English and Comparative Literature

ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study. 4.00 points.

Why does literature affect us as it does, why might you want to understand its history, strategies, and meaning, and how exactly do you go about that? This course won’t give you the answer, because there is no single answer. It will instead point the way toward the multitude of possible answers, giving you a variety of critical tools for exploring these questions, and deepening your powers as a thinker, reader, and writer. The course consists of weekly lectures by department faculty members (ENGL 2000) and small weekly seminars with advanced doctoral candidates (ENGL 2001). The lectures will introduce you to texts from across literary history and in various genres (poetry, drama, prose narrative, etc.), giving you an opportunity to learn from and get to know our renowned faculty members. The intimate seminar setting will give you an opportunity to delve further into these texts and techniques, debate their meaning with one another and an expert guide, and engage in exercises that advance your critical writing and interpretive skills, putting into practice what you’ve learned. You will encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty, your seminar leader, and the discipline at large, while learning to expand upon these approaches and make them your own. The course is required for English majors and minors (who should take it as early as possible in their Columbia careers), but it is for everyone: advanced students of literature or those new to literary study; committed majors or those still exploring; anyone seeking the excitement and immersion this course offers. (Note: Students who register for ENGL UN2000 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN2001.)

ENGL UN2001 Approaches to Literary Study Seminar. 0.00 points.

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN2001 must also register for ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study lecture. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature, through a weekly pairing of a faculty lecture (ENGL 2000) and small seminar led by an advanced doctoral candidate (ENGL 2001). Students in the course will read works from across literary history, learning the different interpretive techniques appropriate to each of the major genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction). Students will also encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty and by the discipline at large, and will be encouraged to adapt and combine these approaches as they develop as thinkers, readers, and writers. ENGL 2000/2001 is a requirement for both the English Major and English Minor. While it is not a general prerequisite for other lectures and seminars, it should be taken as early as possible in a student's academic program

ENGL UN3892 BEOWULF. 4.00 points.

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem Beowulf. We will be reading (smaller) portions of the vast quantity of secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship. As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using our communal site (location tbd) for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters / concepts

ENGL UN3943 ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 4.00 points.

English translations of the Bible from Tyndale to the present

ENGL GU4729 CANTERBURY TALES. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). Beginning with an overview of late medieval literary culture in England, this course will cover the entire Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. We will explore the narrative and organizational logics that underpin the project overall, while also treating each individual tale as a coherent literary offering, positioned deliberately and recognizably on the map of late medieval cultural convention. We will consider the conditions—both historical and aesthetic—that informed Chaucer’s motley composition, and will compare his work with other large-scale fictive works of the period. Our ultimate project will be the assessment of the Tales at once as a self-consciously “medieval” production, keen to explore and exploit the boundaries of literary convention, and as a ground-breaking literary event, which set the stage for renaissance literature

CLEN GU4414 HIST OF LITERARY CRITICISM:PLATO TO KANT. 3.00 points.

The principal texts of literary theory from antiquity through the 18th century, including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Boccaccio, Sidney, and Kant.

CLEN UN3125 Medieval Encounters. 4.00 points.

Though often thought of in mainstream culture as closed, conservative, and backwards, the medieval world was actually a place where the circulation of people and ideas resulted in generative encounters. This course will consider texts that brush up against the unfamiliar. We’ll read travelogues containing Western views of the East and Muslim views of Christian society, plus texts of questionable literary merit and difficult, artful poetry. Via our course readings, you’ll cross borders into strange lands with unaccountable customs, experience the possibilities of the marvelous, and interact with the afterlife and its denizens. Along the way, you’ll be having your own medieval encounter with worldview(s) that require contextual analysis to recuperate

CLEN UN3725 Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well from Plato to Montaigne. 4.00 points.

Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s Phaedo to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them. Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available

CLEN GU4750 Staging the Middle Ages: Medievalism and the Production of New Opera. 4.00 points.

The Middle Ages have long been a source of inspiration for composers of opera. Since the midnineteenth century, mystery plays, troubadour lyrics, enigmatic tapestries, and Arthurian romances have all been showcased on the operatic stage; the last 30 years, in particular, have seen a spike in interest in reenergizing medieval culture for contemporary audiences. Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in medieval literature and/or the history of lyric theater, this course excavates the medievalist turn in opera, from Wagner to the present day. We’ll ask questions about the nature of intermedial adaptation, the effect of staging in constructing or dispelling medieval allusion, the historically contingent politics of musical antiquarianism and revival, and the enduring appeal of the Middle Ages in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Along the way, we’ll read medieval texts from England, Germany, and Occitania, analyze recorded performances of musical works, visit medieval tapestries at the Cloisters, and take a trip to a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera

ENGL UN1336 Shakespeare II. 3.00 points.

This course covers the second half of William Shakespeare’s career, attending to the major dramatic genres in which he wrote. It will combine careful attention to the plays’ poetic richness with a focus on their theatrical inventiveness, using filmed productions of many of the plays to explore their staging possibilities. At the same time, we will use the plays as thematic springboards to explore the cultural forces – pertaining to, among others things, politics, class, religion, gender, and race – that shaped the moment in which Shakespeare lived and worked

ENGL UN3444 Race, Religion, and Early Modernity. 4.00 points.

“Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are both products of modernity.”—Theodore Vial In this course, we will turn the clock back to early modernity, exploring the entanglement of concepts of racial and religious difference in the texts and cultural products of early modern England. Beginning in sixteenth century England, we will explore how a distinctive English Protestant identity was fashioned in relation to various religious and racial others, most notably the Jew, the Ottoman “Turk”, and the Black African. We will then turn to the literatures of encounter, exploring how the categories of race and religion were articulated in travel narratives, ethnographic accounts, and political polemic. Finally, we will turn to the writings of Afro-descended and Indigenous Christians, exploring how religious self-fashioning was performed by these racialized subjects. Conversations throughout the semester will be attentive to the specificities of the period, whilst also serving to recontextualise and unsettle contemporary categories of racial and religious difference. Seminar readings will primarily consist of primary sources from the period including poetry, prose and drama from England and, in the latter part of the semester, its colonies. These will be supplemented with a variety of textual and non-textual materials, including works of art, historical documents, period-specific scholarship, and contemporary theory. Keywords: race, religion, empire, travel, colonialism, enslavement, conversion

ENGL UN2228 Staging Early Modern London. 3.00 points.

This lecture course examines the performances through which early modern London (c. 1558-1642) “staged” itself: at the public and private theaters, on the street in civic and royal rituals, and in popular entertainments. In so doing, we will examine how the capital city’s sense of itself came to be shaped by its various performances – its relationship with the crown, with the country, with strangers and foreigners – and how key sites (the “liberties,” the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Thames, Covent Garden, Hyde Park) came to hold meaning for London audiences. We will be reading texts by dramatists including Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Middleton, and James Shirley, as well as less studied texts

ENGL UN2933 Spenser. 3.00 points.

This course centers on the writing of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), early modern England’s self-styled national poet. We will devote much of our attention to The Faerie Queene, a complex intertwining of romance and epic that is Spenser’s major poetic achievement and the most important understudied work of the English Renaissance. Spenser himself referred to The Faerie Queene as an “endlesse worke” because he couldn’t finish it, but it’s also endless in the sense that it richly rewards deep study. The Faerie Queene envisions a world saturated with meaning, and the poem’s allegory is everywhere engaged with the challenges, dangers, and delights of interpreting it. We will enrich our simultaneous study of Spenser’s poetry and the culture of English early modernity by reading some of his shorter poems, including The Shepheardes Calender, his poetic debut, and the Amoretti, his sonnet sequence. We will supplement this work with a visit to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which will highlight the literary, political, and cultural traditions on which Spenser’s work draws. We’ll also attend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition on Tudor England, which will offer a glimpse of the royal iconography that Spenser’s writing both endorses and critiques. Finally, we will confront Spenser’s colonialist views as expressed in his View of the State of Ireland, a prose tract he wrote after serving as secretary to Arthur Grey, the architect of England’s brutal attempt to colonize Ireland in the 1580s. Taking Spenser’s poetic and political careers together, this course will uncover the deeply contradictory aims of writing in the early modern humanist tradition, which questioned traditional class hierarchies and imagined new ways of fashioning the self at the same time that it helped to sanction England’s burgeoning imperial ambitions

ENGL GU4462 Gender and Resistance in Early Modern Literature. 4.00 points.

This class will focus on early modern literature’s fascination with the relationship between women, gender, and political resistance in the early modern period. The works we will read together engage many of the key political analogies of the period, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. These texts also present multiple forms of resistance to gendered repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways. Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, witchcraft and murder pamphlets, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Gallathea), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art

ENGL UN3343 WOMEN IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA CULTRE. 4.00 points.

Concentrating on the drama of early modern England, this course will investigate a culture of surveillance regarding women’s bodies in the period. We will give special focus to the fear of female infidelity, the theatrical fascination with the woman’s pregnant body, and the cultural desire to confirm and expose women’s chastity. We will read plays in which women are falsely accused of adultery, in various generic contexts (such as William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing), along with plays in which women actually commit infidelity (such as the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). Focusing on a different play each week, we will ask: what does it take, ultimately, to believe women about their fidelity? At the same time, what is the effect of being doubted on women themselves? We will also give consideration to the particular resources of dramatic form, paying attention to moments in plays that coerce spectators themselves into mistaken judgments about women. We will supplement our reading of drama with pamphlets, advice literature, poems, church court cases, and ballads, in order to place these plays within a broader and more varied culture of female surveillance in early modern England. Finally, we will work to recover past strategies of liberation from this surveillance in the plays we read, in women’s writing that warns against male betrayal, and in dramatic and historical instances of female cross-dressing

ENGL UN2404 VICTORIAN POETRY. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). This course examines the works of the major English poets of the period 1830-1900. We will pay special attention to Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, and their great poetic innovation, the dramatic monologue. We will also be concentrating on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, A. E. Housman, and Thomas Hardy

ENGL UN3660 Early American Horror. 4.00 points.

Buried alive. Driven mad with guilt. Dissolved into a vast, anonymous universe. These are some of the terrors that this undergraduate seminar will address as we explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical dimensions of early American horror. How did Puritan, Gothic, and other early American horror writers complicate cultural attitudes towards the unthinkable, the cruel, and the perverse in works of supernatural horror? What do Gothic fiction’s enduring tropes—such as haunted houses, doppelgängers, and sentient machines—reveal about the massive social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, including the expansion and intensification of slavery, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the economic transition to industrial capitalism? And what might early American horror fail to capture about these underlying political realities? Our historical attention to race, labor, and gender will enable us to reconsider canonical American horror literature and illuminate the reliance on early American literary tropes in contemporary horror films for representing the uniquely disturbing experiences of modern life

ENGL UN3781 Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative Fiction. 4.00 points.

This course will focus on literary fiction and film about science, scientists, and scientific culture. We’ll ask how and why writers have wanted to represent the sciences and how their work is inspired, in turn, by innovations in scientific knowledge of their time. This is not a class on genre fiction. Unlike a science fiction class, we will cover narratives in a variety of genres—some highly speculative, and some in a more realist vein—thinking about how literary form is related to content. We start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, often considered the first work of science fiction, before moving to works from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including H.G. Welles’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, George Schulyer’s Black No More, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Carl Sagan’s Contact, Richard Powers’s Overstory, and the short stories of Ted Chiang. We will also watch such films as James Whale’s Frankenstein, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, and Yorgos Lanthemos’s Poor Things. In addition to asking how science and scientists are represented in these narratives, we’ll also discuss the cultural impact of such scientific innovations as the discovery of electricity, cell theory, eugenics and racial science, vaccines and immunology, space travel, new reproductive technologies, gene editing and more. A STEM background is not required, but students will be expected to have curiosity and motivation to learn about science, as well as its narrative representation

ENGL UN2826 American Modernism. 3.00 points.

This course approaches modernism as the varied literary responses to the cultural, technological, and political conditions of modernity in the United States. The historical period from the turn of the century to the onset of World War II forms a backdrop for consideration of such authors as Getrude Stein, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes. Assigned readings will cover a range of genres, including novels, poetry, short stories, and contemporary essays

ENGL UN3726 Virginia Woolf. 4 points.

Six novels and some non-fictional prose: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, Between the Acts; A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas.  Applications on paper only (not e-mail) in Professor Mendelson's mailbox in 602 Philosophy, with your name, e-mail address, class (2017, 2018, etc.), a brief list of relevant courses that you've taken, and one sentence suggesting why you want to take the course. Attendance at the first class is absolutely required; no one will be admitted who does not attend the first class.

MDES UN3121 Literature and Cultures of Struggle in South Africa. 3 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Generations of resistance have shaped contemporary life in South Africa -- in struggles against colonialism, segregation, the legislated racism known as apartheid, and the entrenched inequalities of the post-apartheid era. Two constants in this history of struggle have been youth as a vanguard of liberation movements and culture as a "weapon of struggle." As new generation of South African youth -- the "born frees" -- has now taken to the streets and social media to "decolonize" the university and claim their education as a meaningful right, this course traces the ways that generations of writers, artists, and activists have faced censorship, exile, and repression in an ongoing struggle to dismantle apartheid and to free the mind, "the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor" according to Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko. This course traces the profoundly important roles that literature and other cultural production (music, photography, film, comics, Twitter hashtags like #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall) have played in struggle against apartheid and its lingering afterlife. Although many of our texts were originally written in English, we will also discuss the historical forces, including nineteenth-century Christian missions and Bantu Education, as well as South Africa's post-1994 commitment to being a multilingual democracy, that have shaped the linguistic texture of South African cultural life.

ENGL UN3042 Ulysses. 4.00 points.

The seminar will look at the structure of the novel, its plan, with special attention paid to ‘The Odyssey’, but also to the variations in tone in the book, the parodies and elaborate games becoming more complex as the book proceeds. We will examine a number of Irish texts that are relevant to the making of ‘Ulysses’, including Robert Emmett’s speech from the dock, Yeats’s ‘The Countess Cathleen’ and Lady Gregory translations from Irish folk-tales

ENGL UN3832 New York Intellectuals: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag. 4.00 points.

The nation’s most distinguished homegrown network of thinkers and writers, the New York intellectuals, clustered in its major decades from the late thirties to the late sixties up and down Manhattan, centered mainly in and around Columbia University and the magazine Partisan Review on Astor Place. Although usually regarded as male dominated—Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald were among the leaders—more recently the three key women of the group have emerged as perhaps the boldest modernist thinkers most relevant for our own time. Arendt is a major political philosopher, McCarthy a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and critic, and Susan Sontag was the most famous public intellectual in the last quarter of the 20th century. This course will explore how this resolutely unsentimental trio—dubbed by one critic as “tough women” who insisted on the priority of reflection over feeling—were unafraid to court controversy and even outrage: Hannah Arendt’s report on what she called the “banality” of Nazi evil in her report on the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann in 1963 remains incendiary; Mary McCarthy’s satirical wit and unprecedented sexual frankness startled readers of her 1942 story collection The Company She Keeps; Susan Sontag’s debut Against Interpretation (1966) turned against the suffocatingly elitist taste of the New York intellectuals and welcomed what she dubbed the “New Sensibility”—“happenings,” “camp,” experimental film and all manner of avant-garde production. In her later book On Photography (1977) she critiques the disturbing photography of Diane Arbus, whose images we will examine in tandem with Sontag’s book

ENGL UN3888 The Afro-Feminist Novel. 4.00 points.

What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms? The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision. The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Ann Petry’s The Narrows (1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice

ENGL UN1075 Children’s Literature. 3.00 points.

This is a historical survey of literature (mostly narrative) intended primarily for children, which will explore not only the pleasures of imagination but the varieties of narrative and lyric form, as well as the ways in which story-telling gives shape to individual and cultural identity. Drawing on anonymous folk tale from a range of cultures, as well as a variety of literary works produced from the late 17th century to the present, we’ll attend to the ways in which changing forms of children’s literature reflect changing understandings of children and childhood, while trying not to overlook psychological and formal structures that might persist across this history. Readings of the primary works will be supplemented by a variety of critical approaches—psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, and structuralist—that scholars have employed to understand the variety and appeal of children’s literature

ENGL UN3999 THE SENIOR ESSAY. 3.00 points.

Open to those who have applied and been accepted into the department's senior essay program only.

Prerequisites: the department's permission.
Prerequisites: the departments permission. This course is open only to those who have applied and been accepted into the departments senior essay program. For information about the program, including deadline for application, please visit http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/senior-essay-program

ENGL UN3394 HOW WRITERS THINK. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.
The spell cast by a captivating novel or elegant research can lead us to imagine that great writing is a product of the author's innate genius. In reality, the best writing is a product of certain not-very-intuitive practices. This course lifts the veil that obscures what happens in the minds of the best writers. We will examine models of writing development from research in composition studies, cognitive psychology, genre studies, linguistics, ESL studies, and educational psychology. Our classroom will operate as a laboratory for experimenting with the practices that the research identifies. Students will test out strategies that prepare them for advanced undergraduate research, graduate school writing, teaching, editing, and collaborative writing in professional settings. The course is one way to prepare for applying for a job as a peer writing fellow in Columbia’s Writing Center

CLEN UN3725 Literary Guides to Living and Dying Well from Plato to Montaigne. 4.00 points.

Surrounded by friends on the morning of his state-mandated suicide, Socrates invites them to join him in considering the proposition that philosophizing is learning how to die. In dialogues, essays, and letters from antiquity to early modernity, writers have returned to this proposition from Plato’s Phaedo to consider, in turn, what it means for living and dying well. This course will explore some of the most widely read of these works, including by Cicero, Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Petrarch, and Montaigne, with an eye to the continuities and changes in these meanings and their impact on the literary forms that express them. Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available

ENGL UN3477 New Suns: Worlding in Black Speculative Fiction. 4.00 points.

This course takes Octavia E. Butler’s enigmatic expression, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” as a guide for exploring the politics of Black speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. With literary, sonic, visual, and cinematic examples, including works from Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. DuBois, Samuel Delany, Wangechi Mutu, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Saul Williams, and others, this class considers the contexts of possibility for re/imagining Black pasts, presents and futures. Paying particular attention to how Black speculative fiction creates new worlds, social orders, and entanglements, students will develop readings informed by ecocriticism, science and technology studies, feminist, and queer studies. We will consider the multiple meanings and various uses of speculation and worlding as we encounter and interpret forms of utopian, dystopian, and (post)apocalyptic thinking and practice. No prerequisites

ENGL UN3920 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
The class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary meritThe class will read the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original Middle English language of its unique surviving copy of circa 1400, and will discuss both the poem's language and the poem's literary merit

ENGL UN3873 Troilus and Criseyde. 4.00 points.

The intellectual goals of the course are to understand the manuscript evidence for the text and to be able to read Chaucer with precision: precision as to the grammatical structure, vocabulary, rhymes, and meter of the text. Being such an enlightened, close reader will help students in many, if not all, of their other courses, and will be invaluable to them in most any job they will ever have thereafter

ENGL UN3336 SHAKESPEARE II. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). Shakespeare II examines plays from the second half of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, primarily a selection of his major tragedies and his later comedies (or “romances”)

ENGL GU4263 Literature of the 17th C. 3 points.

This lecture course surveys the non-dramatic literature of seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to its prose writings.   The course will focus on topics including the new politics of the Jacobean court; the tensions leading to the civil wars; the so-called “scientific revolution” and its discontents; and the challenges of the Restoration, including plague and fire.    Authors studied will include Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, George Herbert, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish. Abraham Cowley, and Katherine Philips.

ENGL UN3262 English Literature 1500-1600. 3 points.

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

ENGL UN3343 WOMEN IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA CULTRE. 4.00 points.

Concentrating on the drama of early modern England, this course will investigate a culture of surveillance regarding women’s bodies in the period. We will give special focus to the fear of female infidelity, the theatrical fascination with the woman’s pregnant body, and the cultural desire to confirm and expose women’s chastity. We will read plays in which women are falsely accused of adultery, in various generic contexts (such as William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing), along with plays in which women actually commit infidelity (such as the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). Focusing on a different play each week, we will ask: what does it take, ultimately, to believe women about their fidelity? At the same time, what is the effect of being doubted on women themselves? We will also give consideration to the particular resources of dramatic form, paying attention to moments in plays that coerce spectators themselves into mistaken judgments about women. We will supplement our reading of drama with pamphlets, advice literature, poems, church court cases, and ballads, in order to place these plays within a broader and more varied culture of female surveillance in early modern England. Finally, we will work to recover past strategies of liberation from this surveillance in the plays we read, in women’s writing that warns against male betrayal, and in dramatic and historical instances of female cross-dressing

ENGL UN3728 American Transcendentalism. 4.00 points.

The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Through detailed analysis of Emerson’s Essays we will try to understand his philosophy as an effort to radically reformulate traditional concepts of identity, thinking, and everyday living, and investigate the politics that guided his philosophical efforts, especially his stance on slavery and his activism against the Cherokee removals. But we will also be interested in his thinking on dreams, visions and mental transports and in order to ask how those experiences come to model his understanding of personal identity and bodily integrity. In Thoreau, we will look closely into ideas about the art of living and his theory of architecture, as well as quotidian practices of dwelling, eating or cooking, as ways to come to terms with one’s own life. We will pay special attention to Thoreau’s understanding of thinking as walking, as well as the question of space vs. time and we will spend a lot of time figuring his theory of living as mourning. With Whitman we will attend to his new poetics and investigate its relation to forms of American Democracy. We will also want to know how the Civil War affected Whitman’s poetics both in terms of its formal strategies and its content. Finally, we will try to understand how ideas and values of transcendentalist philosophy fashion poetry of Emily Dickinson both in its form and its content. We will thus be looking at Dickinson’s famous fascicles but also into such questions as loss, avian and vegetal life and the experience of the embodied more generally

ENGL UN3933 Jane Austen. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.
This seminar offers intensive study of the career of Jane Austen, including important recent criticism. We’ll be especially interested in the relations between narrative form and the social dynamics represented in her fiction. We’ll try to cover all six of the (completed) novels, but we can adjust our pace in response to the interests of seminar members

ENGL GU4400 Romanticism. 3.00 points.

This course is designed as an overview of major texts (in poetry and prose), contexts, and themes in British Romanticism. The movement of Romanticism was born in the ferment of revolution, and developed alongside so many of the familiar features of the modern world—features for which Romanticism provides a vantage point for insight and critique. As we read authors including William Blake, Jane Austen, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and many others, we will situate our discussions around the following key issues: the development of individualism and new formations of community; industrialization and ecology (changes in nature and in the very conception of “nature”); and slavery and abolition

CLEN GU4822 19th Century European Novel. 3 points.

The European novel in the era of its cultural dominance.  Key concerns: the modern metropolis (London, Paris, St. Petersburg); the figures of bourgeois narrative (parvenus, adulterers, adolescents, consumers) and bourgeois consciousness (nostalgia, ressentiment, sentimentalism, ennui); the impact of journalism, science, economics. Authors to be drawn from: Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola.

ENGL GU4622 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). This survey of African American literature focuses on language, history, and culture. What are the contours of African American literary history? How do race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect within the politics of African American culture? What can we expect to learn from these literary works? Why does our literature matter to student of social change? This lecture course will attempt to provide answers to these questions, as we begin with Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Richard Wrights Native Son (1940) and end with Melvin Dixons Loves Instruments (1995) with many stops along the way. We will discuss poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fictional prose. Ohter authors include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcom X, Ntzozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. There are no prerequisites for this course. The formal assignments are two five-page essays and a final examination. Class participation will be graded

ENGL UN3042 Ulysses. 4.00 points.

The seminar will look at the structure of the novel, its plan, with special attention paid to ‘The Odyssey’, but also to the variations in tone in the book, the parodies and elaborate games becoming more complex as the book proceeds. We will examine a number of Irish texts that are relevant to the making of ‘Ulysses’, including Robert Emmett’s speech from the dock, Yeats’s ‘The Countess Cathleen’ and Lady Gregory translations from Irish folk-tales

ENTA UN3970 MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
The course will trace the playwriting careers of Henrik Ibsen, Harold Pinter, and Suzan-Lori Parks, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their evolving aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the contested 20C trajectories of modernism and postmodernism. History in modernism and the history of modernism have become much-debated concepts, and these playwrights variously confront the challenges of looking back in time to facilitate looking forward. The course examines, in that context, the status of different kinds of history; the claims of family, friendship, and community identifications; the contributions of often disruptive intruders; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays’ potential as instruments of cultural intervention. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen, Pinter, and Parks seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken (if any), along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available

CLEN GU4771 The Literary History of Atrocity. 3.00 points.

Sometime around the publication of Garcia Marquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, novelists who wanted to make a claim to ethical and historical seriousness began to include a scene of extreme violence that, like the banana worker massacre in Garcia Marquez, seemed to offer a definitive guide to the moral landscape of the modern world. This course will explore both the modern literature that was inspired by Garcia Marquez’s example and the literature that led up to this extraordinary moment—for example, the literature dealing with the Holocaust, with the dropping of the atomic bomb, with the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, and with the Allied bombing of the German cities. It will also ask how extraordinary this moment in fact was, looked at from the perspective of literature as a whole, by inspecting earlier examples of atrocities committed in classical antiquity, in the Crusades, against Native Americans and (in Tolstoy) against the indigenous inhabitants of the Caucasus. Before the concept of the non-combatant had been defined, could there be a concept of the atrocity? Could a culture accuse itself of misconduct toward the members of some other culture? In posing these and related questions, the course offers itself as a major but untold chapter both in world literature and in the moral history of humankind

CLEN GU4201 POETRY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA. 3.00 points.

This course will focus on twentieth century poetry written by authors of African descent in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The readings will allow us to cover some of the most significant poetry written during the major black literary movements of the century, including the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and the Black Arts movement. In particular, the course will be designed around a selection of books of poetry by black writers. We will thus spend a substantial amount of time reading each poet in depth, as well as discussing various strategies for constructing a volume of poetry: thematic or chronological arrangements, extended formal structures (suites, series, or montages), historical poetry, attempts to imitate another medium (particularly black music) in writing, etc. We will use the readings to consider approaches to the theorization of a diasporic poetics, as well as to discuss the key issues at stake in the tradition including innovation, the vernacular, and political critique

ENGL UN3757 The Lost Generation. 4.00 points.

In this course we’ll study literature by “The Lost Generation,” the celebrated cohort of U.S. writers who came of age during the First World War and went on to publish their major works during the heady days of The Jazz Age and the doldrums of The Great Depression. The authors we’ll read will include Barnes, Dos Passos, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, Loos, McKay, and Toomer, and we’ll talk about their relations to the major aesthetic movements of the 1920s and 1930s: Modernism, The Harlem Renaissance, and The Literary Left. Our primary focus, however, will be on how these writers depicted and expressed the alienation of the young during this period. We’ll be learning about a rising generation of Americans who felt out of step with their times and ill-suited to their places, and we’ll be reading books about rootlessness and expatriation, masking and passing, apathy and radicalism, loneliness and misanthropy, repression and derangement, and several other preoccupations of these drifting, wandering, “lost” artists

ENGL GU4316 WORLD'S END: 20th/21st CENTURY DYSTOPIAN FICTION AND FILM. 3.00 points.

No future, there’s no future, no future for you…or me…What happens after the end of the future? If England’s dreaming in 1977 looked like a dead-end, how do we dream of futures in a moment so much closer to the reality of worlds’ end? In this class, we will read a range of ambiguous utopias and dystopias (to use a term from Ursula LeGuin) and explore various models of temporality, a range of fantasies of apocalypse and a few visions of futurity. While some critics, like Frederick Jameson, propose that utopia is a “meditation on the impossible,” others like José Muñoz insist that “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Utopian and dystopian fictions tend to lead us back to the present and force confrontations with the horrors of war, the ravages of capitalist exploitation, the violence of social hierarchies and the ruinous peril of environmental decline. In the films and novels and essays we engage here, we will not be looking for answers to questions about what to do and nor should we expect to find maps to better futures. We will no doubt be confronted with dead ends, blasted landscapes and empty gestures. But we will also find elegant aesthetic expressions of ruination, inspirational confrontations with obliteration, brilliant visions of endings, breaches, bureaucratic domination, human limitation and necro-political chaos. We will search in the narratives of uprisings, zombification, cloning, nuclear disaster, refusal, solidarity, for opportunities to reimagine world, ends, futures, time, place, person, possibility, art, desire, bodies, life and death

CLEN GU4550 NARRATIVE AND HUMAN RIGHTS. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). We cant talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Naim, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams

ENGL UN3269 BRITISH LITERATURE 1900-1950. 3.00 points.

This is a survey course on great works of British literature from around 1900 through around 1950, starting with the late-Victorian world of Thomas Hardy, extending through the fin-de-siècle worlds of Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, then into the modernist landscape of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and ending with the late-modernist vision of Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden. The course includes a wide range of social, political, psychological, and literary concerns, and delves deeply into political and moral questions that are always urgent but which took specific forms during this period

ENGL GU4605 AMERICAN LITERATURE-POST 1945. 3.00 points.

AMST UN3931 Topics in American Studies. 4 points.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

ENGL UN3851 INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). As the great imperial powers of Britain, France, and Belgium, among others, ceded self-rule to the colonies they once controlled, formerly colonized subjects engaged in passionate discussion about the shape of their new nations not only in essays and pamphlets but also in fiction, poetry, and theatre. Despite the common goal of independence, the heated debates showed that the postcolonial future was still up for grabs, as the boundary lines between and within nations were once again redrawn. Even such cherished notions as nationalism were disputed, and thinkers like the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore sounded the alarm about the pitfalls of narrow ethnocentric thinking. Their call for a philosophy of internationalism went against the grain of ethnic and racial particularism, which had begun to take on the character of national myth. The conflict of perspectives showed how deep were the divisions among the various groups vying to define the goals of the postcolonial nation, even as they all sought common cause in liberation from colonial rule. Nowhere was this truer than in India. The land that the British rulers viewed as a test case for the implementation of new social philosophies took it upon itself to probe their implications for the future citizenry of a free, democratic republic. We will read works by Indian writers responding to decolonization and, later, globalization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Beginning as a movement against imperial control, anti-colonialism also generated new discussions about gender relations, secularism and religious difference, the place of minorities in the nation, the effects of partition on national identity, among other issues. With the help of literary works and historical accounts, this course will explore the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society in a globalized era without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. Writers on the syllabus include Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Mahasweta Devi, Bapsi Sidwa, Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu ) with the subject heading Indian Writing in English seminar. In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course

ENGL UN3710 The Beat Generation. 4 points.

Limited to seniors. Priority given to those who have taken at least one course in 20th-century American culture, especially history, jazz, film, and literature.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

(Seminar). Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "The Beat Generation". In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list, from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

ENGL UN3394 HOW WRITERS THINK. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.
The spell cast by a captivating novel or elegant research can lead us to imagine that great writing is a product of the author's innate genius. In reality, the best writing is a product of certain not-very-intuitive practices. This course lifts the veil that obscures what happens in the minds of the best writers. We will examine models of writing development from research in composition studies, cognitive psychology, genre studies, linguistics, ESL studies, and educational psychology. Our classroom will operate as a laboratory for experimenting with the practices that the research identifies. Students will test out strategies that prepare them for advanced undergraduate research, graduate school writing, teaching, editing, and collaborative writing in professional settings. The course is one way to prepare for applying for a job as a peer writing fellow in Columbia’s Writing Center

ENGL UN3756 LITERARY NONFICTION. 4.00 points.

This course is about “creative” or “literary nonfiction”: writing that deploys techniques usually associated with literature to tell stories about actual events, people, or things. Over the course of the seminar, we will investigate the nature of the genre, looking closely at the work of some of its greatest practitioners to analyze how they convey their meaning and achieve their effects. We will ask why writers might choose to use literary techniques to write nonfiction, and discuss the ethical issues the genre raises. At the same time, the seminar is a place for you to develop your work in a supportive and thoughtful community of readers and writers. Application instructions: to apply, please email Professor Peters (peters@columbia.edu) the following: name, year, school, major, a few sentences on why you want to take the course, and a short piece representing your writing at its best. (It may be fiction or nonfiction, and there is no minimum or maximum length, but choose a piece whose first few sentences show the quality of your writing!)

CLEN UN3776 A Pre-History of Science Fiction. 4.00 points.

This undergraduate seminar course traces a possible pre-history of the genre we now know as science fiction. While science fiction is routinely tracked back to the nineteenth century, often to Frankenstein or The Last Man by Mary Shelley, this course looks at some earlier literary writings that share certain features of modern science fiction: utopian and dystopian societies, space travel, lunar travel, time travel, the mad experimental scientist, and unknown peoples or creatures. While the center of this course features texts associated with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century (by Bacon, Kepler, Godwin, and Cavendish), it ranges back to the second century Lucian of Sarosota, and forward to the early nineteenth century with novels by Shelley

ENGL GU4938 HISTORY OF HORROR. 3.00 points.

This course will take a longue durée approach to one of the most widely-attested, and least studied, genres in the western canon: horror. We will take as an orienting assumption the idea that horror is a serious genre, capable of deep and sustained cultural, political, and historical critique, despite its contemporary status as “pulpy” or “pop culture.” We will ask what horror is as an affective and cognitive state, and we will also ask what horror means as a genre. We will ask how horror gets registered in narrative, drama, and in poetic form, and we will address how horror evolves over the centuries. Indeed, the course will range widely, beginning in the early 14th century, and ending in the second decade of the 21st. We will explore multiple different sub-genres of horror, ranging from lyric poetry to film, to explore how horror afforded authors with a highly flexible and experimental means of thinking through enduring questions about human life, linguistic meaning, social connectedness, connectedness with The Beyond, scientific inquiry, and violence. We will explore a series of through-lines: most notably that of cultural otherness, with Jewishness as a particularly archetypal other, thus the pronounced treatment of Jewish literature throughout the course. Other through-lines will include the ideas of placelessness, violence toward women, perverse Christian ritual, and the uncanny valley that separates humans from non-humans. Ultimately, we will try to map out the kinds of social, political, and historical work that horror can do

ENGL UN3879 Global Adaptations of Shakespeare. 4.00 points.

Shakespeare is often considered a touchstone of “universal” values and ideas, and yet his work has been robustly adapted/rewritten/blown apart/creatively appropriated by people across the world who remake his plays to serve their own visions. This course will introduce some of the debates about adaptation and appropriation in modern Shakespeare studies by looking at three plays—Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Twelfth Night—and some of the many adaptations springing from those works. Who owns Shakespeare? How radically can a play be refashioned and still be considered in conversation with his work? Is it useful to divide adaptations into those that resist or write back against Shakespeare and those that display a less conflicted relationship to his authority? What political work do adaptations do in the contexts in which they were written? What happens to those local roots and contexts when productions and films enter global networks of distribution and interpretation? How does a change in medium, say from theater to film to comic book, affect the appropriation process? We will take up these questions in regard to adaptations created in regions as different as India, Iraq, Mali, and Canada. No prior Shakespeare coursework is required, though some knowledge of his plays is preferable. Assignments include two short papers, an oral presentation, and brief weekly responses to each adaptation

CLEN UN3720 Plato the Rhetorician. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission

(Seminar). Although Socrates takes a notoriously dim view of persuasion and the art that produces it, the Platonic dialogues featuring him both theorize and practice a range of rhetorical strategies that become the nuts and bolts of persuasive argumentation. This seminar will read a number of these dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Ion, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Menexenus and Republic, followed by Aristole's Rhetoric, the rhetorical manual of Plato's student that provides our earliest full treatment of the art. Application instructions: E-mail Prof. Eden (khe1@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

CLEN UN3455 Pacifism and the Apocalyptic Imagination. 4.00 points.

This course examines the evolution of pacifist thought in literature from the interwar years to the dawn of the atomic age. It seeks to study the literature of twentieth-century pacifism as a response to expanding technologies of modern warfare. The course asks the following questions, among others: What shape does pacifist thought take in the atomic age, and how does it compare with interwar pacifism? What similarities or differences are discernible? What role do literary representations of modern warfare play in the evolution of pacifist thought? Does pacifism gain persuasive power through these representations, or do they lay bare its limits? How might one understand pacifism’s conceptual relation to nonviolence, anti-war resistance, and anti-militarism? The course begins with works by pacifist writers in the interwar years: Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight (1917); the correspondence between Einstein and Freud in 1932; Aldous Huxley, “What Are You Going to Do About It?” (1936) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936); Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940); Vera Brittain, “Women and Peace” (1940). The course then considers the evolution of pacifism in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focusing on novels, memoirs, essays, short stories, and films, including the following works: Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (1948); M. K. Gandhi, For Pacifists (1949); Pearl Buck, Command the Morning (1959); Alfred Coppel, Dark December (1960); Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain (1965); Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes (1965) and Fire from the Ashes, ed. (1985); Anand Patwardhan, War and Peace (2002, documentary); Howard Zinn (ed.), The Power of Nonviolence (2002). The course encourages students to view selected films probing pacifist and anti-war themes alongside literary and philosophical texts, with a view to grasping the themes’ adaptability across various genres. Students must apply to enrol in the seminar, providing information about year, school, relevant prior coursework, and reasons for wanting to take the course. Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply; prior coursework in literature is strongly recommended

CLEN GU4728 Literature in the Age of AI. 3.00 points.

In this course we will consider the long history of literature composed with, for, and by machines. Our reading list will start with Ramon Llull, the thirteenth-century combinatorial mystic, and continue with readings from Gottfried Leibniz, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Butler. We will read "Plot Robots" instrumental to the writing of Hollywood scripts and pulp fiction of the 1920s, the avant-garde poetry of Dada and OULIPO, computer-generated love letters written by Alan Turing, and novels created by the first generation of artificial intelligence researchers in the 1950s and 60s. The course will conclude at the present moment, with an exploration of machine learning techniques of the sort used by Siri, Alexa, and other contemporary chat bots

ENGL UN3486 Out of Her Mind: American Women Writing, 1630-1930. 4.00 points.

This course explores how American women writers who suffered from depression, disability, bodily pain, or social marginalization, used the environment and its literary representations to redefine the categories of gender, ability, and personhood. Prior to their inclusion into the public sphere through the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment which in 1920 granted women the right to vote, American artists had to be particularly resourceful in devising apt strategies to counter the political and aesthetic demands that had historically dispossessed them of the voice, power, and body. This course focuses on the women writers who conceptualized their own surroundings (home, house, marriage, country, land, island and the natural world) as an agent that actively and decisively participates in the construction and dissolution of personal identity. In doing so, they attempted to annul the separation of the public (politics) and the private (home) as respective male and female spheres, and in this way they contributed, ahead of their own time, to the suffragist debates. Our task in this course will be to go beyond the traditional critical dismissal of these emancipatory strategies as eccentric or “merely aesthetic” and therefore inconsequential. Instead, we will take seriously Rowlandson’s frontier diet, Fuller’s peculiar cure for her migraines, Wheatley’s oblique references to the Middle Passage, Jewett’s islands, Ša’s time-travel, Thaxter’s oceans, Hurston’s hurricanes, and Sansay’s scathing portrayal of political revolutions. We will read these portrayals as aesthetic decisions that had—and continue to have—profound political consequences: by externalizing and depersonalizing what is commonly understood to be internal and intimate, the authors we read collapse the distinction between inside and outside, between the private and public—the distinction that traditionally excluded women from participation in the public life, in policy- and decision-making