English and Comparative Literature
The English and Comparative Literature Department has played a significant role in the history of literary study in the United States and abroad since its inception. The summer offerings explore various areas of interest from Shakespeare to Comic Books—there is a topic of interest for all.
Courses
UNIVERSITY WRITING
ENGL1010S001 3 points.
Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1010S001 | 001/11043 | X Summer Session |
Tu 10:45 AM–12:20 PM Th 10:45 AM–12:20 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Fiona Gorry-Hines |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
UNIVERSITY WRITING
ENGL1010S002 3 points.
Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1010S002 | 002/11070 | X Summer Session |
Tu 01:00 PM–02:35 PM Th 01:00 PM–02:35 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Emily Suazo |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
UNIVERSITY WRITING
ENGL1010S003 3 points.
Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1010S003 | 003/11071 | X Summer Session |
Mo 10:45 AM–12:20 PM We 10:45 AM–12:20 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Gabriella Etoniru |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
UNIVERSITY WRITING
ENGL1010SD01 3 points.
Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1010SD01 | D01/11135 | X Summer Session |
|
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Adam Winters |
3 |
Closed for Online Registration (no Adds or Drops) |
In-Person |
FEMINIST LIFE WRITING
ENGL1021X001 3 points.
Feminists have famously claimed that "the personal is political." Accordingly, life writing--in various genres--has been an important form for feminists across generations. In this class, we will explore the different ways in which feminists have used these modes to create visions of the self, to challenge the roles and self-images given to them, and to imagine new narratives. In particular, we'll explore questions of genre: so many of these writers have developed hybrid genres or challenged the boundaries of genre in order to write their lives. Looking at examples of life writing including letters, diaries and journals, graphic memoirs, and "traditional" autobiographies, we will examine these forms through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability. Readings are subject to change, but may include: Audre Lorde, Zami; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior; poems by Adrienne Rich; Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Janet Mock, Redefining Realness, and selected shorter pieces. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider our primary texts from various critical approaches: including sexuality studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and transgender studies.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1021X001 | 001/00019 | Session B |
Tu 09:00 AM–12:10 PM Th 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Meredith Benjamin |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
FEMINISM, SCIENCE, & REPRODUCTIVE TECH
ENGL1023X001 3 points.
Reproductive technologies can refer to a wide range of techno-medical tools—contraceptives, pharmaceuticals, prenatal/genetic testing, ultrasound imaging, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)—all of which powerfully influence reproductive experiences across the spectrum of pregnancy. We’ll analyze the sociocultural dimensions of these often highly controversial reproductive technologies. How does reproductive technology shape how we relate to reproduction—how we imagine, experience, and construct identities around reproductive processes? How do they both perpetuate and disrupt notions of race, gender, class, and ability? What freedoms do these reproductive technologies promise, and for whom? Course material will focus on the intersections between feminist science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and reproductive health.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL1023X001 | 001/00018 | Session B |
Tu 09:00 AM–12:10 PM Th 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Cecelia Lie-Spahn |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
British Literature to 1500
ENGL3048W001 3 points.
This course will introduce some of the most fascinating texts of the first eight hundred years of English literature, from the period of Anglo-Saxon rule through the Hundred Years’ War and beyond—roughly, 700–1500 CE. We’ll hit on some texts you’ve heard of – Beowulf and selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – while leaving time for some you may not have encountered – Marie de France’s Lais and Margery of Kempe’s Book. Along the way, we’ll also hone skills of reading, writing, and oral expression crucial to appreciating and discussing literature in nuanced, supple ways.
If you take this course, you’ll discover how medieval literature is both a mirror and a foil to modern literature. You’ll explore the plurilingual and cross-cultural nature of medieval literary production and improve (or acquire!) your knowledge of Middle English. Plus, you’ll flex your writing muscles with two papers.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3048W001 | 001/10582 | Session A |
Tu 09:00 AM–12:10 PM Th 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Hannah Weaver |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
SHAKESPEARE
ENGL3233S001 3 points.
This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare through a combination of reading his plays and viewing them in performance. On the one hand, we approach each play as a written, published text: our in-class conversation consist primarily in close analysis of key passages, and, in one class period, we visit Rare Books to examine the earliest printed versions of the plays in light of English Renaissance print technology. On the other hand, we view performances of each assigned play, including the attendance as a group of at least one Shakespeare production on an NYC stage. Our semester’s through line is to trace, from his earliest plays to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s remarkable development of the techniques of characterization that have made generations of both playgoers and readers feel that his dramatis personae are so modern, real, human. We will also devote attention to exploring the value of each play in our present moment and on our local stages. We read 8 plays in all, including Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3233S001 | 001/10013 | Session A |
Mo 01:00 PM–04:10 PM We 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Douglas Pfeiffer |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
WALT WHITMAN AND NEW YORK
ENGL3273S001 3 points.
Walt Whitman was not the first to write about New York. But he was the first of many to let New York write him. By age 43, Whitman had composed most of his best poetry, published three editions of Leaves of Grass, and left New York only twice. How did the second son of an unsuccessful farmer, a grammar school dropout and hack writer become America’s greatest poet? This course offers a response to this perennial mystery of literary scholarship by proposing that “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” was indeed a product of his environment. Coming of age as a writer at the same time the city was emerging as a great metropolis, he received his education and inspiration from New York itself. Course time is equally divided between discussions of Whitman’s antebellum poetry, journalism, and prose (including the newly recovered Life and Adventures of Jack Engle) in their cultural and geographical contexts, and on-site explorations that retread Whitman’s footsteps through Brooklyn and his beloved Mannahatta. Experiential learning is further encouraged through assignments based in archives, museums, and at historic sites throughout the city.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3273S001 | 001/10014 | Session A |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Karen Karbiener |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
THE ART OF THE ESSAY
ENGL3304X001 3 points.
What makes the essay of personal experience an essay rather than a journal entry? How can one's specific experience transcend the limits of narrative and transmit a deeper meaning to any reader? How can a writer transmit the wisdom gained from personal experience without lecturing her reader? In The Art of the Essay, we explore the answers to these questions by reading personal essays in a variety of different forms. We begin with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century philosopher who popularized the personal essay as we know it and famously asked, “What do I know?,” and follow the development of the form as a locus of rigorous self-examination, doubt, persuasion, and provocation. Through close reading of a range of essays from writers including Annie Dillard, George Orwell, Jamaica Kincaid, and June Jordan, we analyze how voice, form, and evidence work together to create a world of meaning around an author's experience, one that invites readers into conversations that are at once deeply personal and universal in their consequences and implications.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3304X001 | 001/00006 | Session A |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Wendy Schor-Haim |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
THE ART OF THE ESSAY
ENGL3304X002 3 points.
What makes the essay of personal experience an essay rather than a journal entry? How can one's specific experience transcend the limits of narrative and transmit a deeper meaning to any reader? How can a writer transmit the wisdom gained from personal experience without lecturing her reader? In The Art of the Essay, we explore the answers to these questions by reading personal essays in a variety of different forms. We begin with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century philosopher who popularized the personal essay as we know it and famously asked, “What do I know?,” and follow the development of the form as a locus of rigorous self-examination, doubt, persuasion, and provocation. Through close reading of a range of essays from writers including Annie Dillard, George Orwell, Jamaica Kincaid, and June Jordan, we analyze how voice, form, and evidence work together to create a world of meaning around an author's experience, one that invites readers into conversations that are at once deeply personal and universal in their consequences and implications.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3304X002 | 002/00021 | Session B |
Mo 01:00 PM–04:10 PM We 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Alexandra Watson |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
THE 'GLOBAL' NOVEL
ENGL3307X001 3 points.
“Yes, globalization can produce homogeneity, but globalization is also a threat to homogeneity.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, 2006.
Thinking through the arguments both in favor of and against globalization, particularly in the realm of cultural productions, in this course we will discuss the “global” novel. To that end, using the introductory essay from The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century as a starting point to discuss five novels from across the globe, we’ll investigate what is meant by “global” and what the criteria for including novels in this categorization are. We will also consider whether there is an erasure of cultural difference and nuance in reading novels using a globalizing perspective in order to render them more approachable for a (primarily) US audience.
In order to think through and challenge this category of the global, we will also read novels that can be roughly categorized as postcolonial. We will thus consider how struggles for independence and the desire to locate one’s identity either within freshly liberated nation-states or in the process of immigrating to former metropoles could give rise to cultural and psychological anxieties. We will also consider the manner in which late-stage capitalism could indeed push toward homogenized senses of self that manifest in a category such as the “global novel” and whether arguments could be made in favor of such homogenization. Ultimately, we will think about the politics of globalization and the desire to include in or exclude from the “global” certain locations, cultural products, or peoples.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3307X001 | 001/00007 | Session A |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Atefeh Akbari Shahmirzadi |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
QUEER GENRES
ENGL3308X001 3 points.
In this class, we will focus on queer narratives of the self to explore how authors represent queerness across centuries and genres, and how these queer narratives are informed by various historical, national, cultural and political contexts. Through a comparative, transnational and intersectional approach that takes into account the particularities of each author’s context, we will aim to answer the following questions: How do various cultural, national, linguistic, religious or political contexts affect the way queer identities are defined and represented in literature? How do these authors represent the intersections of queerness with race, class, ethnicity, disability and citizenship? How have queer narratives developed over time and across cultures in conversation with local and global modes of conceptualizing gender and sexuality? How do queer authors utilize the particularities of each genre to create new forms of self-expression?
Texts will span various genres such as short stories, poems, memoirs, graphic novels, novels and personal essays by authors such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sappho, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Adrienne Rich, Casey Plett and Imogen Binnie. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider these works from a range of perspectives, such as queer studies, feminist studies, disability studies, and transgender studies.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3308X001 | 001/00014 | Session B |
Mo 01:00 PM–04:10 PM We 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Duygu Ula |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
RENAISSANCE DRAMA
ENGL3309X001 3 points.
This class offers a general introduction to English drama at the moment when it became a major art form. Renaissance London gave birth to a booming theatrical world, with plays that reflected the diverse urban life of the city, as well as the layered and often contradictory inner life of the individual. This poetically rich theater was less concerned with presenting answers, and more with staging questions—about gender, religion, power, love, sex, authority, class, violence, and more. We will encounter these questions in works by Shakespeare and other major authors who populated this literary scene: Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, the ever-popular “Anonymous,” and others. Putting them in dialogue with their social world, and situating them within a culture of performance, we will engage with the plays via detailed close reading and literary analysis.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3309X001 | 001/00027 | Session A |
Mo 01:00 PM–04:10 PM We 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Penelope Usher |
3 |
Registration Block (no Adds) (self-man. Wait List) |
AMERICAN MEMORY
ENGL3353S001 3 points.
Historiographically speaking this course is a study of the complex processes that evolve social memory and shape various (often deeply contested) historical narratives. Practically speaking, this course is a study of objects (“scraps” and “fragments”) that “fix” history within the matrices of particular technologies (manuscripts, books, photographs, recorded sound and moving image) at a particular moment in time and amid a variety of historical contexts (most of which quickly become invisible to posterity). Our challenge, really the challenge for all researchers, is to reconcile the process by which fixed history is evolved into both memory and narrative.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3353S001 | 001/10253 | Session A |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Ben Alexander |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
REVOLUTIONS IN TEXT AND TECHNOLOGY
ENGL3376S001 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3376S001 | 001/10012 | Session B |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Susan Mendelsohn |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL: GENRE AND HISTORY
ENGL3595S001 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3595S001 | 001/10019 | Session B |
Tu 05:30 PM–08:40 PM Th 05:30 PM–08:40 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Ross Hamilton |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
The Business Story and the Occupational Novel
ENGL3601W001 3 points.
A story in the “occupational” genre develops within a professional setting, like a hospital, airport, or police department. Occupational novels (and film and television scripts) are widely consumed but rarely studied. In this course, we will take a deep dive into the history of the genre, beginning with works from French and Soviet realisms, and continuing to American police procedurals and Japanese business novels.
Despite its popular image, works in this genre will lead us to profound philosophical questions about collective intelligence, personal belonging, the emergence of institutional agency, and the feeling of personal powerlessness in the face of large bureaucracies. Readings from Plato, Hobbes, Marx, Mary Douglas, Sara Ahmed other institutional theorists will therefore anchor our weekly discussion.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3601W001 | 001/10616 | Session A |
|
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Dennis Tenen |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
Contemporary American Short Story Collections
ENGL3638S001 3 points.
In 2013, Alice Munro was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature. Munro’s award was seen as a literary landmark: the first time that the prize was awarded to a writer whose exclusive form was the short story. The award was seen as fitting recognition, not only for this writer in particular, but also more broadly as moment of recognition for the short story’s importance as a genre, especially in a publishing industry that has long been dominated by the novel.
In this course, we will focus on the contemporary North American short story authors featured on our syllabus: Chimamanda Adichie, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Carmen Machado, Leanne Simpson, Anthony Veasna So. Some of the writers on this list are veterans of the short story form. Others are authors who recently published debut collections. As we work through our reading list, we will attempt to analyze not only individual short stories, but also what marks these books as collections. What might hold these texts together? What disrupts the unifying principles of a collection? And most importantly, what do short stories offer—in terms of representations of American life and culture and itscomplexity—that other forms do not?
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3638S001 | 001/12578 | Session A |
Mo 09:00 AM–12:10 PM We 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Denise Cruz |
3 |
Registration Block (no Adds) (self-man. Wait List) |
In-Person |
Introduction to Language and Computation
ENGL3673WD01 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3673WD01 | D01/11136 | Session B |
|
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Dennis Tenen |
3 |
Closed for Online Registration (no Adds or Drops) |
In-Person |
WHEN AMERICAN TELEVISION BECAME AMERICAN LITERATURE
ENGL3782S001 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3782S001 | 001/10018 | Session B |
Tu 05:30 PM–08:40 PM Th 05:30 PM–08:40 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Ben Alexander |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
19th Century Comparative Novel: Thackeray, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Hardy
ENGL3803S001 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3803S001 | 001/10254 | Session B |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Georgette Fleischer |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
British Women Writers: the Woman Question
ENGL3804W001 3 points.
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?”
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3804W001 | 001/10617 | Session B |
Mo 09:00 AM–12:10 PM We 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Aileen Forbes |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
The Novel and Economic Justice
ENGL3808W001 3 points.
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3808W001 | 001/10642 | Session B |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Ross Hamilton |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
MODERNISM
ENGL3848S001 3 points.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3848S001 | 001/10020 | Session A |
Tu 01:00 PM–04:10 PM Th 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Georgette Fleischer |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
THE ART OF THE ESSAY
ENGL3915S001 3 points.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL3915S001 | 001/10017 | Session A |
Tu 09:00 AM–12:10 PM Th 09:00 AM–12:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Wendy Schor-Haim |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
COMICS: READING THE MEDIUM
ENGL4526S001 3 points.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL4526S001 | 001/10016 | Session A |
Mo 05:30 PM–08:40 PM We 05:30 PM–08:40 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Karen Green |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |
MADE IN AMER: MAFIA IN CINEMA
ENGL4930S001 3 points.
In this course (whose title is taken from the name of the final episode of The Sopranos) we focus on America’s three greatest practitioners of the so-called “Mafia Movie.” In the first half of the course we examine representations of Mafia in the films of Coppola and Scorsese; in the second half, we perform a comprehensive reading of The Sopranos, a serial that redefined not only the gangster genre, but the aesthetic possibilities of television itself. In addition to our close-readings of the primary cinematic texts, we will pay attention to literary, historical, and anthropological sources on Mafia, both in America and in Italy. In the unit on The Sopranos, we will also consider connections to other contemporary representations of American gangsterism, particularly in the medium of television. Critical avenues privileged will include gender, sexuality, criminal and political economy, poetics of place, internationalism, dialect, plurilingualism and the politics of language, ethnicity and race, diaspora, philosophies of violence, philosophies of power.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Session | Times/Location | |
---|---|---|---|---|
ENGL4930S001 | 001/10015 | Session A |
Mo 01:00 PM–04:10 PM We 01:00 PM–04:10 PM |
|
Instructor | Points | Enrollment | Method of Instruction | |
Stefan Pedatella |
3 |
Open for Enrollment (auto-fill Wait List) |
In-Person |