Summer Sessions | Courses | English and Comparative Literature

New media is nothing new. New media historians trace rich record of the moments when some new textual technology entered the public sphere and provoked responses ranging from widespread anxiety and to revolutionary fervor. We will examine the cultural anxieties that attend new media, stretching from Plato’s Phaedrus—where Socrates warns that the advent of writing will destroy people’s memories—to today, when Nicholas Carr asks “Is Google making us stupid?” The clay tablet, the codex, the printing press, the chalkboard, the telegraph, the typewriter, the pdf, computer coding, and the smart phone have each promised to revolutionize the reading and writing publics, access to power, and even how people think.

This course examines those promises within their historical contexts, through critical study, and using hands-on experiences. For instance, we will study the role of clay tablets in upholding ancient empires at the same time that we craft our own clay tablet texts. We will take notes with ink pens while we study the role of Medieval scribes in spreading Christianity and Islam. We will create ‘zines while studying the Riot Grrl movement. And we will create our own html hypertexts (no prior coding experience required) as we read the earliest hypertext fiction. These hands-on experiences move arguments about the dangers and revelations of writing technologies out of the realm of the hypothetical and into the realm of the experiential.

The class will visit Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) and Barnard’s Zine Archive, where we will look at textual artifacts, from ancient papyri to early print and digital texts. Our approach will prepare you to situate the contemporary textual technologies you take for granted (IMs, Twitter, Google Docs, and so on) within the long history of new media. And it will teach those pursuing literary studies, new media studies, and computer science research methods required to examine a text as a technology.

In the late seventeenth century, a new genre appears across Europe: the novel.  It told the stories – not of the princes and princesses – but of ordinary people on extraordinary voyages, from villages to the Metropolis, from England to Africa and the Americas. In their travels, they encountered not the dragons or giants of romance, but the people and things that made up everyday life in the eighteenth century – country houses and whorehouses, aristocrats and the merchants, pirates and slaves, and a vast array of enticing goods (shoes and coats, silks and ribbons, coffee and opium) produced in early capitalism.

Why does the novel appear?  What role does it play, in personal psychology as well as society?  Can we account for its increasing popularity as well as its transformations across the eighteenth century?  To puzzle these questions, we will place the development of the novel within the history of art, philosophy and science, as well as psychology and literary theory.  Writers include Mme. de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Heywood, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, William Godwin, and Jane Austen. Critical readings include selections from Benjamin, Adorno,
Foucault, Elias, Moretti, and others.  Note: we will read primarily novellas (short novels) or selections from longer novels in this course.

How would you teach a computer to read a novel? In answering this question over the course of a summer semester, we will have to get down to the letter—and then work our way up to larger units comprising written language: words, sentences, paragraphs, stories, and story collections. Along the way, students will be introduced to basic concepts in linguistics and formal literary analysis, by using simple computational tools. These building blocks will help us become better close—closest possible—readers of texts, but also to perceive patterns and structures at scale, visible across long-distances, in archival time and space. No prior experience is necessary to participate: the only course requirement is interest in language, history, and technology.

In a 2015 interview with David Simon (creator of The Wire) President Barak Obama offered that The Wire is, "one of the greatest -- not just television shows, but pieces of [American] art in the last couple of decades."  The Wire combines hyperrealism (from a-quasi anthropological capture of syntax and dialect that recalls the language of Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston to a preference for actors who lived “the game” in Baltimore’s inner city) with the reinvention of fundamental American themes (from picaresque individualisms, to coming to terms with the illusory “American dream”, to a fundamental loss of faith in American institutions), and engages in a scathing expose of the shared dysfunction among the bureaucracies (police, courts, public schools etc.) that manage a troubled American inner city.  On a more macro level The Wire humanizes (and therefore vastly problematizes) assumptions about the individual Americans’ who inhabit America’s most dangerous urban environments from gang members to police officers to teachers and even ordinary citizens.

The Wire, of course, did not single-handedly reshape American television. Scholars like Martin Shuster refer to this period of television history as “new television.” That is, the product of new imaginations that felt television had exhausted its normative points of reference, subject matter and narrative technique. Many of the shows from this period sought to reinvent television for interaction with an evolving zeitgeist shaped by shared dissolution with 21st century American life: “I’d been thinking: it’s good to be in a thing from the ground floor, I came too late for that, I know.  But lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end.  That the best is over,” Tony Soprano confides to Dr. Malfi in S1.E1 of the Sopranos.  Series that fall within this rubric include (in chronological order): The Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood; Madmen; and Breaking Bad.

This course in the bourgeois realist novel explores a spectrum of female subjectivities from different classes. Patterns of bourgeois consumption and production—or lack thereof, as the case may be—will be of recurring interest, as will the novels’ representations of history, whether the Napoleonic Wars in the foreground or the July Monarchy in the background. A central concern in each of these novels will be the way in which each female subject is defined and dramatized in relation to her social and domestic milieu. Finally, we will dedicate substantial discussion to the construction of these "loose baggy monsters,” as Henry James referred to large nineteenth-century novels. We will study these novels as works of a particular genre that reached its apotheosis during the bourgeois era, conducting our aesthetic inquiry predominantly through the criticism of the novelist Virginia Woolf. Author of material feminist critiques such as A Room of One’s Own, the literary critic Woolf can help us lift the female subject (Becky Sharp, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Tess) from the bourgeois crisis in which she is entangled. We will read all non-English language novels in translation; however, those among us with working knowledge of French will look at brief sections in the original in order to analyze what Flaubert accomplishes at the level of language.

This course will examine British women writers including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in the context of the (long-) nineteenth-century "Woman Question". Our inquiry will engage the controversy over a woman’s status in terms of the social and political debates of early feminism as well as the enigma of “woman’s nature” in light of the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis in the period. We will consider how women writers negotiate these current social and psychological discourses in the stories they tell about themselves and others: how do they portray a woman’s life, especially as it manifests the tension George Eliot articulates between “inward impulse and outward fact”? We will pay attention to representations of gender, subjectivity, interiority, desire, domestic affections, friendship, education, economic and professional experience, faith, and creativity as reflecting the struggle, rising influence, and emergent identity of woman. In addition to novels, poetry, and drama, we will read excerpts of critical essays from among our primary authors and other prominent thinkers of the period, such as Wollstonecraft, Martineau, Taylor Mill, and Freud, who, by the early twentieth century, still famously puzzles: “What does a woman want?”

Global capitalism inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters.    It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice.  In this seminar we will read three early novels – Behn’s Orinooko, Godwin’s  Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion alongside Marxist theory, and then examine a cluster of twentieth century global novels in English.   We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labor; classes; and ideology.  Special emphasis will also be given to the Marxist approach in the study of culture, the role of intellectuals (such as ourselves) and the relationship between capitalism and culture – through theorists like Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Williams.     

The course tracks how key Marxist concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, David Harvey, and Melinda Cooper.