After having penned a cover review of Cynthia Ozick's recent novel Foreign Bodies for the New York Times Book Review a little over a week ago, Prof. Thomas Mallon is featured in the latest New Yorker article, reviewing Jim Carroll's posthumous offering, The Petting Zoo. Carroll, famous for his memoir The Basketball Diaries, was a wildly talented writer who once had a punk band fronted by Patti Smith (herself a poet and noted memoirist). Carroll was finishingThe Petting Zoo when he died in September 2009.
In other news, GW English alumna Amy Bailey, who received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, recently published her story "The Confidante," in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. We are all very proud of Amy. As she notes in a recent email to her former creative writing professor Faye Moskowitz, "I actually can hear the kvelling" from Washington DC!
The GW Africana Studies Program, Latino Studies Program, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute are proud to sponsor in partnership two events that focus upon William Shakespeare's The Tempest and its legacies. You may read some background here, and see the program for TemFest I here.
Rereading the Tempest
a panel discussion open to all
Friday December 3
3 PM
1957 E Street Room B12
A panel of renowned scholars will speak about the afterlife of the play, sharing their own research and holding a lively public conversation. For a general audience; all are welcome. Featuring:
Anston Bosman, "Accident and Amazement in recent Tempests"
Anston Bosman is Associate Professor and Director of Studies in the English Department at Amherst College. His publications this year include a review essay in Shakespeare Quarterly on the British-South African production of The Tempestand the chapter on "Shakespeare and Globalization" in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. He is completing a book on transnational theater in the early modern Germanic world and a collaborative project on "Intertheatricality" with Gina Bloom (UC Davis) and Will West (Northwestern).
Steve Mentz is Associate Professor of English at St. John's University in New York City. His recent work on maritime literary culture includes the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (Continuum, 2009) and a gallery exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, "Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 - 1750." He has also written a study of Elizabethan prose fiction, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006) and co-edited a collection about early modern criminality, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Michigan, 2004). Works in progress include a study of shipwreck narratives and a co-edited collection on Thomas Nashe.
J Michael Dash, "Ariel's Isle, Caribbean Rewritings of The Tempest"
J. Michael Dash, Professor of French and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is a leading scholar in the fields of Caribbean and Francophone literatures. Dash is the author of two of the most influential works of Caribbean cultural history, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Literature and Ideology in Haiti: 1915-1961(MacMillan, 1981). He has also written many other notable works, including Haiti and the United States (MacMillan, 1997) and a study of the Martiniquan writer Edouard Glissant (Cambridge University Press, 1995). His most recent study, Culture and Customs of Haiti, appeared in 2001 (Greenwood Press).
Both events are free and welcome all who wish to attend. Please join us!
ENGL 1320W, Literature of the Americas, being taught this spring by Department Chair Prof. Gayle Wald, offers students a multicultural, transnational introduction to American literature. One of our goals is to understand "America" in relation to the elsewheres it has always contained, and to ask questions about America itself. Students read works by Langston Hughes, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Phillip Roth, and Junot Diaz. They also read cutting-edge scholarship that seeks to reorient thinking about the boundaries of American literature.
The course is open to all students (there are no requirements), counts toward the humanities GCR, and offers WID credit. It meets twice weekly, once for lecture and once for section (taught by excellent English PhD students). The lecture is Monday 11:10-12:25. Section times vary.
Glitches during enrollment week gave students trying to sign up a message that they needed instructor approval, but this was in error. Questions to gwald@gwu.edu.
Prof. Faye Moskowitz has just announced the roster of acclaimed Jewish writers set to visit GW as part of next spring's Jewish Literature Live (listed as ENGL 3970; old ENGL 188: Jewish American Literature). As of this writing, there are still a few spaces left, but sign up soon!
Jewish Literature Live is a unique course, in which students read and discuss the works of living writers, from established names to up-and-comers, and then have these writers come to visit their classes. Generously funded by GW alumnus and Trustee David Bruce Smith, Jewish Literature Live is now in its third year, and has begun to garner a national reputation for giving writers an opportunity to present and discuss their work with informed and lively student-readers. In addition to class visits, the JLL authors do a free public reading, either on campus at the Marvin Center or at the DC Jewish Community Center at 16th and Q Street NW. Among last year's participants was Howard Jacobson, who won the 2010 Booker Prize, and Ariel Sabar, who is currently teaching ENGL 81 in the English Department.
Here is the stellar line-up for the spring:
Adam Kirsch,
Kirsch is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times, The New Republic, Utne Reader and Slate. He is author of Benjamin Disraeli (Jewish Encounters), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry. He is also the author of two collections of poetry.
Gary Shteyngart
The acclaimed author of three novels, including Absurdistan and this year's Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart was also featured in The New Yorker magazine's recent "20 under 40" list of extraordinary young writers.
Steve Stern
Stern is the prize-winning author of several books about "The Pinch," the old Jewish section of
Memphis, Tennessee. His collection, The Wedding Jester, won the 2000 National Jewish Book Award.His newest book is the very well-received The Frozen Rabbi. He teaches at Skidmore College.
Filmmaker Lily Rivlin
Rivlin will visit class and screen her documentary on the writer Grace Paley. Students in JLL will read from Paley's Collected Stories.
Allegra Goodman
Goodman is the author of 7 books, the most recent of which is The Cookbook Collector. The JLL class will read The Family Markovitz.
E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow is an American author of great distinction. His novel Ragtime has been called one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages. He is the recipient of awards including the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner award. The class will read The Book of Daniel.
Sana Krasikov
A fiction writer, Krasikov, who was born in the Ukraine, is winner of the $100,000 Sammy Rohr Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers. The class will read her prize-winning collection One More Year.
Drawing on an argument made by late New York poet Audre Lorde that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," Prof. Greg Pardlo introduced friend and fellow poet Thomas Sayers Ellis to the ample-sized audience in the Marvin Center Amphitheater last Thursday evening. Pardlo continued:
Although Ellis doesn't directly employ the metaphor of the master's house in Skin, Inc., we can hear Lorde's dictum echoing throughout. The metaphor is not merely a vehicle for the historical memory of American slavery. It expands to encompass a kind of architecture of poetry in our calcified literary environment that privileges poems that behave like stately Greek revival mansions in which no one actually lives. "Thus," states Ellis, "our work has struggled in containers not of our construction; and yet, within those constraints, we have conjured a magnificent aesthetic toolbox."
It is with this attention Ellis pays to the containers that are alien to the artist yet simultaneously so familiar they are almost inviolable aspects of American aesthetic antiquity that the poet presents and reflects on his writing. "Containers" as defined by Ellis conceptually expresses much more than a single, simply-identified constricting set of creative commandments.
**Before reading "Godzilla's Avocado," T.S.E. gave us a little back story. It turns out the piece was written in response to a random request the poet received from the not-so-random NPR for a "food poem." After reading the featured poem, Ellis quipped, "Yeah...they told me it was 'all over the place.'"
**At one point--right before 'singing' "The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song"--Ellis turned the book toward us (grade-school teacher style) and gestured toward the letters on the page. "Look what they let me get away with," Ellis exclaimed as the audience observed the poem was written in the style of an eye-chart. "I'm farsighted," Ellis stated smiling, "so I spent a lot of time at the ophthalmologist." Although it would be obtuse to assume publishers are the only determiners of the cruel, constricting containers of which Ellis speaks, this population--and the picking & choosing that implied in the industry side of literature--seem to fit a broad definition of container-creators.
**Even the container of classic reading comportment was--with a wave of Ellis's emphatic hand--dismissed. "Feel free to shout out," the author added. The reading's sole preadolescent attendee was also given room to roam. As Ellis spoke, the toddler ran his Hotwheels car around a makeshift racetrack: the molding of the Marvin Center room.
**Arguably, Ellis's most shocking statement came in the Q&A period in which, after tapping the book jacket of his copy of Skin, Inc. he said "these are dead bodies in a way." The face of the girl who had posed the question (something about what sort of research and inspiration had gone into the collection) indicated the response was not one she'd anticipated. Ellis argued that even collections of his own work have the potential to "pigeonhole" in the same way preconceived "containers" do. Lifting up the book the poet went on: after they are written, published, "I turn my back on them.They are representations. They represent. That's it ... You can't hold poetry--We're not there yet."
It was an evening of entertainment but also one of inquiry. Ellis is engaged in probing of American cultural interests, the forms taken in artistic expression, and the implications of expression taking these forms as opposed to those. Pardlo's piece to open resonated throughout the reading, as it was increasingly easy to attest to Pardlo's depiction of Ellis as "a master carpenter...[who]has taken that Greek-Revival mansion that was abandoned and built additions to accommodate all the cousins and in-laws who might care to move in."
We've had trouble getting these course descriptions posted to our website, so we're putting them here.
English Course Descriptions – Spring 2011 (updated 11/15/2010)
Dean’s Seminars
149050801.10
Cuba and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism
Professor Tony Lopez
GCR: Humanities
WF 9:35-10:50
OLD Course Number: 801
This seminar explores representations of Cuba in relation to both U.S. imperialism and contemporary global empire—a related, though quite different, phenomenon. We will introduce students to an array of U.S. literary and cultural representations of the Cuban nation from the War of 1898 to the establishment of Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in 2002. U.S. texts produced about the island during the period often suggest an imperialist understanding of Cuba, reproducing ideas of Cuban inferiority. Just as often, however, they challenge ideologies of U.S. hemispheric supremacy by engaging instead with the particulars of the island's history and struggle for national liberation. Students will analyze a variety of texts that invoke the contradictions of U.S. imperialist relations with Cuba. We will also consider works by Cubans themselves, on the island and in the diaspora, that imagine Cuba's history not simply as an effect of U.S. political or cultural interests on the island.
122960801.11
Inquiries, Stories, Histories
Professor Ormand Seavey
GCR: Humanities
MW 4:45-6:00
OLD Course Number: 801
It is naively accepted by many that history, the record of solid factual events, and story, a constructed narrative of events which may or may not have happened, are opposed extremes. But both history and story derive from the same Greek word, a word meaning inquiries, the title of the pioneering work of history by Herodotus. This course considers various chapters in the complex interplay among fact, myth, story, history, and narrative in Western writing over nearly 3000 years. Beginning with the story of the late years of King David and the perceived presence of the God of Israel in Jerusalem court politics, the course asked how a scrupulous witness can identify a divine hand. Herodotus, writing centuries later about the Persian War, believes in the Greek gods and collects evidence of history and culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. The story is continued in the centuries from 1600 to 1900 in story and history by Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cotton Mather, Henry Fielding, Francis Parkman, and Henry Adams.
14296 0801.12
The Art of the Diary
Professor Thomas V. Mallon
GCR: Humanities
TR 12:45-2:00
OLD Course Number: 801
From its long-ago precursors (the ship captain’s log, the reader’s commonplace book) to its post-modern successors (the publicly intimate blog), the diary has been an art form unto itself. It has also been a source for our understanding of private lives and vivid personalities, as well as evidence of what goes into the making of literature, art and history. This seminar will consider the many uses to which diaries have been put: to chronicle the texture of everyday life; record travels; chart spiritual progress; brainstorm creative projects; confess and justify conduct; leave testaments from times of war and years in prison. We will read the diaries of such well-known figures as Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank, as well as a disparate assortment of lesser-known ones. Students will write several short papers, take a midterm and a final examination, and, for a portion of the term, keep a diary.
136410801.13
Race and Identity in American Literature
Professor Evelyn Schreiber
GCR: Humanities
TR 3:45-5:00
OLD Course Number: 801
This Dean’s Seminar explores these issues of race and individual/collective identity in American literature. We will ground the course in theories of race and subjectivity through readings by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, bell hooks, Paul Connerton, Joel Williamson, Vamik Volkan, and Toni Morrison. Then we will read five literary works, by black and white authors, to study regional and national representation of racial issues: Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Jazz, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. Students will write about these representations in papers and group projects. In addition we will watch the film version of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and attend a performance of a play concerning racial/identity/culture issues at a local theater. The course also will draw on Washington, DC as a cultural site for race issues, including northern migration and civil rights activities (March on Washington of 1963, race riots of 1968). South of the Mason-Dixon Line, Washington has a history of segregation that provides concrete examples of contested social spaces: Glen Echo Park, the Carter Barron Amphitheater, the Howard Theater, and the DC public schools.
165280801.14
Imitations
Professor Jane Shore
GCR: Humanities
TR 11:00-12:15
OLD Course Number:801
Robert Lowell writes in the introduction to his book of poems Imitations: “I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as the original poem . . . I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make them ring right for me.” In this course we will focus on several modern and contemporary American poets, who may include Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon OLDs and Tony Hoagland. After reading a volume by each of them, students will analyze and discuss the poet’s work in class and then write their own poems by imitating that poet’s style—paying attention to syntax, subject matter, imagery, patterning, and music. The class will then “workshop” these new poems. Students are encouraged to subvert, refute, and play off the originals. Craft may be teachable, but vision isn’t; even so, one can “learn to write” in the way that painters of the past learned to paint—by apprenticing themselves to master painters. As they gain this invaluable learn-by-doing experience, students will also hone their critical skills and come to understand the way poems work from the inside out.
Creative Writing Classes
148611210.10Intro to Creative WritingPage
W 11:10AM - 12:25PM, F 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
148621210.11Intro to Creative WritingMiller
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
148631210.12Intro to Creative WritingPardlo
TR 04:45PM - 06:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
148641210.13Intro to Creative WritingPage
WF 02:20PM - 03:35PM
OLD Course Number:081
148661210.14Intro to Creative Writing Pollack
M 02:20PM - 03:35PM, W 03:45PM - 05:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
148671210.15Intro to Creative WritingMartin
MW 04:45PM - 06:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
148681210.16Intro to Creative Writing
TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
OLD Course Number:081
148691210.17Intro to Creative Writing Daub
TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
OLD Course Number:081
148701210.18Intro to Creative Writing Payne
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:081
153691210.19Intro to Creative WritingCarrillo
TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM
OLD Course Number:081
154391210.20Intro to Creative Writing Saalfeld
TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
OLD Course Number:081
148721210.MVIntro to Creative WritingLevine
TR 11:30AM - 12:45PM
This course is being taught at the Mount Vernon campus.
OLD Course Number:081
148731210.MV1Intro to Creative Writing Levine
TR 01:00PM - 02:15PM
This course is being taught at the Mount Vernon Campus.
This course will satisfy a WID requirement. Also register for one discussion section1320W.30-35. (See Schedule of Classes for days and times of discussion sections.)
OLD Course Number:041W
136311410W.10Intro to English LiteratureBusse
TR 1245PM – 2:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number: 051W
170371410W.11Intro to English LiteratureBusse
TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:051W
136321411W.10Intro to EnglishLiteratureCarter
TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:052W
170391411W.11Intro to English LiteratureRavyMW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement
OLD Course Number:052W
173081411W.12Intro to English LiteratureVazquez
MW 0935AM – 10:50AM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number: 052W
173101411W.MVIntro to English LiteratureFullerty
TR 11:30AM – 12:45PM
This course is being taught at the Mount Vernon Campus.
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number: 052W
134271510W.10Intro to American LiteratureFisher
MW 08:00AM - 09:15AM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:071W
136351511W.10Intro to American LiteratureRomines
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:072W
155931511W.11Intro to American Literature Soltan
TR 2:20PM - 03:35PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:072W
170401511W.12Intro to American LiteratureKentoff
MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:072W
155101611W.10Intro to Black American LitMiller
TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:074W
136361711W.10Intro to Postcolonial Lit Daiya
T02:20PM - 04:40PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:092W
136331830W.10TragedyGoswami
TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:061W
136341840W.10ComedyCarter
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:062W
Upper-Level Literature Classes
148902800.10Critical MethodsCook
R 02:20PM - 03:35PM
OLD Course Number:120
A survey of literary, cultural and psychological theories applicable to the study of literature, from Aristotle’s Poetics to post-modernism. There will be two midterm exams and a term paper, as well as daily written exercises. Texts: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
148912800.11Critical MethodsAlcorn
R 11:10AM - 12:25PM
OLD Course Number:120
This course will study the major schools and theoretical methods that have influenced the study the literature since 1940. We will examine formalist claims about literature, French structuralist and post-structuralist claims, and conclude with a section on the study of literature from the context of culture. Students will demonstrate an understanding of these methods by writing papers that apply each of the three methods to a literary work.
131043410.10ChaucerCohen
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
Old Course Number:112
This course examines Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in all their complexity, perversity, and artfulness. We will be especially attentive to Chaucer's explorations of identity and the ways in which his texts envision various kinds of community. Students will gain insight into how contemporary scholars interpret the tales. All primary readings are in Middle English. Requirements:class attendance and participation; five relatively short writing exercises during the term; a 12-15 page research paper; and a final examination.
170423430.10The English RenaissanceDugan
MW 09:35AM - 10:50AM
Old Course Number: 125
In this course, we will in interrogate how the concept of utopian space helped to shape the foundational works of the English Renaissance.Sir John Mandeville’s descriptions of foreign lands, Christine de Pizan’s vision of a women’s library, Thomas More’s garden discussion about the island of Utopia, William Shakespeare’s idealized forest of Arden in As You Like It, Ben Jonson’s homage “To Penshurst,” John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Margaret Cavendish’s New Blazing World, to name just a few texts on our syllabus, describe idealized spaces for aesthetic and emotional revelation.As such, each proffers an imaginary landscape that surpasses the realities of the everyday.In this course, we will examine the contours of these landscapes, querying how they connect to the key concepts of “discovery” and “rediscovery” that define the English Renaissance.Our classroom work will be discussion-oriented; it will entail intensive close-reading of primary and secondary texts and attention to their historical contexts.
109783441.10ShakespeareDugan
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
Old Course Number: 128
In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber, a leading Shakespearean scholar, posits that there is nothing universal about Shakespeare’s “genius.”Rather, Garber argues that Shakespeare’s status as the greatest playwright “of all time” culminates from vastly different cultural definitions of what makes his plays “great.”Every age creates its own Shakespeare, defining—and defined by—the cultural spaces in which his plays are performed.Taking Garber’s provocative argument as our starting point, this class approaches Shakespeare’s plays through their relationships with two distinct cities: early modern London and contemporary Washington, DC.We will query: what was the relationship between early modern London’s topography and Shakespeare’s theater?How do Shakespeare’s plays imagine city spaces (such as Rome, Venice, Verona)?What other kinds of topographies define these spaces?How are these spaces performed?And how does our own relationship to the District of Columbia shape our encounters with urban Shakespeare?Texts will include Antony & Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew.Our classroom work will be discussion-oriented; it will entail intensive close- reading of the texts and attention to dramatic staging and historical contexts.
148923441.11ShakespeareHarris
Desiring Shakespeare (Prof. Jonathan Gil Harris; TA Jessica Frazier)
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
Old Course Number: 128
This course will examine both desire in Shakespeare and desire for Shakespeare: that is, the ways in which his poems and plays depict love, longing, eroticism and appetite, as well as the extent to which our own desires are unleashed by the very act of reading and interpreting Shakespeare – whether those desires take the form of an unabashed Bardolatry, a more strategic investment in the cultural capital that familiarity with his work supposedly confers, a longing for knowable play-texts that “speak Shakespeare’s mind” and/or “speak the truth,” or other more polymorphous and illicit modes of Shakespeare-related pleasure.Some topics to be considered: reproductive vs. non-reproductive love; homoeroticism; male vs. female sexuality; the death drive; desire for fashion; venereal disease; policing desire; desire in a capitalist society; the relationship between sex and (theatrical) performance; narcissism; cross-cultural desire.
Texts we will examine include The Sonnets; Venus and Adonis; Romeo and Juliet; The Taming of the Shrew; Measure for Measure; Troilus and Cressida; The Phoenix and the Turtle; Antony and Cleopatra; A Lover's Complaint.
141283450.10Shakespeare on FilmCook
TR 04:45PM - 06:00PM Old Course Number: 129
This course will consider the strange and powerful interaction of Shakespeare and the cinema over the past century. We will analyze selections from a wide range of films, both mainstream and experimental, to try to understand the ways that cinematic methods of representation can develop, distort and enhance the Shakespearean play-text. Students must have convenient access to a VCR or DVD player and will be required to obtain copies of several films on their own in the appropriate format. Writing requirements will include two substantial analytic essays and a number of short ungraded assignments.
13939 3481W.10The Eighteenth CenturySeavey
MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
Old Course Number: 132W
As the assured certainties of Classicism yield to the corrosive influences of sentiment and religious questioning, eighteenth-century writers like Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Boswell, and Voltaire scrambled to erect structures of signification that preserved the Old values while accommodating to incoming political and cultural developments. Even seduction and romance come to have larger political and cultural meanings. Employing a comparative literature approach, this course focuses on British eighteenth-century figures with some attention to French and Austrian figures.
12746 3510.10Children’s LiteratureGoswami
TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
Old Course Number: 134
The primary objective of this course is to become familiar with the kinds of literature available for children and young adults. We will focus on nineteenth- and early twentieth century classics central to the development of children’s literature as well as more contemporary works. We will read representative works by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, J.K. Rowling, Lois Lowry, Maurice Sendak, Louis Sachar, and others.
165103530.10The Romantic MovementPlotz
TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM
Old Course Number: 133
The Romantic Movement: Romanticism and the Sense of Place The romantic period in Britain was a time of the expansion ofempire, the world-historical population shift from country to city, and a cultural turn to the psychological “journey to the interior”.Thus “place”—whether conceived as the alien spaces of empire, the intimacies of the English rural landscape, the shock ofmetropolitan London,the realm of “Nature”, the inner spaces of the psyche—is at the thematic and aesthetic center of romantic literature. This
course will focus on three substantial prose works (Austen’s Mansfield Park, a country-house novel set in England; Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, set in Ireland; Lewis’s Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, set in Jamaica);and on selectedworks by six poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, and Clare).
107813541.10Victorian LiteratureCarter
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
Old Course Number: 136
This course on the period 1865-1910 tracks the development of modernism and the critique of “Victorianism” from deep in the Victorian period.We study not only major British writers—Swinburne, Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy—but also powerful continental figures—Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Proust--whose achievements intersect with and complement those of their British counterparts.The death of God and the development of aestheticism are two themes among others that we trace.
165243570.1019th-Century Black Literature:Race, James
Romance and Revolution in Transatlantic
Antislavery Fiction
MW 04:45PM - 06:00PM
Old Course Number: 190
This course will examine literature by black and white writers from the U.S., the Caribbean, France and Britain who turned to "romance"--tales of love, forbidden attraction and sexual temptation--to interrogate contact, power, and racial identity in the Atlantic world. Some works will include Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Anonymous, The Woman of Colour; Victor Sejour, "The Mulatto"; Alexander Dumas, Georges;Claire de Duras, Ourika; William Wells Brown, Clotel, or the President's Daughter; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, or Sketches in the Life of a Free Black.
3610.10ModernismGreen-Lewis
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:137
The early decades of the twentieth century saw an extraordinary shift of emphasis in all kinds of cultural and literary production, as the rise of realism, with its promise of a world that might be more or less accurately represented through language, gave way to a focus on language itself as world. The Great War is often touted as the chasm marking off the Victorian from the modern world, but we shall see that Modernism as a movement – with its attention to the uncertainties of life, its suspicions of the known, its skepticism regarding such novelistic fundamentals as plot and character— also grows out of the pre-war world of such writers as Henry James and Joseph Conrad.In this course we will trace a discernible literary history that helps us to be made ready for Modernism's demands and difficulties, and in our discussions of some of the works from the period with which Modernism is associated (c. 1900-1930) we will focus on the following topics: nationalism and national identity; the idea of character; loss; beauty; and urban culture.
165143621W.10American PoetryMcAleavey
MW 03:45PM - 05:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:164W
This course intends to help you engage with and gain increased mastery of American poetry written and published from the WW I era to the present. You will be asked to read carefully, to read aloud, to memorize and recite poems, and to participate as fully as is reasonably possible in class discussion. Papers will enable you to discuss specific authors and ideas in greater depth and with more accuracy than is possible in class discussions. The final exam will ascertain your familiarity with the assigned reading and will also test your ability to make insightful connections and to reason in various ways about modern/contemporary poetry. As this is a Writing in the Disciplines course, there will be an emphasis on writing throughout the semester; the purposes or imagined audiences for your various assignments will vary; and there will be opportunities for revision, usually involving peer review.
136383631.10American DramaCombs
TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
OLD Course Number:166
American Drama II: developments in American Drama from the 1960s to the present, including works by Edward Albee, David Mamet, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, and others. Requirements: two oral reports, in-class midterm exam, play attendance project, take-home final exam. Clips from films of plays will be shown in class.
148943641W.10Twentieth-Century American NovelMoreland
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:168W
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
In this course, we will explore literary modernism in the context of the development and transformation of the American novel during the 20th century.Taking a psychobiographical and sociocultural approach, we will examine the ways in which the psychologicalconcerns of various American writers shape their novels, and the ways in which the novels--and indeed the writers--are "written" or encoded by American culture.
Representative Texts: Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms; Faulkner, Sanctuary;Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Heller, Catch-22;Walker, The Color Purple
Requirements: An annotated bibliography, a long paper, a final exam, and participation in
class
117693650.10The Short StoryCombs
TR 02:20PM - 03:35PM
OLD Course Number:170
The Short Story: developments in short fiction from Poe to the present, including works by Hawthorne, Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, James, Kafka, Mann, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mansfield, O'Connor, Singer, Wright, Baldwin, Welty, Cheever, Olsen, Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Barthelme, Mason, Beattie, Munro, and others. Requirements: two oral reports, daily in-class writing, in-class midterm exam, take-home final exam.
ENGLISH 139/3660 studies Twentieth-Century Irish Literature with the emphasis on drama and poetry. Four Irish writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, and Heaney. As well as these great writers, there have also been many good poets and dramatists (including poets of the theatre) who have been admired by readers and theatre-goers as well as imitated by other international writers. With Lady Gregory, Yeats founded the Irish National Theatre and provided a space and institution at the Abbey where playwrights like themselves, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, and Hugh Leonard could celebrate and criticize the human condition in Ireland. Yeats was also the giants of Irish poetry and was followed by fine poets like Clarke, Kavanagh, McNeice, Montague, Heaney, the Longleys, Boland, Ni Dhomhaill, and Clifton. ENG 139/3660 will explore the world-renowned and not-so-famous writers from a small country with a high degree of quality. In class we will read aloud and discuss sections from plays and poems.
“What ish my nation?” asked the Irishman in Shakespeare’s Henry V. W. B. Yeats claimed that “art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man’s Land.” These are among many thorny issues of conflict and identity which we will explore. As Yeats said, “Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric; out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.” ENGL 139/3660 will explore the world-renowned and not-so-famous writers from a small country with a high degree of quality.
131893661.10Irish Literature: James JoyceSoltan
TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
OLD Course Number:140
Our focus will be on the remarkable achievement of Irish fiction writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.We'll read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and we'll read excerpts from Ulysses.Our main text will be The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, but we'll also read novels by Flann O'Brien, John Banville, Anne Enright, and others.The course will trace the evolution of Ireland through these years from a rather provincial, politically unsettled, and pretty impoverished Catholic country to the worldly, politically calmer, reasonably affluent, and increasingly secular country we see today.
165123710W.10Contemporary DramaGriffith
MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:158W
A study of outstanding recent American drama, requiring attendance at theatre and a creative presentation.
165153721W.10Contemporary American LiteratureMoreland
TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM
Comments: The course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:178W
As the hegemonic influence of literary modernism began to wane after the mid-point of the twentieth century, literary critics and scholars became curious about the new direction that American literature would take.While the initial answer seemed to be “postmodernism” of a narrowly specific sort, that proved to be only a temporary answer.However, it helped to enable a number of other answers—that is, various “postmodernisms,” all of which manifest a freedom from the constraints of the realistic conventions that modernism had borrowed from the nineteenth-century and used for its own ends.This course will focus on novels and short stories from the 1960s to the 2000s in order to explore how this emergence from the limitations of realism enabled a new era of literary experimentation.
Representative Texts: Jong, Fear of Flying; Barth, Lost in the Funhouse; Martin, Mary Reilly (in conjunction with Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); Kennedy, Legs;Morrison, Beloved; Jones, The Known World
Requirements: An annotated bibliography, a long paper, a final exam, and participation in
class
149003730.10Around the World in 80 Days: Travel WritingDaiya
Fictional Travels, and Identity in International
Literature and Film
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:173
This course explores the experience of travel and how it shapes cultural and gender identity in modern global writing and cinema.From Jules Vernes' classic "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1873) to Elizabeth Gilbert's runaway best-seller "Eat, Pray, Love" (2006), our literature shows that people travel for several different reasons: as representatives of colonizing empires, as tourists wishing to encounter and learn about a different culture, as study-abroad students, as immigrants to better prospects, as emotional refugees seeking self-discovery, as adventurers to experience the pleasure of cross-cultural encounters, among other reasons.We explore travel literature, fiction about travel, as well as films that represent travel, to debate a range of questions: what happens to identities in travel?How do we represent the encounter with cultural and linguistic difference? How does travel shape and reshape our identities, around gender, race, sexuality, culture and class?How do narratives of travel shape politics?We will look at representations of Jewish people who migrate to India, Frenchmen who circumnavigate the world, Nigerians who travel to America, Americans who journey to South-east Asia, among others.In the process, we will explore the historically changing forms of thinking identity – racial, gendered, cultural, national- in fiction and films about travel and global circulation, and theories of empire and globalization.
121953810.10Adolescence/OLD Age in 20th Century Writing Romines
MW 03:45PM - 05:00PM
OLD Course Number:172
In the twentieth century, concepts of adolescence and Old age (often inflected by gender) were invented and reinvented in American culture.In this class, we will explore how these concepts are reflected, and often juxtaposed, in American fiction and memoir of the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesOur primary texts will include Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; short fiction by Willa Cather, John Updike, and others; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima; Toni Morrison, Sula; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller, and Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.Additional texts, either fiction or film, will be chosen by the class.Supplementary texts will include related critical, theoretical, and historical readings.Assignments will include in-class reports, major paper, midterm and final exams.
141313810.11Representations of the Holocaust in Raphael
Literature And FilmTR 02:20PM - 03:35PM
OLD Course Number:172
This course will focus on representations, both documentary and fictional, of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. How (and, for that matter, why) does one “realistically” depict a very real event, the Holocaust? What role does “unrealistic” depiction play? Whose experiences are more “authentic,” whose more suited for a book or a film than another writer’s and why? Which genre -- poetry memoir, fiction, chronicle or film -- is the “best” for telling (retelling?) what happened? Is there, as Saul Friedlander suggests in his book Probing the Limits of Representation, a limit to what kind of representations we might accept? Furthermore, what does it mean to survive the Shoah, to live and write about it? How does that complex identity get worked through in fiction?
148963820.10DeLilloSoltan
TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
OLD Course Number:171
Texts: Players, Great Jones Street; Libra, White Noise, Mao I, The Name, Underworld. Falling Man, PointOmega, “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” Various readings via Blackboard
Considered by many to be America’s best living novelist, Don DeLillo writes fiction that readers and fellow writers consider both politically engaged and aesthetically satisfying.This course will be an intensive reading of his most significant works, along with a reading of some important essays about his themes and styles.We will begin in the middle of his career, with his best-known novel, White Noise.We’ll then move chronologically through his other novels (we'll read one short story), noting recurrent ideas and techniques.
To read DeLillo is to read contemporary American history and culture, and our discussions will focus not only on the content of his novels, but on the degree to which that content successfully captures our own sense of the reality of being postmodern Americans.
139453820W.10Faulkner and MorrisonSchreiber
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
This course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:171W
This course, taught by Professor Schreiber, links authors Toni Morrison and William Faulkner through the ways in which their fictional and discursive practices reflect on each other.Specifically, we will examine how the texts of both authors reenact and resist racism and patriarchal structures; how they explore the ways in which memory and the past construct identity; and how they experiment with style.We will consider the ways in which the texts illuminate a continuum in American literature through discussions of socially constructed identity and issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, the class utilizes cultural studies and psychoanalytic critical approaches to the texts of these authors.The reading list may include Playing in the Dark, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, and Go Down, Moses.Writing assignments include two papers with revisions and a final exam.In-class workshops for papers
165203930.10Nation, Migration, and Diaspora in Twentieth-Lopez
3940.10Topics in African American Literature – CANCELLED
165233970.10Jewish American LiteratureMoskowitz
TR 12:45PM - 02:00PM
OLD Course Number:188
Thanks to donor David Bruce Smith, here's an opportunity to speak directly to the cutting edge authors whose books you will read in this once-in-a-lifetime college course.We will read six or seven works of Jewish American literature, talk about them, write about them, formulate questions about them, and after each book the author will come to campus for a conversation with the class and a presentation in the evening.Authors expected this semester include, Gary Shteyngart, Steve Stern, Allegra Goodman, Sana Krasikov, Nicole Krauss and E. L. Doctorow.
Requirements: Response papers, written questions, attendance at evening readings, final exam or presentation.
133804250W.10Honors ThesisAlcornThis course will satisfy a WID requirement.
OLD Course Number:198W
102464360.10Independent StudyWald
Departmental approval required to register.
OLD Course Number:197
107114470.10InternshipSeavey
Departmental approval required to register.
OLD Course Number:199
GRADUATE SEMINARS:
170446130.10Selected Topics in Criticism: Virginia WoolfGreen-Lewis
and the Victorians: Modernist Aesthetics
and Nineteenth-century views
R 03:30PM - 06:00PM
OLD Course Number:261
This course will take the rather unusual path of exploring not just the influence of Bloomsbury aesthetics on the experimental fiction of Virginia Woolf, but also that of the previous generation: namely, the Victorians.
We will focus on three areas:
1)the shaping force of contemporary art theories developed by Clive Bell and Roger Fry and embodied in the work of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell;
2)the influence of the past, both in the form of Victorian aesthetics, as represented by Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde, and also in the long emotional reach of the Stephen family; and
3)Woolf’s theories of the self in relation to others, as explored in four of her novels, a selection of her essays, and her diaries
NB:There will be an amazing amount of (wonderfully interesting) reading for this course.Passion and commitment are prerequisites.If you’re lukewarm on Woolf, this course is not for you!Please read Hermione Lee’s biography of Woolf over the vacation (this will be the basis of our first discussion) and bring your copy of Shone’s Art of Bloomsbury to class.
Required texts ordered at the bookstore (nb edition dates; all paper; all required):
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room(Harvest) 0-15-654742-3; Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest) 0-15-662870-8, To the Lighthouse (Harvest) 0-15-690739-9 The Waves (Harvest) 0-15-694960-1; A Writer’s Diary (Harvest) 015-602791-7; Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics) 978-0-19-92181-1; Ruskin, Selected Writings (Oxford World’s Classics) 0-19-280262-3;
Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford World’s Classics) 0199535078;
Wilde, The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics) 0199540764; Clive Bell, Art (out of print; used copies can be found on the internet); A Roger Fry Reader (ed. Christopher Reed, U of Chicago P) 0226266427; Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury (Princeton UP); 0691095140.Also required, but not on order at bookstore: Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
153686220.10Renaissance Drama and Schwalkwyk
Performance
T 3 :30PM - 06:00PM
Love’s Transgression” in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
This course will examine the concept of erotic love in Shakespeare. It will bring historical, philosophical, and literary lenses to bear on the concept by tracing writings on love historically, from Plato through the Renaissance in Leone Ebreo, Tullia d’Aragona, Ficino, and Michel de Montaigne, as well as the Galenic psychologists, Thomas Wright, Nicolas Coefetteau and Edward Reynolds. We will subject the tendency, from Plato onwards, to reduce love to desire to scrutiny, and try to forge a concept of romantic love differentiated from desire via a selection of modern philosophies of love, including those of Irving Singer, Tzevan Todorov and Jacques Lacan. Our theoretical preparation will be completed by looking at ways in which certain modern theories of language (Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, and William Reddy) show, counter-intuitively, that if love is not reducible to desire, it is not an emotion either. Armed with a new shiny concept to crack the rib of reality, we will then look at the representations of “love’s transgression” in Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets to see how they differ from the mainstream philosophical and literary views of romantic love and its relation to desire.
Texts
Classical and Renaissance Philosophy
Tullia d'Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (University Of Chicago Press, 1997).
Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love (University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (Spring Publications, 2000).
Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne: Essays (Penguin, 1993).
Mary Martin McLaughlin, The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of their Complete Correspondence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Plato, The Lysis(any edition)
Plato, The Phaedras (any edition)
Plato, The Symposium (any edition)
Renaissance humoral theory
Nicolas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, trans. Edward Grimeston (London, 1621).
Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (London, 1640).
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604).
Recent theories
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: Transference
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Stanley Cavell, "Performative and Passionate Utterances", in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 155-92.
Shakespeare
Any good scholarly edition of the Complete Works.
Recommended reading:
Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, 3 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
170436220.10Seminar in Medieval and Early Modern Cohen
Studies:Agency, Objects, and the
Constitution of Life
M 03:30PM - 06:00PM
OLD Course Number:209
This seminar explores the topics foregrounded by the March GW MEMSI conference "Animal, Vegetable and Mineral." We will survey contemporary ways of rethinking materiality and causality such as actor network theory (Gilles Deleiuze, Bruno Latour, Manuel de Landa), object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman), psychoanalysis (Slavoj Zizek), vibrant materialisms (Jane Bennett), and queer ecocritical approaches (Timothy Morton), among others. We will in tandem investigate a body of work that constitutes a kind of minor literature for early Britain, wonder-filled "Breton lais" (short romances) that unfOld -- or, better, explode --in oceanic, geographic, cultural and temporal interspaces. Middle English works will be read in their original; French in translation. Time permitting, we will trace these durable narratives of possibility to their early modern forms.
16525 6351.10Nineteenth CenturySten
M 06:10PM - 08:40PM
OLD Course Number:232
This course will examine Herman Melville’s career as a traveler and transnational writer with a deep interest in issues of colonialism, cultural interaction, cosmopolitanism, and the rise of imperial powers in the nineteenth century.At the same time it will explore his views on nationalism, American “exceptionalism,” and the War Between the States.Readings include several novels, including Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, as well as short stories and poems, plus theoretical and historical studies of transnationalism and nationalism relevant to Melville and the nineteenth century.Requirements include seminar reports, a review essay, and a seminar paper (18-25 pages).
16716 6520.10Ethnicity and Identity: Introduction to Chu
Asian American Literature
W 03:30PM - 06:00PM
OLD Course Number:244
The course introduces Asian American literature as a tradition that questions mainstream constructions of Asian American race and ethnicities and provides alternative accounts of Asian American experiences.We’ll discuss the political roots of the terms “Asian American” and “Asian American literature”; nineteenth-century East-West encounters; Chinese immigration and exclusion; Japanese American internment narratives; feminist, national, and postcolonial influences; adoption; transnational migration; theories of narrative, genre, mourning, and loss.
16527 6630.10Literature and MedicineAlcorn
T 06:10PM - 08:40PM
OLD Course Number:281
In this seminar, the practice of medicine is interrogated using methods of critical theory.The seminar is organized into organizing leitmotifs: the changing body, medical institutions and medical ideology/ideologies, grief and trauma and theories of the postmodern as they address the present and the future of medicine. Contemporary medicine and health sciences can be more fully understood through the lens of the literature that examines the human condition during the 20th and 21st
102476720.10Independent Research Harris
OLD Course Number:295
102486720.11Independent Research Harris
OLD Course Number:295
102516811.10Folger Institute Seminar Harris
OLD Course Number:302
Departmental approval required to register. Consult English department for details on applying to register for the Folger Seminar.
102496998.10Thesis Research
OLD Course Number:299
102506999.10Thesis Research
OLD Course Number:300
102528998.10Advanced Reading and ResearchHarris
OLD Course Number:398
136408999.10Dissertation Research TO 12.00 HarrisOLD Course Number:399
After having penned a cover review of Cynthia Ozick's recent novel Foreign Bodies for the New York Times Book Review a little over a week ago, Prof. Thomas Mallon is featured in the latest New Yorker article, reviewing Jim Carroll's posthumous offering, The Petting Zoo. Carroll, famous for his memoir The Basketball Diaries, was a wildly talented writer who once had a punk band fronted by Patti Smith (herself a poet and noted memoirist). Carroll was finishing The Petting Zoo when he died in September 2009.
