Please note: these listings are tentative and subject to change
Summer term 2004
After the instructor's name, you will see the Course Group designation (eg. III) and then the Concentration Area tag(s).
Eng. 11 at 10: King James I (Wykes) n/a n/a
Eng. 30 at 12: Order and Disorder in British Neoclassicism (Wykes) II National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 46 at 11: 20th Century American Fiction: 1900 to World War I (Renza) III National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 60.1 at 10A: Caribbean/New World Identities in West Indian Literature (Rohlehr) III Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial, National Traditions and Countertraditions
This course seeks to introduce students to Caribbean cultures, societies and identities. The themes which will be explored are ethnicity, race, gender, migration, exile, education, colonialism, cultural erasure and reconstruction. In exploring these themes, the course will examine issues such as:
The settlement of the New World: genocide, plantation slavery; psychic and social dislocation
The development of Creole societies, race, ethnicity, colour, class, gender issues, cultural pluralism.
The Great Migration [USA]; the Caribbean diaspora; relocation of Caribbean immigrants in England and the USA; the reconstruction of identities in the context of movement and exile.
The construction of masculinity and femininity in the midst of the processes indicated above
Caribbean and New World creativity; identity as innovation, improvisationApart from the focus on the themes outlined, there will be consistent examination of the writers' use of language and the questions of style, linguistic register, technique, structure and critical approaches.
Eng. 60.2 at 2A: Oral and Related Poetry from the West Indies (Rohlehr) III Genre-poetry, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial
"Oral and related poetry from the West Indies" examines the survival and renewal of Oral Tradition; its impact on poetry of the voice and performance poetry; linkages between poetry and music. A whole unit of this course focuses on the Calypso and part of the course will be concerned with the emergence of Jamaican popular music, [form mento via rock steady and reggae towards dub and dancehall] and its impact on emerging performance poetry in Jamaica. Other oral forms to be explored will be narrative, legend, prayer, elegy, praise-song, work-song, signifying speech, curse, sermon, lament
Eng. 67.1 at 2: Bob Dylan (Renza) III Genre-poetry, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
In this course, we will do close, critical readings of certain Dylan lyrics spanning his entire career, also taking into consideration their social, historical, and biographical circumstances. Oral reports as well as a long final paper will be required. Note: some attention will be given to the performance aspect of Dylan's songs, but we will not listen to them in class. All of the songs assigned and discussed will be available for your listening in the Paddock Music Library beforehand.
Eng. 80 (Arr) Creative Writing (Hebert) n/a Creative Writing
Eng. 83 (Arr) Advanced Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction (Hebert) n/a Creative Writing
Fall term 2004
Eng. 15 (12) Introduction to Literary Theory (Edmondson) IV
Eng. 16 (12) Old and New Media (Halasz) IV Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
Eng. 20 (11) Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Travis) I Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
Eng. 23 (10) The English Renaissance (Crewe) I Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
Eng. 24 (9L) Shakespeare I (Grene) I Genre-drama
Eng. 31 (10) Sensibility/Self in 18th Cent. British Lit. (Cosgrove) II TBA
Eng. 40 (10A) American Poetry (Cook) II Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 41 (11) American Prose (Renza) II Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 58 (11) Introduction to Postcolonial Literature (Giri) III Genre-narrative, Multicultural/Colonial and Postcolonial {crosslisted with AAAS 65}
Eng. 63.1 (12) The Historical Novel (Cosgrove) IV Genre-narrative
Though we strongly believe in a distinction between fact and fiction, much of our knowledge of history has been mediated through fiction. Indeed, some theorists claim that history writing itself is based on fictional forms. We will examine these issues through a mixture of history, theory and novels. The syllabus will include Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, about an eighteenth-century architect, Donaghue's Slammerkin, Johnson's Middle Passage, about the Atlantic slave trade, and Vidal's Burr, a wry look at the Founding Fathers. These works will allow us to test the theoretical positions of Hayden White, Anne Rigney and Frank Ankersmith.
English 67.2 (2A) Modernism, Modernity and Realism in 20th British Literature (Grant) III National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
The 20th century in British and British-related (e.g. Irish) literature includes the High Modernist era proper (Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf), but both pre-dates it (e.g. Conrad, Wells, Bennett) and post-dates it. Most post-Second World War British literature is not High Modernist but realist, especially in the novel, but also in much poetry (Larkin, Betjeman); even where Modernism survives, as in the plays of Beckett and Pinter, there is a significant admixture of realism. What was Modernism about? Was it a single thing, or composite, a family resemblance phenomenon? Where did it come from? To what was it a reaction? What is its relation to the modern world (since not all modern literature is Modernist)? And why did its influence dwindle? How seriously should we take Postmodernism, if it doesn't take itself seriously?
Primary readings will include: Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness; W.B. Yeats, selected poems; James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; D.H. Lawrence: The Rainbow; T.S. Eliot: selected poems; Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse; George Orwell: Collected Essays, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust; Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter: Waiting for Godot, The Birthday Party; Philip Larkin: selected poems. Secondary texts will include works by Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, and others. Course Group III [Period Group IV].
Eng. 70.1 (2) Spenser: Poetry, Myth, Nation (Halasz) I Genre-poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions
We will read Spenser's pastoral poem, The Shepheardes Calendar, his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, and his prose treatise, A View of the Present State of Ireland, as well as selections from his minor poems. Our discussion will take its cues from the intersections and boundaries between recent critical work on Spenser's twenty years as a colonial servant of the English Crown in Ireland and an older critical tradition that reads Spenser as "our new Poet" in a lineage that includes Virgil and Ovid as well as Chaucer. Intense, fascinating reading, several short papers, one of which will be revised and expanded into a longer paper.
Eng. 72.1 (11) Neither Harmonious nor Homogeneous: African American Fiction and Criticism in the 1990s (Favor) III National Traditions and Countertraditions, Literary Theory and Criticism {crosslisted with AAAS 92}
While always having been a literature encompassing a broad range styles, subjects, ideologies and aesthetics, African American fiction has-in recent years-become more visibly multifaceted. At the same time, critical and theoretical approaches to African American literature have deepened and complicated the question: "What is Black fiction?" This course will explore African American prose fiction published since 1990 in an effort to understand its current position in various communities and academies. We shall also read extensively in African American criticism and theory with an eye toward learning how they have shaped the canon of African American literature and how well critical paradigms of African American writing and identity frame, describe and analyze diversity within the broad fields of African American and American literary production.
Eng. 72.2 (ARR) The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (Zeiger) III Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
About Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Exchanging Hats," the younger gay poet James Merrill wrote: "here was a poet addressing herself with open good humor to the forbidden topic of transsexual impulses, simply by having invented a familiar, 'harmless' situation to dramatize them. "I was enthralled." Some of Bishop's poetic traits are captured by this reminiscence: her humor; her exploration of twentieth century identities, spaces and boundaries; her willingness on try on the "headgear" of another gender or culture. Yet Bishop's exploratory playfulness is connected to her sense of personal displacement and danger. An orphan, a woman poet, a lesbian, a long-term expatriate in Brazil, Bishop is nowhere definitively at home. Partly for that reason, her work initially resisted feminist and other forms of political categorization. More refined variations on these perspectives have, however, made Bishop's work the focus of an exciting assortment of queer, feminist, and postcolonial criticism. We will read widely in this work and study all of Bishop's poems and some of her drafts and letters in this new critical context. The last part of the course will focus on Bishop's relationship with her own mentor, Marianne Moore, and on the male poets who learned from her: Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Frank Bidart.
Eng. 72.3 (2A) Reading Yeats: Poems and Contexts (Grene) III Genre-Poetry, National Traditions and Countertraditions
How should we go about reading Yeats's poems? How far does our reading have to be informed by an awareness of his loves and friendships, his involvement with the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre, his politics, his interests in the occult? This course offers an opportunity for reading Yeats's poems closely with due attention to the contexts that conditioned them. We will make our way through the Collected Poems looking at one or two books at a time. The first class each week will be devoted to the relevant background of the individual book as well as its own shape and structure. For these classes there will be prescribed reading of related materials: essays, plays and autobiographical writings of Yeats and of his contemporaries, as well as critical interpretation. The second class will be taken up with student-led discussion of particular poems. These class presentations on the poems will be written up as part of the required work; each student will also have to submit one shorter (2000 word) and one longer (5000 word) paper. There will be no final exam.
Eng. 80 (2A) Creative Writing (Dimmick)
Eng. 85.1 (3A) Sr. Workshop in Poetry & Prose Fiction (Dimmick)
Eng. 85.2 (Arr) Senior Workshop (Huntington)
Winter term 2005
Eng. 15 ( 10) Introduction to Literary Theory (Boggs) IV
Eng. 26 ( 2) English Drama to 1642 (Halasz) I Genre-drama, Genders and Sexualities
Eng. 38 (12) The 19th Century English Novel (McKee) II Genre-narrative
Eng. 42 (10) American Fiction to 1900 (Pease) II National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
Eng. 60.3 (2A) Ruins, Ridicule and Resistance: An Introduction to Irish Literature (Davies) II National Traditions and Countertraditions
This course follows three persistent strands in Irish literature: satire, elegy, and protest. Although some of the readings have been translated from the Irish language, most were composed in Irish forms of English. Beginning with the eighteenth century, we shall read Swift's Modest Proposal, Eileen O'Leary's Lament for Art O'Leary, and Brian Merriman's Midnight Court. An assortment of songs (of love, conviviality, mockery, emigration, or rebellion) brings us into the nineteenth century. Next come such authors of the Celtic Revival as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, and Padraig Pearse. Yeats's later work, the poems of Patrick Kavanagh, the plays of Sean O'Casey, and the short fiction of James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Mary Lavin, and Flann O'Brien offer a less romantic view of Irish life. More recent writings include poems, plays, and fiction by Seamus Heaney, Nuala N. Dhomhnaill, Samuel Beckett, Anne Devlin, Brian Friel, Roddy Doyle, and William Trevor. Since no such course would be complete without controversy, we shall also enter into critical debates initiated by Sean O'Faolain, Edna Longley, Seamus Deane, and Declan Kiberd.
Eng. 60.6 (11) Native American Oral Traditional Literature (Runnels) Multicultural and Colonial/Post-colonial studies {crosslisted with NAS 34}
Native American oral literatures constitute a little-known but rich and complex dimension of the American literary heritage. This course will examine the range of oral genres in several tribes. Since scholars from around the world are studying oral literatures as sources of information about the nature of human creativity, the course will involve examining major theoretical approaches to oral texts. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW.
Eng. 63.2 ( 2A) Critical Issues in English and American Literary Studies. Locating Meaning in a Text: Is it Possible? (Siraganian) IV
This course focuses on one of the major debates in twentieth-century literary criticism: how do we locate the meaning of a text Are we relevant to an author's intentions. By reading a variety of literary texts, including poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, a novel, a comic book autobiography and literary criticism, we come to terms with a range of critical positions on the issue of meaning that are current in literary study today. Authors include Propp, Brothers Grimm, Fish, Poe, Whitman, Dreiser, Spiegelman.
Eng. 65.1 (10A) The Merchant of Venice: Jews and the Protestant Imagination (Luxon) [cross-listed with Jewish Studies 40] I Genre-drama, National Traditions and Countertraditions
This course will offer a close examination of Shakespeare's construction of "Jewishness," in the context of a larger review of Jewish history in medieval and early modern Europe.
Eng. 66.1 (10) Colonialism and 18th Century British Literature (Cosgrove) Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies, National Traditions and Countertraditions
We will read and analyze contemporary writings of this period for their relation to the ideology of colonialism, mostly concerning the role of the Caribbean in English literary consciousness, as well as the importance of the cultural exchanges over the Black Atlantic with some discussion of the Somerset Case. Readings will include Behn's Oronoko, the letters of Ignatius Sanchez, Olaudah Equiano's Life, and John Stedman's History of a Slave Rebellion in Surinam.
Eng. 67.3 (2A)Virginia Woolf:Theory and Practice (Silver) III Genre-narrative, Literary History
In this seminar we will read a number of works by Virginia Woolf, including experimental short stories, essays about language and literature, polemical writings, and novels. We will also read essays written in the early 20th century that are associated with the Modernist movement, as well as critical and theoretical essays about Woolf's work. Prerequisites include at least one course on 20th century fiction and, preferably, a course on literary theory
Eng. 67.5 (12) Native Cultural Production: (Re)Mapping Race, Gender and Nation (Goeman) National Traditions and Countertraditions, Multicultural and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies {crosslisted with NAS 30}
This class will address various issues of particular importance to indigenous communities as it is reflected in twentieth-century creative works. The relationship between race, gender, and nation will be explicated through an examination of films, visual work, short stories, poems, and novels. We will begin with American Indian literature at the turn of the century, which addresses the trope of the frontier and the push westward, and end with current indigenous work that comments on global restructuring and the indigenous movement in the Americas. By using literary analytical tools in exploring metaphor, poetic structures, and genres, we will engage with the methods American Indian writers employ in their work to map out spaces of their own making. The selected material is presented with a concern for the diversity of American Indian Nations and the variety of their experiences and ideas in order to tackle common misperceptions and put forth the rich complexity of the legal, psychological, and communal contexts of the work. Important to this class is an open and thoughtful discussion about the active struggle for decolonization and healing that takes place in Native communities. Texts will include: Course Reader; National Museum of the American Indian Website, Various Exhibits; Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto FistFight in Heaven; Esther Belin, From the Belly of My Beauty, Fast Runner; Joy Harjo, How We Became Human; Linda Hogan, Solar Storms; Rabbit Proof Fence; Greg Sarris, Grand Avenue; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Marc Warhus, Another America: Native American Maps and The History of Our Land.
Eng. 70.2 ( 2A) The Story of Troilus and Cressida: 1160-1650 (Edmondson) I Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
The primary aim of this course is simply to chart the evolution of the Troilus and Cressida story over a period of roughly five hundred years, with particular attention paid to its Chaucerian iteration. This apparently straightforward design will, however, allow us to inquire more deeply into several important topics: literary inheritance and tradition; the symbolic interment and exhumation of dead characters; the ethics of translation; the determining force of history; the nature of intertextuality; the use of the past in the construction of the present; the representation of gender and sexuality; the effect of genre on narrative; the central role of "courtly love" in the history of subjectivity; the rise of sentimentality; and the role of literature as social critique. We will also want to ask why it is that this particular story and its characters have been revived so often. Primary readings will include Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (in translation), John Lydgate's Troy Book, Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, among other works. Theoretical readings will include Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Liteks Sublime Object of Ideology.
Eng. 71.1 (3A) Moby Dick and the Invisible Man (Pease) II Cultural Studies and Popular Culture, National Traditions and Countertraditions
The participants in the Melville-Ellison Seminar will analyze Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man within the context of the American Renaissance paradigm in which both works attained canonical status. The seminar will involve its participants in a comparative analysis of these works and a critical analysis of the paradigm in which they were valorized.
Eng. 71.2 (10A) Victorians In Italy (McKee) II Cultural Studies and Popular Culture CANCELLED
In this course we will study the importance of Italy, especially Venice, to Victorian aesthetics and Victorian culture. Focusing on the work of writers such as John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Henry James, as well as of painters such as James McNeill Whistler, we will examine Anglo-American myths about Venice as well as effects of tourism on the city. Reading will include Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, James's The Aspern Papers, Norwich's Paradise of Cities, and Venice: The Tourist Maze by David and Martin.
Eng. 72.4 (10A) James Joyce (Huntington) III Genre-narrative, Multicultural/ Colonial and Postcolonial
This seminar will be devoted to the study of Joyce's Ulysses. After some discussion of Joyce's Portrait and Dubliners -- both of which students are urged to read before the course begins--we will focus on the text of Joyce's Ulysses, with an emphasis on close reading and an examination of Joyce's experiments in prose and his place in modern literature. Each student will be asked to write two papers.
Eng. 72.5 (10A) Postmodern Fiction: Boxes, Labyrinths and Webs (Silver) III Genre-narrative, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
This seminar will explore that strand of postmodern fiction that has led to the recent genre of electronic hyperfiction. Non-sequential, multilinear, interactive, hyperfiction is an extension of the theories and practice underlying much of postmodern thought and literature, including its challenge to traditional narrative structures. We will read print fictions by writers whose novels anticipate or parallel the experiments in non-sequential narrative made possible by the computer, as well as a wide variety of electronic hyperfictions. We will also read a number of critical and theoretical essays on the topics examined in the course. Readings will include print fiction by writers such as Borges, Coover, Pynchon, Stein, Winterson, Coetzee, and Pavic, as well as hyperfictions by Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, Shelley Jackson, Mark Amerika, and others. We will also explore the vibrant world of multi-media web fiction/art. Preference will be given to students who have taken courses in 20th century fiction and/or literary theory.
Eng. 80.1 (10A) Creative Writing (Mathis)
Eng. 80.2 (Arr) Creative Writing (Sleigh)
Eng. 81 (2A) Advanced Creative Writing-Poetry (Mathis)
Eng. 82 (3A) Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction (Dimmick)
Spring term 2005
Eng. 06 (10A) Essay Writing (Grantham) n/a n/a
Eng. 09 (12) Composition: Theory and Practice (Gocsik) n/a n/a
Eng. 15 ( 2) Introduction to Literary Theory (Will) IV
Eng. 18 (10) History of the English Language (Otter) IV National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
[crosslisted with LING 18]
Eng. 22 ( 11) Medieval English Literature (Edmondson) I National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
Eng. 24 (12) Shakespeare I (Boose) I Genre-drama
Eng. 28 (2A) Milton (Luxon) I Genre-poetry, Genders and Sexualities
Eng. 34 10 Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society, 1780-1832 (Will) II National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 39 (10A) Early American Literature (Schweitzer) I Multicultural and Colonial and Postcolonial, National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 45 (11) Native American Literature (Goeman) III Multicultural and Colonial and Postcolonial, National Traditions and Countertraditions {crosslisted with NAS 35}
Eng. 47 (10) American Drama (Pease) III National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genre-drama
Eng. 49 (11) Modern Black American Literature (Favor) III National Traditions and Countertraditions, Cultural Studies and Popular Culture Multicultural /Colonial and Postcolonial Studies {crosslisted with AAAS35}
Eng. 54 (2) Modern British Drama (Saccio) III Genre-drama National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 55 (11) 20th Century British Fiction: World War II to the Present (Giri) III Genre-narrative, National Traditions and Countertraditions
Eng. 60.5 ( 2A) Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature (Chin) III Genders and Sexualities, National Traditions and Countertraditions
This course studies intersections of race, gender, sexuality and nation in Asian American literature. We will look at processes of identity formation and the ways in which difference and divergence are constructed in literature. We will interrogate such binaries as Asian/American, normal/deviant and assimilationist/feminist that have influenced Asian American studies. Among issues covered are "Oriental" sexualities, queerness and diasporic memory, feminist poetics and erotics. Texts studied in the course may include Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea, Chitra Divakaruni's Black Candle, Jessica Hagedorn's Silent Movie, Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet, Jana Monji's Kim, Sandip Roy's Curry Queens and Other Spices and Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables.
Eng. 62.1 (2) Immigrant Woman Writing in America (Zeiger) III National Traditions and Countertraditions, Genders and Sexualities {crosslisted with WGST 40}
CANCELLED
In responding to the obstacles facing America's immigrants -- problems of dislocation, split identity, family disunity and claustrophobia, culture shock, language barriers, xenophobia, economic marginality, and racial and national oppression -- women often assume special burdens and find themselves having to invent new roles. They often bring powerful bicultural perspectives to their tasks of survival and opportunity seeking, however, and are increasingly active in struggles for cultural expression and social and economic justice. We will examine the different conditions for women in a variety of immigrant groups in America, reading in several histories, anthologies of feminist criticism, interdisciplinary surveys, and relevant texts in critical theory, but ultimately focusing on the words, in autobiography and fiction, of women writers. We will read such works as Akemi Kikimura's Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior; Bharati Mukerjee's Darkness; Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street; Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy; and Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House.
Eng. 66.3 (2A) The Victorian Novel and the City (McKee) II Genre-narrative
This course will consider how Victorian fiction responded to, was shaped by, and also shaped urban experience, as well as cultural perspectives on urban experience, in nineteenth-century Britain. Study will focus on how London and, more briefly, Manchester are represented as sociological, physical, and psychological presences in fiction, as well as on formal aspects of the novel that may have appeared because of urban experience. Reading will include such novels as Dickens's Great Expectations, Gaskell's North and South, Collins's The Woman in White, and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as excerpts from the work of Victorian critics of London life such as John Ruskin and Henry Mayhew.
Eng. 66.4 (10) Dickens and Fictional Autobiography (Wykes) II Genre-narrative
Charles Dickens failed when he tried to write an autobiography, but the fragment he left, on his childhood, is very revealing. He three times told the story of the Lost Boy, a wronged waif providentially saved from people and circumstances intent on denying or stealing his birthright of superiority and distinction. The three versions of this myth are the early OLIVER TWIST, his openly autobiographical novel DAVID COPPPERFIELD, and the later GREAT EXPECTATIONS (where the myth of the Lost Boy comes in for a brilliantly ironic re-examination).We shall read these novels as Dickens as particular form of autobiographical fiction, and follow his efforts to embody and redefine his personal obsessive myth through them.
Eng. 67.4 (10A) Contemporary American Poetry (Mathis) III Genre-poetry
This course concentrates on American poetry since 1960. We will consider the influence of the "schools" of poetry which evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, including the Beats, the New York poets, the Confessional poets, the Black Mountain School, the New Romantics, and the New Formalists. Our primary focus will be to examine a variety of poets through close readings of individual poems. Paying close attention to the crafting of the poem, we will discuss key aspects such as voice, tone, image, metaphor, and the nature of the line. Poets we will study include Ginsberg, Lowell, O'Hara, Bishop, Plath, Kunitz, Hayden, James Wright, Brooks, Levine, Levertov, and Rich. Creative Writing majors are encouraged to take this course.
English 67.6 (11) Jews in American Culture and Theory: The New York Intellectuals (Milich) [cross-listed with Jewish Studies 30] III National traditions and Countertraditions, Popular Culture and Cultural Studies
No other group of Jewish critics has been so influential in American literary and cultural politics as the New York Intellectuals, who came to prominence with the foundation of the Partisan Review (1937-2003). While some scholars interpret their political transformation from Marxist criticism to “liberal imagination” as a move from the periphery to the center of cultural critique, others consider this reconciliation with America as a depoliticization. Taking the New York Jewish Intellectuals as a paradigmatic segment of American criticism since the 1930s, this course shall focus on their political debates in the 1940s and 1950s (Marxism, the Rosenberg trials, McCarthyism), their alienation from European high culture after Fascism and Stalinism in the 1950s, their literary and cultural debates about the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s (the Beat Generation, Pop art, counterculture, the student movement), and finally their political separation since the 1980s. Starting from the assumption of what Russel Jacoby has identified as a Jewish-gentile split among the NYI, special emphasis will be laid on how the political and cultural debates informed notions of Jewish-American identity, particularly in respect to other minority groups such as African Americans.
Eng. 70.3 (10A) Elizabethan Romance (Crewe) I Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
What is Elizabethan Romance? Why was it so popular and important during the reign of Elizabeth 1, and why did it continue to be popular? What were its origins in classical literature, and what did it contribute to the development of English prose fiction? How did prose romance cross over to the English stage, getting taken up by Shakespeare among others? How did romance function--and entertain--in the cultural and political world of Elizabethan England? To answer these questions and more, we will read works by authors including Shakespeare, Philip Sidney (Arcadia), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene), and Robert Greene.
Eng. 72.6 (10A) The Autobiographical Impulse in Asian American Literature (Chin) III Genre-narrative, Multicultural /Colonial and Postcolonial
This course studies expressions of the autobiographical impulse in such diverse forms as memoirs, poems, short stories and performance pieces. We will consider issues of self-representation and referentiality as well as questions raised by the writer Frank Chin concerning the genealogy and authenticity of autobiography for Asian Americans. Authors studied may include Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Le-Ly Hayslip, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shishir Kurup, Kyoko Mori and Yung Wing.
Eng. 72.7 (2A) Contemporary Experimental Fiction: From Burroughs' Naked Lunch to Satrapi's Persepolis (Siraganian) III Genre-narrative
What does avant-garde writing look like today? How does such writing differ from that of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, or Stephen King? What makes a novel postmodern? This course explores these questions with recent examples of innovative fiction, such as Colson Whitehead's The Intutionist, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, and Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2. We study recently 'canonized' postmodern texts such as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLillo's White Noise, and Art Spiegelman's graphic novellas. Although we will focus primarily on recent American fiction, we will also examine influential work by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges,Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Marjane Satrapi, among others. A prerequisite of English 15 and/or a twentieth-century literature course is highly recommended.
Eng. 80. (TBA) Creative Writing (Lenhart)
Eng. 80.2 (Arr) Creative Writing (Hebert)
Eng. 82 (3A) Advanced Creative Writing-Fiction (Dimmick)