haudenosaunee Great Law to the contemporary fiction of Erdrich, Silko, and Alexie. Features an interactive component, offering students the opportunity to learn through speakers and events that locate texts in particular social and geographic landscapes.
English 188. Transnational Fiction - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 81023 Enrollment: Limited to 35.
Robert Nicholas Jose (University of Adelaide )
Half course (fall term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
This course explores contemporary Anglophone fiction from or about Asia and the Pacific, including by Rohinton Mistry, J.M. Coetzee, Michelle de Kretser, Alexis Wright and Nam Le, with works in translation by Haruki Murakami, Yu Hua and Roberto Bolaño.
English 191. Asia-Pacific Conversations - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 55555
Robert Nicholas Jose (University of Adelaide )
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
An introduction to writing from Asia and the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand (in English or translation), that exemplifies intercultural dialogue, including fiction by Gao Xingjian, Shashi Deshpande, Aravind Adiga, Patricia Grace, Peter Carey, Alexis Wright and Gail Jones, and some poetry. How do these authors approach language, storytelling and tradition in the indigenous, national and transnational dimensions of their writing?
English 192. Political Theatre and the Structure of Drama - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 10566
Elaine Scarry
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
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.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 193. An Introduction to 20th-Century Literary Theory
Catalog Number: 8913
Leland P. de la Durantaye
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
An introduction to 20th-century literary theory. We examine the principal trends in 20th-century literary criticism, including New Criticism, phenomenological criticism, psychoanalytical criticism, semiology, the Frankfurt school, French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, new historicism, and multiculturalism. Readings may include Auerbach, Adorno, Curtius, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, Spitzer, Gadamer, Frye, Eco, Freud, Lacan.
English 195x. Contemporary African American Literature
Catalog Number: 0098
Glenda R. Carpio
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
Discussion of African American novels, plays and poetry produced since the 1960s. Among other topics, we will discuss the Black Arts Movement, the renaissance of black women authors in the 1970s, the rise of the neo-slave narrative, and black postmodern texts. Major authors will include but not be limited to Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Samuel Delaney, Adrienne Kennedy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
*English 209. Necessary Truths: William Langland, Julian of Norwich, and the Idea of Vernacular Learning: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 6160
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
A study of the intense debate over what the unlearned must know to be saved, and its impact on the rise of vernacular Christian writing. Focuses on Piers Plowman, and several shorter texts.
*English 228y. Milton and His Contemporaries: Literature in the Era of the English Revolution (1629-1674): Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 1277
Barbara K. Lewalski
Half course (fall term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
Milton’s poetry and prose, examined in relation to other texts that refract the experience and culture of the period: e.g., the poetry of Vaughan, Herrick, the Cavaliers, and Marvell; histories, sermons, political tracts, autobiography, biography.
*English 229. Sidney, Spenser and Milton’s Continental Sources - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 16435
Gordon Teskey
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4.
Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso; Tasso, Aminta and Gerusalemme Liberata; Montemajor, Diana; D’Urfé,, L’Astrée; Camoes, Os Lusiadas. Works to be read in Renaissance translations where possible, with select passages from the original languages.
*English 241. The 18th-Century Novel: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2896
Leo Damrosch
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Laclos, Walpole, Godwin, and Austen. Issues include genre (what was new about novels?), the representation of subjectivity, the paradoxes of "realism," didacticism and its subversion, and the significance of gender and class.
Note: Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor.
*English 264x. Sensation and Moral Action in Thomas Hardy: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2714
Elaine Scarry
Half course (fall term). Th., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
Approaches Hardy’s novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic essays on “luck” and “action”).
Note: Open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of instructor.
*English 265. Hopkins: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 61756
Helen Vendler
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
A study of Hopkins’ works, primarily the poems, but with selections from the letters, journals, and sermons. Some reading in the poems of Keats, Tennyson, and the Rossettis, for purposes of influence and comparison.
*English 267. Wordsworth and Coleridge - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 11025
James Engell
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Their writings and relationships. Poetry and prose. Individual research and common discussion. this research seminar assumes some prior study of these writers and their milieu.
Note: Open to qualified undergraduates.
*English 269. Literatures of Immigration - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 31542
Joanne van der Woude
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Reading accounts of transatlantic immigrants to America, including Vikings, Puritans, Huguenots, African slaves, and Jews, we will consider terminology (disapora, modernity) and methodology (performance). Authors include Crevevoeur, Cather, di Donato, and Mengestu.
*English 272. 19th-Century American Fiction - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 50145
Elisa New
Half course (fall term). Tu., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
The nineteenth century American literary career, with attention to the development of fictional modes (sketch, tale, romance, novel), exigencies of publication (the periodical press, transatlantic distribution networks) and evolving notions of fiction’s place in American culture. Emphasis on Hawthorne, Melville and James but some attention to other authors.
*English 273. Permutations of Literary Regionalism: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 88552
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). Th., 4–6.
Significant works (mostly fiction) and critical readings from/about regionalism’s 19th century Anglo-American beginnings to the present. Special emphasis on U. S. writers but also on selected writers from the U. K. and the Anglophone diaspora.
*English 276x. African-American Literary Tradition: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 3536
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3.
An exploration of the emergence and 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 are stressed.
*English 277xr. Multilingual Literatures of the United States: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 7685
Marc Shell
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Non-English literature of what is now the US: The historiographic and critical treatment of non-Anglophone texts, general theoretical problems of an ongoing multilingual American tradition, and recuperation and presentation of texts. Focus is on work with original source materials, on new research possibilities, and on translation theory.
Note: Visiting scholars will attend several sessions
*English 278. Postbellum/Pre-Harlem: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 38534
Glenda R. Carpio
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Close readings of major writers in the context of cultural history. We examine diverse genres-from slave narratives, novels and poems to plays, speeches and song lyrics.
*English 284. Theorizing the Transpacific - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 27919
Hua H. Hsu (Vassar )
Half course (spring term). Tu., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
A survey of fiction and criticism dealing with the transpacific. The course draws from an array of mostly American and Chinese sources: nineteenth century travelogues, early twentieth century journalism, Christian conversion narratives, classics of the American canon, middlebrow bestsellers and modern Asian American writings.
*English 286b. William Carlos Williams: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 90056
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (fall term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
The democratic modernisms of William Carlos Williams, in several kinds of poetry and prose, from the late 1910s to the early 1960s, with some attention to his contemporaries and rivals.
*English 291. Freud, Pyschoanalysis and Literary Study - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 30751
Marjorie Garber
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
The major writings of Sigmund Freud in English translation, together with relevant works of literature and culture. Additional readings from Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Zizek, and Edelman, among others. Psychoanalysis will be considered as a reading practice, a master narrative, an allegorical structure, a theatrical and cinematic mode, and a political intervention. Students will develop their own approach to Freud and psychoanalysis in a final seminar paper.
*English 293. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Literature: Seminar (Graduate Seminar in General Education) - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 91179
Louis Menand and Alison Simmons
Half course (spring term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
An examination of issues at stake in contemporary psychiatry, including changing concepts of personality and identity; the medicalization of personality differences; mind/brain distinctions; genetic versus social-constructionist accounts of behavior; and the role of emotion and the unconscious in cognition and decision-making. Specifically, the course will explore how philosophy and literature can contribute to an understanding of these questions. The seminar will design and develop a General Education course on these themes for undergraduates.
*English 297. Law and Humanities Colloquium - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 49354
Julie Peters and Janet E. Halley (Law School)
Half course (spring term). M., 5–7 p.m. EXAM GROUP: 9
What is law and humanities scholarship? Guest speakers: scholars discuss their recent work with students and faculty. Additional sessions address canonical texts in legal theory, and concepts, theories, and methodologies of law and humanities scholarship.
*English 298. Literary Theory in the Life of Literature: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 3464
Homi K. Bhabha
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
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 298b. Modernist Polemics: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 74949
Daniel Albright
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Modernism’s theories of itself-manifestoes, polemics, strident declarations, urbane repudiations of the old-fashioned-tested against Modernist practice, in literature, music, and painting. I welcome students from disparate graduate programs in the university.
*English 302hf. Renaissance: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 2814
Marjorie Garber 7264, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), and Gordon Teskey 4466
Half course (throughout the year). Alternate W., at 4:15.
The Conference focuses upon dissertations in progress and other research topics of mutual interest.
Note: Limited to faculty members teaching or conducting research in Renaissance literary studies 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 on Renaissance topics.
*English 304hf. The Extended 18th-Century: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6110
Leo Damrosch 2200, James Engell 8076, Leah Price 3501 (on leave 2009-10), and Michael Shinagel 7659
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Focuses on dissertations, dissertations 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 306hf. 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 5268
Leah Price 3501 (on leave 2009-10)
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
*English 308hf. Drama: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6909
Marjorie Garber 7264, Elizabeth Dyrud Lyman 4433 (on leave 2009-10), 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, Elisa New 2428, 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 dissertations, faculty members, and visiting scholars.
*English 350. Teaching Colloquium
Catalog Number: 8208
Marjorie Garber 7264
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5 (biweekly).
The craft of teaching (discussion, lectures, tutorials, course descriptions, syllabi). This colloquium, designed for third-year graduate students, also considers issues related to the field exam, prospectus, and other aspects of advanced graduate study in English.
Note: Required of all third-year graduate students.
*English 397. Directed Study
Catalog Number: 6588
Members of the Department
*English 398. Direction of Doctoral Dissertations
Catalog Number: 5968
Daniel Albright 4615 (on leave spring term), Homi K. Bhabha 4100 (on leave fall term), Lawrence Buell 2655 (on leave 2008-09), Stephen Louis Burt 5945 (fall term only), Glenda R. Carpio 4408, Leo Damrosch 2200 (on leave fall term), Leland P. de la Durantaye 4457, Daniel G. Donoghue 1469, James Engell 8076, Philip J. Fisher 1470, Marjorie Garber 7264, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2899, Jorie Graham 2358 (on leave fall term), Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Joseph C. Harris 1089, Matthew Kaiser 5443 (fall term only), Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), Elizabeth D. Lyman 4433, Louis Menand 4752, Elisa New 2428, Peter C. Nohrnberg 4726, John M. Picker 3728, Leah Price 3501, Peter Sacks 2161 (on leave fall term), Elaine Scarry 2206 (on leave fall term), Marc Shell 3176 (on leave spring term), Michael Shinagel 7659, James Simpson 4791, Werner Sollors 7424 (on leave fall term), John Stauffer 1006, Jason W. Stevens 5406 (fall term only), Gordon Teskey 4466, Helen Vendler 7226 (on leave spring term), and Nicholas Watson 3851 (on leave 2008-09)
Note: Normally limited to students reading specifically in the field of a proposed doctoral dissertation. 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
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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.