*English Calr. Advanced Screenwriting: Adaptation - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1240 Enrollment: Limited to 15. At least one prior class in screenwriting or playwriting.
Christine Mary Evans
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–5. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17, 18
This course combines creative work with reading, viewing and close analysis of a range of contemporary films based on works in another medium, along with their literary sources and selected theoretical accounts of adaptation. Study examples include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and its adaptations into the novel and then the screenplay The Hours; Raymond Carver’s short stories with Robert Altman’s Short Cuts; and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Students develop their own feature-length screenplay through several drafts, based on a novel, short story, cycle of poems or other work chosen in consultation with the professor. The study and practice of adaptation from a literary to visual medium allows students to focus closely on the formal and structural requirements of storytelling in film, while also providing a creative framework for the demanding process of writing a feature-length screenplay.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Capr. Advanced Poetry Workshop
Catalog Number: 6523 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jorie Graham
Half course (spring term). Two sections: W., 1–4 p.m. OR W., 4–7 p.m. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16, 17
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 previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cbr. Topics in the Arts
Catalog Number: 0032 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Sven P. Birkerts
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
In this course we will take a broad hands-on survey of the various approaches to writing about the arts in a public voice. We will begin by looking at—and venturing—more comprehensive essayistic responses such as one might find in our various intellectual (not scholarly) journals, and end by reading and writing reviews. Considering different art forms and questioning the implications of aesthetic positions, we will fuse discussion and practice. Essays and reviews will be workshopped.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cdr. Writing Memoir - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1739 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Sven P. Birkerts
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
The focus of this course will be personal experience as refracted through the crystal of memory. You will study the elements of this kind of personal writing, read and discuss a number of different memoiristic essayists, and develop your own voice through an array of assignments. Weekly workshops and regular exploration of assigned readings will be the basis of class work.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Ckr. Introduction to Playwriting
Catalog Number: 6781 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Christine Mary Evans
Half course (fall term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Plays are unusual beasts in the world of writing; they are design templates for live performance. Therefore, learning to think architecturally is a vital part of the playwrights’ 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 previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Clr. Introduction to Screenwriting
Catalog Number: 6121 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Christine Mary Evans
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Writing for film requires a strong grasp of dramatic structure along with an understanding of the visual and temporal potential of the medium. This workshop-based course will introduce students to the art and craft of writing screen-plays. It will combine intensive weekly writing and discussion of student work with reading screenplays and watching and analyzing films. All students will complete a one-act screen-play along with several shorter pieces.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cpr. Poetry Writing
Catalog Number: 3053 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter Richards
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Fall: Tu., 1–4; Spring: Th., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16, 17
A poetry workshop open by application to undergraduate and graduate students alike. In this class students will study modern and contemporary poets and can expect to submit their own poems on a weekly basis for peer review.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
[*English Cpwr. Poetry Workshop]
Catalog Number: 4606 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Jorie Graham
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16, 17
Open by application to both undergraduates and graduates. 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 includes the discussion of literary texts as well as work written by students.
Note: Expected to be given in 2008–09. Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cqr. Advanced Poetry Writing
Catalog Number: 2644 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter Richards
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 1–4. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7, 8
An advanced poetry workshop with an emphasis on form, revision, and aleatory methods for generating new work. Readings include Guillaume Apollinaire, W.H. Auden, Anna Balakian, Gottfried Benn, Joe Brainard, Anne Carson, Joseph Ceravolo, John Cage, Jean Cocteau, Ann Lauterbach, James Merrill, Robert Motherwell, Leslie Scalapino, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens among others.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Crr. Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 1893 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Bret A. Johnston
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). M., 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: Written assignments include exercises, typed critiques for each workshopped story, two original short stories, and at least one extended revision. Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Csr. Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 2601 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Katherine A. Vaz
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Tu., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
An introduction to the art and craft of fiction writing. Addresses the basics of character, plot, dialogue, imagery, setting, and description with weekly exercises and informal lectures. Reading assignments include works by Chekhov, O’Connor, Schultz, Cortázar, and Chute. Students are required to submit two stories and to provide thorough commentary on the work of colleagues. Short stories or portions of novels are acceptable.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Ctr. Advanced Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 7175 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Bret A. Johnston
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 4–7 p.m. EXAM GROUP: 9
See English Crr. Students in the advanced class will also make presentations on craft, and be expected to revise work more often and to a higher standard.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing. Generally for students who have previously taken fiction workshops.
*English Cwr. Advanced Fiction Writing
Catalog Number: 7765 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Katherine A. Vaz
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). W., 1–3.
Students make weekly presentations on aspects of craft, and reading assignments include works by Schultz, Morrison, García Marquez, Munro, Rodoreda, and Fitzgerald. Two stories (or portions of novels) are required along with revisions of material (to be decided on a per project basis). Typed critiques must be provided for all work of colleagues under review.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
*English Cyr. The Lyric Essay
Catalog Number: 8545 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Sven P. Birkerts
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
This course begins at the conventional center, with the personal essay, and moves outward to explore more eccentric and associative modes of presentation. What kinds of departures succeed, and why? Students read a range of essays, shading increasingly toward the experimental as the term progresses. Principles of voice, narration, and structure will be addressed. Original and reflective/analytic assignments will be given. Essays will be workshopped.
Note: Admission based on previously submitted samples of writing.
English 10b. Major British Writers II
Catalog Number: 0550
Daniel Albright
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 5
An introduction to the study of British literature from the early 18th century to the present.
Note: Open to freshmen. Two lectures and one section meeting per week. Required of English concentrators. This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
[English 17. American Literature to 1915]
Catalog Number: 3883
----------
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
To fulfill the English 17 requirement in 2007-08, see English 171 and English 175.
Note: Expected to be given in 2008–09.
*English 90at. The American Transcendentalists
Catalog Number: 4748 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Lawrence Buell
Half course (fall 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 also paid to precursors and legacy, e.g. Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, etc.
*English 90cd. Introduction to Medieval Drama - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 0415 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Amy R. Appleford
Half course (fall term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
This course examines dramatic texts and performance from the early Middle Ages up to and including the sixteenth century. Investigating ritual performance and the liturgy; carnival games and mummers’ plays; civic drama and staging the Passion; court pageantry and spectacle; commercial theater, its reforming opponents, and the medieval stage of Marlowe and Shakespeare – considers the limits of performance (in drama, ritual, magic), the implications of playing God, and suffering as spectacle.
*English 90cl. Comic Literature through the Middle Ages
Catalog Number: 8321 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Daniel G. Donoghue
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
An introduction to various kinds of literature broadly construed as comic, including drama, fabliaux, Latin lyrics, Chaucer, Middle Scots poetry and other genres up to Rabelais and Shakespeare. Non-English works read in a facing-page translation. With the help of Huizinga, Bakhtin, and later critics, students develop an understanding of what constitutes humor from this period, as well as the serious “institutions” that invite a comic reflex.
*English 90fh. Hamlets - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 5034 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Stephen J. Greenblatt
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Intensive study of Shakespeare’s tragedy, along with its sources, the history of its reception and performance, and its modern adaptations and transformations.
*English 90hv. Sex and Gender in Victorian Literature
Catalog Number: 0225 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Leah Price
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
How did Victorian literature shape gender roles, both exotic and familiar? And how did nineteenth-century ideas about sex shape a modern system of literary genres? Course considers sex and money, work and marriage, reading and shopping, domestic realism and utopian fantasy, feminism and anti-feminism, in fiction (Bronte, Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Conan Doyle, James), essays (Ruskin, Mill, Nightingale) and more ephemeral genres including pornography, cookbooks, and legal tracts.
*English 90ic. Coetzee and Ishiguro - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 2202 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Martin Puchner
Half course (fall term). Tu., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro, contemporary masters of the novel in English, struggle with the most pressing problems of form, including the return of realism, the relation between novels and ideas, and meta-fiction. At the same time, they examine central ethical challenges, such as the rights of animals, cloning, and the representation of war. The seminar combines minute literary analysis with a discussion of how literary style confronts the contemporary world.
*English 90jd. Charles Dickens and Herman Melville - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 8198 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Amanda Claybaugh
Half course (spring term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Surveys the careers of Dickens and Melville, from their early popular works to their difficult late style. Readings range across a number of genres, but the encyclopedic major novels (Bleak House, Moby-Dick, and Our Mutual Friend) are at the center of the course.
[*English 90je. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson] - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 9936 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Helen Vendler
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
An extensive study of Dickinson’s poetry throughout her writing life. Topics: inflexibility of form; enigma of content; idiosyncrasy of expression; landscape; grief and ecstasy; seeing "New Englandly."
Note: Expected to be given in 2008–09.
*English 90kw. The American Civil War
Catalog Number: 1957 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
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. We consider aesthetic, historical, and intellectual dimension and focus in particular on national and section identities; the shift from romanticism to realism; and dilemmas of slavery, race, and freedom. Authors include Melville, Whitman, Douglass, Lincoln, Stowe, Alcott, Twain, Crane, Mary Chesnut, Bierce, and others.
*English 90lv. Consciousness from Austen to Woolf
Catalog Number: 3200 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
James Wood
Half course (fall 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 90mf. The Rise of the Novel
Catalog Number: 6041 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Michael Shinagel
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
The course examines the rise of the novel as a genre in England through a close reading of major works by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones).
*English 90pb. Dramatic Structure and Analysis
Catalog Number: 4661 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Robert Scanlan
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
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 20th-century practice.
*English 90qc. Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov
Catalog Number: 3194 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Elizabeth D. Lyman
Half course (fall term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
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 90qe. Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill, & Frayn
Catalog Number: 9595 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Elizabeth D. Lyman
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
An in-depth look at the three 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 90qi. 20th-Century Irish Literature - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 2661 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter C. Nohrnberg
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
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 90qp. 20th-Century American Poetry - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 6694 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Peter Sacks
Half course (spring term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
This course attends to the work of several American poets whose careers span much of the second half of the 20th century. Poets include Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, A.R.Ammons, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and others.
*English 90qw. Contemporary Theater - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 2746 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Martin Puchner and Gideon Lester
Half course (spring term). Th., 4–6. EXAM GROUP: 18
This course focuses on the process of adaptation, how contemporary directors adapt dramatic and non-dramatic texts for the stage and how contemporary dramatists appropriate and explode classical models, such as Greek and Elizabethan drama. The seminar, a joint venture between Dramatic Arts and English, is also fully integrated with the spring season at the ART. Productions by Peter Brook, Richard Schechner, the Wooster Group; plays by Mee, Kane, Greig, Wellman, among others.
*English 90tw. Transatlantic Literature
Catalog Number: 3077 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
John M. Picker
Half course (fall term). W., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Considers concurrent trends and developments in American and British literary genres across the long 19th century. The focus is on transatlantic hauntings: the development of the gothic phenomenon in texts that pose lingering questions about objectivity and the nature of perception, psychology, gender, race, and cross-cultural influence. Readings include fiction, poetry, and non-fiction by Irving, Poe, Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Hawthorne, James, and others.
*English 90va. Victorian Visualities
Catalog Number: 4968 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Michele C. Martinez
Half course (fall term). Th., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Explores the visuality of Victorian narrative and lyric in light of aesthetic theory and material culture (e.g., the illustrated book, art exhibition, gothic revivalism and photography). Writers and artists include Tennyson, Brontë, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Morris, Hardy, Pater, Baudelaire, James, Whistler, Cameron and Thomson.
*English 90wc. George Eliot and William Dean Howells - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 9780 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Amanda Claybaugh
Half course (spring term). M., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
In addition to being the most successful novelists of their day, Eliot and Howells were also the most influential critics. This course focuses on their championing of literary realism and on their experiments in narration and novelistic form, as well as their respective involvements in suffrage campaigns and the Haymarket Affair. Novels to include Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes.
*English 90xp. Contemporary Non-American Poetry - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 9321 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (fall term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Poetry in English since 1960 from outside the US, with some emphasis on writers or writings not already widely-known here, such as James K. Baxter (New Zealand), Basil Bunting (England), Okot p’Bitek (Uganda), Mary Dalton and Lisa Robertson (Canada), and John Tranter (Australia), as well as Derek Walcott and Paul Muldoon.
*English 97. Seminar—Sophomore Year
Catalog Number: 0280
Daniel G. Donoghue 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. Required of concentrators in the sophomore year.
*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.
Supervised small group tutorial in the study of English and American literature.
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 102e. Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Introduction to Poetry
Catalog Number: 1128
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (fall term). M., W., (F.), at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Introduction to the language and culture of England before 1066, with special attention to poetry and poetics that have influenced modern poets such as Pound and Auden. By the end of the term we will have read, in the original, a handful of the greatest short poems in the English language, among them The Wanderer and The Seafarer.
Note: Fulfills the College language requirement and the English Department’s Foreign Literature requirement if its continuation, English 103e, is also completed.
English 103e. Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Beowulf and Elegy
Catalog Number: 9185
Joseph C. Harris
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
Tolkien thought Beowulf as much “elegy” as “epic,” and current readers treat the poem as a cultural elegy for a passed or passing world. Close reading of about one-half of the poem in the original, the rest in the Heaney translation, leading to criticism and scholarship on Beowulf and elegy in Old English and related literatures. Builds on English 102e, continuing the language study and cultural survey with focus on the central poetic monuments of Anglo-Saxon England.
English 115b. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Catalog Number: 2945
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
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 1390s).
English 120. Introduction to Shakespeare
Catalog Number: 7430
Gordon Teskey
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
A selection from Shakespeare’s plays–comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances–giving an overview of his development as a dramatist and engaging in intensive reading of some of the most important plays, notably Hamlet and King Lear. Emphasis will be divided between questions concerning performance and the literary qualities that make Shakespeare the most celebrated author ever.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 131. Milton: Major Poetry and Prose
Catalog Number: 8005
Gordon Teskey
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
An introduction to Milton’s life and poetry, with emphasis on his epic poem, Paradise Lost. Milton will be studied in relation to the events of his day, in particular, the English revolution, but also in relation to later English poets, especially the romantics.
English 132. Metaphysical Poetry
Catalog Number: 0233
Gordon Teskey
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
A course on the major lyric poets of the 17th century, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and Marvell. What is the relation between poetry and philosophy, between lyric expression and permanent order? In the seventeenth century, medieval notions of order gave way before the rise of science and of early modern philosophy. One result of these changes was the emergence of a new individualism in poetry.
English 133. Spenser - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1333
Gordon Teskey
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 7
An introduction to Spenser’s poetry, concentrating on The Faerie Queene. We discuss such problems as the theory of allegory and the question of poetic thinking.
English 150b. Romantic Poetry in an Era of Change - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 2064
Isobel Armstrong
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
The course addresses major experiments in poetic form, genre, and subject matter, prompted by revolutionary upheaval in many spheres. Lectures will be on male and female poets, often in dialogue with one another, responding to change: William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, William Blake, Anna Barbauld, Lord Byron, Joanna Baillie, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, Amelia Opie, and others.
English 152. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 7730
Helen Vendler
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 6
A study of the non-dramatic poetry of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). As a political poet, he documented the drama of Ireland through World War I, the proclamation of an Irish Republic, the Irish Civil War, and after; as a poet of the private life, he innovated within the immemorial themes of love, friendship, aging, and death; as a world poet, he brought into the English lyric material from continental Europe, Japan, and India.
English 155. Victorian Modernity
Catalog Number: 4216
John M. Picker
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
This survey of English literature and culture from 1830-1901 considers the tensions of a transitional era that flirted with and feared modernity. We explore writings on subjects that shaped the modern age: faith and doubt, bodies and machines, new technologies and media, science, sex and gender, empire, the function of art, degeneration. Genre-crossing texts from Carlyle, Dickens, Tennyson, Darwin, Braddon, Martineau, Arnold, Ruskin, Wilde, others.
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.
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: Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Buddenbrooks, Great Expectations, 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.
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 Beckett, among others. Topics covered include: innovations in narrative form, the representation of individual consciousness and identity, responses to imperialism, the Great War, mass culture, and the rise of feminism.
English 162c. Modern Drama
Catalog Number: 4717
Elizabeth D. Lyman
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 2. EXAM GROUP: 16
A survey course which examines landmark works from Ibsen to Kushner through a focus on generative cultural and stylistic moments (The Woman Question 1880-1900; The Theater of the Absurd 1950-60; The AIDS Crisis 1985-95, etc.). Plays are considered on their own merits and in terms of the broader movements they helped to define. Course includes introduction to terminology and conventions of the genre.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 162t. Modern Tragedy - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 0161
Martin Puchner
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
This course explores twentieth-century drama through the lens of tragedy. Although modern dramatists were often critical of tradition, they also sought to outdo their predecessors by reinventing tragedy--one of the oldest and most venerable forms--for the modern world. The result was some of the most compelling modern plays. Authors include Wilde, Granville-Barker, Synge, T.S. Eliot, O’Neill, Treadwell, Williams, Walcott, Soyinka, and others.
English 163 (formerly Dramatic Arts 64). Dramatic Literature from the Greeks to Ibsen
Catalog Number: 2389
Robert Scanlan
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 12. EXAM GROUP: 14
A survey of major monuments of European drama, starting with Aeschylus’ Oresteia and culminating with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, gateway to modern drama. Lectures introduce the historical periods that produced and preserved selected classics of western drama. After the Greeks (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander) and Romans (Plautus, Terence), Medieval examples pave the way for Renaissance (Machiavelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare) and French Neo-classical masterpieces (Molière, Racine), followed by the rise of European bourgeois drama (Goldoni, Lessing, Beaumarchais, Goethe).
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: In 2007-08, this course will not meet during the first week of classes. The first class will be held on Monday, February 4. This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts A.
English 167. Poets of World War I - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 6226
Peter Sacks
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
This course investigates the poetry and poetics of certain authors writing during the First World War. Authors include Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, others. Supplementary texts may include prose by Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Pat Barker, Paul Fussell, others.
English 168d. Postwar American and British Fiction
Catalog Number: 8250
James Wood
Half course (spring 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.
English 168x. New Frontiers: American Cultures and Countercultures of the 1960s
Catalog Number: 4616
J. D. Connor
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 12
Collects a wide range of examples around culturally significant nodes: JFK, Los Angeles, the hippie movement, computer science, black power, feminism, the Vietnam War, and the moon landing. Writings by Dick, Didion, Ginsberg, Greenlee, LeGuin, Mailer, Reed, Wolfe; films including Primary, West Side Story, Endless Summer, Sound of Music, 2001, Wanda, In the Year of the Pig.
English 171. Poetry in America - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 7808
Elisa New
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., 11:30–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
This course surveys poetry in America from the 17th through the 20th centuries with particular attention to questions of "in": that is, to the poem’s office within a culture gradually becoming American. Is a poem accountable to the nation? a general readership? family values? beauty? Are new nations more original? Do poems come from: God? earth? mind? the folk? Europe? language itself. Poets include Bradstreet, Taylor, Poe, Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson, Poe, Robinson, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Pound, Frost, Bishop, Lowell, Ashbery, and others.
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the English 17 requirement.
English 172d. The American Novel: 1865-1914 - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 9722
Amanda Claybaugh
Half course (fall term). M., W., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 4
Explores the three literary modes that flourished in the postbellum era: realism, naturalism, and "local color" fiction. Considers the following topics: rising and falling, choice and chance, consciousness and embodiment, as well as the aftermath of Civil War and Reconstruction. Authors to include: John W. De Forest, George Washington Cable, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton.
[English 174f. Faulkner: The Major Works]
Catalog Number: 2652
Jason W. Stevens
Half course (spring term). Hours to be arranged.
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.
Note: Expected to be given in 2008–09.
English 175. American Literary Emergence
Catalog Number: 3894
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). M., W., at 10. EXAM GROUP: 3
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), of American poetry (Whitman and Dickinson particularly), and of slave narrative (Douglass and others).
Note: This course, when taken for a letter grade, meets the English 17 requirement and the Core area requirement for Literature and Arts C.
English 182. Science Fiction - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 3189
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (fall term). Tu., Th., at 11. EXAM GROUP: 13
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.)
English 192w. Language War & Global English - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 4569
Marc Shell
Half course (spring term). Tu., Th., at 1. EXAM GROUP: 15
Focuses on the prodigality of the English language and its literature, with special attention to such issues as international toponymy, mixed dialect, reduplication, hyphenated"Englishes," shibboleth use, and the national linguicides that have helped define the history of English. Also considers how and why English is able to absorb other languages and how the remarkable expansiveness of English has affected its spoken and written literature into the digital age. Readings will include involve The Last Class (Daudet), Henry V (Shakespeare), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), and Pygmalion (Shaw) as well as various online dictionaries and search engines.
*English 203. Early Women Writers: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 8189
Nicholas Watson
Half course (spring term). M., 11–1. EXAM GROUP: 4, 5
Investigates the vexed but persistent fact of premodern female authorship in twelve poets, sibyls, visionaries, martyrs, institution-builders, and women of letters from Hildegard (d.1179) to Behn (d.1689), read in their literary, intellectual, and cultural contexts.
*English 223. Lifelikeness: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 7398
Stephen J. Greenblatt and Frank Fehrenbach
Half course (spring term). W., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
This central topos of Renaissance art and literary theory refers to many different discourses (rhetoric/agency, ingenium/style, phenomenology, natural philosophy, gender/fetishism, theology, etc.). The seminar will focus on strategies of ’animation’ in art and literature.
*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). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
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 234. The Poetry of John Keats: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2514
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
A study of most of the poetry, focusing on influences, genre-changes, poetics, and the Keatsian lexicon.
*English 237. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 9188
Helen Vendler
Half course (fall term). W., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 5, 6
A study of the complete lyric poetry of W.B. Yeats. Emphasis on generic and formal innovation, within the context of inventing an Irish national literature.
*English 241. The 18th-Century Novel: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 2896
Leo Damrosch
Half course (spring 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 253. Victorian Lyric Poetry and the Passions - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 6261
Isobel Armstrong
Half course (spring term). Th., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 17, 18
Lyric poetry from Tennyson to Hardy, Christina Rossetti to ’Michael Field’; explored concurrently with accounts of emotion, feeling and empathy, Kierkegaard to Darwin.
*English 259. Methods in Book History: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1402
Leah Price and Ann M. Blair
Half course (fall term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
Introduces students to methods and debates in the history of the book and of reading.
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). W., 10–12. EXAM GROUP: 3, 4
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 269. Vladimir Nabokov: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1861
Leland P. de la Durantaye
Half course (spring term). Tu., 11–1. EXAM GROUP: 13, 14
This seminar will examine the depth and breadth of the works of Vladimir Nabokov. Special attention paid to those works written directly into English. Special consideration will be accorded to Nabokov’s irreverent and idiosyncratic opinions on the task of the critic, and his criticism of other writers from Pushkin and Flaubert to Proust and Joyce.
*English 272. American Genres through Hawthorne: Sermon, Meditation, Oration, Sketch, Romance. Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 9107
Elisa New
Half course (fall term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Why does the romance (rather than the realist novel) emerge as major 19th century American genre? Reading sermons, lyric meditations, travel narratives, sketches, orations and tales 1640-1840s, we will ask: what’s romance made of?
*English 275m. Reinventing American Memory: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 1064
Lawrence Buell
Half course (spring term). Tu., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 16, 17
Novels by Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, others considered as reinventions of prior "masterplots" arising from such cultural discourses as immigration/diaspora, success/failure, wilderness romance.
*English 284. Recent American Poetry, Theory and Practice: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 3443
Stephen Louis Burt
Half course (spring term). M., 3–5. EXAM GROUP: 8, 9
Promising, profound, controversial, or otherwise notable new American poems, and ideas about them, from the last twenty years: verse or prose by, among others, Armantrout, Graham, Grossman, Merrill, Waldner, and C.D. Wright.
*English 285e. The New Economic Criticism: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 3446
Marc Shell
Half course (spring term). M., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 6, 7
Focuses on issues of monetary and linguistic representation and exchange, with special attention to metaphorization, to historical introductions of new monetary economic and literary media, and to various kinds of connections between economic and aesthetic production. Readings include Heraclitus, Herodotus, Aristotle, Sophocles, medieval tales of the Holy Grail, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Goethe, Marx, Melville, Heidegger, and many theorists of digital representation and exchange in the twenty-first century.
*English 290p. Theater and Philosophy: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 6275
Martin Puchner
Half course (spring term). Th., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
This course focuses on philosophical reflections on the theater, as well as dramatic dialogues, the theater of ideas, and theatricality in philosophical works. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Shaw, Burke, Stoppard, Murdoch, Badiou.
*English 292. Issues in the Study of American Literature: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 1618
Werner Sollors
Half course (fall term). M., 11–1. EXAM GROUP: 4, 5
Issue-oriented approaches to modern literature, using Hemingway as a point of departure; close reading, in different contexts, of an exemplary classic whose current stock seems to be low; archival research in the Hemingway papers.
Note: Please read or reread Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises for the first meeting.
*English 295. Marxism and Postcolonial Studies: Graduate Seminar - (New Course)
Catalog Number: 0865
Biodun Jeyifo
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4. EXAM GROUP: 7, 8
Divergent formations of postcolonial studies explored against the background of Marxist theorizations of transnational, postindustrial, postfordist capitalism and its dominant intellectual currents and cultural contradictions. Some feminist, Post-Marxist, liberal-humanist and "Third World" theories of capitalist modernity also explored.
Note: Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of instructor.
*English 298. Literary Theory in the Life of Literature: Graduate Seminar
Catalog Number: 3464
Homi K. Bhabha
Half course (fall 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.
Note: In 2007-08, this course will not meeting during the first week of classes. The first class will be held on Thursday, September 27.
*English 299. The Intellectual Life of the Profession: Proseminar
Catalog Number: 7739
Marjorie Garber
Half course (fall term). Tu., 12–2. EXAM GROUP: 14, 15
Developments in literary criticism and theory from the 1960s to the present (including historicism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, cultural studies, book history, visual and performance studies), and an overview of the profession: publication, teaching, conferences, research, and other aspects of academic life.
Note: An introduction to graduate study in English, open to both first and second year graduate students.
*English 302hf. Renaissance: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 2814
Marjorie Garber 7264 (on leave spring term), Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), John Parker 3729 (spring term only), 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 303. Guided Dissertation Research and Article Publication
Catalog Number: 4267
Elaine Scarry 2206 (on leave spring term)
Half course (fall term). W., 2–4.
Through regular meetings with faculty advisers, each student works towards completion of chapters of the dissertation.
*English 304hf. The Extended 18th Century: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6110
Leo Damrosch 2200, James Engell 8076 (on leave fall term), Leah Price 3501, 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 305. Narrative (1800 to the Present): Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 4846
Philip J. Fisher 1470 (on leave spring term)
Half course (fall term; repeated spring term). Hours to be arranged.
The Conference focuses on dissertations in progress and other research topics of mutual concern.
Note: 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
Leah Price 3501
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
*English 308hf. Drama: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 6909
Marjorie Garber 7264 (on leave spring term), Elizabeth D. Lyman 4433, and Elaine Scarry 2206 (on leave spring term)
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 (on leave spring term)
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 314hf. 20th-Century Literature and Cultural Theory: Doctoral Conference
Catalog Number: 1410
Homi K. Bhabha 4100
Half course (throughout the year). Hours to be arranged.
Topics include African-American literature, contemporary literature, drama, film and/or performance, modernism, literary and cultural theory, postcolonial studies, postmodernism and Anglophone literatures. Work in progress, as well as dissertation chapters and potential articles and conference papers, encouraged.
Note: Open to all graduate students and faculty working in 20th-century literature and cultural theory.
*English 350. Teaching Colloquium
Catalog Number: 8208
Marjorie Garber 7264 (on leave spring term) and Maia Margaret Mcaleavey 5772
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, Homi K. Bhabha 4100, Lawrence Buell 2655, Glenda R. Carpio 4408 (on leave 2007-08), Leo Damrosch 2200, Leland P. de la Durantaye 4457, Daniel G. Donoghue 1469 (on leave spring term), James Engell 8076 (on leave fall term), Philip J. Fisher 1470 (on leave spring term), Marjorie Garber 7264 (on leave spring term), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2899 (on leave spring term), Jorie Graham 2358, Stephen J. Greenblatt 3436, Joseph C. Harris 1089, Barbara K. Lewalski 7450 (on leave spring term), Elizabeth D. Lyman 4433, Louis Menand 4752 (on leave 2007-08), Elisa New 2428, Peter C. Nohrnberg 4726, John M. Picker 3728, Leah Price 3501, Peter Sacks 2161, Elaine Scarry 2206 (on leave spring term), Marc Shell 3176, Michael Shinagel 7659, James Simpson 4791 (on leave spring term), Werner Sollors 7424 (on leave spring term), John Stauffer 1006 (on leave fall term), Gordon Teskey 4466, Helen Vendler 7226, and Nicholas Watson 3851
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.