(Lecture). This course aims to introduce you to a selection of sixteenth-century English verse and prose, from major works such as More's Utopia, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Sidney 's Defense of Poesie, to more occasional but illuminating excerpts. Although the classes will range widely across social, political and historical concerns, the focus will be on close reading of the texts. [NB This course fulfills the poetry requirement]

(Lecture). This course will look at the major works of John Milton in the context of 17th-century English religious, political and social events. In addition to reading Milton's poems, major prose (including The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Areopagitica, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth), and the full texts of Paradise Lost and Sampson Agonistes (the course text will be Orgel and Goldberg, eds. John Milton), we will look at the authors and radicals whose activities and writings helped to provide the contexts for Milton's own: poets and polemicists, sectarians and prophets, revolutionaries and regicides, Diggers and Levelers. Requirements for this course include two short primary research papers (3 pp.) and an exam. Graduate students will also be required to write a seminar paper.

(Seminar). The end of the eighteenth century saw the birth of the literary gothic, a subgenre of romance that registered a backlash against the prescriptive realism favored by critics earlier in the century. In addition to indulging flights of sensationalistic fancy, the gothic was also an outsider's genre, dramatizing the frightening nature of everyday life, of social institutions too often taken for granted: persecuting villains stand in for tyrannical husbands, and corrupt churches for patriarchal failure; transgressive desires reveal the stifling nature of traditional gender roles and heteronormative expectations. At the same time, the gothic confronts monsters from without, for the popularity of the genre mirrors the rise of the British Empire. This seminar will explore the origins and development of the gothic (1764-1820), as well as the ways in which eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers used gothic tropes to reflect on their society. In the eighteenth century, these authors will include, among others, the progenitors of the form, Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) and Clara Reeve (The Old English Baron), continuing through Anne Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk), as well as Jane Austen's satire on the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. Early nineteenth-century texts will also include Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Undergraduate requirements: one short passage explication, to be revised, a brief final paper prospectus, and a final paper of approximately 10-12 pages. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Horejsi (njh2115@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Gothic seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). An examination of forms of the 'sublime': exalted, overwhelmingly powerful, often disturbing experiences frequently described during the romantic period. Traces the development of the concept of the sublime in the eighteenth century, and tracks its role in depictions of genius, terror, nature, revolution, eros, intoxication, and other fixations of British poetry and gothic novels of the period. Looks at the ways the romantic sublime moves freely between aesthetics, philosophy, morality, and politics, challenging the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Considers, finally, how ideas and techniques of romantic sublimity have survived in the present day. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Phillipson (mlp55@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Sublime seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will explore the unexpected-and its affective response, surprise-as crucial elements of nineteenth-century fiction. Our seminar will consider the unexpected in many senses: certainly, twists and turns of plot, but also how formal features of a work create, enhance, or challenge a sense of the unexpected. Juxtaposing sensation novels with domestic plots and masterworks of realism, we will ask such questions as: what tensions emerge between elements of the unexpected and the goal of verisimilitude in the fiction of the nineteenth century? In what ways do domestic and social novels weave elements of the unexpected in their plots, and why might these works so frequently do so? We will consider the effects that the unexpected was historically thought to produce, as well its effect on our own reading experience. Primary readings include Ainsworth, Austen, Braddon, Collins, Dickens, Gaskell, Goldsmith, and Thackeray. Supplemental readings include contemporary reviews by G.H. Lewes, historical theories of the picturesque by Richard Payne Knight, and criticism from Caroline Levine and Franco Moretti. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Aschkenes (dta2102@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Unexpected seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). A study of the novelistic genre, in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and the US, that centers on the vexed relation between individual consciousness and social behavior, particularly as revealed by the small customary norms known as "manners." How manners express, encode, inhibit, or produce things like social conflict, ethics, and desire will be our theme. We will also give special attention to manners as a crucial cultural battleground between aristocratic status and bourgeois striving: not just the details of eating, dress, gesture, and speech, in other words, but also how those details tell the story of modern subjectivity. Novels to be selected from among Austen, Gaskell, Trollope, Meredith, James, Wharton, Waugh, Pym, Hollinghurst; supplementary reading from Trilling, Geertz, Douglas, Goffman, Elias, Bourdieu, and others; likely attention to at least one cinematic example, such as Renoir's La règle du jeu. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Dames (nd122@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Novel of Manners seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, relevant courses taken, and along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). The phrase "the art of the novel," a reminder that the ascension of the genre to the status of "high art" rather than merely popular entertainment is still relatively recent, comes from Henry James, himself both a novelist and an influential critic of the novel. The premise of this co-taught seminar is that it is intellectually productive to bring together the perspectives of the novelist and the critic, looking both at their differences and at their common questions and concerns. In addition to fiction and criticism by Orhan Pamuk, students will read novels by Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Robbins (bwr2001@columbia.edu) by noon, Wednesday, April 11th with the subject heading "Art of the Novel seminar". In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Note: When available, an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm.

(Lecture). This is a course primarily on James Joyce's great novel Ulysses. We will spend the first third of the course on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to be followed by two months to read and discuss Ulysses. In addition to two lectures per week, there will also be a required weekly discussion section, led by a teaching assistant. There is no extra reading or written work required for the discussion sections.

(Lecture). We can't talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Na'im, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.

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(Seminar). Early American literature often promoted self-reliant heroes who championed the emerging democracy, but a darker side exhibited what one critic called "The American School of Catastrophe." This course examines works from the dawn of the American Republic that envisioned an impending dusk. Primary images of destruction featured in these works included the "Dying Indian," a reminder that the rise of the United States entailed the displacement of the region´s former inhabitants, and ancient ruins in Europe, marks of the inevitable decline of empires. The course investigates the literary identity crafted between the devastated Native Americans of the West and the decadent Europeans of the East. The focus is on the years 1820-1850, and texts by major authors of that period include poems, short stories, and one long novel. Students are required to write two short papers and one longer final paper. As this is a discussion-based seminar, regular participation is essential and expected of all students. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hay (jah2159@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Catastrophe seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will be an overview of Faulkner's career, with an emphasis on his engagement with the American past. We'll read the landmarks: "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Absalom, Absalom!," "Light in August," and "Go Down, Moses." We'll also read others of his novels that are significantly historical in orientation, especially in regard to the Civil War ("The Unvanquished," for instance). There will be short papers, a longer research paper, and heavy emphasis on discussion. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Graham (taustingraham@gmail.com) by April 11th with the subject heading "Faulkner seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This course traces a history of transnational American literature since the mid-nineteenth century. The syllabus includes Melville's portrayal of Pacific expeditions, the modernists' wandering poetics, literary conceptions of black internationalism and leftist internationalism in the interwar period, the Beats' engagement with global cultures during the early Cold War, and representations of U.S. foreign entanglements in contemporary American writers. Among other topics, our discussions will focus on corporeal and psychic reactions to foreign adventures, immigration, and travels under the condition of capitalist globalization. In other words, we'll examine how our writers reflect on the re-organization of the body in globalization, even as they seek to understand the shifting position of the U.S. in the world. Literary readings: Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, WEB DuBois's Dark Princess, Claude McKay's Banjo, William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The course will conclude with a foray into a small number of theoretical readings on the "biopolitics" of globalization. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Jin (wj2130@columbia.edu) by noon on April 11th with the subject heading "Melville/ Pynchon seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will explore the ways in which African American men are represented and theorized in a range of cultural, historical, and political texts. I am interested in literary, filmic, and popular portrayals of black men: from the "extravagant masculinity" of W.E.B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to the socialization of young black men through such televisions shows as The Wire and modes of cultural performance such as Hip Hop. In looking at both canonical and less-studied texts, we will deconstruct notions of genre and, especially, narrativity. What stories are told about black men? How do they tell their own individual and collective stories? How do they enact a fuller sense of black interiority? What is the relationship between masculinities and sexualities? How does gender function as an analytical category through which to understand race? Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Black Masculinities seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). The dates for the three lions of American drama in the 20th century range from 1888 to 2005. Despite that vast span, the best works of all three were produced within a twelve-year period (1945-1956): The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible. Each playwright responds quite differently to changes in American society that resulted from the emergence after WWII as a global Super Power: Tennessee Williams laments the passing of an old order under the glare of modernism; Eugene O'Neill charts the heartbreaks of desire in a greedy, materialistic world; Arthur Miller decries the erosion of moral responsibility under the reign of rampant capitalism. Collectively they dramatize irreconcilable conflicts between society, family, and individual interests that still resonate with many of our hopes and dreams and fears today. Class requirements include two short papers (5-7 pages), an oral/written research presentation, regular attendance and active class participation. E-mail Professor Brietzke (zb2120@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Drama seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Film Noir" In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). 3 points. This course surveys major works of American fiction, poetry, essays, literary and cultural criticism written since 1945. It will situate the analysis of literature against a historical backdrop that includes such key events as the Holocaust; the atomic bomb; the Beatniks; youth counterculture; the women's, peace, and Civil Rights movements; the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars; the energy crisis; globalization; the rise of the internet; and the War on Terror. We will also consider major literary and artistic movements such as postmodernism, the Beats, confessional poetry, minimalism, the New Journalism, and historiographic metafiction. Lectures will emphasize literature in its cultural/ historical context, but will also attend to its formal/ aesthetic properties.

(Lecture). Survey of American poetry and poetics from 1900-1945. Poets to be discussed include Stein, Pound, Williams, H.D., Loy, Hughes, Toomer, Zukofsky, Oppen, Crane and Stevens.

(Seminar). In the age of animal rights, artificial intelligence, drone warfare, and corporate personhood, we gradually find ourselves no longer the sole proprietors of what once seemed like the exclusive purview of the human condition. Thinking beyond the human is a chance to reflect critically on cognition, language, law, literature, war, and culture from the perspective of animals, machines, and complex systems. In this course we will ask "What is it like to be a bat?" along with Thomas Nagel, analyze elephant paintings, simian and machine-generated poetry, contemplate the rhizome along with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, question the history of drone warfare with Manuel de Landa, consider the lobster with David Foster Wallace, ponder insect semiotics with Jakob von Uexkull and Franz Kafka, define life with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, investigate information and systems theories with Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, and explore the inner lives of cyborgs with Donna Haraway and Isaac Asimov. Excursions into the worlds of philosophy, legislature, fiction, film, software, MMORPG, and a trip to the zoo will help frame our discussion.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robinson-Appels (jr2168@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Contemporary Theater seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This course will reflect on the theme and use of secrecy in a wide variety of texts (mostly prose) from the Middle Ages up to the present. Important to this course is an examination of how secrets are structured rhetorically, technologically, and epistemologically within literary texts and within discourses in general (science, psychoanalysis, religion) as a means for organizing knowledge and meaning. Literary texts include (but are not limited to): Le Roman de Silence, Tanizaki's The Key, Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, the pseudo-Aristotle Secretum Secretorum, troubadour poetry, and short stories by Henry James (tbd). We will also be reading works by Freud: "Screen Memories" and "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through," and looking at Coppola's film The Conversation. Other works will be added to our syllabus. Requirements: one in-class presentation and two longer papers. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Dailey (pd2132@columbia.edu) and Professor Strand (ms3091@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Secrecy seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). We will read plays written by leading Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Heywood, John Webster, and John Ford. Enrollment limited to 55 students. No LLL, no auditors.

(Seminar). Witches, pick-pockets, murderers, and prostitutes are among some of the scandalous characters we will encounter in this course, which examines the representation of crime in early modern English literature from the late-sixteenth through the early-seventeenth centuries. Criminals are ubiquitous in early modern literature: pamphlets denouncing murder, robbery, and prostitution abound; shady lawbreakers appear as characters in the prose narratives as well as drama of the period; ripped-from-the-headlines-style plays, based on lurid news pamphlets, were popular entertainment; and exposés of the early modern underworld and its inhabitants were best sellers. We will closely examine the representation of crime in various genres, from the news pamphlet to the stage play. In so doing, we will explore the texts' gender, moral, social, religious, and political implications. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Ashley Streeter (amb2263@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Underworld seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). This course examines the literature of the turbulent final years of the sixteenth century in England, from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. It ranges over prose, drama, and verse of the period, often read in the context of other historical documents. Topics will include debates about the succession; the perceived threats from Spain and Roman Catholicism; economic hardships; immigration; the challenge posed by the earl of Essex; and concerns about Ireland and the Irish. Texts will include works by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon, among others.

(Seminar). This seminar will explore the unexpected-and its affective response, surprise-as crucial elements of nineteenth-century fiction. Our seminar will consider the unexpected in many senses: certainly, twists and turns of plot, but also how formal features of a work create, enhance, or challenge a sense of the unexpected. Juxtaposing sensation novels with domestic plots and masterworks of realism, we will ask such questions as: what tensions emerge between elements of the unexpected and the goal of verisimilitude in the fiction of the nineteenth century? In what ways do domestic and social novels weave elements of the unexpected in their plots, and why might these works so frequently do so? We will consider the effects that the unexpected was historically thought to produce, as well its effect on our own reading experience. Primary readings include Ainsworth, Austen, Braddon, Collins, Dickens, Gaskell, Goldsmith, and Thackeray. Supplemental readings include contemporary reviews by G.H. Lewes, historical theories of the picturesque by Richard Payne Knight, and criticism from Caroline Levine and Franco Moretti. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Aschkenes (dta2102@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Unexpected seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). Occupying an uneasy place between the pre-industrial world of the eighteenth century and the rapidly urbanizing world of the Victorian period, the Romantic period represents a tipping point in the history of modernity. In this course, we will explore the literature of the British Romantic period as offering a set of diverse, complicated, and often contradictory answers to urgent questions. Among these are: What is the role of art in a multimedia age, or of the artist in a culture fascinated by celebrity? Does literature have something to teach us about justice and equality? Is it possible for human beings to develop sustainable ways of life, or are we doomed to destroy the planet and ourselves? Readings include poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Barbauld, Clare, and Landon; one major work of non-fiction prose, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; and two novels, Jane Austen's Persuasion and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

(Seminar). In addition to some foundational essays of theory and criticism, the class will read closely with a theatrical point of view a number of major works by the three masters of early modern drama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The course will focus on the stylistic innovations, thematic concerns, and performance possibilities created by each respective playwright. Particular emphasis will be to identify the writers' rebellions from melodrama and their unique worldviews produced by the distinctive, recurring and essential action of individual plays such as A Doll House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, The Seagull, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata, and several more. Three short papers (5-7 pages), one on each playwright, regular attendance, and active class participation will be required. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Brietzke (zb2120@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Ibsen seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). The European novel in the era of its cultural dominance. Key concerns: the modern metropolis (London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois narrative (the parvenu, the adulterer, the adolescent, the consumer) and bourgeois consciousness (nostalgia, ressentiment, sentimentalism, ennui); subjectivity and its relation to class tactics, labor, money, and social upheaval; the impact of journalism, science, economics. Works by Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Thirties seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. His cumulative breadth of understanding, in what is ostensibly a narrative of modern French life, extends to every dimension: familial, social, amatory, intellectual, artistic, political, religious. His account, running from the Franco-Prussian War to the aftermath of World War One, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey's end, at home in time and in eternity too. In this course, we read the seven volumes of Proust's masterwork in the Modern Library translation (C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, as emended by D. J. Enright). Students are asked to read Swann's Way, the first volume, prior to our first meeting. Two essays of about ten pages each will be due in the course of the term. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Taylor (bbt16@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Proust seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This course examines practices of literary plagiarism, piracy, kidnapping, reproduction, falsification and other disparaged textual activities to consider their implication in the power/knowledge complex of (neo)imperial international relations under current capitalist copyright and intellectual property regimes that constitute the so-called "World Republic of Letters." In its attention to translinguistic and transnational examples of "copy writing," this course goes beyond the "Empire Writes Back" version of intertextuality that has characterized so many studies of the postcolonial novel, in which "non-Western" literature is read simply as a derivative response to the European canon. We will study cases that involve "trafficking" in texts across linguistic and national boundaries to analyze historical, cultural, socio-economic, political and theoretical notions of authorship, originality, and (trans-)textuality as they intersect with colonialism and postcolonialism and as they are being negotiated in legal and literary conventions in the contemporary era of cultural-economic globalization. Likely authors: Marcel Bénabou, Tahar ben Jelloun, Calixthe Beyala, Jorge Luis Borges, Peter Carey, Miguel de Cervantes, Bessie Head, Norma Khouri, Wanda Koolmatrie, Camara Laye, Mario Roberto Morales, Yambo Ouologuem, Caryl Phllips, Ricardo Piglia, Alice Randall, Spider Robinson, Ousmane Sembène. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Slaughter (jrs272@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Plagiarism." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking this course.

(Seminar). This seminar will engage in a close study of James Joyce's final work Finnegans Wake. After an introductory session, considering the structure of the book, and strategies for approaching it, we'll read it together in manageable pieces. Each week, students will be expected to bring to the seminar a short paper (300-400 words), reflecting on a particular passage (typically only a sentence or two) from the material read that week. They will present their responses, and this will serve as a basis for joint exploration and discussion. No texts other than Finnegans Wake itself will be assigned, but two secondary sources are recommended: John Bishop Joyce's Book of the Dark and Philip Kitcher Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their response papers, their contributions to discussion, and a final essay. Prerequisites: English 3230 (Joyce) or Permission of the Instructor. (It is important that those in the seminar have read Joyce's earlier works of prose fiction, particularly Ulysses, and have done so thoroughly.) Application instructions: E-mail Professor P. Kitcher (psk16@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Finnegans Wake." Syllabus.

(Seminar). The novelist Caryl Phillips once wrote: "For many British people, to accept the idea that their country has a long and complex history of immigration would be to undermine their basic understanding of what it means to be British." By focusing on imaginative writing by British people of African, Caribbean, and South Asian origin, this seminar investigates the "Blackness" and "Britishness" of contemporary British literature. We will discuss the literary dimensions of this diverse and growing body of writing, which is too often reduced to documentary status. And we will unsettle established social and literary-historical narratives about the so-called Windrush Generation, exploring how the racial label, "Black British," can have important transracial implications. We will ask how Black British literature is a peculiarly national product, while also focusing on the way old and new patterns of immigration, political-economic globalization, and socio-cultural exchange have made it a peculiarly transnational body of writing. The syllabus will include exemplary texts by some important first and second generation writers and performers: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Buchi Emecheta, V. S. Desani, Beryl Gilroy, "Lord Kitchener," and Sam Selvon. Our focus will then broaden as we shift to contemporary writing, including poems by John Agard, Jean "Binta" Breeze, David Dabydeen, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Jackie Kay; novels by Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith; and screenplays by Hanif Kureishi and the Black Audio Film Collective. There will be additional readings in cultural history and critical theory. Requirements will involve an argumentative seminar paper for oral delivery, a critical analysis paper, and an annotated bibliographic research essay. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Matthew Hart (mh2968@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Black British Writing." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Intimacy seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). We will pursue an introduction to Freud's basic works on the unconscious, dreams, the death drive, sexuality, and symptoms, by considering the narrative and argumentative dimensions of his case studies, his readings on literary and visual art, and his Interpretations of Dreams. Freud referred to his theory of drives as his own "poetry" and often approached the case study as a story-teller. Does the literary dimension of Freud's work contribute to the controversy over whether his claims are ultimately justifiable? To answer the question, we have first to pursue some others: Does he tell a story in order to make an argument, or are his arguments so many stories? At stake is whether there is an argumentative dimension to his narrative writing, or does he sidestep the need to make arguments by using figures and telling stories? Why are literary works so important his analysis, and how do they relate to the structure of dreams and fantasy? Finally, does Freud give us a way to think about the relationship between literature and philosophy? Can we say that psychoanalysis is one name for that relationship? Readings include The Relationship of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents. Case Studies include The Rat Man and Dora; essays include "Drives and their Vicissitudes" "The Unconscious" "The Uncanny" "The Economy of Masochism" and his reflections on Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffman, among others. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Butler (jb3479@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Freud seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). According to D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy possessed "sensuous understanding... deeper than perhaps that of any other English novelist." In this seminar we will read the major novels of both authors, applying historical, biographical, psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and other critical perspectives. We will pay particular attention to representations of class, sexuality, the body, spirituality, and landscape, as well as to each author´s unique philosophical views. Reading the two side by side will allow us to consider not only the nature of literary influence, but how Lawrence creates a new context for a deeper understanding of Hardy´s imagination. Moving back and forth across the 19th and 20th century divide, we will examine how modernism both breaks with and extends the tradition of the realist novel. Novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D´Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley´s Lover. Requirements: weekly response papers, one presentation, final paper. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Smallwood (cms2197@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Hardy seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Recent decades have witnessed a flood of life writing about illness and disability. This development represents a significant change, as autobiography has historically been reserved for the most accomplished and able-bodied among us. Our course will study the rise of illness and disability memoir, asking how it revises traditional autobiography as it attempts to carve out literary space for voices and bodies that have not historically been represented in public. We will consider how these new memoirs talk back to doctors and other health care professionals who medicalize the disabled body, as well as social environments that stigmatize and exclude the ill and disabled. We will also ask how race and gender inform stories of illness and disability, as well as investigating differences between physical and mental illness and/or disability. Each week we will read one memoir, paired with other writings meant to prompt discuss and critical examination. In addition to more traditional academic writing, students will also have opportunities to experiment with their own life writing.

(Lecture).

(Lecture). This course will focus on twentieth century poetry written by authors of African descent in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The readings will allow us to cover some of the most significant poetry written during the major black literary movements of the century, including the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and the Black Arts movement. In particular, the course will be designed around a selection of books of poetry by black writers, such as Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew, Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn, and Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah. We will thus spend a substantial amount of time reading each poet in depth, as well as discussing various strategies for constructing a book of poetry: thematic or chronological arrangements, extended formal structures (suites, series, or montages), historical poetry, attempts to imitate another medium (particularly black music) in writing, etc. We will use the readings to consider approaches to the theorization of a diasporic poetics, as well as to discuss the key issues including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique at stake in the tradition. Other authors covered may include Gwendolyn Brooks, Nicolás Guillén, Christopher Okigbo, Amiri Baraka, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen. Requirements: weekly response papers, a 5-7 pg. midterm paper and a 9-12 pg. final paper.

(Lecture). An introduction to African American literary and cultural studies. In this second part of the historical survey, we will focus our attention on the politics of representation in twentieth century African American literature from Richard Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), to John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir, Brothers and Keepers (1984). How do we locate these texts within an appropriate historical and cultural context? What theories of representation best serve our needs as readers of race, gender, and class? Does it make sense to teach these works as a distinct literary tradition? Course requirements: mandatory class attendance and participation, two five-page essays, and final examination. Previous enrollment in Eng W3400X is not required.

(Seminar). Seminal twentieth-century works are analyzed in terms of the formation of a modernist gay literary style, with references to the earlier history of homosexual literature. Close reading of authors from Europe and the United States, such as Mann, Proust, Baldwin, Cather, Anzaldua, Ashbery, Cavafy, Stein, Cixous, Pasolini, and Lorde. Discussion of lesbian and gay visual and performing artists in order to clarify literary themes of veiling, amplification, gesture, camp, and the body. The course will include lesbian and gay theory, in particular Foucault, Barthes, Butler, Sedgwick, Irigaray. The course also considers the newer, post-AIDS literary forms that congeal the most recent cultural knowledge of the continuing AIDS crisis. How do recent literary forms describe and define: 1.) the medicalization of AIDS, 2.) melancholy and mourning as a response, 3.) literatures of self-healing, 4.) the expressive portrayal of AIDS bodies, 5.) notions of individual vs. social immunity, 6.) the recent social history of immunology, 7.) the scarcity of socio-cultural critique of AIDS etiology, and 8.) the intermittent coverage of "living with AIDS" stories. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Robinson-Appels (jr2168@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Gay and Lesbian Literature seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Early American literature often promoted self-reliant heroes who championed the emerging democracy, but a darker side exhibited what one critic called "The American School of Catastrophe." This course examines works from the dawn of the American Republic that envisioned an impending dusk. Primary images of destruction featured in these works included the "Dying Indian," a reminder that the rise of the United States entailed the displacement of the region´s former inhabitants, and ancient ruins in Europe, marks of the inevitable decline of empires. The course investigates the literary identity crafted between the devastated Native Americans of the West and the decadent Europeans of the East. The focus is on the years 1820-1850, and texts by major authors of that period include poems, short stories, and one long novel. Students are required to write two short papers and one longer final paper. As this is a discussion-based seminar, regular participation is essential and expected of all students. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hay (jah2159@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Catastrophe seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will explore the ways in which African American men are represented and theorized in a range of cultural, historical, and political texts. I am interested in literary, filmic, and popular portrayals of black men: from the "extravagant masculinity" of W.E.B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to the socialization of young black men through such televisions shows as The Wire and modes of cultural performance such as Hip Hop. In looking at both canonical and less-studied texts, we will deconstruct notions of genre and, especially, narrativity. What stories are told about black men? How do they tell their own individual and collective stories? How do they enact a fuller sense of black interiority? What is the relationship between masculinities and sexualities? How does gender function as an analytical category through which to understand race? Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Black Masculinities seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will explore the ways in which African American men are represented and theorized in a range of cultural, historical, and political texts. I am interested in literary, filmic, and popular portrayals of black men: from the "extravagant masculinity" of W.E.B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to the socialization of young black men through such televisions shows as The Wire and modes of cultural performance such as Hip Hop. In looking at both canonical and less-studied texts, we will deconstruct notions of genre and, especially, narrativity. What stories are told about black men? How do they tell their own individual and collective stories? How do they enact a fuller sense of black interiority? What is the relationship between masculinities and sexualities? How does gender function as an analytical category through which to understand race? Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Blount (mb33@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Black Masculinities seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar, which will be limited to twelve participants, will study the bulk of Tony Kushner's published work. This will include a number of his essays; plays such as Bright Room Called Day, Angels In America Parts I and II, Hydriotaphia, The Illusion, Slavs!, Caroline or Change, Homebody/Kabul, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, plus screenplays for the films Munich and Lincoln. We will scour the city for productions of any of the plays and screen the two films. We will try to understand Kushner both as a theatrical innovator and as the inheritor of particular traditions of European and American theater; and we will read his work in relation to political and social events in turn-of-the-century America. There will be several short written assignments in the course of the semester and a more substantial final paper. No exams. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Howard (jfh5@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Tony Kushner seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Stephens (ps249@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Poetry Magazines seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Film Noir" In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Lecture). This course is a survey of American literatures and cultures ranging from the colonial era to the Age of Revolution. Although many of the texts on the syllabus were written in colonies that would eventually become part of the United States, the course itself is not designed to be a literary history of the U.S. Instead, we will put pressure on terms like "American" and "Literary" as we inquire into the theological, political, scientific, and literary issues that framed colonial experiences. Our goal will be to explore the various modes through which colonial encounters were described by foregrounding the local, regional, and Atlantic contexts of the material we read. In particular, we will consider the multiple trajectories of Early American literary history by examining subjects like Exploration and Captivity, Puritan Theology, Antinomianism, the Enlightenment, the Caribbean, Slavery and Emancipation, and Revolution. Our investigations will push us to test the conceptual limits of these categories as we trace their place in emerging discourses of nation. Authors may include: William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, William Earle, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Mary Prince. This course satisfies the American, the prose fiction / narrative, and the pre-1800 period requirements for the major.

(Lecture). The class will be guided by the premise that the writings of Poe and Melville not only reflect mid-19th century modernity but are also generated by it. To support this claim we will look closely into their experimentation with narrative structure and ask whether the absence of clearly delineated characters in their stories and novellas is related to the emergence of urban crowds, the intensified feeling of anonymity in the lives of New York city dwellers, and practices of dehumanization employed in New York and Philadelphia prisons, alm houses, asylums and hospitals. We will follow how their obsession with a violence that "undoes" persons might be understood as a critique of slavery or incarceration, and inquire into the theories of life that both authors drew from contemporary sciences such as biology and medicine, in order to formulate their critique of capital punishment, as well as other types of corporal punishment used on plantations and in prisons. Additionally, we will reconstruct how their insistence on non-taxonomical thinking derived from their interest in pseudo-sciences such as natural magic, mesmerism or phrenology, and investigate the political and ethical consequences of such thinking. We will pay special attention to their interest in the occult and supernatural with a view to understanding that it was in those realms that they sought to reveal how the secular means of control of the persons function. And finally, we will discuss how categorical divides between human and non-human, so prominent in their work, function as a form of resistance to the extermination of animal species enacted by colonization and industrialization, as well as a critique of the suffering inflicted on animals by the aestheticization of modern life (zoological gardens, city parks, circuses, etc.). To reconstruct the multilayered relations their writing maintained with its historical context we will read texts by Jacob Bigelow, Sir David Brewster, Charles Darwin, Orville Dewey, Charles Dickens, William Goodell, and Justice Lemuel Shaw. However, the major emphasis of the class will be on close readings of Melville's works (Moby Dick (1851); Israel Potter (1855); The Piazza Tales (1856), The Confidence Man (1857); Battle Pieces and Aspects of War (1866); Clarel: A Poem and A Pilgrimage (1876); Billy Budd, Sailor (1924)) and Poe's poetry, prose and journalism.

(Lecture). The very name of the modernist movement suggests its concern with the new, the current, and the up-to-date. So too did modernism in the United States draw much of its dynamic energy from its pathbreaking national moment, one of American jazz, skyscrapers, movies, airplanes, immigration waves, and economic booms. But the modern cannot exist but in opposition to the old, and so in this course we will study formally experimental works whose freshness grows out of a deep sense of the past. How does the modern engage with the anti-modern, and to what end? In addition to literature, we will discuss historiographical methods, nostalgia, primitivism, folk culture, memory and the subconscious, Old Europe and expatriation, and legacies of slavery and the Civil War. Authors might include DuBois, Fitzgerald, Eliot, O'Neill, Toomer, Hemingway, Cather, Pound, H.D., Williams, Faulkner, Hurston, and Dos Passos. There will be papers, an exam, and opportunities for in-class discussion.

(Lecture). Survey of American drama from 1900-1960s. We will ask what makes American drama "American" and how American dramatists responded to European influences. We will also examine American drama's relationship to key cultural events and transformations of the early 20th century, such as the rise of mass culture; mechanization and alienation; labor unrest; race and racism; and Cold War paranoia. How has American identity been constructed and contested on stage? What are the broader social and political contexts of dramatic performance in the 20th century? How does drama relate to other media, such as film? Plays and films by D.W. Griffith, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, Sophie Treadwell, Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.

(Seminar). Irish Prose examines a tradition of writing in Ireland, beginning with The Tain and the uses of mythology in Irish saga writing, and including Edmund Spenser's 'A View of the Present State of Ireland'. These two texts establish a tradition of the heroic and the anti-heroic in Ireland; they offer images of the country as a place ripe for epics or a culture ripe for destruction. The course then takes texts by Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Somerville and Ross, W.B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, Kate O'Brien and Samuel Beckett and traces an uneasy tradition of dramatising the broken, the alarming, the untrustworthy, the contested and the disappointed. The course looks at styles in Irish writing both invented and inherited. Most of the texts examined will be novels, but short stories, essays, travel writing and considerations of translation will also be part of the course. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Toibin (ct2544@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading "Irish Prose seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). In Jack London's 1906 short story "The Apostate," an exposé of child labor, the narrator notes of a young millworker: "There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate relationship with machines." Drawing on novels, short stories, dramas, and essays by American and English writers from 1880 to WWII, this course seeks to understand what it means to become "intimate with machines." How did technology shape perception, consciousness, identity, and the understanding of the human in fin de siècle literature? What were the effects of new "writing machines," like the telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter, on traditional conceptions of authorship? How did technology intersect with class, race, and gender politics? What fears and fantasies did new inventions inspire? We will discuss how writers represented the cultural and social impact of technology and why they often felt compelled to invent new literary styles, forms, and movements--such as realism, aestheticism, and modernism--in order to do so. Texts by Herman Melville, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Sophie Treadwell, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Biers (klb2134@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Writing Machines seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). No prerequisites. We each will choose something to edit (it may be something you already are editing), and we all will help each other edit. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Yerkes (dmy1@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, "Intro to Scholarly Editing seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). How is the rapid development of global computer networks, digital media, and massive data archives changing the way we study history and culture? We now have access to unprecedentedly large and rich bodies of information generated from the digitization of older materials and the explosion of new content through social media. Machine learning and natural language processing make it possible to answer traditional research questions with greater rigor, and tackle new kinds of projects that would once have been deemed impracticable. At the same time, scholars now have many more ways to communicate with one another and the broader public, and it is becoming both easier - and more necessary - to collaborate across disciplines. Students in this course will begin by learning about some of the core concepts and practices of traditional literary, cultural, and historical analysis, and then consider how they might be transformed. They will explore tools and techniques that include data curation, named-entity extraction, part-of-speech tagging, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, machine and crowd-source translation, social and citation network analysis, and text visualization. The course will take shape as an intensive workshop, where we will gain and share methodological expertise, and begin to think big about digital archives, information architectures, live data, and large-scale textual corpora. The course is open to students at all levels of technical skill and with a variety of research interests. Expect to form groups led by graduate and faculty researchers, to work collaboratively, and to actively shape the trajectory of the course.