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COURSES: Spring 2012

For all registration dates and deadlines, see the GC academic calendar.

To view detailed course descriptions click here or click on the faculty name in the grid below.

Register on Record: CRN 17200 (If you ROR you must also register for WIUs)

Weighted Instructional Units: CRN 1720X (the last digit is the value of credits you need to bring you up to 7 credits).

For Dissertation Supervision click here

Course listings and room numbers are subject to change

Courses listed alphabetically by instructor

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ENGL 86500. “Postcolonial Poetics”.Meena Alexander. 2/4 credits. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 17342].
American colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke's great melody against it
W.B.Yeats

We will consider how writers make sense of a colonial world and how in its aftermath  the imagination serves to bring disparate bits and pieces together, forging a new history. How does the writer enter the fragmented field of public space? What tensions exist between a deeply personal quest for identity and the need for national or diasporic belonging? What becomes of the bodily self ? What roles do gender and sexuality play? What kind of genealogy might we seek ?

We will begin with the late eighteenth century, writings by Edmund Burke -- his great anti-colonial speeches – On the Nawab of Arcot’s Debts, Fox’s East India Bill and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings setting these by the side of his notion of the Sublime (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757)

We will read writings from Ireland and India, two postcolonial countries that have endured Partition: the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W.B.Yeats, both poetry and prose. Next we will turn to the later twentieth century – Irish writers Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland ,Seamus Heaney and Indian writers  Kamala Das , A.K. Ramanujan as well as selected prose and poetry by Dalits – members of the formerly `Untouchable’ community. Here special attention will be paid to questions of language, violence and sexuality.

To deepen our exploration of aesthetic form and the body in the world, we will read selected writings by Maurice-Merleau-Ponty. There will also be a choice of weekly readings from Adorno, Appiah, Bauman, Bhabha, Butler, Cesaire, Darwish, Fanon, Glissant, Heidegger, Manto, Spivak, Virno, Walcott  and others.

The course will be run as a seminar with weekly readings and presentations; one short mid-term paper and one final research paper. Weekly readings will be uploaded onto the Graduate Center library site. These readings will include poems by Kamala Das since her work in not readily available. Books will be available for purchase at  Book Culture, 536 West 112th Street New York, NY 10025: Rabindranath Tagore, Tagore Anthology, eds Dutta and Robinson; *Sadat Hasan Manto, Kingdom’s End and other Stories; A.K.Ramanujan, Collected Poems; *No Alphabet in Sight, New Dalit Writing from South India eds Satyanarayana and Tharu; William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems ed Finneran; Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996; Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems; Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader eds Johnson and Smith. (Books with italics next to them may not be available through the book store – if this is the case, they will be placed on reserve in the Mina Rees Library and relevant materials uploaded.) For any questions about the course please contact Professor Alexander.

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ENGL 80600. “Tragedy: The Changing Forms of an Unchanging Genre”.Felicia Bonaparte. 2/4 credits. Fridays 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 17343].
Very few genres survive the ages. Hegel held all genres locked in the periods that engendered them and Tennyson, who had hoped to write an epic on the Arthurian legends but ended up writing Idylls instead, explained his failure by saying that "nature brings not back the mastodon." Yet certain genres seem to persist, and, despite the fact that many have written obituaries for it, tragedy seems to be among them.

Our purpose in this course will be to try to understand the concept and the history of tragedy and perhaps of genres themselves. To that end, we will consider questions such as: where is its essence? In its form or in its content? Is there a core that cannot change without the genre ceasing to be? Are there aspects that can change? Can other genres be called tragedies (not just tragic but tragedies): a novel for instance or an opera (we will look at one of each)? Are there times and places that seem especially given to this genre? Are there others that are not? If there are, what can account for it?  (And does this have something to do with the fact that two of the greatest writers of tragedies, Racine and Shakespeare, stopped writing them at the peaks of their careers?) And are there different kinds of tragedy? Can Shakespeare's Richard III be thought of in the same category as King Lear?

Beginning in Greece with the Oresteia and ending in the United States with such works as Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, our reading will include the widest possible representation, in time and place as well as kind, of works that people have called tragedies, as well as works that some have not. We will look at some tragedy chains (King Lear, Père Goriot, Death of a Salesman, and Fences) in which a tragedy is rewritten and the rewritings rewritten as well. And, as we go we will incorporate some of the major theories of tragedy and hope to decide whether they make sense.

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ENGL 83500. “Charmed Circles: Women Writing Comedy and Satire in the Long Eighteenth Century”. Rachel Brownstein and Carrie Hintz. 2/4 credits. Thursdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 17344].
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own..." –Jonathan Swift

"Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." –Peter Ustinov

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn," Mr. Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice. Just as Mr. Bennet's wit charms readers into agreement, comedy and satire charm the reader into aligning him or herself with the writer or author. The “charmed circles” of our title refers to the women writing comedy and satire in the long eighteenth century, who created textual coteries and cliques that excluded outsiders—and counted the reader in. What secret knowledge did their readers imagine themselves privy to? How did women writers of the period use satire and comedy to present a vision of the society they ardently desired—and the society they hoped to avoid?  In this course, we will imagine male and female writers in conversation, and consider such topics as misanthropy and misogyny; women’s use of anger and vitriol; satire as a utopian mode; play, on and off the stage; slapstick and physical humor; and wit, true and false.  We will also examine the political dimension of comedy and satire by women. 

Comedy and satire have a long history as a means to disseminate social and political views.  Eighteenth-century English writers figure importantly in these genres established by Greek and Roman writers; their work enriched the papers, plays, and coffee houses of the period, defining the culture and the nation.  Were the attitudes and techniques of women writers of the period like or unlike those of the more famous, and famously clubbable, literary men?  Our readings of comedic and satirical texts range from romantic comedy to gentle send-ups of cherished friends to the most vicious (and partisan) of satirical attacks.  Authors will include—but will not be limited to—Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Jane Collier, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen.  We will draw on feminist theory, auto/biographical writings, theories of satire and humor, and theoretical models of the development of the public sphere in England.  Students will complete a presentation and a seminar paper.

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ENGL 70500. “Canterbury Tales”.Glenn Burger. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 17345].
In this course we will read Chaucer's most experimental work, The Canterbury Tales, taking up a variety of interrelated historical, social, and political questions. How, for example, does Chaucer represent the relations and conflicts among the various classes of late-medieval society, and what effects does Chaucer's own class position—as bourgeois civil servant with strong ties to the aristocracy—have on the production of the Canterbury Tales? What views of gender and sexuality do the Tales present and explore? To what extent are they shaped by Christianity, and how do they represent the relation between Christianity and other systems of belief (classical "paganism," Islam, Judaism)? How does Chaucer treat the interimplication of such categories of identity as race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality? Why—of all the writers of the English Middle Ages—is it Chaucer whom we are most likely to read? What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the so-called "father of English poetry?"

Alongside the text of The Canterbury Tales itself we will read a variety of other kinds of material: (1) sources and analogues for the tales; (2) later literary responses to Chaucer’s poem; (3) historical/documentary material that might shed light on Chaucer’s work; (4) current critical treatments of The Canterbury Tales; (5) theoretical/critical discussions that might be pertinent to reading Chaucer and medieval texts more generally.

Text: either The Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed. Ed. Larry Benson et al. Oxford University Press, 2008 (ISBN-10: 0199552096 ISBN-13: 978-0199552092) $41.35; or the Penguin Canterbury Tales (original-spelling Middle English).  Ed. Jill Mann.  Penguin, 2005.  (ISBN-10: 014042234X ISBN-13: 978-0140422344) $20.00.

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ENGL 87500. “Letters and Lives”.Mary Ann Caws. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 17346].
How do the ways we portray ourselves to our correspondents, and ourselves – I am taking journals as letters to oneself -- resemble and/or differ from the ways we live our lives? And how did and does this work for the persons whose works we read or observe? (And all the more fascinating that so many burned their letters, as in Henry James and Pierre Reverdy.)

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ENGL 86000. “From Rebellion to Modernism: Crosscurrents of the 1920s”.Morris Dickstein. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. (Cross-listed with ASCP 82000). [CRN 17347].
The 1920s are invariably seen as the first modern decade in American life, thanks to significant social changes but also to transformations in the arts and communications. The changes that contributed to modernization include the aftereffects of the world war, with its uprooting of combatants, their war experience, the wartime growth and centralized planning of major industries, as well as the postwar prosperity; the shift or population from rural areas to major cities; the cumulative impact of decades of mass immigration in creating a more multicultural society; new avenues of mass communication, among them movies and radio, popular sports, public relations, and advertising; the emergence of a distinct, rebellious youth culture, carrying with it momentous changes in moral standards and sexual mores; and, finally, major transformations in the arts that both reflected and at times influenced these social trends. Yet there were also strong countercurrents representing older nativist traditions: isolationism, Prohibition, moral revivalism, the closing off of immigration.

The course will explore how writers and artists lived the experience of modernity and gave voice and form to the upheavals of modern life, sometimes with enthusiasm, often with hostility. Their angles of vision include the famous “revolt from the village” - the attack on provincial life - by writers like Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio; the expatriate experience as chronicled by Malcolm Cowley, embracing works by Hemingway, Pound, and Fitzgerald; the postwar disillusionment in writers that finds its tone in Hemingway and Eliot; the new avant-garde of little magazines and the cultural criticism of Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks; the extreme recoil from modernity in Eliot and Willa Cather, among others, along with the pioneering techniques of literary modernism in writers are different as Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane; the exploration of racial identity by Nella Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance and ethnic identity in the fiction of Anzia Yezierska and the film The Jazz Singer, which also marks the coming of sound to the movie industry; and the new musical modernism, especially in jazz works by George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

In short, the course will center on some major literary and artistic achievements of the decade, approached both in and of themselves and as keys to the social and psychological experience of the times. Literary works discussed will include Cowley’s Exile’s Return, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway’s In Out Time and The Sun Also Rises, Cather’s The Professor’s House, Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and shorter works, and poetry by Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Millay, Frost, and Crane, though not all of these writers will make the cut. There will also be assignments from secondary works of social history and criticism. Each member of the class will also be expected to deliver an oral report and a concluding research paper.

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ENGL 81400. “Affective Politics in the Elizabethan History Play”. Mario DiGangi. 2/4 credits. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 17348].
On the London stage of the 1590s, a new theatrical genre emerged: the English history play. Often experimental in form, history plays addressed subjects such as the formation of national identity, the problems of anachronism and nostalgia in representing the past, and the causes of political change. Although the political dimensions of the history play have long been acknowledged, more recent work has considered how this genre engages with issues of embodiment that have been central to early modern scholarship on gender, sexuality, social status, and affect. In this seminar, we will read the history plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with particular attention to the relationship between embodied experience (including that of women, commoners, servants, and criminals) and political agency. We will consider the possibility that heightened emotional states might enhance political insight, we will explore the significance of everyday life to national history, and we will examine the conditions in which cross-status intimacies are forged between commoners and members of the nobility. Plays by Shakespeare will include Richard III, Richard II, King John, and Henry V; other plays might include The Famous Victories of Henry V, The True Tragedy of Richard III, Thomas of Woodstock, Sir Thomas More, Peele’s Edward I, Heywood’s Edward IV, and Dekker and Webster’s Sir Thomas Wyatt.

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ENGL 86100. “James Joyce Finnegans Wake”. Edmund Epstein. 2/4 credits. Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 17349].
This course is devoted to a close examination of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as an example of High Modernism. It will emphasize the continuities of the Wake and the myriad styles employed in the book.
The purpose of the course is two-fold: to acquaint the students with a controversial modern classic, and to provide them with the methods of interpreting complex modern literary texts.

The Wake is notoriously one of the most complex texts ever written, and by the end of the term, the students in the class should be well versed in interpretive techniques, and the critical issues involved in interpretation of any literary texts.
There will be one term paper.

Texts
James Joyce Finnegans Wake any edition
Edmund Epstein A Guide Through Finnegans Wake (paperback) University of Florida Press
Richard Ellmann James Joyce. Oxford University Press:, paperback edition
Roger McHugh Annotation to Finnegans Wake. John Hopkins University Press, paperback edition

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ENGL 75000. “Early American Speculations: Aesthetics and Risk in the Circum-Atlantic World, 1790-1830”. Duncan Faherty. 2/4 credits. Wednesdays 6:30PM-8:30PM. (Cross-listed with ASCP 81500). [CRN 17350].
The revolutionary Circum-Atlantic basin was a marketplace of new writing, new ideas, new paranoias, new frauds and exploitations, new land schemes and settlements, new economies, new enterprises in self-creation and authorship, and new desires for alternative worlds. This course seeks to map some of these conjectures, innovations, risks, and predictions which distinguish the revolutionary age. In so doing, we will explore how such a reorientation might challenge exceptionalist (nationalist) literary and cultural narratives or force paradigm shifts in the field imaginary. Some questions we will address along the way: What speculative practices do we need to talk about these revolutionary innovations? What are the speculations and investments of canonization and authorship? How do social, scientific, sexual, and economic speculations concretize in literary productions? How do literary texts offer alternative histories or counterfactual tales as a means of entering into political and social discourses? What did it mean to inhabit a risk culture and/or a culture always at risk? How do we account for literary representations of counter-revolutionary movements? How do we classify attempts to stabilize uncertainty and curtail certain kinds of speculation? In addition to our examination of primary texts, we will be reading a broad range of recent critical work to think about the conventions and limitations of disciplinarity, and to consider the challenges of writing about canonical and non-canonical texts (to contemplate, among other questions, whether or not the canonical “status” of a novel demands a different kind of scholarly engagement). Requirements will include one oral report and a final seminar paper.

*The Graduate Center will be hosting an international conference on this theme this upcoming April. Our readings will therefore attempt to align (to a degree) with some of the texts under discussion at this conference so that we will have direct access to emerging scholarship in the field.

Possible texts include: Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American, the anonymously published The History of Constantius & Pulchera, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart,  the anonymously published The Hapless Orphan, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta, Lenora Sansay’s The Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, Lucy Brewer’s The Female Marine, Sally Woods’ Dorval; or, the Speculator , Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee.

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ENGL 89500. “The Meaning of Media”. David Greetham. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 17351].
As the title suggest, this course takes a post-McLuhan approach to the relationship between the message/meaning/substance of communications and the medium/vehicle/form in which these communications are embedded. While the narrative and specific content of the course will depend on individual student interests (e.g., periodical literature, digitization, copyright, censorship), there will be several nodes around which our discussions will be centered; these will include historical/terminological consideration of the key critical concepts in “media studies” (widely construed) a consideration of the crucial shifts in transmission method (oral to written, manuscript to print, print to electronic the cultural construction of reading/text-production communities (monastic foundations; contemporary commercial scriptoria; coterie publishing; samizdat circulation; blogs; graphic novels-anime)  an investigation into the structures of power in creating/resisting texts (e.g., through censorship; claims for further extending intellectual property; and the litigation involved; DRMs; wikileaks; cryptography; royal privilège; licensing; piracy) the challenges of text storage and recuperation: libraries, archives--print and electronic--universal catalogues; the Google Books project; N-Gram; Kindle; Nook; etc., computer crashes; hackers) communities of readers/communicators, e.g, book clubs; Facebook; MySpace; LinkedIn; Snapfish; YouTube; gchat the aesthetics/ontology and negotiation of media, print and electronic, e.g., MSS illumination (including books of hours and grotesques); Gutenberg; Manutius/Griffo (and the “pocket classics”); chapbooks; Morris (arts & crafts); modernist/imperialist design, e.g., Helvetica, Arial) the place of “media studies” as a relatively new interdisciplinary focus for research on authoriality, intention, readership, meaning, cultural production, information theory, etc.

Given the potentially very wide array of topics, it would be helpful if students thinking of taking the course could let me know in advance of their interests and the areas they would like to see explored, so that I can distill/prune the list of feasible topics down to a manageable body. While the course will clearly not be a straightforward “history of the book,” I anticipate having a number of expert guest discussions with English faculty and those from related disciplines/periods, including Classics, Medieval, Renaissance, 18C, 20C. Please let me know if you have specific areas in mind.

As general research/reference resources, we will use Mitchell and Hansen’s Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago 2010), the Book History Reader, ed. Finkelstein and McCleery, 2nd ed. (Routledge 2002), with perhaps an occasional glimpse into the very brief chapters of Vandendorpe’s From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library (llinois, 2009). More advanced/focussed works will be suggested for those wishing to do more specialized research (e.g. James Gleick’s The Information (2011), or Matt Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT, 2008), or even Matt Gold’s forthcoming collection Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minnesota: Minneapolis, early 2012).

Requirements: Preparation of readings for each session, one (or possibly two) in-class presentations, plus a seminar paper, web site, blog or other response to the issues involved. We will have a course folder on Dropbox (where sub-folders for specific assignments/topics can be mounted) and may also use a course blog on the CUNY Academic Commons for comments, suggestions, discoveries, expostulation, as the course progresses, as well as using our course roster as a listserv. With the permission of the authors, I might suggest that some of the final projects (usually online) by those who took an earlier version of this course be made available as examples to those enrolled in the current course.

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ENGL 79500. "Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship". Hildegard Hoeller. 4 credits. Mondays 6:30PM-8:30PM. Open to Ph.D. Program in English students only. [CRN 18200].
This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century.  We will consider the history of the field, its current contours and questions, as well as the roles archival work and theory play in the production of scholarship.

Fundamentally, I teach this course as a workshop designed to prepare you for some of the realities and practices of literary scholarship and to expand your knowledge about the field you enter.  The course will introduce you to some current debates, concerns, and realities of the profession, to its history, to some theoretical directions it has taken, to ideas about textuality, and to the system of peer review and publication that is at the core of our profession.  Most importantly, this course will ask you to develop ideas about and reflect upon your own practices within the field of literary scholarship.

We will discuss readings in common , and you will be asked to write, reflect, and present on those common readings, and you will pursue an independent scholarly project in stages throughout the entire semester as well.  

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ENGL 88000. “Faking It: American Women Writers and the Masks of Modernism”.Hildegard Hoeller. 2/4 credits. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. (Cross-listed with MALS 70800, ASCP 81500, and WSCP 81000). [CRN 17352].
Why did Nella Larsen--if she did--"plagiarize" a story by Sheila Kaye-Smith, and why did she also write under a pseudonym? Why did Zora Neale Hurston "plagiarize"--if she did--an article about Cudjoe Lewis from Southern writer Emma Langdon Roche and then expand the piece after? And what masks did she wear in her letters and autobiography? And why was Roche interested in representing Cudjoe's story, the story of the last surving African slave, which Hurston and Roche has also wanted to represent? Why did, as Michael North notes in The Dialect of Modernism, editors check whether the writer of "Melanctha" was indeed Getrude Stein, a white women, before they considered it a valuable piece of modernist writing in "black" voice? And why did now forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning author Julia Peterkin-- a white Southern plantation owner who had also chased after Cudjoe's story--write in "black" voice? Why did Edith Wharton in one of her late fictions reimagine her roots as potentially less white than always imagined? And how "real" is the immigrant voice of Anzia Yezierska's immigrant narrative Breadwinners? In this seminar we will explore these questions in the works--essays, fiction, letters, autobiographies--of early 20th century women writers (such as Stein, Larsen, Hurston, Wharton, Faucet, Hurst, Yezierska, Peterkin, Roche), and we will pay attention to their manipulations of their texts and the reader/writer contract within the rich critical context of modernism's use of modes and strategies such as collage, textual borrowing, translation, ethnography, folklore, masking, and primitivism.

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ENGL 80200. “Aestheticizing Science: The Cross-Fertilization of Contemporary Science and Literary Narrative”. Gerhard Joseph. 2/4 credits. Mondays 11:45AM-1:45PM. [CRN 17353].
“The universe,” says Muriel Rukeyser debatably enough, “is made of stories [and poems], not of atoms.” Beginning with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, George Levine’s “The Narrative of Scientific Epistemology,” and the “Sokal Hoax” (and the responses of the scientific and humanistic communities to the last in The Sokal Hoax—U. of Nebraska Press), we, as in large measure “techno-illiterate humanists” (Powers, Galatea 2.2, 314), will then consider—in our amateurish fashion, to be sure, and as applicable—scientific methodology (Allegra Goodman, Instinct) thermodynamics, chemistry and ballistics (Thomas Pynchon, “Entropy” and Gravity’s Rainbow), the history of mathematics and demographics (Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star), quantum theory (Michael Frayn, Copenhagen), entymology and evolutionary biology (E. O. Wilson, The Ant Hill), climatology (Ian McEwan, Solar), artificial intelligence (Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2),  cognitive theory and neuroscience (Richard Powers, The Echo Maker), autism (Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), science and feminism (Donna Haraway, (Modest Witness), and genetic modification (Octavia Butler, the Xenogenesis trilogy, especially Dawn). Our larger purpose, implicit in the grammatical pun within “aestheticizing science,” is to show how simultaneously science, at its cutting edges, tends to aestheticize the world (as in, say, Brian Greene’s elegant book on superstring theory, The Elegant Universe), and contemporary writers of fictions support their purchase on the Lacanian “real” by metaphorizing contemporary science/technology within their work. As they do so, they move us now in the direction of aesthetic wonder, now in that of abject terror (hence, the emergent genre of the posthuman sublime). Course requirements: an oral report and a term paper.

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ENGL 86400. “The Practice of Everyday Life”.Wayne Koestenbaum. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 17354].
How does time get spent?  How do days get wasted, employed, observed?  How does one walk through a city?  How does one dwell—poach, squat, “make do”?  By accident?  By crafty intention?  How do we read a body’s movement through the day’s alleys and cul-de-sacs?  Where might we find stark, helpful, and sometimes “prankish” answers to these stumping questions?  Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life will anchor this seminar, which explores how certain aesthetic works have recounted the systems (the regimes of attention and, alas, of inattention) that regulate the unfolding of a quotidian day.  Our goal—following de Certeau’s clarion call—is to find alternative processes of ambulation and bookkeeping.  Four other “heavy” and influential figures will serve as co-anchors:  Henry David Thoreau (Walden), Sigmund Freud (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), John Cage (Silence), and Walter Benjamin (“Hashish in Marseilles” and other essays).  Two great films that mark two women’s movements through clock-time will give breathing-room to an inquiry that might otherwise become claustrophobic:  Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  Turning away from the fictive and toward the sociologically visionary, we will see how Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Samuel R. Delany, in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, describe the subversive, sustaining practices of a textured urban life that gentrification and “progress” threaten to demolish.  Next, we will hear one opera, Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, which teases us with the ludic methods of libidinal hermits (writers, recluses, eremites, libertines), and suggests that sacred experience, sieved through queer bodies, offers measured antidotes to quotidian existence’s maladies.  Finally, we will read several contemporary poetic (and narrative) account books:  among these texts might be Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Myung Mi Kim’s Dura, Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life, Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents, and Jon Cotner’s and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/Two Talks.  Students will each give an in-class presentation and write a final project, which could involve a perambulatory adventure in urban foraging and exhumation (exploring, coining, or divining some mysterious element of this baffling city in which we now live).

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ENGL 89000. “The Archive's Seductions: Memories, Ephemera & Shiny Things”.Mark McBeth. 2/4 credits. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 17355].
In Archive Fever, Derrida mistrusts the ways that official archives shape our historical (and perhaps ideological) memory, warning “The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (17)  Suspicious of archivable content and archiving, he questions the established criteria through which objects merit collection as well as the over-determining techniques by which objects get catalogued. Other scholars see the archive as a place of pleasure, enchantment, and imagination.  In “Theorizing Shiny Things,” Kathy E. Ferguson explores the “joy of archives while still attending to the troubles they foster”; she prefers the “small, cluttered site of accumulation [that] represents a different kind of archive, a deliberately counter-hegemonic collection centered on a radical critic [and critique] of the status quo.”  
In this course, we investigate both the dangers and delights of the archive.  We will interrogate the rationales of conventional collections and consider their alternatives.  We will study testimonial sources such as Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat which he and his colleagues buried in milk cans beneath the Warsaw Ghetto, chronicling Jewish life there from 1939-1942. We uncover the archival techniques of the Mazer Lesbian Archives which “encourages all lesbians to deposit the everyday momentos of [their] lives so that others can discover them in the future.” Additionally, we will analyze the work of scholars who engage with archival content in unpredictable, divergent ways. 

Finally, the participants in this seminar will pursue their own archival interests.  As a primary initiative of this composition/rhetoric course, students will explore the annals of CUNY to recover lost stories of teaching and learning.  While our urban university began Open Admissions and has consistently offered educational opportunities to a diverse and expansive student population, our forerunners in this social experiment were often too pre-occupied with their efforts to simultaneously record their educational innovations. Consequently instead of institutional memory, we have institutional amnesia (and, consequentially, no historical evidence when we are politically attacked).  Students interested in this (potentially publishable) project will rummage through CUNY’s libraries, yearbooks, and rusted filing cabinets to reveal an institutional narrative that deserves retelling.  (Optionally, students who are not interested in this project may choose another archival topic.)

Abridged Reading List (& Works Cited)
Derrida, Jacques.  Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Print.
Faderman, Lillian.  Who We Are.  Mazer Lesbian Archives.  Web. 10 October 2011. 
Ferguson, Kathy E.  “Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors.”  Theory & Event 11.4 (2008).  Project Muse. Web. 10 October 2011.
L'Eplattenier, Barbara E. "An Argument for Archival Research Methods: Thinking Beyond Methodology."  College English 72.1 (2009) 67-79.
Lisciotto, Carmelo and Webb, Chris. Emanuel Ringelblum: The Creator of “Oneg Shabbat” Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team (H.E.A.R.T), 2007. Web. 10 October 2011. 
Mavor, Carol.  Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Munoz, Jose.  Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory: 8:2, no. 16 (1996): 5 – 18. 

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ENGL 79500. “Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship”.Robert Reid-Pharr. 4 credits. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM.  Open to Ph.D. Program in English students only. [CRN 17357].
This course will involve questions both practical and theoretical about what it means to do scholarship in the discipline of “English” and what it means to be a part of the academic world of “English” studies in the 21st century. Theoretically, we will examine the boundaries of the discipline, how it intersects with but also is differentiated from other disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and how various theories define, in sometimes complementary but also sometimes contradictory ways, the discipline of “English” studies. Practically, we will discuss how to define objects of inquiry (“texts” and “contexts”) within “English” studies, how to research such objects, how to identify the main debates currently circulating around them, how to develop new knowledge. The course follows four main lines in inquiry, examining: 1) archival and bibliographical work, 2) concepts of text and textuality, 3) theoretical approaches, and 4) the historical, institutional context of the discipline.

Requirements: The work for the course has two parts: 1) readings in common that will be discussed in class, and 2) an individual project pursued throughout the semester and designed to put into practice the more general issues taken up in the course. Students will periodically report in class on their progress in the individual project. The course grade will be based on the final project, on the work done in stages on that project throughout the semester, and on general participation throughout the semester. 

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ENGL 75100. “Walt Whitman’s America--and Harriet Beecher Stowe's and John Brown’s, Too: Literature, Culture, and Society”. David S. Reynolds. 2/4 credits. Wednesdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. (Cross-listed with ASCP 82000). [CRN 17358].
Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, three towering figures of nineteenth-century America, had an enduring impact on literature and society.   Whitman’s all-inclusive poetry absorbed many facets of the American experience and forever altered the language and themes of poetry.  Stowe’s landmark antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin directed popular cultural themes and images toward an assault on slavery that helped trigger the Civil War and affected politics, racial views, and gender relations right up to modern times.  John Brown, the abolitionist warrior, became a cultural icon who inspired an outpouring of literary responses from such prominent writers as Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Whittier, Longfellow, and Lydia Maria Child.  This seminar explores the literary, social, and political contexts and resonances of Whitman, Stowe, and Brown, whose careers intermingled.  The overarching presence in the course is Whitman, the quintessential American bard whose democratic poetry attempted to heal the social ruptures that Stowe and Brown, in their energetic challenges to the existing political system, exacerbated.  We trace the development of Whitman’s career, from his early journalism and apprentice poetry and fiction through the great 1885 edition of  Leaves of Grass to his war poems and later writings.  Whitman’s works open windows on an array of historical phenomena—science and pseudoscience, the visual arts (including photography and painting),  theater, music, politics, law, philosophy, religion, reform, sexual mores, slavery, issues of gender and race—that have become of central interest to critics.  Among Stowe’s works, we concentrate on her two antislavery novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, and consider the many cultural spin-offs, including Uncle Tom-based plays and merchandise. John Brown’s meaning for Whitman, Stowe, and other American writers of his time and later periods is considered.  Websites such as the Walt Whitman Archive and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture are tapped for documents and images. Secondary readings include a variety of critical, cultural, and theoretical studies, including excerpts from Professor Reynolds’s writings. Course requirements include an oral report and a term paper.

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ENGL 91000. “Dissertation Workshop”. Joan Richardson. 0 credits. Fridays 2:00PM-4:00PM. Open to Level 2 & 3 Ph.D. Program in English students only. [CRN 17359].
This seminar covers techniques of dissertation writing, research, analysis, and documentation.  Students at the prospectus stage or the chapter stage will work on their own projects and read each other’s work under the professor’s guidance.  In addition, the course explores avenues toward publishing students’ work in scholarly journals or as book-length monographs.

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ENGL 80600. “Contemporary Narrative Theory”.David Richter. 2/4 credits. Tuesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. [CRN 17360].
After a brief but respectful glance at early twentieth century narrative theory (Henry James's The Art of Fiction; E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel; M.M. Bakhtin's Discourse in the Novel), the course will move to the two most fertile sources of contemporary narratology, Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction and Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. From this point the course will explore four principal branches of contemporary narrative theory: (1) rhetorical narratology, including  theorists such as Seymour Chatman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and David Richter; (2) cognitive narratology, including theorists such as David Herman, Alan Palmer, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Lisa Zunshine;  (3) postmodern narratology, adapting narrative theory to experimental, minimally mimetic texts, including theorists such as Brian McHale and Brian Richardson; and (4) identity narratology (my shorthand term for theories that view gender/race/class/national identity markings as central rather than peripheral to the reading of narratives), including theorists such as Susan Sniader Lanser, Gerald Prince, and Robyn Warhol. 

Readings will include essays by theorists such as those listed above.  In addition, we will have access to the MS of Practicing Narrative Theory, a book to be published in 2012, in which theorists of the four branches wrestle with some of the key concepts they hold in common (authors, narrators, narration; plot and progression; character; narrative worlds; space and setting; reception and the reader; ethical and aesthetic values).   It will be important to have a group of narratives that all of us know in detail, so I will assign a group of short stories, novellas and short novels for us to read before class starts; check the course link on my webpage for the most recent details.

No term paper.  Students will give an oral report in which they apply a theoretical model to a narrative text, and will write three short (1000-1500 word) papers (counting a write-up of the oral report) in which they attempt to apply three different narratological models to the same literary text.

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ENGL 84500. “Victorian Marital Models”. Talia Schaffer. 2/4 credits. Thursdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 17361].
This course charts the shifting notions of the family, focusing especially on the institution of marriage, throughout the 19th century. We'll start with Austen, using Ruth Perry's influential analysis of 18th century and Regency fictions that mourn lost familial affiliations in a new era of strictly patrilineal inheritance. Paying attention to changes in marriage law, we'll discuss the changing status of women and family in 1857 and 1870, and we'll look at the new ways marriage was being theorized in 'primitive marriage' discussions in anthropology. The course will use Corbett's, Marcus's, and Kelly Hager's work to address crucial mid-Victorian marriage plots in the Brontes, Trollope, and Dickens. The course will end with a consideration of Charlotte Yonge as promulgator of an alternative view of marriage, reading important recent criticism on affiliation in Yonge (and its relation to disability) by Tamara Silvia Wagner and Martha Stoddard Holmes. "Victorian Marital Models" asks how much space there was in Victorian marriage practices for alternative kinds of unions - queer unions, familial matches, weddings that functioned to generate networks of kinship and friendship, marriages motivated by nonerotic needs like vocational possibilities.

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ENGL 84200. “Romantic Concepts of Nature”. Alexander Schlutz. 2/4 credits. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. [CRN 17362].
Since the rise of ecocriticism and green Romanticism it has become commonplace to present Romantic writers as anticipating contemporary environmentalist concerns and to (re)mobilize for contemporary ecological debates the Romantic critique of nascent processes of industrialization and a Cartesian, mechanical, view of the natural world. At the same time, ecologists and environmental writers perceive the “romanticization” of nature – the projection of imaginary, aesthetic and cultural constructs onto a material world fundamentally alien to them – as one of the main obstacles to a fruitful understanding of our relationship to the environment. Hence, the Romantics can be both lauded for writing against the objectification of nature and critiqued for neglecting the difference between the products of the writer’s consciousness and affect and the material Other he or she confronts.

To find answers to such conflicting assessments, we will interrogate the concepts of nature of several poets and philosophers in the Romantic period in England and Germany. We will examine central texts of Spinoza, Kant, and Schelling and discuss the poetry and philosophical positions of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). One of our goals will be to examine the answers these Romantic writers give to questions about the place of human beings in the natural world and the relationship of mind and matter, central philosophical questions they indeed share with contemporary environmentalist thinkers.
Coursework will include position papers, an oral presentation, and a final research paper.

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ENGL 86500. “Postcolonial African Narratives”.Barbara Webb. 2/4 credits. Thursdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). [CRN 17797].
A study of the narratives of Anglophone African writers since the period of decolonization.  We will examine their representations of the African struggle to transform the  political and cultural legacies of colonialism and contemporary challenges of globalization.  Of particular interest will be their engagements with nationalist and postcolonial discourse. We will discuss how these writers address problems of language and literary form, and how they see their roles as artists and social critics. Our readings will include novels, short stories and essays by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nuruddin Farah, and Zoe Wicomb.  In addition to literary texts, we will read essays by African critics such as Appiah and Gikandi as well as selected writings by postcolonial theorists.  Texts: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat; Ama Ata Aidoo, No Sweetness Here; Bessie Head,  The Collector of Treasures; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus; , Nuruddin Farah,  Maps;   Zoe Wicomb, David’s Story; Ben Okri, The Famished Road; Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins; and Christopher Abani, Graceland.  Requirements:  Oral presentations and a research paper (15-20 pages).  This course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.

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ENGL 80700. “Rex quondam et futurus: the Legend of King Arthur in Medieval and Modern Literature”.E.Gordon Whatley. 2/4 credits. Thursdays 6:30PM-8:30PM. [CRN 17365].
Dante Gabriel Rossetti said the Bible and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur were “the two greatest books in the world” and in 1911, J. Pierpont Morgan paid $42,800 for the only complete extant copy of Caxton’s 1st ed. (1485) of the Morte Darthur.  After the Norman Conquest, the Arthurian legend, despite glorifying “England’s” inveterate Romano-Celtic foe, became the “Matter of Britain,” and has since remained one of the dominant secular myths of the Anglophone world.  It has inspired a succession of acknowledged literary masterworks, both medieval and modern, not only in Latin, English and Welsh, but also in the other European vernaculars.  Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries,  it has been a recurring theme of both high-brow art and popular culture. The present course will ponder the implications of this success, besides enabling the complex pleasures of immersion in myth and history (i.e., the story itself, its uncertain origins, and the historical contexts of Arthurian “discourse”). We will consider such topics as: Arthurian imperialism (medieval, Victorian, and post-colonial); the religious problem of the Grail; romance as narrative genre; chivalry, courtoisie and “noble love” as normative models of culture and gender; the subversive “feminine subtext”; and Arthurian textuality (manuscripts, print, art, opera, film, comics).  In a single semester we can only hope to sample, rather than survey, the vast field of Arthurian texts. We will read together a common core of classic medieval and modern works, while pursuing and reporting on individual research projects involving interdisciplinary and/or non-canonical sources.  Core readings will include: the Arthuriads of “Nennius” and Geoffrey of Monmouth, plus selections from Wace & Layamon; the Old Welsh Kilhwch & Olwen; selected verse romances by Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, and (maybe) Wolfram’s Parzival; selections from Malory’s Morte Darthur, with his English and French sources (e.g., the so-called Alliterative Morte Arthure and the French “Vulgate” Lancelot), and (designedly out of chronological order) Sir Gawain & the Green Knight. Modern authors will include Tennyson, Morris, Robinson (who?), White, and Stewart. Medieval readings, except Malory, will be in modern translation; but working with the originals is also encouraged.

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Dissertation Supervision

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