Graduate Courses
Fall Semester 2009
(Spring Semester 2010 is below)
ENG 801: Introduction to Graduate Studies (Prof. Aslami)
Monday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
This course introduces graduate students to recent critical approaches in the discipline of English, the practical skills necessary to conduct research, and ongoing conversations about the profession itself. Together, the critical, research, and self-reflexive components are designed to prepare students as they embark on a graduate career in English. The course is organized around certain keywords that have focalized recent criticism. These keywords may include affect, fetishism, fantasy, ideology, the everyday, the public sphere, privacy, sentimentality, neoliberalism, and security. In our exploration of these concepts, we will discuss and prepare readings in such approaches as historical epistemology, cultural studies, race studies, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies.While engaging theoretically with the readings, we will also discuss how they open up metacritically, pedagogically, and professionally. Students will be introduced to using the library and researching both print and digital archives. Requirements will include individual and group research, writing, and presentation projects.
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ENG 803: Feminist Theory (Prof. Pollak)
Thursday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
Readings in classic and recent works in the field of feminist theory with a focus on where feminist thinking has been and where it is going. We will explore key issues and debates in the field, many of them involving the critical engagement of feminism with other theoretical approaches (e.g., psychoanalysis, cultural and transnational studies, queer theory).
Although this is a graduate seminar, it does not assume prior knowledge of feminist theory; it is conceived, rather, as a rigorous introduction to the field. We will make use of the “working archive” designed for the Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities (FGS) emphasis area by the English Department’s Feminist Literature and Theory Working Group (FLATwg). Students will have the opportunity to investigate the current status of feminist work in their respective fields of interest in order to identify archives and map out possible areas for future work.
(Honors College students and graduate students from programs other than English are encouraged to contact Prof. Pollak about enrolling).
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ENG 813: The Novel and Modernity I: Plotting the Secular World (Prof. Juengel)
Wednesday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
A host of questions lie at the center of this course: How did the novel emerge as the genre of the modern world? What is the relationship between increasing secularization—e.g. the modern cogito; the demise of providential accounting; new forms of skepticism and critique; the rise of the human sciences—and the cultural form and function of the novel? How do novels imagine being-in-the-world? How does early modern fiction symptomatize and fitfully restage the loss of totality? Where does the novel break off from epic, romance, history, and allegory? Where does it intervene in early modern philosophical questions about “possible worlds,” the existence of God, the presence of evil and catastrophe, and the plot of historical progress? These and other lines of inquiry will guide our deliberations in this course, the first of a two-part, year-long intensive study of the history and theory of the novel from early modernity to late capitalism (the second semester will be taught by Prof. O’Donnell). Beginning with Don Quixote and ending in the nineteenth-century with the rise and consolidation of realism, our Fall semester syllabus will seek to reconnect the early history of the novel form with the philosophical and historiographical developments that gave contour to modern life and its narratives. In particular, many of the texts we will read will be linked by the theme of “plotting”—understood in narrative, cartographical, and conspiratorial terms—as a means of sounding the diverse ways in which the novel genre attempted to order an increasingly heterogeneous and disjointed world.
Our readings are likely to emerge from the following list:
Novels: Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605); La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves (1687); Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) or Oroonoko (1688); Manley, The New Atlantis (1709); Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747); Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752); Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-69) or Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist (1796); Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798); Sansay, The Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808); Scott, Guy Mannering; or The Astrologer (1815); Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Shelley, The Last Man (1826); Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851); Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857).
Philosophical Works: Leibniz, Spinoza, Bayle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel
Criticism and Theory: Lukács, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Woolf, Ortega y Gasset, Kermode, Watt, McKeon, Armstrong, Said, Gallagher, Brooks, Taylor, Moretti, Buck-Morss, Slaughter
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ENG 818: Transnational Genealogies of Racial/Gender Performance(Prof. Lim)
Thursday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
This graduate seminar maps out ethnographies of racial performance in colonial, global and neoliberal contexts as a way to understand how “our” transnational present has come to be configured variously as a (white) man’s world, a perverse modernity, and a touristic carousel. Using a comparativist framework, our overall objective is to interrogate how racial/gender performance is staged in the "non-Western” and developing worlds, particularly as it is related to issues of gender and queer sexuality. We seek to uncover racial/gender performance as it is imbricated in the (homo)erotics of colonial projects, market forces, state regulation, or as staged through feminist interventions and geopolitical imaginaries ranging from the orientalist to the transnational. Using performance, queer and feminist theories for our inquiries, we ask: How are racialized encounters recorded and encoded in performance, or inscribed in texts that circulate from the First World to the Third World and vice versa? How are transnational feminist and lesbian feminist voices making a difference in local struggles for gender equities? What are the intercultural limits for representing racialized subjects in trans/national worlds, and what is the relationship of this racialization to (homo)sexuality? How are neoliberal ideologies affecting the production and consumption of racial performance? What is the difference between the native woman and native boy in the economy of colonial desire? Ultimately, we are interested in a mixed genealogy of racial/gender performance related to colonial, global/local and neoliberal claims to truth, and how this might help shape a more nuanced way of reading and producing performance and text in international contexts.
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ENG 819: The Postcolonial Condition (Prof. Singh)
Tuesday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
The term, “postcolonial,” which is now something of critical commonplace, has a complex trajectory that reveals how literary and cultural works have been and are continually implicated within colonial and postcolonial histories from the early modern period to the present. More recently, postcolonial studies have also become an increasingly fractured discursive field, intersecting with categories such as the ‘global,’ ‘trans-national,’ and ‘trans-cultural,’ among others. Taking stock of these developments, this readings course will re-assess the impact of postcolonial theory on literary and cultural studies -- as well as on cultural politics and disciplinary realignments within the Anglo-American context -- in the past three decades.
With Edward Said’s Orientalism as our starting point, in Part I we will first interrogate the ways in which English literary studies, and the so-called Western canon, was opened up to competing histories and a plurality of socio-political contexts – the marks of the postcolonial condition. In Part II we will move beyond the presentist trends and cast a proleptic eye on early English colonial encounters through the lens of postcolonial theory. Thus, our approach to the English Renaissance will be cognizant of historical and theoretical perspectives on race (including slavery), nationhood, early globalization, cosmopolitanism, and gender and class struggles. Finally in Part III, we will focus on contemporary issues and debates in postcolonial studies as they constellate around definitions of subalternity, hybridity, humanism, and modernity in our era of globalization. Examining representational practices and ideological struggles as they shape recent novels and films, we will re-assess our understandings of the current and future forms of postcoloniality.
Selected Readings: (For a final list, contact me after June 1st)
Theory:
You will be assigned selections from the following:
Edward Said, Orientalism
Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory
Neil Lazarus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies
Anne McLintock, Aamir Mufti, et al. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments
Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period
Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire
Literary Works:
Ahmed Ali, Twilight in Delhi
E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene (selections)
W. Shakespeare, Othello
C. Marlowe, Tamburlaine
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Nurruddin Farah, Knots
Amitava Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Selected Poems
Films:
Shakespearewallah
Silences of the Palace
Heat and Dust
Burn
The Chess Players
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ENG 820.1: Sade and Feminism (Prof. McCallum)
Tuesday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
The writings of the Marquis de Sade limn not only sexual politics and pornographic possibilities, but dissect power itself. At the crest of second-wave feminism and the Anglo-American vogue in French theory in the seventies and eighties, feminists like Kathy Acker and Angela Carter returned to Sade, among other writers, to reimagine the workings of power, the formation of sexual relations, and the limits of rationality, as they theorized women's liberation and pleasures. This course examines the controversial intersections of feminism and sadism in the writings of Acker and Carter, as well as how similar questions and concerns about power, sexuality, violence, subjection, and abjection are taken up by other writers, who will likely include Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Pauline Réage, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and of course Sade himself.
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ENG 820.2: (Re)covering Cooper (Prof. Arch)
Monday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
James Fenimore Cooper has fared pretty well in the popular literary imagination since the mid-19th century, largely on the strength of his creation of the Leatherstocking novels. (See: Daniel Day Lewis.) However, with the rise (first) of the New Criticism and with the emergence (later) of post-structuralist theory and identity politics, he has increasingly become less central to our conception of an American canon. In this course, we will consider Cooper as a case study for how we remember, forget, and (re)imagine the literary and cultural past.
We will read only one of the Leatherstocking novels, and then we will sample some of the other kinds of novels Cooper wrote: sea novel, satire, novel of manners, historical fiction, utopian fiction.. Students must be prepared do so some reading digitally, since many of Cooper’s novels are out of print. We will, at the same time, investigate and practice two methods of recovery: reading JFC in historical context and reading JFC in light of contemporary theory.
As an Emphasis Area Seminar, this course will prepare to students to write an essay on Cooper (or on one of his contemporaries) that foregrounds their own understanding of how we understand and assess the literary past. Students will need to read deeply, participate actively in class discussion, lead the class through a discussion of one of the works on the syllabus, and write a seminar paper of 20-25 pages. Though our own theoretical readings will necessarily focus on two or three different approaches, all kinds of theoretical and historiographical approaches to the material are welcomed.
Tentative reading list: Cooper novels: The Spy (1821), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Bravo (1831), Home as Found (1838), Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (1843), The Two Admirals (1842), The Crater (1847). Biography: Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2008). Historical context: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2008). Theory: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (2001), Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). Cooper in critical context: 8-9 selected essays from the period 1852-2009 that track Cooper’s reputation.
Spring 2010
ENG 802 – Literary Criticism and Theory: Focus on Trends in Twentieth Century Theory and Philosophy (Prof. Michaelsen)
Monday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
This course is designed to introduce students to a broad range of twentieth century intellectual trends that have directly influenced the way we study literature today. We are going to emphasize diverse approaches drawn from a wide range of theory and philosophy. Basic topics include structural linguistics, poststructuralism, Foucauldian archaeology, twentieth century Marxisms, postcolonialism, race and culture theory, feminist and queer theories, theories of history, and theories of the political. We start at ground zero in terms of the structural revolution in linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure ‘s Course in General Linguistics, and proceed from there. Our other texts include:
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s
Janet Halley. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation
Alexander Garcia Duttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus
Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other
Anne Norton. 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method
Paul Ricouer. Memory, History, Forgetting
Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political
Students in this course will be expected to make two, 20-minute oral presentations during the semester, and will write a 20-page research paper on a topic related to the class.
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ENG 803: PostHumanism: Inflections of Critical Theory and Science (Prof. Roof)
Wednesday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m
This course will explore some of the many critical and theoretical ramifications of ceasing to regard humans as the center of the universe. We will look not only at the strains of thinking that led to a different positioning and even definition of the human, but also at the kinds of thinking that might ensue once we have brought human centrality and taxonomic hierarchies in question. Readings include eclectic material from Einstein, Poincare, Jarry, Haraway, von Bertalanffy, Wiener, Feynman, Lyotard, Clarke, Wolfe, Luhman, Serres, Latour, Wills, Hawking, and others. The course will also include some fiction--McCarthy’ ’sRemainder , Beckett, The Unnamable, and Barnes’ ’Nightwood. That’ ’s a lot.
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ENG 812: Language and the African American Community (Prof. Smitherman)
Thursday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
This course is designed around readings on language use and linguistic issues within the African American community. Topics and readings include: issues of definition and history of U.S. Ebonics; perceptions of and attitudes toward Black speech; language, power, and Black identity; Hip Hop linguistics; language and education. No prerequisites other than graduate status.
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ENG 818: The Decolonization of Black Cinema (Prof. Harrow)
Monday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
This course will track the parallel movements of African and of African American cinema as they developed from their origins to contemporary times. I am particularly interested in ways in which these cinemas have related to their historical periods, where they can be said to have passed from initial stages of a colonized cinema to ones in which they have become, through struggle, decolonized. The relationship to the history of decolonization, both literally in Africa, and figuratively in the United States, can be calibrated in cinematic terms as black filmmakers have gradually taken possession of the camera and forged representations in opposition to dominant cinema’s ideologies. In the end, the success of this trajectory toward some kind of liberation has also meant increasing integration into the dominant film industry, or the transformation into a popular mode that accommodates itself to commercial cinema. Thus the complexity of “decolonization” for a cultural mode of production, cinema, is to be seen in its relationship to the dominant ideological strains in each cinema’s respective society.
Tracking these parallel cinemas simultaneously will help the class discover how each cinema may be seen as having been influenced by the other, especially because the movements from colonized to decolonized, from “race” films to black cinema, were marked by a close convergence in historical patterns. Just as the Negritude movement was historically joined to the Harlem Renaissance, so too were the trajectories of black cinema marked by fascinating historical movements whose conjunctions included moments of cultural exchange and political collaboration.
We will be viewing what films we can obtain from the earlier period, including films or clips of films that generated colonized images—like Birth of a Nation—as well as responses from the earliest African American directors, like Oscar Micheaux. For African equivalents we will view early Belgian films made in the Congo, like Matamata and Pilipili. Eventually we will come to the early pioneers like Sembène Ousmane or the directors of “race films” in the States, who sought, respectively, African and African American audiences. The contemporary proliferation of directors will encompass Mario Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, Charles Burnett, Carl Franklin, Bill Duke, Julie Dash, Spike Lee,or John Singleton on this shore, and Mauretanian-Malians like Sissoko,Burkinabe woman directors like Fanta Nacro, Cameroonians like Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Jean-Pierre Teno, Chadian directors like Mahamet-Selah Harroun. Eventually we will be asking questions not only about the movement, in cinema, from colonial to decolonized, but about the communications within the world of black visual culture that turn on the issue of controlling the camera in a world in which representation could not be separated from the politics of the cinematic apparatus.
In addition to the films, the texts we will study will bear on both film history and the historical context, as well as the theorizing around black cinema by such figures as Mark Reid, Manthia Diawara, Thomas Cripps, Donald Bugle, Ed Guerrero and others. (The final list of films and readings is not yet definitive)
ENG 819: Novel and Modernity II: Deplotting Totalities (Prof. O’Donnell)
Tuesday 7:10 – 10:00 p.m.
The development of the novel since the mid-19th century reflects the emergence of modern technocracies, various forms of capitalism leading to so-called “late capitalism” (Mandel, Jameson), and the modern cosmopolitan subject immersed in mass culture. The novel can be seen as a the product and underwriter of these forces, but it can also be viewed as offering critical resistance even as a representation of modernity; it can be perceived—in its bulk, navigation of temporal cross-currents, and heteroglossia—as a palimpsest that aspires to the condition of totality or as an assemblage of minor narratives. It can be considered as an entity that corresponds to the emergent national narratives of modernity, or that diverges from these in its hybridity, gesturing toward other narratives of identification and alterity. These considerations will guide our reading and discussion in this course, which is intended to conjoin and converse with Prof. Juengel’s Fall seminar on the novel and modernity from Don Quixote to the mid-nineteenth century. Students need not have taken the first semester of this year-long offering to participate fully in the second semester, which will seek to trace philosophical, historiographical, political, and aesthetic connections between the novel and the counters of modern and postmodern existence.
Possible Novels include: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Virginia Woolf, The Waves; Nathanial West, The Day of the Locust; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Samuel Beckett, Watt; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled; Robert Bolano, The Savage Detectives
Philosophy, Criticism and Theory: Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Bakhtin, Lukacs, Benjamin, Moretti, Woloch, Rorty, Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, David Miller, Seltzer, Glissant, Fanon, Eco
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ENG 820.1: Legal Fictions: Early Modern Literature and the Law (Prof. Deng)
Thursday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
IIn this course we will examine recent critical interest among early modern literary scholars in relations between literature and the law. Notable literary authors of the period such as Thomas More, John Donne, John Webster and Francis Bacon studied the law at the Inns of Court (which were themselves important sites of literary production), while critics have also read as literature writers on the law, including Edward Coke, Christopher St. German and John Davies (also a poet). Other writers with no clear legal training—for example, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Isabella Whitney—nevertheless demonstrate understanding of legal nuances, perhaps because the Elizabethan period was among the most litigious in history (not unlike our own). Moreover, regardless of their experience with particulars of the law, literary authors often engaged with philosophical positions on law and categories of law in their more abstract forms.
We will begin the course with a consideration of the relation between divine, natural, and positive law in philosophical writings by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Francisco Suárez, Hobbes and Locke. We will then discuss specific forms of positive law, especially Roman/civil, statute and common law. Finally, we will examine categories of law that have particular bearing on literary and cultural production, including treason; slander; usury; property law, equity and the legal status of women; vagrancy; and early versions of copyright. Throughout the course we will examine (or re-examine) literary texts by authors listed above in light of these various legal issues.
A key strain throughout the course will be the intersection of law with several modes of political power, such as in the concepts of jurisdiction, sovereignty and absolutism, “the ancient constitution,” judicial power through “artificial reason,” and public service.
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ENG 820.2: Mysteries of the Organic: Modernism and the Meaning of Life (Prof. Nieland)
Tuesday 4:10 – 7:00 p.m.
“The philosophy of Nature needs a language that can take up Nature in its least human aspect, and which thereby would be close to poetry.”
--Maurice Merleau-Ponty
One of the most tired clichés about aesthetic modernism is its crass anti-positivism. In this story, modernism’s trademarked novelty spawns iconoclastic versions of organic life irreducible to the various “bad” determinisms (naturalistic, scientific, psychological, technological) thought to make modern life unlivable. In a modernity that has reduced mind to brain, human reflection to animal reflex, modernist organicism—so the story goes—is a reactionary counter-materialism, an attempt to make too-prosaic organic life newly poetic, mysterious. In this line of thinking, modernist artistic investigations into the deeper, more vital mysteries of the organism abet organic conceptions of public, national, or political life that are nostalgic, or conservative, or racist, or totalitarian.
But might modernism be thought differently? As an attempt to think organic nature in its least human, and most poetic aspects? And might such poetry be produced within, rather than against, a materialist environment? The problem is not that “life” has been unthought in formulations of revolutionary art—one thinks of Rimbaud’s call to “Change life!” or Peter Bürger’s influential definition of the avant-garde telos as “the reintegration of art into the praxis of life.” Rather, it is that “life” has been understood as the inert object of change rather than as change’s dynamic medium. What version of avant-gardism might be produced by animating the static term “life” in more familiar formulations of revolutionary art? To approach the question, this seminar explores how the laboratories of modernist and avant-garde experimentation were energized by a range of so-called “positivist” developments in the domains of biology, physics, technology, the social sciences, and psychology. Through such developments, organic life was radically estranged from itself. In the process, modernism emerged as a messy cluster of life-styles—forms of reckoning with modern life’s uncanny continuum of biology and culture, plastic organism and biopolitical organization, life and style. While modernist art surely fueled dubious forms of vital biopolitics (primitivism, social Darwinism, eugenics), it also found new kinds of ethical animation and political liveliness in the radically altered picture of organic life that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the human was forever displaced from the center of a non-teleological lifeworld.
Because modernism’s own life was heterogeneous and its critical afterlife ongoing, the experimental forms considered in this seminar will range across media, and span the late nineteenth century to the present. We will explore questions like these: How did modernism respond to the development of evolutionary theory, and how do modernist aesthetics answer to contemporary evolutionary psychology? How are current conceptual debates about the human-animal divide, the authority of biological science, the nature of affect, the biopolitical, or the posthuman informed by modernist receptions and revisions of both Darwin’s ideas and other varieties of evolutionary theory? How and why has the new vitalism of contemporary theory (of Brian Massumi, Elizabeth Grosz, Mark Hansen) returned to modernist theoristsof affect, embodiment, temporality, and psychology? Why does modernist and avant-garde art occupy such a prominent place in the resuscitation of life (as "creaturely," "damaged," "bare") in political and ethical theory?
Primary texts may be drawn from the work of: Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, William James Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, A.N. Whitehead, Georg Simmel, Georges Sorel, Wilhelm Worringer, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Rilke, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, Waldo Frank, Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Jean Painlevé, Stan Brakhage, Charles and Ray Eames, Sergei Eisenstein, Dusan Makavejev, and Jan Švankjmajer.
Contemporary theoretical texts may include work by: Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Brian Massumi, Katherine Hayles, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Cary Wolfe, Elizabeth Grosz, Julia Kristeva, Mark Hansen, Lev Manovich, Anson Rabinach, Michel Foucault, Eric Santner, Nikolas Rose, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben.
