Summer 2013

In this course we will examine the law as a literary theme in nineteenth-century American fiction and the presence of literary discursive strategies in nineteenth-century American law cases. In particular, we will examine how race operated as both an absurd legal fiction and a brutal social reality in the nineteenth century. By reading a varied collection of novels, historical texts, and theoretical essays, we will explore how race was conceptualized in American culture and given socioeconomic meaning in the law. In turn, we will explore how race legalities deeply troubled American liberal ideas of justice, individualism, and unalienable rights. If, for example, a slave was an object of property, and the slave killed the master, could the slave be held accountable for murder? Murder, after all, is understood by the law as an act committed by a subject-and therefore not an object-capable of conscious foresight and self-determined action. In terms of fictional representations of legal conundrums, nineteenth-century literature is replete with stories of Americans having to choose between the law and their conscience, and with stories exploring the paradoxes of a social system stratified by an (il)logic of skin color. Authors will include Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, and Booker T. Washington; law cases will include Dred Scott v. Sandford, State of Mississippi v. Jones, State of North Carolina v. Mann, and Plessy v. Ferguson. This course will satisfy the English major's geography requirement in American literature and genre requirement in prose fiction/narrative.

This course provides an introduction to Shakespeare through reading, discussing and, when possible, viewing local performances of his plays. Our in-class conversations will consist primarily of close analysis of the language and formal texture of the texts, centering on Shakespeare's highly complex techniques of characterization. We will also devote special attention to exploring the value of each play in our present moment and on our local stages. We'll read 8 plays in all, including Richard III, Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

The course will investigate literary texts relating to the very first stirrings of English empire in the New World. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, England was a provincial backwater struggling to define itself against its richer, more imperially successful European neighbors; its colonial holdings isolated, tiny, and uncertain. One hundred years later, the nation was perched on one edge of a nearly-unmatched, globe-spanning commercial maritime empire. How did authors from Newfoundland to Surinam to London respond to this massive unsettling of population, resources, and knowledge that snowballed from the late sixteenth century onward? To answer this question, we'll put together the literary archives of early modern England and its North Atlantic & Caribbean holdings (something that has not often been done), looking at the picture that emerges when colonial authors ranging from Puritans to pirates are put in sustained dialogue with the points of view of investors, planners, and dreamers "at home" in 17th century England. Surveying travel narratives, pirate plays, utopian fiction, colonial promotion materials, jeremiads, sermons, captivity narratives, and early ethnographies produced by authors all around the Atlantic rim, this course asks students to think critically across and about both generic and national formations. In doing so, the course draws on the growth of Atlantic studies in the last decade. This scholarly movement, in tandem with a larger transnational turn in history and literary studies, has revealed archives and produced scholarship that ask us to rethink long-entrenched assumptions about national literary formations, the nature of citizenship and belonging, and America's role in global networks. To open up these questions, we will read major canonical figures from the literatures of early modern England and its colonial possessions: John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, John Winthrop, and Anne Bradstreet, as well as less well-known authors such as Thomas Morton, Richard Brome, and Mary Rowlandson. We'll look at representations of crime, law, and jurisdiction in the colonies; contact and negotiation between Native Americans, colonists, and the English at home; portrayals of sex and gender in early America and their reception in England; the problem of piracy and privateering; and early responses to the rise and development of chattel slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout, we'll pay close attention to the material circumstances of the texts under consideration, many of which-though they have often been classified as "American"-were printed and circulated (sometimes exclusively) far beyond the boundaries of the colonies. Though the course readings are largely Anglophone, we will be attentive to the role of other Atlantic imperial powers, particularly the Spanish and Dutch, in the English imagination of empire.

This course is a study of romantic poetry and poetics but does not approach its subject from the belated perspective of the Victorians or the Moderns. Instead, the famous Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are viewed proleptically, from the vantage point of early and mid 18th-century poets who established the modern criteria and generated the forms and ideas later ingeniously personalized by the poets we customarily refer to as the Romantics. Indeed, though we shall spend the concluding half of our study with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, our study begins with the neoclassical romanticism of Pope, Thomson, Akenside, the Wartons, Gray, and Goldsmith. As such, our reading entails a study of lyric trends bridging 18th - and 19th-century verse and of related discourses in aesthetic psychology, moral philosophy, experimental religion, natural description, and affective criticism. We shall attend closely to rhetorical and prosodic elements, with a view to characteristic genres (ode, epistle, georgic, epitaph), innovative hybrids and new forms (elegy, the "conversational" poem). Recommended and required readings in prose are of the period and include theoretical and critical writings by our poets.

Through close reading of four of George Eliot's masterpieces, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, this course will engage Eliot not only as a consummate author of nineteenth-century realist fiction but also as an ethical philosopher. "How should one live?" "What is one's obligation to the other?" are among the questions that Eliot's novels explore. Far from moral didacticism, Eliot's novels represent and critique an array of conflicting and inadequate responses to these questions. The major issues of Victorian debate, including utilitarianism, cultural progress, sympathetic community, class, faith, romanticism, and feminism, will inform our examination of the complexity of ethical value in Eliot's work.

This course approaches "transatlantic modernism" by taking travel as a rubric through which to think about different types of movements and displacements in modernist American literature. Travel as a trope opens up a rich range of perspectives: whether presented in the form of border crossings, diasporic passages, cosmopolitan exploration, searches for health, or psychological transitions, it helps us explore global consciousness as defined by modernity. We will consider the concepts of the modern metropolis, tourism, war, the expatriate, the exile, the health seeker, and the flâneur. Our readings are structured along the nexus of New York and Paris but also take us to other destinations. We will ask how the increased preoccupation with mobility, displacement, and crosscultural exchanges impacts both the themes and the form of American modernism and leads to new ways of narration. We will combine formal analysis of the novels with reading other types of modernist writing and historical and sociological texts on modernism, travel, and multilingualism. As a prime example of a multilingual, multi-accented metropolis shot through patterns of movement, New York serves as a key location in our discussion; planned field trips will help us consider how the central questions of the course are played out in visual modernism. The writers include John Dos Passos, Claude McKay, Henry Roth, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein. The course will interest students who wish to learn about theories of the novel, modernism and modernity, and theories of linguistic and cultural encounter. The course will satisfy the prose-fiction/narrative and American requirements. There are no prerequisites.

This seminar offers a deep engagement with the inventive, obsessive, and painfully humane canon of David Foster Wallace. By thoroughly considering his body of work--the novels, the stories, and the non-fiction--we will explore the moral and cultural pressures that for Wallace give shape to contemporary American authorship, language, and life. His pervasive and posthumous rise as a stylistic and ethical touchstone for a current generation of authors and essayists will be one ongoing focus of the seminar: for whom, and for what reasons, does the Wallace voice resound? Other areas of study in Wallace may include gregarious solipsism, run-on syntax, narrative specters, paralyzing entertainments, transcendental boredoms, journalistic fabrication, registers of addiction, the function of footnotes, and higher powers sacred, feathered, and famed.

From Narnia to New York, modern children's literature is filled with alluring other worlds which offer an exciting contrast to the more pedestrian life on the other side of the wardrobe or New Jersey turnpike. Focusing on this rich tension between the pull of an adventurous secondary world and the familiar comforts of home, we will consider how the 20th century looks through children's eyes, and how this perspective is mediated and imagined by adults. We will examine a major genre of children's literature each week (e.g. fantasy, school story, animal adventure) and investigate how these different genres negotiate the dynamic of escape and return. As we develop a vocabulary to think critically about children's literature, we will interrogate how real and imagined secondary worlds are used as crucibles to forge political, cultural and sexual identities. Many of the American works we will read are set in New York City and part of our project will be to explore the double vision of New York as a dangerous and dirty adult world and a potential children's utopia. Examining how iconic spaces (Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, the subway) are re-imagined as fantastic playgrounds for children, we will attend a special children's literature tour of New York City and visit the Children's Center at the New York Public Library. Authors studied include Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak, Judy Blume, E.B. White, Phillipa Pearce, E. L. Konigsburg, J.D. Salinger, Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. Though most of our attention will be spent on work written for 8-12 year olds, we will study several picture books and end by reading some young adult literature.

We will be reading from the best available anthology of international short fiction, The Art of the Story (ed. Daniel Halpern). We will discuss tales by such extraordinary authors as Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Vikram Chandra, Eduardo Galeano, James Kelman, Ian McEwan, Mohammed Mrabet, Haruki Murakami, Jeanette Winterson, and Can Xue (besides leading writers of the U.S.) These stories cover the gamut of modern experience in diverse cultures and represent an equally broad range in terms of narrative style and tone. We will zero in on a number of fundamental questions: How do these stories illuminate different dimensions of social life in our complex, globalized world? How do the readings vary depending on the author's home culture or exposure to various cultures? Do certain themes or forms of storytelling emerge as "universal"? How do these tales explore ethical values, and what lessons might we learn from them with respect to our challenging contemporary modes of living? Each student will make a presentation on a work of her/his choosing, and students will also be required to write a substantial research paper on a favorite author.

This course is designed to explore the rich interplay between sound and literature in twentieth century African American letters. Historically denied the right to literacy and education, African Americans have utilized sound, primarily in the form of music and orature, as a mode of protest and an expression of freedom, subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging. In this course we will explore the ways in which African American writers have drawn on this rich sonic tradition to make political claims about race, gender, class, region, nation, and cultural identity. While many of the readings feature music, we will also attend to other modes of sonic expression-such as laughter, oratory, screams, yells, shouts, grunts, and noise-to think more expansively about the multiplicity of sounds that emanate from black literature and their various cultural connotations. Readings will frequently be accompanied by sound recordings that range from early minstrel and vaudeville ditties to speeches, work songs, and jazz. As such, practices of critical listening and audition will figure centrally in our discussions. Some of the concerns we will engage include: What does it mean to think about the African American literary tradition as a sonic archive? How have black writers adapted literary form to mirror musical forms? How might folktales rupture the putative binary opposition between orality and literacy? What is the relationship between sound, the body, and subjectivity? How has sound recording technology impacted the way that we listen and hear?

The central aim of this course is to act as an introduction to the social theme of the 'stranger in the city' and the corresponding range of aesthetic practices that arose around ideas of alienation and estrangement in European Modernism between 1920 and 1931. We shall do this through a sampling of texts and practices associated with three cities: Dublin, Paris and Berlin. In this enquiry, the work of the British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams will serve as our first guide, taking as our starting point his observation that the cities of European modernism 'forced certain productive kinds of strangeness and distance'. By productive here, Williams refers to modes of both social life and aesthetic form, and it is the weaving together of the two that forms the textual and conceptual ground for this course. In it, we shall compare and contrast a number of texts which speak to this 'strangeness and distance', examining different representations of the stranger (and the corresponding figure of the insider) in three very different - but as we shall see, strangely intersecting - cities: Dublin, Paris and Berlin. Dublin. We shall begin with a formal and stylistic observation of some of the key differences between realism and modernism through comparative analysis of James Joyce's very different ways of representing Dublin city life in his early text Dubliners (1914), and in his masterpiece Ulysses (1922). Here we shall examine the ways in which Joyce's dramatic technical break with coincides with his quite explicit questioning of Ireland's parochial and xenophobic culture, its ways of dealing with strangers. The focus of our attention will be on just one story from Dubliners ('Araby') and several sections from Ulysses, which we will read and analyse primarily in the frame provided by of a selection of Joyce's own critical writings, though also with reference to a range of standard secondary readings. Paris. Second, we will examine some of the terms of social strangeness and aesthetic estrangement in a surreal Paris. Two major texts will be our guide: the contrasting approaches to the idea of the surrealist city in two highly intriguing and unstable texts, André Breton's Nadja (1924), and Aragon's Paris Peasant (1924-26). Once again, our focus will be on the relations between social and narrative representations of city life, examining the two texts in the frame provided by Breton's own Surrealist Manifestos and in relation to Walter Benjamin's essay, 'Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the Intelligentsia'. Berlin. Both Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Fritz Lang's film, M (1932) seek to overturn the usual understandings of the hierarchical structure of the social order, and in so doing present innovative forms of narration in film and musical. Produced under the shadow of the coming anti-semitism of the Nazi regime, the work of both Brecht and Lang offer powerful reflections on nationalism, identity, and difference, and the complex relations between politics and aesthetics in the modernist city. We shall examine these groundbreaking texts in relation to commentary and analysis by Brecht and Lang themselves, as well as through secondary discussions by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Ernest Bloch.

The detective story, with its familiar cast of characters and plot formulas-the crime, the investigation, the red herrings and cold trails, the epiphany, the neat resolution (or, of course, the final twist)-is one of the most popular and enduring forms of narrative fiction, with New York City one of its most iconic settings. In this course, we will read eleven detective novels, all set in twentieth or twenty-first century New York, and apply the critical techniques of literary studies-close reading and detailed textual analysis, historical contextualization of fictional material, and the construction of original, research-based arguments-to this popular genre. As an introduction to the major authors, texts, conventions, and aesthetic styles of detective fiction and an exploration of the way that the narrative strategies and tropes of the detective novel represent and filter our understanding and experience of urban space and its (dis)order, this course will situate readings in relation to literary history and to historical and geographical contexts, with particular attention to how the conventions of detective fiction map, construct, and represent New York in relation to dominant ideologies of race, gender, and class. The required readings, which are all relatively short and easily read, will include seminal works by Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Mickey Spillane, and Paul Auster; we will also watch clips from New York detective films and television shows. We will spend one class period at the New York Historical Society, and one evening outside of class seeing the Off-Broadway play Perfect Crime.

In 1950, eminent social theorist C.L.R. James declared that it is in the "serious study" of popular comic strips like Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley that "you find the clearest ideological expression of the American people and a great window into the future of America and the modern world." This course will take a prolonged look through this 'great window' to trace the history of comics and graphic novels in the United States. Focusing on major representative texts that define and redefine the genre, we will learn how to approach comics as a distinct literary and visual form, while familiarizing ourselves with the critical vocabulary of "sequential art." By examining the graphic novel with an eye toward the literary, the course will examine the ways it deploys conventional literary forms such as allegory, epic, character, setting, and extended metaphor. We will consider how comics resist, represent, and entrench dominant cultural ideologies about power, myth, heroism, humor, adolescence, gender, sexuality, family, poverty, religion, censorship, and the immigrant experience. The course will provide students with the critical tools to examine this key vehicle of contemporary creative expression. Readings will include seminal works by Bechdel, Burns, Eisner, Miller, Moore, Crumb, Pekar, Spiegelman, Ware, and others. In addition, we will read selections from texts on graphic narrative theory and comics history, beginning with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. A field trip will also take us to Columbia's own Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

This course undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the simultaneous coming-of-age of the poet and his beloved city. Readings include Whitman's poetry, journalism, and short fiction, as well as works by his contemporaries and literary heirs. Walking tours, site visits and field research also required.

If the west is sometimes figured as a vacant space in which an exceptional nation can take shape, at other times it's depicted as a diversely populated zone marked by violence and dispossession. This course will examine such varied representations of the region at the nation's western edge in nineteenth century U.S. literature. In this period, authors from Black Hawk to Twain to Ruiz de Burton offered competing visions of the west. Those visions often sought to intervene in urgent debates about race, nation, and empire in America. Authors developed such geopolitical interventions in a broad range of genres-historical romance, lyric poetry, sensation novel, and autobiography. Our course will read both canonical and less familiar literary texts, along with carefully selected archival materials and scholarship from border studies and empire studies, in order to ask: How can we situate these competing visions of the west in conversation with one another? In what ways do literary accounts of the west engage the political discourses of the emerging nation? And how does genre shape the geographical imagination? Because the conceptions of the west that proliferate in nineteenth century literature re-emerge in the visual and material culture of the period, and later on in film, our course will include museum trips-to examine landscape and western paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and indigenous documentary artifacts at the National Museum of the American Indian-and a screening of Pekinpah's western The Wild Bunch. Authors to be covered include Cooper, Black Hawk, Whitman, Buntline, Ridge, Twain, and Ruiz de Burton. This course will satisfy the English major's geography requirement in American literature and the genre requirement in prose fiction. There are no prerequisites.

Why do we still laugh at comic works from nearly 2500 years ago, comedies that have outlived their generations? An examination of the different forms of staged comedy throughout the centuries, beginning with foundational texts from Ancient Greece, especially Aristophanes. We consider how today's playwrights are still building on, and making reference to, primary works from the Western canon. Texts we will read range from Shakespeare, Jonson and Restoration comedies, to Wilde, Beckett, Hansberry, Tennessee Williams, Pinter, and Churchill. We will also cover contemporary work seen on the stages of New York, including short comic plays, stand up, and physical comedy. Attention will be given to comic characters, comic pretense, wit, humor, comedy of errors, comic gestures, comic archetypes, farce, cross-dressing, satiric comedy, comic relief, tragicomedy, romantic comedy, and theatre of the absurd. This course will be of special interest to serious students of comedy. When possible, class outings make use of current New York City productions.

The course focuses on the diction, imagery, narrative techniques, and principal thematic concerns of the English Bible, a literary masterpiece in its own right, and the single most important influence on English literature throughout the ages. Readings include complete works or substantial selections from major books of the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha. Though our reading is in English, we consider the generic conventions and the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which biblical literature was produced. In addition to close literary study of individual biblical works from Genesis to Revelation, other topics to be considered include: the complexities of the construction of gender roles in and across various biblical texts; the problem of unity and diversity in a single book that is also an anthology of Near Eastern and Late Antique literary forms; the related problem of the canon of Scripture and its contested formation; the influential rabbinic mode of biblical interpretation known as midrash and contemporaneous Christian forms of biblical exegesis (parable, allegory, and typology); and the history and problematics of English Bible translation (with special attention to the literary and cultural landmarks of the Wycliffite Bible versions, c.1385-95, and the King James/Authorized Version, 1611). The influence of the Bible on English writers will occupy us throughout the course, and in their term papers students will have the option of exploring the relationship between a specific biblical text and a major English poem, play, or novel (e.g., Byron's Cain, Milton's Samson Agonistes, Robert Frost's Masque of Reason, etc.).