English

Departmental Office: 602 Philosophy; 212-854-3215
http://www.english.columbia.edu

Director of Undergraduate Studies: Prof. Molly Murray, 406 Philosophy; 212-854-4016; mpm7@columbia.edu

Departmental Adviser:
Prof. Molly Murray, 406 Philosophy; mpm7@columbia.edu

The program in English fosters the ability to read critically and imaginatively, to appreciate the power of language to shape thought and represent the world, and to be sensitive to the ways in which literature is created and achieves its effects. It has several points of departure, grounding the teaching of critical reading in focused attention to the most significant works of English literature, in the study of the historical and social conditions surrounding literary production and reception, and in theoretical reflection on the process of writing and reading and the nature of the literary work./p>

The courses the department offers draw on a broad range of methodologies and theoretical approaches, from the formalist to the political to the psychoanalytical (to mention just a few). Ranging from the medieval period to the 21st century, the department teaches major authors alongside popular culture, traditional literary genres alongside verbal forms that cut across media, and canonical British literature alongside postcolonial, global, and trans-Atlantic literatures.

At once recognizing traditional values in the discipline and reflecting its changing shape, the major points to three organizing principles for the study of literature—history, genre, and geography. Requiring students not only to take a wide variety of courses but also to arrange their thinking about literature on these very different grids, the major gives them broad exposure to the study of the past, an understanding of the range of forms that can shape literary meaning, and an encounter with the various geographical landscapes against which literature in English has been produced.

Advising

Students are not assigned specific advisers, but rather each year the faculty members serving on the department’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) are designated undergraduate advisers (see above). Upon declaring a major or concentration in English, students should meet with the director of undergraduate studies or a delegated faculty adviser to discuss the program, especially to ensure that students understand the requirements.

Students must fill out a Major Requirements Worksheet early in the semester preceding graduation. The worksheet must be reviewed by an adviser and submitted to 602 Philosophy before the registration period for the final semester. The worksheet is available in the English Department or on-line at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate/major-requirements. It is this worksheet—not the Degree Audit Report (DAR)—that determines eligibility for graduation as an English major or concentrator.

Course Information

Lectures

Generally, lectures are addressed to a broad audience and do not assume previous course work in the area, unless prerequisites are noted in the description. The size of some lectures is limited. Senior majors have preference unless otherwise noted, followed by junior majors, followed by senior and junior non-majors. Students are responsible for checking for any special registration procedures on-line at https://english.columbia.edu/content/course-listings.

Seminars

The department regards seminars as opportunities for students to do advanced undergraduate work in fields in which they have already had some related course experience. With the exception of some CLEN classes (in which, as comparative courses, much material is read in translation), students’ admission to a seminar presupposes their having taken ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS. During the three weeks preceding the registration period, students should check https://english.columbia.edu/content/course-listings for application instructions for individual seminars. Applications to seminars are usually due by the end of the week preceding registration. Students should always assume that the instructor’s permission is necessary; those who register without having secured the instructor’s permission are not guaranteed admission.

Departmental Honors

Writing a senior essay is a precondition, though not a guarantee, for the possible granting of departmental honors. After essays are submitted, faculty sponsors deliver a written report on the essay to the department’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), with a grade for the independent study and, if merited, a recommendation for honors. CUE considers all the essays, including sponsor recommendations, reviews students’ fall semester grades, and determines which students are to receive departmental honors. Normally no more than 10% of graduating majors receive departmental honors in a given academic year.

The Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS)

The DAR is a useful tool for students to monitor their progress toward degree requirements, but it is not an official document for the major or concentration, nor should it replace consultation with departmental advisers. The department’s director of undergraduate studies is the final authority on whether requirements for the major have been met. Furthermore, the DAR may be inaccurate or incomplete for any number of reasons—for example, courses taken elsewhere and approved for credit do not show up on the DAR report as fulfilling a specific requirement.

Online Information

Other departmental information—faculty office hours, registration instructions, late changes, etc.—is available on the departmental website.

Professors

  • James Eli Adams
  • Rachel Adams
  • Branka Arsić
  • Christopher Baswell (Barnard)
  • Sarah Cole
  • Julie Crawford
  • Denise Cruz
  • Nicholas Dames
  • Jenny Davidson
  • Andrew Delbanco
  • Kathy Eden
  • Brent Edwards
  • Stathis Gourgouris
  • Farah Jasmine Griffin
  • Jack Halberstam
  • Matt Hart
  • Saidiya Hartman (University Professor)
  • Sharon Marcus
  • Edward Mendelson
  • Frances Negrón-Muntaner
  • Robert O’Meally
  • Julie Peters
  • Ross Posnock
  • Austin E. Quigley
  • Bruce Robbins
  • James Shapiro
  • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (University Professor)
  • Alan Stewart
  • Colm Tóibín
  • Gauri Viswanathan
  • William Worthen (Barnard)
  • David M. Yerkes

Associate Professors

  • Patricia Dailey
  • T. Austin Graham
  • Erik Gray
  • Eleanor Johnson
  • Molly Murray
  • Joseph Slaughter
  • Dennis Tenen
  • Jennifer Wenzel

Assistant Professors

  • Joseph Albernaz
  • Carlos Alonso Nugent
  • Lauren Robertson
  • Dustin Stewart
  • Hannah Weaver

Lecturers

  • Paul Grimstad
  • Sue Mendelsohn
  • Aaron Ritzenberg
  • Maura Speigel
  • Nicole B. Wallack

Guidelines for all English and Comparative Literature Majors and Concentrators

Declaring a Major in English

Upon declaring a major in English, students should meet with either the director of undergraduate studies or a departmental adviser to discuss the program. Students declaring a major should obtain a Major Requirements Worksheet from 602 Philosophy or on-line, which outlines the requirements.

Additional information, including events and deadlines of particular relevance to undergraduates, is provided at http://english.columbia.edu/undergraduate, the department’s undergraduate homepage. The sidebar on this page provides links to pages with details about undergraduate advising, major and concentration requirements, course options and restrictions, registration procedures, the senior essay, and writing prizes, as well as links to downloadable worksheets for the major and concentration and to course distribution requirement lists, past and present. For detailed information about registration procedures, students should consult https://english.columbia.edu/content/course-listings, which explains the requirements and enables students to monitor their own progress.

Newly declared majors should contact the undergraduate coordinator in 602 Philosophy Hall and request that their names be added to the department’s electronic mailing list for English majors and concentrators. Because important information now routinely is disseminated through e-mail, it is crucial that students be on this list.

Literary Texts, Critical Methods

The introductory course ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS, together with its companion seminar, ENGL UN3011 LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM), is required for the English major and concentration. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement is a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures. This once-a-week faculty lecture, accompanied by a seminar led by an advanced graduate student in the department, is intended to introduce students to the study of literature. Students read works from the three major literary modes (lyric, drama, and narrative), drawn from premodern to contemporary literature, and learn interpretative techniques required by these various modes or genres. This course does not fulfill any distribution requirements.

Senior Essay

The senior essay program is an opportunity for students to explore in depth some literary topic of special interest to them, involving extensive background reading and resulting in an essay (8,000–15,000 words) that constitutes a substantial and original critical or scholarly argument. Students submit proposals in September of their senior year, with acceptance contingent upon the quality of the proposal and the student’s record in the major. Students who are accepted are assigned a faculty sponsor to supervise the project, from its development during the fall semester to its completion in the spring. It is for the spring semester, not the fall, that students officially register for the course, designated as ENGL UN3999 THE SENIOR ESSAY. Senior essays are due in early April.

Course Options and Restrictions

  1. No course at the 1000-level may be counted toward the major.

  2. Speech courses may not be counted toward the major.

  3. Two writing courses or two upper-level literature courses taught in a foreign language, or one of each, may count toward the major, though neither type of course fulfills any distribution requirement. Writing courses that may be applied toward the major include those offered through Columbia’s undergraduate Creative Writing Program and through Barnard College.

  4. Comparative literature courses sponsored by the department (designated as CLEN) may count toward the major. Those sponsored by other departments (e.g. CLFR - Comp Lit French, CPLS - Comp Lit and Society) are not counted toward the major without permission of the director of undergraduate studies. Literature courses taught in English in language departments do not count toward the major.

  5. No more than two courses taken during the summer session may be counted toward the major.

  6. Courses offered through the Barnard English Department may count toward the major or concentration. Before taking Barnard courses, students should verify with the director of undergraduate studies whether and how such courses may count toward the major.

  7. For courses taken abroad or at other American institutions to count toward the major, students must obtain approval of the director of undergraduate studies.

  8. To register for more than 42 points (including advanced standing credit) in English and comparative literature, a student majoring in English must obtain permission of the director of undergraduate studies.

  9. No more than five courses taken elsewhere may be applied to the major, four to the concentration.

  10. One independent study (for at least 3 points) may count toward the major but cannot satisfy any distribution requirements; likewise, the Senior Essay may count toward the major but fulfills no requirements. Students may not count both an Independent Study and the Senior Essay toward the major.

  11. Courses assigned a grade of D may not be counted toward the major.

  12. Only the first course taken to count toward the major can be taken Pass/D/Fail.


Major in English

Please read Guidelines for all English and Comparative Literature Majors and Concentrators above.

Ten departmental courses (for a minimum of 30 points) and, in the process, fulfillment of the following requirements. See course information above for details on fulfilling the distribution requirements.

  1. ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS and ENGL UN3011 LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM)
  2. Period distribution: Three courses primarily dealing with periods before 1800, only one of which may be a course in Shakespeare
  3. Genre distribution: One course in each of the following three generic categories:
    • Poetry
    • Prose fiction/narrative
    • Drama/film/new media
  4. Geography distribution: One course in each of the following three geographical categories:
    • British
    • American
    • Comparative/global (comparative literature, postcolonial, global English, trans-Atlantic, diaspora)

Course Distribution Lists are available in the department and on-line at https://english.columbia.edu/content/course-listings to help students determine which courses fulfill which requirements. A single course can satisfy more than one distribution requirement. For example, a Shakespeare lecture satisfies three requirements at once: not only does it count as one of the three required pre-1800 courses it also, at the same time, fulfills both a genre and a geography distribution requirement (drama and British, respectively). Courses not on the distribution list may count toward the major requirements only with the permission of the director of undergraduate studies. Two writing courses or upper-level literature courses taught in a foreign language, or one of each, may count toward the ten required courses.


Concentration in English

Please read Guidelines for all English and Comparative Literature Majors and Concentrators above.

Eight departmental courses and, in the process, fulfillment of the following requirements. See course information above for details on fulfilling the distribution requirements.

  1. ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS and ENGL UN3011 LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM)
  2. Period distribution: Two courses dealing with periods before 1800, only one of which may be a course in Shakespeare
  3. Genre distribution: Two courses, each chosen from a different genre category (see above)
  4. Geography distribution: Two courses, each chosen from a different geography category (see above)

See the Course Distribution Lists, available in the department or on-line at https://english.columbia.edu/content/course-listings, to determine which courses fulfill which requirements. All of the restrictions outlined for the English major also apply for the concentration in English.


Comparative Literature Program

Students who wish to major in comparative literature should consult the Comparative Literature and Society section of this Bulletin.

Fall 2023

Introduction to the Major

ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods.
Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing. This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL UN3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken as early as possible in a students career. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3001 001/11905 T 10:10am - 11:25am
702 Hamilton Hall
Edward Mendelson 4.00 71/75
ENGL 3001 AU1/20808 T 10:10am - 11:25am
Othr Other
Edward Mendelson 4.00 4/5
Spring 2024: ENGL UN3001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3001 001/12316 F 10:10am - 11:25am
602 Hamilton Hall
Erik Gray 4.00 59/75

ENGL UN3011 LITERARY TEXTS&CRIT MTHDS(SEM). 0.00 points.

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3011 must also register for ENGL UN3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture.
Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3011 must also register for ENGL UN3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL UN3001. The seminar both elaborates upon the topics taken up in the lecture and introduces other theories and methodologies. It also focuses on training students to integrate the terms, techniques, and critical approaches covered in both parts of the course into their own critical writing, building up from brief close readings to longer research papers

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3011
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3011 001/15251 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Bwy Alfred Lerner Hall
Megan Lonsinger 0.00 9/15
ENGL 3011 002/15252 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
602 Northwest Corner
Connor Spencer 0.00 15/15
ENGL 3011 003/15253 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
602 Northwest Corner
Julia Bannon 0.00 15/15
ENGL 3011 004/15254 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
253 Engineering Terrace
Amy Barenboim 0.00 16/15
ENGL 3011 005/15255 Th 10:10am - 12:00pm
301m Fayerweather
Grant Miner 0.00 16/15
Spring 2024: ENGL UN3011
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3011 001/12319 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
602 Northwest Corner
Shanelle Kim 0.00 11/15
ENGL 3011 002/12321 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
253 Engineering Terrace
Alina Shubina 0.00 10/15
ENGL 3011 003/12323 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
329 Uris Hall
Ali Yalgin 0.00 8/15
ENGL 3011 004/12324 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
707 Hamilton Hall
Andrea Penman-Lomeli 0.00 14/15
ENGL 3011 005/12326 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm
302 Fayerweather
Aidan Levy 0.00 16/15

Medieval

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

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3892
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3892 001/11896 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
308a Lewisohn Hall
David Yerkes 4.00 15/18

ENGL UN3794 Trees. 4.00 points.

Trees shadow the human in faceless fashion. They mark of a form of deep-time AN record and respond to ecological devastation and abundance. Symbolic of the strange proximity of the divine in numerous different religious and literary traditions, trees figure as alter-egos or doubles for human lives and after-lives (in figures like the trees of life and salvation, trees of wisdom and knowledge, genealogical trees). As prostheses of thought and knowledge, they become synonymous with structure and form, supports for linguistic and other genres of mapping, and markers of organization and reading. As key sources of energy, trees –as we know them today -- are direct correlates with the rise of the Anthropocene. Trees are thus both shadows and shade: that is, they are coerced doubles of the human and as entry ways to an other-world that figure at the limits of our ways of defining thought and language. By foregrounding how deeply embedded trees are in world-wide forms of self-definition and cultural expression, this course proposes a deeper understanding of the way in which the environment is a limit-figure in the humanities’ relation to its “natural” others. This course assumes that the “real” and the “literary” are not opposed to one another, but are intimately co-substantial. To think “climate” or “environment” is not merely a matter of the sciences, rather, it is through looking at how the humanities situates “the tree” as a means of self-definition that we can have a more thorough understanding of our current ecological, political, and social climate. Foregrounding an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, this course includes material from eco-criticism, philosophy, religion, art history, indigenous and cultural and post-colonial studies. It will begin by coupling medieval literary texts with theoretical works, but will expand (and contract) to other time periods and geographic locales

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3794
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3794 001/11918 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
329 Uris Hall
Patricia Dailey 4.00 23/18

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

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4729
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4729 001/11904 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
310 Fayerweather
Eleanor Johnson 3.00 45/90
ENGL 4729 AU1/20813 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
Othr Other
Eleanor Johnson 3.00 5/10

CLEN UN3243 MYSTICISM. 3.00 points.

This course covers a wide range of male- and female-authored mystical texts (poetry and prose) ranging in date from Late Antiquity to the fifteenth centuries and provides an introduction to some of the major medieval Christian mystical texts in the Western tradition. In addition, we will see how the legacy of mysticism has permeated later philosophical traditions and contemporary culture, whether it be in Descartes’ meditations, contemporary narratives of psychedelic experiences, or in representations of outsiders in film. Throughout our readings, we will confront the question of what mysticism means, how women’s and men’s mystical texts compare, and how “literariness” impacts mystical experience. How does poetic form or literary prose shape the nature of mystical experience? What do we make of the insistence on bodily experience and on the appearance of biography? How does it relate to the role of exemplarity, pedagogy, hermeneutics, or to narrative in general? Where do we find the language and tropes of mysticism in contemporary culture and to what end? Texts will include works by St. Paul, St. Augustine, Origen, Beatrice of Nazareth and her hagiographer, Hadewijch of Brabant and William of St. Thierry, Bonaventure and Angela of Foligno, Marguerite d'Oignt and Guigo II, St. Francis and St. Claire, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, St. Juan de la Cruz and Teresa of Avila Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton and Richard Rolle. Middle English texts (Julian, Rolle, Hilton, and Margery) will be available in Middle English; all other texts will, however, be read in modern English translation. No prerequisites necessary. Assignments will include: two written papers (6 pp) and weekly responses to prompts

Fall 2023: CLEN UN3243
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3243 001/11906 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
516 Hamilton Hall
Patricia Dailey 3.00 35/54

Renaissance

ENGL UN3335 SHAKESPEARE I. 3.00 points.

Enrollment is limited to 60.

(Lecture). This course will cover the histories, comedies, tragedies, and poetry of Shakespeare’s early career. We will examine the cultural and historical conditions that informed Shakespeare’s drama and poetry; in the case of drama, we will also consider the formal constraints and opportunities of the early modern English commercial theater. We will attend to Shakespeare’s biography while considering his work in relation to that of his contemporaries. Ultimately, we will aim to situate the production of Shakespeare’s early career within the highly collaborative, competitive, and experimental theatrical and literary cultures of late sixteenth-century England

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3335
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3335 001/11891 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
503 Hamilton Hall
James Stephen Shapiro 3.00 49/55

ENGL GU4214 Milton, Colonization, Revolution. 3.00 points.

This course will look at the major works of the poet, polemicist, and revolutionary John Milton in the context of seventeenth-century English intellectual, religious, political, military and colonial events. In addition to reading Milton’s shorter poems, major prose (including Areopagitica), and the full text of Paradise Lost, we will look at the authors and agents whose activities and writings helped to create the conditions in which he wrote: poets and agitators, natural scientists and utopians, sectarians and prophets, colonists and enslavers, revolutionaries and regicides. The class will pay particular attention to political debates about freedom and tyranny and to the colonial efforts (particularly in Virginia, Ireland and Barbados) that subtended both the English revolution and Milton’s own work

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4214
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4214 001/14176 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Julie Crawford 3.00 29/54
ENGL 4214 AU1/20812 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
Othr Other
Julie Crawford 3.00 2/2

ENGL GU4702 TUDOR-STUART DRAMA. 3.00 points.

This course investigates the boldly experimental world of early modern drama beyond Shakespeare. The opening of London’s commercial playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century fundamentally changed the nature of popular entertainment in England, offering eager spectators an array of secular drama for the first time. The playwrights who wrote for these theaters collaborated and competed with each other to produce moving tragedies, eviscerating social satires, and fantastic romances, upending ideas about how theater worked as regularly as they invented them. We will read a range of playwrights and kinds of plays, asking how this drama intervened in the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and politics that defined early modern England and shaped its future. We will also spend time discussing the plays in performance, attending to how the conditions of staging influence literary meaning. Finally, we will give attention to the performance styles and techniques of those actors who, in inspiring admiration and adoration as they realized these plays onstage, became London’s very first celebrities

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4702
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4702 001/13698 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Lauren Robertson 3.00 16/54
ENGL 4702 AU1/20811 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
Othr Other
Lauren Robertson 3.00 2/2

ENGL UN3847 Friendship and the Early American Frontier. 4.00 points.

This seminar interrogates friendship in theory and in practice in Anglophone colonial America. Friendship, when satisfying, seems simple andstraightforward, a meeting of like minds and hearts. But early Americans just as often as not experienced disorienting frustrations in their intimate social lives, dissatisfactions that led them to reflect more broadly on problems inherent to civic and political community, as well as problems unique to collective life the colonial context. This course hones skills of close reading on literary, documentary, and philosophical texts, examining them for the challenges to friendship that their manifest and latent contents propose. Students will write a shorter midterm paper (8-10 pp) and a longer final paper (15-20 pp) to showcase their apprehension of the course content. Readings indicated for a particular week should be completed by that week

18th and 19th Century

ENGL UN3398 Odd Women in Victorian England. 4.00 points.

Victorian England remains known for its rigid definitions of femininity, but it also produced a remarkable number of “odd women”: female outlaws, eccentrics, and activists including spinsters, feminists, working women, women who desired other women, and people assigned female at birth who lived as men. This undergraduate seminar will explore the pains and pleasures of gender non-conformity through the lens of nineteenth-century literary works, historical documents, and foundational theories of gender and sexuality. Readings will include the diaries of Anne Lister, a wealthy Yorkshire lesbian libertine; a slander trial involving accusations of lesbianism at a Scottish all-girls school; the diaries of Hannah Munby, a London servant whose upper-class lover fetishized her physical strength; the autobiography of Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who traveled the world; and fiction, including Charlotte Bronte’s novel *Villette; *Margaret Oliphant’s novel *Miss Marjoribanks; *Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market”; and Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire tale “Carmilla.” Application instructions: E-mail Professor Marcus (sm2247@columbia.edu) with your name, school, major, year of study, and a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3398
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3398 001/11930 W 6:10pm - 8:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Sharon Marcus 4.00 12/18

ENGL UN3387 AUSTEN, ELIOT, JAMES. 4.00 points.

A study of the work of three writers most often credited with developing the narrative techniques of the modern Anglo-American novel, who also produced some of their culture’s most influential stories of female autonomy. What do the choices of young women in the nineteenth century— their ability to exercise freedoms, the forces that balk or frustrate those freedoms, even their choices to relinquish them— have to do with the ways that novels are shaped, with the technical devices and edicts (free indirect discourse, ‘show don’t tell,’ etc.) that become dominant in the novel’s form? One or two texts by each author read carefully, with attention to relevant critical discussions of recent decades

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3387
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3387 001/11913 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
253 Engineering Terrace
Nicholas Dames 4.00 14/18

CLEN UN3335 Poetry and Philosophy. 4.00 points.

Since Plato, poets and philosophers have been at odds as often as they have cross-pollinated. How should we think about the relation between these two discourses? In this seminar we will put the following dictum of Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the test: “No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.” We will read philosophical poetry, poetic philosophy, and texts that don’t seem to quite fit in any genre. What makes certain poets particularly inspiring to philosophers, and vice versa? How does each group appropriate the tools of the other for their own purposes? We will be especially interested in the question of how poetic language offers a mode of thinking that may be philosophical in character, but is also fundamentally different from the conceptual and argumentative constraints of philosophy as it is usually conceived. The first part of the class will be focused on the Romantic period, especially the two central philosophical Romantic poets: William Wordsworth and Friedrich Hölderlin. In the second part of the class, we will read several contemporary poets who are redefining the philosophical power of poetry in our time. Our focus will be on deep thinking, and slow, close reading. In addition to two papers, you will choose between a presentation, a commentary, or writing a poem for a more creative assignment. All readings will be provided in English, but having studied German will be useful

Fall 2023: CLEN UN3335
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3335 001/15235 Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm
1102 International Affairs Bldg
Joseph Albernaz 4.00 13/18

ENGL UN3946 Movement and Feeling in the 18th Century. 4 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

Literature, we like to say, moves us. We also say that it makes us feel for others, moved on their behalf. This seminar asks what it means to think of literary experience as both feeling for someone (but whom?) and traveling to someplace (but where?). We will trace the history of this connection between motion and emotion back to the Restoration and eighteenth century, an age of remarkable expansion for the British Empire. Though travel and sentiment are often kept separate in studies of this exuberant period, we will find that British writers working across a range of genres—novels, plays, poems, sermons, journals, and philosophical treatises—frequently drew the two together. Their works raise questions about empire and relocation even as they contribute to a new psychological and textual emphasis on the sympathetic heart. Slaves, prisoners, servants, and political or religious outliers test this emphasis, and we’ll discuss how our authors by turns facilitate and foreclose emotional identification with them.

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3946
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3946 001/11908 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm
507 Philosophy Hall
Jenny Davidson, Dustin Stewart 4 17/18

CLEN GU4820 Comparative Romanticisms. 3 points.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the explosion of Romanticism: a sweeping cultural movement that developed alongside—and deeply impacted—revolutions in politics, philosophy, industry, and the arts. Romanticism not only spanned multiple media (literature, visual art, music), but also was in essential ways a trans-national phenomenon, with rich cultural cross-pollinations among a number of countries and languages.


This course will introduce literary Romanticism as what William Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age,” primarily in the comparative contexts of Great Britain, Germany, and France. We will explore similar themes and concerns in some of the major writers in these traditions, and also ask what makes each “Romanticism” singular to its time and place. One particular thread for our inquiry will concern how writers confronted crisis and creativity in the religious sphere during a time of political upheaval. From the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a “new mythology,” to William Blake’s “Bible of Hell,” to Mary Shelley’s “modern Prometheus” and Victor Hugo’s wrestling with God and Satan, what new gods come to the fore in Romanticism, and what is their legacy today?


While our main focus will remain on Britain, Germany, and France, we will also glance at contemporaneous Romantic currents in Italy, India, and the United States. All readings will be provided in English translation, but students with reading knowledge of French and/or German are encouraged to read texts in the original languages.

Fall 2023: CLEN GU4820
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4820 001/14175 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Joseph Albernaz 3 27/54

ENGL GU4407 VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 3.00 points.

A wide-ranging introduction to British literature in the age of Victoria (1837-1901), focusing on the many-faceted cultural impact of unprecedented material change. Victorian Britain was the world’s first industrial society, at its zenith the most powerful nation on earth, ruling an empire on which the sun proverbially never set.  But this manifold success, many writers feared, was subsuming all values in economic self-interest, and they responded by exploring sources of meaning and value outside the realm of exchange.  They were especially drawn to domestic life, centering on an ideal of selfless femininity, and to an ideal of “culture” as a realm of disinterested contemplation, immune to the demands of practicality (“So what do you do with an English major?”), and associated above all with the experience of literature and art.  Hence multi-volume novels of domestic life, lyrics of frustrated desire and agonizing doubt, and  an explosion of critical writing devoted to (among other things)  the social effects of industrialism, challenges to religious faith, the nature of art, the rise of mass culture, and new models of gender and sexuality.   We’ll be especially interested in a host of formal innovations—the serial novel, “sage writing,” the dramatic monologue, the “novel in verse,” melodrama, the short story—as they reshape the representation of personal identity and social life.  Authors include Dickens, Tennyson, Carlyle, Mill, George Eliot, R. Browning, E.B. Browning, Ruskin, Morris, Arnold, Pater, Stevenson, Kipling, and Wilde. 

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4407
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4407 001/11892 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
516 Hamilton Hall
James Adams 3.00 25/54

CLEN GU4723 18th C Comparative Novel. 4 points.

This course encompasses a series of readings in the eighteenth-century European novel.  Style, narratology, the “rise” of realism and the history of novel criticism will all figure in our discussions; the seminar offers a theoretical rather than a thoroughly historical survey, and should serve as groundwork for considering questions about style and the novel in other periods and national traditions.

Fall 2023: CLEN GU4723
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4723 001/11932 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
607 Hamilton Hall
Jenny Davidson 4 14/18

ENGL GU4619 AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE I. 3.00 points.

(Lecture). This lecture course is intended as the first half of the basic survey in African-American literature. By conducting close readings of selected song lyrics, slave narratives, fiction, poetry, and autobiography, we will focus on major writers in the context of cultural history. In so doing, we will explore the development of the African- American literary tradition. Writers include, but are not limited to, Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, Harper, Dunbar, Chestnutt, Washington, Du Bois, and Larsen. Course requirements: class attendance, an in-class midterm exam, a five-page paper, and a final exam

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4619
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4619 001/11911 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
516 Hamilton Hall
Robert O'Meally 3.00 24/54

20th and 21st Century

ENGL UN3520 Introduction To Asian American Literature and Culture. 3 points.

This course is a survey of Asian North American literature and its contexts.  To focus our discussion, the course centers on examining recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. The second section of the course will focus on how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines; to the development of the model minority mythology during the Cold War. The final section will examine intimacies and exclusions in contemporary forms of migration, diaspora, and community communities.

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3520
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3520 001/11910 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Denise Cruz 3 106/120

ENGL UN3863 Dramatic Breakups. 3.00 points.

Modern drama keeps on breaking up. From the moment a stage door slammed shut on a failed marriage in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879), dramatic breakups no longer seemed the purview of tragedy, but rather a harbinger of new social potentialities. Modern stages helped to invent the notion of the romantic breakup that we have received today, and yet love was not all that shattered in the modern theater. After rupturing romances, modern playwrights went on to fracture families, upend political institutions, demolish scenic spaces, and ultimately, explode the form of drama itself. This course provides an introduction to twentieth and twenty-first century theater by surveying the many things that it breaks: hearts, homes, ideologies, and dramatic forms. We will examine the contention that drama, as a form in which conflict and transformation are vividly enacted, provides a critical lens for examining the dissolution of relationships at a wide range of scales, including the national, imperial, and ecological. In our encounters with diverse dramatic materials from the late nineteenth century to the present, we will explore how, when, and towards what end drama reimagined itself as “modern.” Students will read approximately two plays each week and will have the option to present a creative response to our course materials at the conclusion of the semester

ENGL GU4826 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

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4826
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4826 001/13697 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Rachel Adams 3.00 19/54

ENGL UN3241 African American Literature: The Essay. 4 points.

According to literary critic Cheryl A. Wall, African American writers have done their most influential work in the essay form. Using Wall’s scholarship as a starting point, this course explores essays by a distinguished group of writers from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison to consider the centrality of this understudied form to African American writing.

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3241
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3241 001/11935 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
401 Hamilton Hall
Farah Griffin 4 11/18

ENGL UN3228 Aldous Huxley. 4 points.

The course proposes to examine the major works of Aldous Huxley as vital contributions to the emerging 20th century canon of modernism, internationalism, pacifism, spiritualism, and the psychology of modern consciousness. Critical studies of Huxley have typically split his work into two phases—social satire and mysticism—that roughly correspond to Huxley’s perceived oscillation between cynicism and religiosity. This course proposes a less disjunctive approach to his writings. Huxley’s starkly dystopian vision in Brave New World often overshadowed his earnest endeavors to find a meeting point between mainstream Western thought and the philosophical traditions of the non-Western world, particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism. His early novels, including Brave New World, bear traces of his deep-seated spiritual quest, even as his works were steeped in critiques of the ominous trends towards regimentation and authoritarian control of the social body. 


As a novelist of ideas, Huxley gave voice to the most vexing intellectual and moral conflicts of his time, refusing to retreat into the solipsism of experimental writing while at the same time searching for wholeness in Eastern meditative systems. This course probes Huxley’s writings from a multitude of angles, examining his works (both fiction and nonfiction) in the context of evolutionary, secular thought, while also reading them as strivings towards models of world peace inspired, to some extent, by mystical thought. The latter invoked concepts drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought, alongside Christian mysticism and Taoism, in an eclectic practice that Huxley called “the perennial philosophy.” Organized chronologically, course readings include Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Perennial Philosophy (1944), Ape and Essence (1948), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Doors of Perception (1954), The Genius and the Goddess (1955), Island (1962), and The Divine Within (1992). This course will be of importance especially to students interested in the intersections of 20th century British modernist literature and non-Western philosophical and religious systems, as well as more generally to students interested in an intensive study of one of the 20th century’s most prolific authors.

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3228
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3228 001/11915 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Schiff Earl Hall
Gauri Viswanathan 4 15/18

CLEN UN3905 What is Art For? Modernism and the Problem of Autonomy. 4 points.

This seminar explores the meaning of aesthetic autonomy for 20th- and 21st-century art and literature. Modernist artists are famous for fomenting revolutions in form and value. But did those revolutions attack the idea of aesthetic autonomy or entrench it? The critics disagree. For every poet like T. S. Ellio, committed to aesthetic autonomy, there's another like Bertolt Brecht, who seeks to reconnect art and society. The seminar begins by illustrating the split character of modernist attitudes towards autonomy, moves on to classic modern accounts of aesthetic autonomy, surveys a variety of modernist assaults on autonomous form, and concludes by illustrating the stakes of such debates for contemporary writers and theorists. This seminar will appeal to students with an interest in the philosophy of art, literary theory, and the history and future of modernist culture.

Fall 2023: CLEN UN3905
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3905 001/11939 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm
401 Hamilton Hall
Matthew Hart 4 13/18

ENGL UN3480 The Novel after the Age of Literature. 4.00 points.

What is the value of literature today, amid dire predictions about its waning cultural authority and shrinking popularity? In this seminar, we'll explore this question by studying major variants of the contemporary novel that are responding to the cultural, social, and economic forces restructuring literary culture, while also learning about the corporations, institutions, and readers who mediate their production, circulation, and reception. Based on the novel's relative social prevalence from the 1800s on in Britain and America, literary scholars have often ascribed grand effects to the fonn: it has shaped modern ideas about the self, organized people's sense of national belonging, and even fueled protests that prompted political change. Can we say as much today? Access to traditional literary culture, while it has always been exclusive based on race, gender, and class, appears to be contracting due to the ongoing erosion of its socioeconomic suppmts: affordable education, well-funded publishing, secure paid work, and ample leisure time. Meanwhile, novels exist in an increasingly crowded media field that includes television, film, video games, and social media, all of which may be said to have a greater hold on our limited attention. How has the novel adapted to these conditions? How should we adapt our understanding of the novel in response? This course begins with two cases from the British tradition to explore ideas about the form and function of the novel across what scholars have called the period of"literary dominance": Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005). The changing form and function of the novel will then be examined through analysis of four major trends in twenty-first­century literary culture: the rise of hybrid literary-genre fiction (Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel); the feminization of literary work (Colleen Hoover and Delia Owens); the proliferation of autofiction (Ocean Vuong and Patricia Lockwood); and evolutions in the metaliterary novel (Isabel Waidner and Ruth Ozeki). Through class discussion, literary-critical writing, and a literary-sociological project, where students will analyze the way readers talk about novels online, this course develops interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate the many forms that novels and novel-reading (including via audiobook) are taking today

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3480
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3480 001/15169 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
302 Alfred Lerner Hall
Patrick Anson 4.00 12/15

CLEN GU4644 REVOLUTION IN/ON THE CARIBBEAN. 4.00 points.

Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and the Cuban Revolution (1959-1976). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize politics through language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers such as Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Reinaldo Arenas, Michelle Cliff, and V.S. Naipaul, among others. We will also read essays by Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Paul Breslin, A. James Arnold, Phyllis Taoua, Robin D.G. Kelley, Brad Epps, Kimberle Lopez, Bruce King, Maria Elena Lima, Yoani Sánchez, and Audre Lorde. In addition, we will listen to a variety of music by Caribbean and African American musicians that take revolution as its theme in form and/or content

Fall 2023: CLEN GU4644
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4644 001/11922 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
304 Hamilton Hall
Frances Negron-Muntaner 4.00 20/18

ENGL GU4669 Hollywood's Countercultural Cinema: Movies of the 1970s. 4.00 points.

You will be asked to watch a lot of movies for this course. Some of the films will be assigned primarily to provide background and will receive only glancing attention in class; others (as indicated) will be the focus of our discussion. Your postings on Courseworks will draw from both categories of assigned films

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4669
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4669 001/11931 Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm
509 Hamilton Hall
Maura Spiegel 4.00 19/22

ENGL UN3488 Silence and Screaming: the Sound of African American Literature. 4.00 points.

Why and when do we scream or remain silent? Do we scream out of joy or in terror? Do we remain silent out of respect or fear? Perhaps more importantly, who screams (or who do we scream at), and who remains silent? And how do we register those sonic utterances in between the extremes of screaming and silence, the groans, moans, coughs, and grunts that resist transcription? This course develops out of the convergence between the study of African American Literature and Sound Studies to examine the affective and political resonances of these auditory modes. In this course we will think about how screaming, silence, and utterances are embodied auditory practices marked by race, gender, and sexuality that the artists on this syllabus transcribe into text, music, and image. These three auditory modes, screaming, silence, and utterance, share the commonality of being difficult to transcribe into written text and of being difficult to understand: they resist singularity and definition. In this course we will examine how writers, composers, performers, and directors engage in the ambivalences of these auditory modes. Our goal is not to remove that ambivalence, to clearly or definitively decide what something means, but to investigate the multiplicity contained within that ambivalence. No prerequisites

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3488
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3488 001/15201 M 10:10am - 12:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Alex Valin 4.00 6/15

ENGL UN3790 ‘The Rich are Different from Us’: Wealth in American Literature and Culture, 1913-2022. 4.00 points.

To say “wealth” is to say “class,” which is also to say “manners” and “snobbery,” and, especially in America, is to say vaulting “ambition.” This course examines how the amassing of wealth --individual & corporate-- creates class tensions and social manners over the course of a century. And we will conduct this examination aware that to make these matters explicit disturbs some basic American habits of mind that prefer fictions of egalitarianism. As Lionel Trilling observed in 1950: “Americans appear to believe that to touch accurately on the matter of class, to take full note of snobbery, is somehow to demean themselves…We don’t deny that we have classes and snobbery, but we seem to hold it indelicate to take precise cognizance of these phenomena. As if we felt that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled.” Among the topics/figures to be studied: the “New Woman” divorcee (Wharton), the social climbing arriviste (Fitzgerald), the pathologies of wealth (Chesnutt, Fitzgerald), the Black elite (Chesnutt, West), corporate capitalism as it colonizes the human body (Powers), wealth and post modernism (Diaz)

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3790
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3790 001/13702 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Sat Alfred Lerner Hall
Ross Posnock 4.00 15/18

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

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3832
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3832 001/11921 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
467 Ext Schermerhorn Hall
Ross Posnock 4.00 16/18

Special Topics

ENGL UN3795 SENIOR ESSAY RESEARCH METHODS. 3.00 points.

The senior essay research methods seminar, offered in several sections in the fall semester, lays out the basic building blocks of literary and cultural studies. What kinds of questions do literary and cultural critics ask, and what kinds of evidence do they invoke to support their arguments? What formal properties characterize pieces of criticism that we find especially interesting and/or successful? How do critics balance the desire to say something fresh vis-a-vis the desire to say something sensible and true? What mix of traditional and innovative tools will best serve you as a critical writer? Voice, narrative, form, language, history, theory and the practice known as “close reading” will be considered in a selection of exemplary critical readings. Readings will also include “how-to” selections from recent guides including Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I Write the Book, Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style and Aaron Ritzenberg and Sue Mendelsohn’s How Scholars Write. The methods seminar is designed to prepare those students who choose to write a senior essay to complete a substantial independent project in the subsequent semester. Individual assignments will help you discover, define and refine a topic; design and pursue a realistic yet thrilling research program or set of protocols; practice “close reading” an object (not necessarily verbal or textual) of interest; work with critical sources to develop your skills of description and argument; outline your project; build out several sections of the project in more detail; and come up with a timeline for your spring semester work. In keeping with the iterative nature of scholarly research and writing, the emphasis is more on process than on product, but you will end the semester with a clear plan for your essay itself as well as for the tasks you will execute to achieve that vision the following semester. The methods seminar is required of all students who wish to write a senior essay in their final semester. Students who enroll in the methods seminar and decide not to pursue a senior essay in the spring will still receive credit for the fall course

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3795
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3795 001/15199 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
401 Hamilton Hall
Jenny Davidson 3.00 20/18
ENGL 3795 002/15334 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
201 Casa Hispanica
Julie Peters 3.00 17/18
ENGL 3795 003/20647 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
402b International Affairs Bldg
Rebecca Pawel 3.00 14/18

ENGL UN3943 ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 4.00 points.

English translations of the Bible from Tyndale to the present

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3943
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3943 001/11907 T 10:10am - 12:00pm
612 Philosophy Hall
David Yerkes 4.00 17/18

ENGL UN3402 Language Rights and Wrongs. 4.00 points.

This course examines public battles over language in American and invites you to situate your linguistic history in the larger context of thesebattles. We will ask, Is Northern English more correct than Southern English? Are Black English speakers disadvantaged in the job market? Should English be our national language? What should the language of instruction be in public schools? Do nonbinary students have a right to determine the pronouns their professors use to address them? These language rights battles play out in Congress, the courts, and classrooms. At stake are voting access, employment rights, learning opportunities, and the pathway to American citizenship. The first half of the semester will introduce you to sociolinguists’ understandings of language differences. We will put their research in conversation with the lived experiences of diverse Americans by exploring a number of literacy narratives. And as a class, we will carry out research to study the language attitudes and experiences of members of our own community. The second half of the semester features a series of case studies—legal cases, school board fights, academic battles, legislation—that will lay bare the surprising disagreements between what sociolinguists understand about language and what laypeople passionately believe about it. The goal of the course is to equip you to address language rights in ways that account for research and people’s lived experiences

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3402
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3402 001/14145 Th 10:10am - 12:00pm
311 Fayerweather
Susan Mendelsohn 4.00 12/18

CLEN W3740 The Thirties: Metropole and Colony. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission.

(Seminar). This course focuses on the tumultuous 1930s, which witnessed the growth of anticolonial movements, the coming to power of totalitarian and fascist regimes, and calls for internationalism and a new world vision, among other developments. Even as fascism laid down its roots in parts of Europe, the struggle for independence from European colonial rule accelerated in Asia and Africa, and former subjects engaged with ideas and images about the shape of their new nations, in essays, fiction, poetry, and theater. Supporters and critics of nationalism existed on both sides of the metropole-colony divide, as calls for internationalism sought to stem the rising tide of ethnocentric thinking and racial particularism in parts of Europe as well as the colonies. We'll read works from the metropole and the colonies to track the crisscrossing of ideas, beginning with writers who anticipated the convulsive events of the 1930s and beyond (E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Gandhi), then moving on to writers who published some of their greatest work in the 1930s (Huxley, Woolf, C.L.R. James, Mulk Raj Anand), and finally concluding with authors who reassessed the 1930s from a later perspective (George Lamming). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 13th, with the subject heading, "The Thirties seminar." In your message, include basic information: name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN UN3983 WRITING ACROSS MEDIA. 4 points.

This course is structured as a comparative investigation of innovative modernist and postmodernist strategies for conjoining or counterpoising literature with other media, such as photography, painting, film, music, and dance. We will focus on experimental writing practices that deliberately combine disciplines and genres — mixing political commentary with memoir, philosophy with ethnography, journalism with history — with special attention to the ways that formal innovation lends itself to political critique. The course will be especially concerned with the ways that the friction among media seems to allow new or unexpected expressive possibilities. The syllabus is structured to allow us to consider a variety of edges between literature and other media — spaces where writing is sometimes taken to be merely raw material to be set, or ancillary comment on a work already composed (e.g. libretto, screenplay, gloss, caption, song lyric, voiceover, liner note). Examples may include lecture-performances by Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Spalding Gray, and Anne Carson; talk-dances by Bill T. Jones and Jerome Bel; sound poems by Kurt Schwitters, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka; graphic novels by Art Spiegelman, Joshua Dysart, and Alison Bechdel; language-centered visual art by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Martha Rosler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat; texts including photographs or drawings by Wallker Evans and James Agee, Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon, Theresa Cha, John Yau, and John Keene; and hypertext/online compositions by Shelley Jackson, among others. Requirements will include in-class presentations and regular short structured writing assignments, as well as a 10-12 page final research paper. 

Fall 2023: CLEN UN3983
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3983 001/11894 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
476b Alfred Lerner Hall
Brent Edwards 4 14/18

ENTA UN3701 DRAMA, THEATRE AND THEORY. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission. (Seminar). Theatre typically exceeds the claims of theory. What does this tell us about both theatre and theory? We will consider why theatre practitioners often provide the most influential theoretical perspectives, how the drama inquires into (among other things) the possibilities of theatre, and the various ways in which the social, spiritual, performative, political, and aesthetic elements of drama and theatre interact. Two papers, weekly responses, and a class presentation are required. Readings include Aristotle, Artaud, Bharata, Boal, Brecht, Brook, Castelvetro, Craig, Genet, Grotowski, Ibsen, Littlewood, Marlowe, Parks, Schechner, Shakespeare, Sowerby, Weiss, and Zeami. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading Drama, Theatre, Theory 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. 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

Fall 2023: ENTA UN3701
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENTA 3701 001/11928 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
318 Hamilton Hall
Austin Quigley 4.00 12/15

AMST UN3930 Topics in American Studies. 4 points.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies website for course descriptions for each section. americanstudies.columbia.edu

Fall 2023: AMST UN3930
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 3930 001/11940 T 10:10am - 12:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
James Stephen Shapiro 4 10/18
AMST 3930 002/11948 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Mark Lilla 4 13/18
AMST 3930 003/11960 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Roosevelt Montas 4 19/18
AMST 3930 004/11962 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Hilary-Anne Hallett 4 13/18
AMST 3930 005/11963 Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Michael Hindus 4 15/18
AMST 3930 006/12009 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
311 Fayerweather
Casey Blake 4 13/18
AMST 3930 007/12015 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
309 Hamilton Hall
John McWhorter 4 12/18

ENTA UN3707 Memes, Metaphors, and Performances. 4.00 points.

From millenary ritual songs to deep fried Wojaks, memes have always been an integral part of how we transfer cultural information. Since their mainstream widespread in 2008, memes have shifted from being mere online entertainment to a tool for disseminating worldviews and modes of understanding. In recent years, memes have shown to have the capacity to affect political elections. Understanding these cultural objects has become a pressing task, allowing the development of the research field of memetics. By outsourcing their reproducibility to the user, memes provide us with an opportunity to question our own social structures. In this course we’ll take a deep dive into the liminal world of memes, using metaphor and performance theory. We’ll explore their conceptual origins, discuss cultural memetic examples throughout history, and apply that understanding to our current political landscape. Since current memes are designed to take advantage of the different social media algorithms, new formats emerge all the time. In each class we’ll discuss a text or a movie alongside a meme format, and use the assigned theoretical framework to close-read memes and their cultural consequences. How can we use them as an effective tool in today’s realist capitalism? How does our role as users affect the social media algorithm and its tightly controlled echo chambers? Each participant will engage with these questions via weekly discussions and writing explorations. By the end of the semester, everybody will develop a personal project, exploring the ideas we’ve seen

Fall 2023: ENTA UN3707
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENTA 3707 001/15200 M 12:10pm - 2:00pm
302 Fayerweather
Eduardo Pavez Goye 4.00 9/15

ENGL GU4898 THE BILDUNGSROMAN: COMING OF AGE IN THE NOVEL. 3.00 points.

The bildungsroman is the modern, realist version of the hero’s quest. Instead of slaying dragons and weaving spells, the protagonist of the bildungsroman struggles with what it means to become an adult – or to refuse to. Also known as the novel of development or coming-of-age novel, the bildungsroman typically focuses on growth and development, the cultivation of the self, and the tensions between individual and society, idealism and realism, dreamy inertia and future-oriented action. The reading list spans coming-of-age novels from Germany, France, England, and the United States, from the 1790s through the 2010s. Lectures will focus on the novel as a literary form in dialogue with other literary works; with historical events; and with ideas drawn from philosophy, psychology, and sociology. The course will address questions that include: what is society, what is a self, and what is the shape of a human life? What fosters human development and what thwarts it? How do coming-of-age novels engage with social norms concerning love, work, personhood, and maturity? The earliest novels of development focused on the dilemmas faced by white, middle-class men; how have subsequent works represented the challenges that non-dominant subjects encounter? This is a 3-point lecture course. In accordance with university guidelines, you should expect to spend about six hours per week outside of class doing the course reading, which will consist entirely of novels and vary from ~150 to ~300 pages per week

Fall 2023: ENGL GU4898
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4898 001/11919 T Th 6:10pm - 7:25pm
614 Schermerhorn Hall
Sharon Marcus 3.00 72/120
ENGL 4898 AU1/20809 T Th 6:10pm - 7:25pm
Othr Other
Sharon Marcus 3.00 9/15

University Writing

ENGL CC1010 UNIVERSITY WRITING. 3.00 points.

ENGL CC/GS1010: University Writing, is a one-semester seminar designed to facilitate students’ entry into the intellectual life of the university by teaching them to become more capable and independent academic readers and writers. The course emphasizes habits of mind and skills that foster students’ capacities for critical analysis, argument, revision, collaboration, meta-cognition, and research. Students read and discuss essays from a number of fields, complete regular informal reading and writing exercises, compose several longer essays, and devise a research-based project of their own design. Courses of Instruction ENGL CC1010 University Writing. 3 points. ENGL CC/GS1010: University Writing (3 points) focuses on developing students’ reading, writing, and thinking, drawing from readings on a designated course theme that carry a broad appeal to people with diverse interests. No University Writing class presumes that students arrive with prior knowledge in the theme of the course. We are offering the following themes this year: UW: Contemporary Essays, CC/GS1010.001-.099 UW: Readings in American Studies, CC/GS1010.1xx UW: Readings in Gender and Sexuality, CC/GS1010.2xx UW: Readings in Film and Performing Arts, CC/GS1010.3xx UW: Readings in Urban Studies, CC/GS1010.4xx (will be sharing 400s with Human Rights) UW: Readings in Climate Humanities, CC/GS1010.5xx (will be sharing 500s with Data & Society) UW: Readings in Medical Humanities, CC/GS1010.6xx UW: Readings in Law & Justice, CC/GS1010.7xx UW: Readings in Race and Ethnicity, CC/GS1010.8xx University Writing for International Students, CC/GS1010.9xx For further details about these classes, please visit: http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/uwp

Fall 2023: ENGL CC1010
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 1010 005/18346 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
201d Philosophy Hall
Aaron Ritzenberg 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 015/18402 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
407 Hamilton Hall
Allison Fowler 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 022/18405 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
425 Pupin Laboratories
Joseph Bubar 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 026/18406 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Shannon Hubbard 3.00 12/14
ENGL 1010 031/18419 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Wally Suphap 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 035/18411 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
408a Philosophy Hall
Genevieve Shuster 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 054/18417 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Noran Shaalan 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 104/18343 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Jessica Campbell 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 124/18383 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Hannah Gold 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 130/18407 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
201d Philosophy Hall
Alexander Burchfield 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 145/18392 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Austin Mantele 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 150/18396 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Austin Mantele 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 201/18399 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
307 Mathematics Building
Leia Bradley 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 211/18375 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Rachael DeWitt 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 219/18380 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Rachael DeWitt 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 233/18409 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
201d Philosophy Hall
Gabriella Etoniru 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 243/18414 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
608 Lewisohn Hall
Levi Catherine Hord 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 244/18391 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Natalie Adler 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 253/18416 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Ashley Thomas 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 303/18401 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
201d Philosophy Hall
Emily Garrison 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 334/18410 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
502 Northwest Corner
Ali Yalgin 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 346/18393 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Emily Weitzman 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 348/18415 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
507 Lewisohn Hall
Claudia Grigg Edo 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 351/18397 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Emily Weitzman 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 412/18376 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Kirkwood Adams 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 416/18378 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Seth Cosimini 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 417/18403 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Finn Anderson 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 425/18384 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Seth Cosimini 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 437/18387 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Therese Cox 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 441/18390 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Michael Druffel 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 449/18395 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
307 Mathematics Building
Therese Cox 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 452/18398 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Michael Druffel 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 514/18377 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Michael D'Addario 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 518/18379 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Aled Roberts 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 521/18381 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
502 Northwest Corner
Lauren Horst 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 523/18382 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Michael D'Addario 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 527/18385 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
502 Northwest Corner
Lauren Horst 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 528/18386 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Pranav Menon 3.00 12/14
ENGL 1010 538/18388 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
502 Northwest Corner
Michael Schoch 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 539/18412 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Benjamin Hulett 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 540/18389 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Kirkwood Adams 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 542/18413 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
507 Lewisohn Hall
Conor Macvarish 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 547/18394 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
502 Northwest Corner
Aled Roberts 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 606/18344 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
502 Northwest Corner
Kristie Schlauraff 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 702/18400 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
201b Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Furlong 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 707/18345 W 10:10am - 11:25am
201b Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Cargile 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 710/18374 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Cargile 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 736/18342 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Celine Aenlle-Rocha 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 809/18373 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Tejan Green Waszak 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 820/18404 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
307 Pupin Laboratories
Stephanie Wambugu 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 832/18408 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
307 Mathematics Building
Jehbreal Jackson 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 855/18418 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Zoe Hardwick 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 908/18347 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Walters 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 913/18348 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Walters 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 929/18349 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
502 Northwest Corner
Charles Green 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 956/18350 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Justin Snider 3.00 14/14
Spring 2024: ENGL CC1010
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 1010 004/15193 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
201b Philosophy Hall
Erag Ramizi 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 007/17168 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
408a Philosophy Hall
Maria Baker 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 011/18523 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
313 Pupin Laboratories
Kendall Collins 3.00 11/14
ENGL 1010 015/16184 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Megan Lonsinger 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 016/15194 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
507 Hamilton Hall
Glenn Gordon 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 022/16186 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
502 Northwest Corner
Shannon Hubbard 3.00 10/14
ENGL 1010 025/16630 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Allison Fowler 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 028/17013 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
201d Philosophy Hall
Valeria Tsygankova 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 034/16189 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
201d Philosophy Hall
Genevieve Shuster 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 049/16190 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
505 Lewisohn Hall
Noran Shaalan 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 051/15195 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
502 Northwest Corner
Elizabeth Furlong 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 052/16192 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
505 Lewisohn Hall
Joseph Bubar 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 107/15196 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Jessica Campbell 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 109/15197 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Jessica Campbell 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 112/15198 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Austin Mantele 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 117/15199 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Austin Mantele 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 129/16194 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Alexander Burchfield 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 206/15200 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
307 Mathematics Building
Rachael DeWitt 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 208/15201 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
307 Mathematics Building
Rachael DeWitt 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 219/16196 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Levi Catherine Hord 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 220/16198 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201 80 Claremont
Ashley Thomas 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 223/16200 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Andrea Jo 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 231/16201 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
502 Northwest Corner
Leia Bradley 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 235/16203 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Gabriella Etoniru 3.00 12/14
ENGL 1010 255/15202 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Natalie Adler 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 303/16204 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
201d Philosophy Hall
Emily Garrison 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 341/15203 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
323 River Side Church
Emily Weitzman 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 346/15204 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
323 River Side Church
Emily Weitzman 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 402/15205 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
408a Philosophy Hall
Michael Druffel 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 411/15206 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Michael Druffel 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 445/15207 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Kirkwood Adams 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 510/15208 M W 11:40am - 12:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Lauren Horst 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 513/15209 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
502 Northwest Corner
3.00 10/14
ENGL 1010 514/16205 M W 1:10pm - 2:25pm
507 Lewisohn Hall
Benjamin Hulett 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 518/15210 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
502 Northwest Corner
Aled Roberts 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 521/15211 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Lauren Horst 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 524/16207 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
505 Lewisohn Hall
Finn Anderson 3.00 11/14
ENGL 1010 533/15212 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
408a Philosophy Hall
Michael D'Addario 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 536/15213 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Michael Schoch 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 538/15214 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Michael D'Addario 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 540/15215 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
652 Schermerhorn Hall
Michael Schoch 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 542/16209 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
502 Northwest Corner
Conor Macvarish 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 550/15216 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Therese Cox 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 605/15217 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
502 Northwest Corner
Kristie Schlauraff 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 643/16210 T Th 1:10pm - 2:25pm
104 Knox Hall
Ayesha Verma 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 732/15218 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
502 Northwest Corner
Celine Aenlle-Rocha 3.00 11/14
ENGL 1010 739/15219 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Cargile 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 747/15220 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
201b Philosophy Hall
Elizabeth Cargile 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 748/15221 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
502 Northwest Corner
Celine Aenlle-Rocha 3.00 12/14
ENGL 1010 826/16631 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Zoe Hardwick 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 837/16213 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
104 Knox Hall
Jehbreal Jackson 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 844/15222 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Tejan Green Waszak 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 853/15223 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
408a Philosophy Hall
Tejan Green Waszak 3.00 14/14
ENGL 1010 901/16123 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
502 Northwest Corner
Charles Green 3.00 13/14
ENGL 1010 954/15224 T Th 5:40pm - 6:55pm
201d Philosophy Hall
Justin Snider 3.00 14/14

Senior Essay Methods Seminar

ENGL UN3795 SENIOR ESSAY RESEARCH METHODS. 3.00 points.

The senior essay research methods seminar, offered in several sections in the fall semester, lays out the basic building blocks of literary and cultural studies. What kinds of questions do literary and cultural critics ask, and what kinds of evidence do they invoke to support their arguments? What formal properties characterize pieces of criticism that we find especially interesting and/or successful? How do critics balance the desire to say something fresh vis-a-vis the desire to say something sensible and true? What mix of traditional and innovative tools will best serve you as a critical writer? Voice, narrative, form, language, history, theory and the practice known as “close reading” will be considered in a selection of exemplary critical readings. Readings will also include “how-to” selections from recent guides including Amitava Kumar’s Every Day I Write the Book, Eric Hayot’s The Elements of Academic Style and Aaron Ritzenberg and Sue Mendelsohn’s How Scholars Write. The methods seminar is designed to prepare those students who choose to write a senior essay to complete a substantial independent project in the subsequent semester. Individual assignments will help you discover, define and refine a topic; design and pursue a realistic yet thrilling research program or set of protocols; practice “close reading” an object (not necessarily verbal or textual) of interest; work with critical sources to develop your skills of description and argument; outline your project; build out several sections of the project in more detail; and come up with a timeline for your spring semester work. In keeping with the iterative nature of scholarly research and writing, the emphasis is more on process than on product, but you will end the semester with a clear plan for your essay itself as well as for the tasks you will execute to achieve that vision the following semester. The methods seminar is required of all students who wish to write a senior essay in their final semester. Students who enroll in the methods seminar and decide not to pursue a senior essay in the spring will still receive credit for the fall course

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3795
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3795 001/15199 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
401 Hamilton Hall
Jenny Davidson 3.00 20/18
ENGL 3795 002/15334 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
201 Casa Hispanica
Julie Peters 3.00 17/18
ENGL 3795 003/20647 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
402b International Affairs Bldg
Rebecca Pawel 3.00 14/18

Spring 2024

Introduction to the Major

ENGL UN3001 LITERARY TEXTS & CRIT METHODS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods.
Prerequisites: Students who register for ENGL UN3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the advanced study of literature. Students will read works from different genres (poetry, drama, and prose fiction), drawn from the medieval period to the present day, learning the different interpretative techniques required by each. The course also introduces students to a variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing them with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing. This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL UN3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken as early as possible in a students career. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures

Fall 2023: ENGL UN3001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3001 001/11905 T 10:10am - 11:25am
702 Hamilton Hall
Edward Mendelson 4.00 71/75
ENGL 3001 AU1/20808 T 10:10am - 11:25am
Othr Other
Edward Mendelson 4.00 4/5
Spring 2024: ENGL UN3001
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3001 001/12316 F 10:10am - 11:25am
602 Hamilton Hall
Erik Gray 4.00 59/75

Medieval 

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3920
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3920 001/12354 T 10:10am - 12:00pm
612 Philosophy Hall
David Yerkes 4.00 13/18

Renaissance

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”)

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3336
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3336 001/12343 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
717 Hamilton Hall
Lauren Robertson 3.00 53/60

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.

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4263
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4263 001/12355 M W 8:40am - 9:55am
503 Hamilton Hall
Alan Stewart 3 18/54

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]

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3262
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3262 001/12332 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Kathy Eden 3 24/54

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3343
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3343 001/12344 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
327 Uris Hall
Lauren Robertson 4.00 14/18

18th and 19th Century

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3728
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3728 001/14880 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
507 Philosophy Hall
Branka Arsic 4.00 16/18

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3933
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3933 001/14905 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm
212a Lewisohn Hall
James Adams 4.00 18/18

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

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4400
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4400 001/12357 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Joseph Albernaz 3.00 17/54

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.

Spring 2024: CLEN GU4822
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4822 001/12315 T Th 4:10pm - 5:25pm
141 Uris Hall
Nicholas Dames 3 47/60

20th and 21st Century

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

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4622
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4622 001/12370 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm
326 Uris Hall
Farah Griffin 3.00 33/60

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3042
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3042 001/12331 T 12:10pm - 2:00pm
302 Hamilton Hall
Colm Toibin 4.00 19/18

ENTA UN3970 MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
The course will trace the pattern of the evolving theatrical careers of Henrik Ibsen and Harold Pinter, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their emerging aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the trajectories of modernism and postmodernism and examining, in that context, the emblematic use of stage sets and tableaux; the intense scrutiny of families, friendships, and disruptive intruders; the experiments with temporality, multi-linearity, and split staging; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays' potential as instruments of cultural intervention. Two papers are required, 5-7 pages and 10-12 pages, with weekly brief responses, and a class presentation. Readings include major plays of both writers and key statements on modernism and postmodernism. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Austin Quigley (aeq1@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Ibsen and Pinter 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. 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

Spring 2024: ENTA UN3970
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENTA 3970 001/14899 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
327 Uris Hall
Austin Quigley 4.00 14/18

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

Spring 2024: CLEN GU4771
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4771 001/12314 M W 10:10am - 11:25am
330 Uris Hall
Bruce Robbins 3.00 43/60

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

Spring 2024: CLEN GU4201
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4201 001/12630 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
413 Kent Hall
Brent Edwards 3.00 39/60

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3757
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3757 001/12352 M 10:10am - 12:00pm
707 Hamilton Hall
Austin Graham 4.00 13/18

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

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4316
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4316 001/12356 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
209 Havemeyer Hall
Jack Halberstam 3.00 41/60

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

Spring 2024: CLEN GU4550
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4550 001/12312 M W 5:40pm - 6:55pm
310 Fayerweather
Joseph R Slaughter 3.00 31/60

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3269
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3269 001/13418 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
330 Uris Hall
Edward Mendelson 3.00 46/60
ENGL 3269 AU1/18568 T Th 10:10am - 11:25am
Othr Other
Edward Mendelson 3.00 7/7

ENGL GU4605 AMERICAN LITERATURE-POST 1945. 3.00 points.

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4605
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4605 001/12367 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm
503 Hamilton Hall
Ross Posnock 3.00 24/54

AMST UN3931 Topics in American Studies. 4 points.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

Spring 2024: AMST UN3931
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
AMST 3931 001/13243 M 2:10pm - 4:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Andrew Delbanco, Roger Lehecka 4 14/18
AMST 3931 002/13254 M 6:10pm - 8:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Benjamin Rosenberg 4 15/18
AMST 3931 003/13268 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Roosevelt Montas 4 13/15
AMST 3931 005/13277 W 2:10pm - 4:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Ross Posnock 4 5/15

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3851
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3851 001/12353 W 4:10pm - 6:00pm
507 Philosophy Hall
Gauri Viswanathan 4.00 17/18

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.

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3710
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3710 001/14867 W 6:10pm - 8:00pm
612 Philosophy Hall
Ann Douglas 4 20/22

Special Topics

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3394
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3394 001/12348 W 10:10am - 12:00pm
607 Hamilton Hall
Nicole Wallack 4.00 18/18

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!)

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3756
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3756 001/12351 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm
602 Northwest Corner
Julie Peters 4.00 13/15

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

Spring 2024: CLEN UN3776
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3776 001/14874 T 8:10am - 10:00am
612 Philosophy Hall
Alan Stewart 4.00 9/18

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

Spring 2024: ENGL GU4938
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 4938 001/12372 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
501 Northwest Corner
Jeremy Dauber, Eleanor Johnson 3.00 100/120
ENGL 4938 AU1/20981 T Th 8:40am - 9:55am
Othr Other
Jeremy Dauber, Eleanor Johnson 3.00 2/3

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3879
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3879 001/14896 T 10:10am - 12:00pm
520 Mathematics Building
Jean Howard 4.00 8/18

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.

Spring 2024: CLEN UN3720
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3720 001/12311 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm
328 Uris Hall
Kathy Eden 4 16/18

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

Spring 2024: CLEN UN3455
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 3455 001/14868 T 4:10pm - 6:00pm
302 Alfred Lerner Hall
Gauri Viswanathan 4.00 15/18

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

Spring 2024: CLEN GU4728
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
CLEN 4728 001/12313 M W 2:40pm - 3:55pm
5ab Kraft Center
Dennis Tenen 3.00 57/60

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

Spring 2024: ENGL UN3486
Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment
ENGL 3486 001/12349 W 12:10pm - 2:00pm
317 Hamilton Hall
Vesna Kuiken 4.00 12/18