English and Comparative Literature

ENGL UN2000 Approaches to Literary Study. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN2001 Approaches to Literary Study Seminar. 0.00 points.

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

ENGL UN2792 Early Horror. 3.00 points.

This course will examine the origins and evolutions of horror literature from ancient Babylon to the Early Modern period. We will be examining consistent tropes that span long periods of time, as well as local innovations and idiosyncracies that are particular to a given culture at a given moment. We will be asking what makes for horror—that is, how does horror literature work, and what is it trying to do—as well as why horror is such an enduring modality

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

ENGL UN3892 BEOWULF. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3943 ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE. 4.00 points.

English translations of the Bible from Tyndale to the present

ENGL GU4790 ADVANCED OLD ENGLISH. 4.00 points.

The course description will remain the same

ENGL UN2091 Introduction to Old English. 3.00 points.

ENGL GU4091 Introduction to Old English will be renumbered to ENGL UN2091 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998

ENGL UN2791 Mysticism and Medieval Drama. 3.00 points.

ENGL GU4791 Mysticism and Medieval Drama will be renumbered to ENGL UN2791 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998

ENGL UN3873 Troilus and Criseyde. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3920 MEDIEVAL ENGLISH TEXTS. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN1336 Shakespeare II. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN2232 TRADE AND TRAFFIC WITH EARLY MODERN ENGLAND. 3.00 points.

This lecture course explores England’s sense of itself in relation to the rest of the world in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will examine the hopes and fears provoked by the trade and traffic between the English and other peoples, both inside and outside the country’s borders, and raise questions of economics, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, immigration, and slavery. The central materials are familiar and unfamiliar English plays, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Massinger, John Fletcher, and others, which we will study alongside economic treatises, acts and proclamations, and travel narratives

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

CLEN GU4598 Erasmian Humanism. 4.00 points.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536), arguably the single most influential public intellectual of the sixteenth century, was responsible for the educational and religious reforms that changed European culture in the early modern period and that are in many quarters still with us today. This course will feature the rhetorical assumptions and methods that shaped these reforms with an eye to the commonalities that narrowed the gap between the exercises of the schoolmaster, the efforts of the preacher, and the accomplishments of the literary artist

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

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

ENGL UN1335 Shakespeare I. 3.00 points.

(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

ENGL UN2100 Drama Before Shakespeare. 3.00 points.

This lecture course focuses on the many different forms of drama that emerged in England in the decades before William Shakespeare started writing. The drama of sixteenth-century England found its stages in a bewildering variety of venues: the city streets, boys’ grammar schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of Court, the royal court, civic halls, private households, and inns. This course will introduce students to a range of plays in all genres (tragedies, comedy, history), and use these plays to explore aspects of Elizabeth theatre, including the playhouses, companies, repertory, playwriting, and the printing of plays. No knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays is required

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

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

ENGL UN2400 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, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and many others, we will situate our discussions around key issues including: the development of new ideas about individualism and community; industrialization and ecology (changes in nature and in the very conception of “nature”); and slavery and abolition

ENGL UN2402 Romantic Poetry. 3.00 points.

This course examines major British poets of the period 1789-1830. We will be focusing especially on the poetry and poetic theory of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. We will also be reading essays, reviews, and journal entries by such figures as Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The class is open to all undergraduate; first-year students and non-English majors are welcome. Graduate students interested in taking the course should email the professor

ENGL UN2404 VICTORIAN POETRY. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN2703 Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. 3.00 points.

Plays and other theatrical experiences in England from 1660-1780, with attention to a wide range of social, cultural and formal questions. We will discuss performance history and theories of acting as well as politics, sex, Shakespeare adaptation, the presentation of self and a number of other topics that remain relevant today. Students with a practical interest in theater are encouraged to enroll, and no prior background in theater or in eighteenth-century literature and culture is expected or required

ENGL UN3626 GREAT SHORT WORKS OF AMERICAN PROSE. 4.00 points.

The aim of this course is to read closely and slowly short prose masterworks written in the United States between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, and to consider them in disciplined discussion. Most of the assigned works are fiction, but some are public addresses or lyrical or polemical essays. We will read with attention to questions of audience and purpose: for whom were they written and with what aim in mind: to promote a cause, make a case for personal or political action, provoke pleasure, or some combination of all of these aims? We will consider the lives and times of the authors but will focus chiefly on the aesthetic and argumentative structure of the works themselves

ENGL UN3432 Places for Poetry. 4.00 points.

This seminar asks how poetry claims places. The poets come mostly from Britain or its former colonies. The poems range from the seventeenth century all the way to the present day, with the majority (around two-thirds of the schedule) drawn from the long eighteenth century. In that period, an age of increased urbanization inside Britain’s borders and increased mobility around its expanding empire, the main distinction that organized cultural conversations about place was the divide between the town and the country. But poems about the virtues of rural life often spoke from a distressed urban perspective, and poems about the dynamism of the city frequently described it from the viewpoint of an outsider or newcomer. What the eighteenth century can teach us about the poetry of place, then, is that it might secretly be poetry of movement, poetry about how one seemingly stable location (or type of location) might pick up and go somewhere else. Starting from this insight, we will wrestle with larger questions about how shareable the poetry of place can be. Does staying faithful to a single place—its grainy specificity, its deep history, its rich tradition—risk making a poem unintelligible elsewhere? To what extent does a place-based poem need to shed its local attachments and try to speak a more universal language? How can a poem communicate its rootedness with people who don’t have roots in the same spot? When is a poem an extension of place, and when is it an escape from it? Instead of proceeding chronologically, our weekly seminar will largely be arranged by settings that various English, Scottish, Irish, Caribbean, Anglo-Indian, and American poets have evoked. For the first ten weeks of the term, we will move from one type of place to another: from country houses to city streets, perhaps, or battlefields to bridges, hills to dales, walking paths to railway stations, outer islands to outer space. For the final few weeks, we will shift our organization and sample several major poets of place—one or two from the eighteenth century, one or two from the following centuries. Your final project for the class will imaginatively map the poetry of one of the places that you claim or one of the places that claims you

ENGL UN3437 John Keats. 4.00 points.

John Keats (1795–1821) is one of the most beloved of all English writers, a poet of intense sensitivity, imagination, and generosity. In this class we will read work from across Keats’s brief, meteoric career, devoting significant attention to his early poems as well as to the pieces from his 1820 Poems for which he is best known. We will also read a large selection of Keats’s letters, as well as poems, letters, and reviews by Keats’s contemporaries, in addition to a sampling of modern criticism

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

ENGL UN2802 History of English Novel II. 3.00 points.

ENGL GU4802 History of English Novel II will be renumbered to ENGL UN2802 with a graduate section added to ENGL GR6998

ENGL UN3994 ROMANTICISM ＆ FREEDOM. 4.00 points.

“Freedom” was perhaps the central watchword of Romantic-era Britain, yet this concept remains notoriously difficult to pin down. Taking a cue from the sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson, who writes that “freedom is one those of values better experienced than defined,” this seminar will explore the variegated experiences of freedom and its opposites in the literature of British Romanticism. Romanticism unfolds alongside major revolutions in America, France, and Haiti, and we will begin by examining how the differing conceptions of freedom offered in the wake of these revolutions and their receptions galvanized writers and thinkers in Britain. From here, we will probe the expressions, possibilities, implications, and limits of freedom as outlined in various domains: political, individual, aesthetic, economic, philosophical, religious, and beyond. In situating Romanticism alongside developments like revolution, the rise of globalization, and the Atlantic slave trade, we will be particularly interested in confronting how the explosion of claims to freedom in this period emerges together with and in response to the proliferation of enslaved, colonized, and otherwise constrained or hindered bodies. As we read poems, novels, slave narratives, philosophical essays, political tracts and documents, and more, a fundamental question for the course will concern the relation between binary terms: to what extent, and how, do notions of freedom in Romanticism depend on the necessary exclusion of the unfree? Since the Romantic age sees the birth of concepts of freedom still prevalent in our own day, this course will offer an opportunity to reflect critically on the present. To that end, we will take up some contemporary theoretical analyses and critiques of freedom, both directly in relation to Romanticism and reaching beyond

CLEN GU4840 Jazz and the Literary Imagination. 3 points.

This course will focus on the interwoven nature of jazz and literature throughout the 20th and early 21st century. We will consider the ways that jazz has been a source of inspiration for a variety of twentieth-century literatures, from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to African American drama and contemporary fiction. Our readings and musical selections highlight creative ideas and practices generated through the formal and thematic convergences of jazz and literature, allowing us to explore questions such as: How do writers capture the sounds and feelings of different musical forms within fictional and non-fictional prose? In what ways might both music and literature (and/or their points of intersection) represent ideas of black identity and consciousness? How can certain musical concepts and terms of analysis (improvisation, rhythm, syncopation, harmony) be applied to practices of writing? How does music suggest modes of social interaction or political potential to be articulated in language?

ENGL UN3725 Auden. 4.00 points.

Poems and prose by W. H. Auden, at length and in depth. To apply for this seminar, send a brief email message to edward.mendelson@columbia.edu that includes: your year (senior, junior, etc.), the names of some English courses you have taken, and one sentence saying why you want to take the course

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

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

ENGL UN3576 U.S. Poetry in the Expanded Field Since 1960. 4.00 points.

This course explores postwar poets’ extensive experimentation with new media and hybrid genres. The visual arts and the sonic arts—as well as computer-generated writing—offered inspiration to poets who understood themselves to be working in a context broader than conventional lyric poetry. Poets to be discussed include John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Larry Eigner, Jayne Cortez, Norman Pritchard, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Lilian-Yvonne Bertram. We will also discuss theoretical accounts of the “expanded field” of intermedia arts and cross-genre writing. No prior knowledge of postwar poetry or art is presumed

ENGL GU4614 Ralph Ellison. 4.00 points.

In this seminar we will read virtually everything by Ralph Ellison—leaving aside for now the posthumous “novel” published as Three Days Before the Shooting. We will concentrate on this writer’s highly influential insights and perspectives as an essayist, short story writer, and novelist. We also will investigate his recently discovered work as a photographer, and his uses of “photographic imagery” in his writing. Above all we will delve deeply into his aesthetic values as well as his political philosophy or--to use a keystone Ellisonian word--his stances. As we read Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction (and look at his photographs), let us be watchful for Ellison’s positions on current cultural/critical questions: parody and pastiche; sound technologies and art (musical and literary); “planned dislocations of the senses”; the importance of place—region, city or country, nation; internationality; complex definitions of individuality and community; race; vernacular art and culture; and the role of the politically engaged artist. How to track a line from Ellison’s early Marxism to his later more centrist political positions? What do today’s readers make of his strong American nationalism? How have political conservatives made use of Ellison? Beyond “stances,” what are the key terms for unpacking the world according to Ellison?

ENGL UN3438 Archives and Afterlives in Postcolonial Texts. 4.00 points.

What are archives and why are they a common feature of postcolonial stories? What are the different forms of archives that we encounter in postcolonial narratives and what aesthetic effects do they have on these narratives? By looking at archives that are found in literary texts and literary texts that are found in archives, we will study the different ways that the term 'archive' can be understood: as documents deemed important for posterity, as ephemeral collections of ‘small things’ in surprising shapes and spaces, and as metaphor for the ways in which time and knowledge are organized and experienced. We will consider how archives act as sites where the afterlives of unjust racial pasts persist into the present and take forms both old and new. We will discuss the role of archives in literary pursuits of racial justice as sites that both enable discovery and necessitate loss. As a word that sits on the borders between life and afterlife, past and future, ‘fact’ and fantasy, colonial and postcolonial, 'archive' is a resonant keyword through which many urgent concerns in the study of race and Empire today can be examined. Through our work for this course, we will ask: How might we as literary scholars of the postcolonial respond creatively to the traces and absences of the archive? We will explore archival afterlives in postcolonial works from the 20th and 21st centuries across a range of media including novels, poetry, film. We will also develop some initial forays into hands-on archival research at Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and seek out institutional as well as informal archives that lie beyond Morningside Heights. No prerequisites

ENGL UN3985 FILM NARRATIVE (SEMINAR). 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. This course will examine the noir tradition in American film between 1941 and 1959. We begin with noir's origins in two turn-of-the-century literary works about Empire, Inc and the divided self of the modern era, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and Stevenson's " Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". We will consider the international roots of Hollywood noir, many of whose directors were European refugees from Hitler, and its depictions of the femme fatale, l'homme fatale, and the world métropole, particularly NYC and LA. Readings will include Marxist, postcolonial, and gender theory, and film history. Films will include "The Killers", "Double Indemnity", "The Big Heat", "The Lodger", "Gilda", "Sunset Blvd", "Sweet Smell of Success", and "Vertigo". Application instructions: Email Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Film Noir application". 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

MDES GU4122 THE NOVEL IN AFRICA. 4.00 points.

The main task of this course will be to read novels by African writers. But the novel in Africa also involves connections between the literary genre of the novel and the historical processes of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. One important question we'll consider is how African novels depict those historical experiences in their themes and plots—we'll read novels that are about colonialism, etc. A more complex question is how these historical processes relate to the emergence of the novel as an important genre for African writers. Edward Said went so far as to say that without imperialism, there would be no European novel as we know it. How can we understand the novel in Africa (whether read or written) as a product of the colonial encounter? How did it shape the process of decolonization? What contribution to history, whether literary or political, does the novel in Africa make? We'll undertake a historical survey of African novels from the 1930s to the present, with attention to various subgenres (village novel, war novel, urbanization novel, novel of postcolonial disillusion, Bildungsroman). We'll attend to how African novelists blend literate and oral storytelling traditions, how they address their work to local and global audiences, and how they use scenes of characters reading novels (whether African or European) in order to position their writing within national, continental, and world literary space

ENGL UN3439 Afro-Asian Literary Imaginaries. 4.00 points.

In a gesture of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and spurred on by a wave of anti-Asian violence ignited by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian American artists and activists recently revived the slogan “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power.” Behind this slogan lies a long history of solidarity and collaboration between members of the Asian and African diasporas who saw their struggles against racial oppression, both on a domestic and global scale, as deeply intertwined. This course explores the literary dimensions of this rich yet often overlooked history, whose greatest thinkers were often also writers themselves. Through the study of poetry, novels, drama, and memoir, we will trace the development of “Afro-Asian” literary imaginaries from the early twentieth century to the present. Far from adopting a uniform approach to the subject, the texts we read will vary in form and content, ranging from the romantic, to the experimental, to the critical. Our reading throughout the course will be anchored in key historical moments in the history of Black and Asian solidarity and conflict, from pre-war anti-colonial movements, to the Third World Liberation strikes of the 1960s, to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Together, we will ask what the unique role of literature has been within this history, and explore the possibilities that literature holds for imagining cross-racial solidarity in our contemporary moment

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.

ENGL UN2826 American Modernism. 3.00 points.

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

CLEN UN2742 World Fiction Since 1965. 3.00 points.

In the period since 1965, fiction has become global in a new sense and with a new intensity. Writers from different national traditions have been avidly reading each other, wherever they happen to come from, and they often resist national and regional labels altogether. If you ask the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah whether the precocious child of Maps was inspired by Salman Rushdie´s Midnight´s Children, he will answer (at least he did when I asked him) that he and Rushdie both were inspired by Sterne´s Tristram Shandy and Grass´s The Tin Drum. At the same time, the human experiences around which novelists organize their fiction are often themselves global, explicitly and powerfully but also mysteriously. Our critical language is in some ways just trying to catch up with innovative modes of storytelling that attempt to be responsible to the global scale of interconnectedness on which, as we only rarely manage to realize, we all live. Authors will include some of the following: Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Elena Ferrante, and Zadie Smith

CLEN GU4199 LITERATURE AND OIL. 3.00 points.

This course will investigate the connections between literary/cultural production and petroleum as the substance that makes possible the world as we know it, both as an energy source and a component in the manufacture of everything from food to plastic. Our current awareness of oil's scarcity and its myriad costs (whether environmental, political, or social) provides a lens to read for the presence (or absence) of oil in texts in a variety of genres and national traditions. As we begin to imagine a world "beyond petroleum," this course will confront the ways in which oil shapes both the world we know and how we know and imagine the world. Oil will feature in this course in questions of theme (texts "about" oil), of literary form (are there common formal conventions of an "oil novel"?), of interpretive method (how to read for oil), of transnational circulation (how does "foreign oil" link US citizens to other spaces?), and of the materiality (or "oiliness") of literary culture (how does the production and circulation of texts, whether print or digital, rely on oil?). 

ENGL UN3712 HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON. 4.00 points.

James & Wharton, America's two greatest novelists in the half century after the civil war and the eve of the first world war, were friends and fellow cosmopolitans, at home in the US  & Europe, chroniclers of an emerging transatlantic urban modernity traversing New York, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva. Their fiction often portrays glamorous surfaces and intricate social texts that their brilliant heroines --Isabel Archer  of The Portrait of a Lady & Lily Bart of The House of Mirth,  for example--negotiate with wit and subtlety, confusion and daring,  amidst fear and fascination. They find themselves immersed in bruising plots--crafted by society's disciplinary imperatives and by their creators, the latter standing in uneasy complicity with the social order even as they seek its transformation.  Giving female protagonists unprecedented boldness and ambition, Wharton & James chart how intense exertion of will and desire collides with "the customs of the country," to cite the title of a great Wharton novel. We will read the three novels mentioned above as well as Wharton's Summer & Ethan Frome and James's "Daisy Miller," Washington Square & The Ambassadors.

ENGL UN3628 FAULKNER. 4.00 points.

In this course, we’ll be studying novels, stories, and screenplays from the major phase of William Faulkner’s career, from 1929 to 1946. Our primary topic will be Faulkner’s vision of American history, and especially of American racial history: we’ll be asking what his fictions have to say about the antebellum/“New” South; the Civil War and Reconstruction; the issues of slavery, emancipation, and civil rights; and the many ways in which the conflicts and traumas of the American past continue to shape and burden the American present. But we’ll consider other aspects of Faulkner’s work, too: his contributions to modernist aesthetics, his investigations of psychology and subjectivity, his exploration of class and gender dynamics, his depiction of the natural world, and his understanding of the relationship between literature and the popular arts

ENGL UN3726 Virginia Woolf. 4 points.

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

ENGL UN3351 FAMILY FICTIONS: MEMOIR, FILM AND THE NOVEL. 4.00 points.

This course will explore cinematic, novelistic and memoirist renderings of “family cultures,” family feeling, the family as narrative configuration, and home as a utopian/dystopian and oneiric space. Explorations of memory, imagination and childhood make-believe will interface with readings in psychoanalysis and in the social history of this polymorphous institution. A central goal of the course is to help each of you toward written work that is distinguished, vital and has urgency for you. Authors will include Gaston Bachelard, Alison Bechdel, Jessica Benjamin, Sarah M. Broom, Lucille Clifton, Vivian Gornick, Lorraine Hansberry, Maggie Nelson and D.W. Winnicott; and films by Sean Baker, Ingmar Bergman, Alfonso Cuaron, Greta Gerwig, Lance Hammer, Barry Jenkins, Elia Kazan, Lucretia Martel, Andrei Zvyagintsev and others

ENGL UN3734 American Literature and Corporate Culture. 4 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

(Seminar). "It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives." - Frank Kermode This seminar will focus on American literature during the rise of U.S. corporate power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The legal and economic entity of the corporation established new social hierarchies and systems of power, changed the roles of government and families, and wrought new forms of relationships between individuals. American culture demonstrated both an enchantment with the possibilities of a growing economy and a looming anxiety about the systematization of personal relationships. Authors and critics grappled with an American society that seemed to offer unprecedented opportunity for social rise but only within a deeply threatening and impersonal structure. We'll examine the ways that literary and popular culture depicted corporations and the ways that corporate structure influenced literary aesthetics and form. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Aaron Ritzenberg (ajr2186@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "American Literature and Corporate Culture 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. Admitted students should register for the course; they'll automatically be placed on a wait list, from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.

ENGL UN3805 The Political Novel. 4.00 points.

Is the political novel a genre? It depends on your understanding both of politics and of the novel. If politics means parties, elections, and governing, then few novels of high quality would qualify. If on the other hand “the personal is the political,” as the slogan of the women’s movement has it, then almost everything the novel deals with is politics, and few novels would not qualify. This seminar will try to navigate between these extremes, focusing on novels that center on the question of how society is and ought to be constituted. Since this question is often posed ambitiously in so-called “genre fiction” like thrillers and sci-fi, which is not always honored as “literature,” it will include some examples of those genres as well as uncontroversial works of the highest literary value like Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and Camus’s “The Plague.”

CLEN GU4899 Resistance Literature. 4.00 points.

This course will explore the historical category of Resistance Literature, its theory and practice, its transnational expansion, and its ongoing relevance today. Originally proposed by Palestinian author and political activist Ghassan Kanafani in 1967, “Resistance Literature” named an activist practice of writing that sought to challenge discriminatory state practices, social policies, power structures and lived injustices, as well as to reshape the ideological frameworks that enabled official political structures of oppression in the institutional forms of colonialism (settler and otherwise), neocolonialism, authoritarianism, apartheid, systemic racisms, ethnonationalisms, gendered exclusions, and religious discrimination. Examining diverse genres such as novels, poetry, plays, memoirs, films, we will analyze the literary and political strategies, motifs, and modes by which authors around the world over the past century have attempted to use their art to resist oppression, to mobilize public opinion, and to advocate for social change. Collectively, we will attempt to identify literary and formal commonalities across these literatures to identify generic characteristics of Resistance Literature that might distinguish it from Literature in general

ENGL GU4932 ESSAYISM. 4.00 points.

In the second decade of the 21 st century there is more critical attention than ever before on the essay as a literary genre and a cultural practice that crosses media, registers, disciplines, and contexts. The concept of “essayism” was redefined by the Robert Musil in his unfinished modernist novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930) from a style of literature to a form of thinking in writing: “For an essay is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favourable occasion be elevated to the status of truth or that might just as easily be recognized as error … ; an essay is the unique and unalterable form that a man’s inner life takes in a decisive thought.” In this course will explore how essays can increase readers’ andwriters’ tolerance for the existential tension and uncertainty we experience both within ourselves as well as in the worlds we inhabit. As Cheryl Wall argues, essays also give their practitioners meaningful work to do with their private musings and public concerns in a form that thrives on intellectual as well as formal experimentation. The course is organized to examine how practitioners across media have enacted essayism in their own work and how theorists have continued to explore its aesthetic effects and ethical power

ENGL GU4559 August Wilson. 4.00 points.

In this seminar we will read the complete published plays of August Wilson along with significant unpublished and obscurely published plays, prose, and poetry. The centerpieces of this course will be what Wilson termed his “century cycle” of plays: each work focusing on the circumstances of Black Americans during a decade of the twentieth century. As we consider these historical framings, we also will explore closely on what Wilson identified as the “four B’s” that influenced his art most emphatically: Bessie Smith (sometimes he called this first B the Blues), Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, and Jorge Luis Borges. Accordingly, as we consider theoretical questions of cross-disciplinary conversations in art, we will study songs by Bessie Smith (and broad questions of the music and literary form), plays, prose, and poetry of Baraka (particularly in the context of Wilson’s early Black Arts Movement works), the paintings of Bearden, and the poetry and prose (along with a few lectures and transcribed interviews) of Borges. We will use archival resources (online as well as “hard copy” material, some of it at Columbia) to explore Wilson’s pathways as a writer, particularly as they crisscrossed the tracks of his “four B’s.” Along the way we will examine several drawings and paintings (from his University of Pittsburgh archives) as we delve into the rhythmical shapes, textures, and colors he used on paper and canvas as well as in his plays. Visitors to the class will include Wilson’s musical director Dwight Andrews and at least one of his regular actors

ENGL UN1075 Children’s Literature. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3999 THE SENIOR ESSAY. 3.00 points.

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

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

ENGL UN3648 Comics, Health, and Embodiment. 4.00 points.

Deformed, grotesque, super/transhuman and otherwise extraordinary bodies have always been a central feature of comics. However, the past ten years have seen a surge of graphic narratives that deal directly with experiences of health and illness, and that are recognized as having significant literary value. This course will focus on graphic narratives about healthcare, illness, and disability with particular attention to questions of embodied identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and age. Primary texts will include the work of Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, CeCe Bell, David Small, Allie Brosch, and Ellen Fourney. We will study the vocabulary, conventions, and formal properties of graphic literature, asking how images and text work together to create narrative. We will consider whether graphic narrative might be especially well suited to representations of bodily difference; how illness/disability can disrupt conventional ideas about gender and sexuality; how experiences of the body as a source of pain, stigmatization, and shame intersect with the sexualized body; and how illness and disability queer conventional sexual arrangements, identities, and attachments. While studying the construction of character, narrative, framing, color, and relationship between visual and print material on the page, students will also produce their own graphic narratives

CLEN GU4578 Reading the Haitian Revolution. 4.00 points.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1803), in which the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony threw off their chains and defeated the European colonial powers, was a seismic event in modernity. As an “unthinkable” revolution that was silenced by later (according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot) history yet was ubiquitously discussed at the time, the Haitian Revolution calls into question the very meaning of an “event” and challenges the fundamental organizing terms of the modern era. In this class, we will study this revolution, its representations, and its legacies into the present. We’ll pay special attention to the archive that records the experiences of the Haitian revolutionaries themselves, from poems, songs, and plays to political texts, and we’ll also be interested in reactions from Romantic-era writers in Europe like William Wordsworth and Victor Hugo. How was the revolution written and expressed by its participants, and what can we learn from the depictions it solicitated in those reading about the event from afar? In the last weeks, the course will also take up important historical, literary, and philosophical treatments of the Haitian Revolution in the twentieth-century. This course is open to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students. As a 4000-level seminar, you’ll be expected to produce a research paper related to the course material at the conclusion. Some reading knowledge of French would be helpful but is not required

CLRS GU4039 Chekhov and Others. 3.00 points.

We will explore Anton Chekhov’s work on its own terms, in its cultural context, and in relation to the work of others, especially Anglophone writers who responded, directly or indirectly, to Chekhov and his work. Readings by Chekhov include selected stories (short and long), his four major plays, and Sakhalin Island, his study of the Russian penal colony. There are no prerequisites. Knowledge of Russian is not required; all readings in English. Students who know Russian are encouraged to read Chekhov’s work in Russian. The course will be comparative as it addresses Chekhov on his own and in relation to anglophone writers. The course is open to undergraduates (CC, GS, BC) and graduates in GSAS and other schools. The attention to how Chekhov writes may interest students in the School of the Arts

ENGL UN3394 HOW WRITERS THINK. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3884 Climate Fictions. 4.00 points.

This course will consider numerous kinds of climate fictions, including, but not limited to, the recent literary category of prose fiction known as “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. In this course, “climate fictions” also refers to a range of ideas, assumptions, cultural narratives, and hypotheses about the Earth’s climate: in other words, frameworks constructed by humans[1] for thinking about (or not thinking about) the climatic conditions of our planetary home. These fictions might include such debatable propositions as “humans can’t change the climate,” “there’s nothing we can do about climate change,” “climate change is something that will happen in the future,” “climate change is something that will happen far away,” or “climate change is only about the weather.” “Climate fictions” also include scenarios and projections of a near-future, climate-changed world, whether those offered by scientists, by writers, or by ordinary people as they contemplate the possible trajectories of their lives and the lives of their descendants. Thinking among these versions of “climate fictions,” we’ll consider the role of literature and the literary imagination in fashioning, interpreting, and inhabiting them. What work does the imagination do in the world, in grappling both with the worlds that humans have made, and with the boundary parameters of the Earth system that have shaped life on this planet as we have known it? How do cultural and narrative assumptions shape the work of scientists and policy-makers? How can prose fiction help readers engage with the challenges of knowledge, emotion, anticipation, judgement, and action that a warming world will require? How can climate fictions of all sorts help readers try on modes of living and other futures that we do or don’t want—or lull them into thinking that such anticipation is unnecessary or futile? Thinking together about these questions, we will use the reading list and the seminar meetings to hone our skills of noticing, extrapolating, speculating, proposing, listening, disagreeing, concurring, and cooperating in the difficult work of confronting fear and doubt and of finding a path toward truth and perhaps even hope. You will be asked to read carefully and curiously, to test your ideas in regular informal writing and weekly seminar discussion, and to develop more polished thoughts (or dreams!) in a response paper and a final project. [1] The English word fiction derives from the Latin verb fingĕre: to fashion or form

ENGL GU4885 Writers on Writing: Fictions, Theories, Risks, and Rituals. 4.00 points.

This seminar examines how 20th and 21st century writers have staged in their fiction, nonfiction, and multi-genre works ideas about why, how, and for whom they write. What do writers have to say in their essays and public talks about the strategies they use to sit down to their writing, when everything else in the world seems to be requiring their attention elsewhere? How is the figure of the writer and their often-fraught relationship with their work depicted in fictional accounts and in the complex retrospection of memoir and essays? In what ways do writers tether their goals for their work to the needs and experiences of others in communities of which they are a part or that they wish to reach? The course begins with essays and talks that answer the question, “Why I Write” by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, bell hooks, Stephen King as well as philosophical explorations through Helene Cixcous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. These ideas about writers’ motivations will provide launching points for how each of us can begin to theorize our own motives as writers. We will use these ideas as a frame for reading novels that center the figure of the writer including Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Jenny Offill’s The Department of Speculation, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master. Through the work of essayists and memoirists, Samulet Delaney, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson, we will track how writers wrestle with the political, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of their identity as writers. Our final weeks will invite us to explore writerly advice and strategies for getting the work done. We will listen to podcasts featuring historians, such as Drafting the Past, explore revision strategies in John McPhee’s Draft 4, consider our writerly routines with excerpts from Maria Popova’s literary blog, The Marginalian and distill ideas about the work of research and writing from talks and essays by writers who have influenced each of us at Columbia and beyond. Students will produce their own autotheory of writing to accompany a piece in any genre that they will be drafting over the course of the semester

CPLS UN3951 Narratives for Living: Planetarity. 3.00 points.

Is it possible to read literature in such a way as to be coherent with the requirements for the environmental disaster that seems to be upon us? This course will attempt to answer this question through 4 novels dealing with planetarity and climate change. This is a restricted course by interview only. ICLS students will read the Bengali and/or French texts in the original. Students are required to write a 1 page response to the text to be read the next day by midnight the previous day. Class discussions will be constructed on these responses. There will be a colloquium at the end of the semester, requiring oral presentation of a research paper that will engage the entire class

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

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

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

CSER UN3523 INTRODUCTION TO LATINX STUDIES. 4.00 points.

In the US, Latinxs are often treated in quantitative terms—as checkmarks on census forms, or as data points in demographic surveys. However, Latinxs have always been more than mere numbers: while some have stayed rooted in traditional homelands, and while others have migrated through far-flung diasporas, all have drawn on and developed distinctive ways of imagining and inhabiting the Americas. In this course, we will explore a wide range of these Latinx lifeways. Through readings in the humanities and social sciences, we will learn how Latinxs have survived amidst and against settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Meanwhile, through the study of literature and art, we will see how Latinxs have resisted and/or reinforced these social systems. With our interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, we will determine why Latinidad has manifested differently in colonial territories (especially Puerto Rico), regional communities (especially the US–Mexico borderlands), and transnational diasporas (of Cubans, of Dominicans, and of a variety of Central Americans). At the same time, we will understand how Latinxs have struggled with shared issues, such as (anti-) Blackness and (anti-)Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, citizenship and (il)legality, and economic and environmental (in)justice. During the semester, we will practice Latinx studies both collectively and individually: to enrich our in-class discussions, each student will complete a reading journal, a five- page paper, a creative project, and a digital timeline

ENGL UN3891 INTRO TO CLASSICAL RHETORIC. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. (Seminar). This course examines rhetorical theory from its roots in ancient Greece and Rome and reanimates the great debates about language that emerged in times of national expansion and cultural upheaval. We will situate the texts of Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others in their historical contexts to illuminate ongoing conversations about the role of words and images in the negotiation of persuasion, meaning making, and the formation of the public. In the process, we will discover that the arguments of classical rhetoric play out all around us today. Readings from thinkers like Judith Butler, Richard McKeon, Robert Pirsig, and Bruno Latour echo the ancients in their debates about hate speech regulation, the purpose of higher education, and the ability of the sciences to arrive at truth. We will discover that rhetoricians who are writing during eras of unprecedented expansion of democracies, colonization, and empire have a great deal to say about the workings of language in our globalizing, digitizing age. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Sue Mendelsohn (sem2181@columbia.edu) by April 11 with the subject heading Rhetoric 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

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

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

CLEN UN3790 Caribbean Radicalisms in New York, 1890-1990. 4.00 points.

New York City has been closely linked to the Caribbean from at least the seventeenth century. Presently, nearly 25％ of its inhabitants are of Caribbean descent. In addition, according to a 2021 New York City Office of Immigrants report, five of the top countries of origin of the city's new immigrants were born in a Caribbean country: Dominican Republic (421,920, number 1), Jamaica (165,260, number 3), Guyana (136,180, number 4); Trinidad and Tobago (85,680, number 8), and Haiti (78,250, number 9). In addition, Puerto Ricans, who are colonial migrants, number 1.2 million or 9％ of the city’s population. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York City was a pivotal space for Caribbean radical praxis understood here as political action and thought shaped by the Caribbean experiences of enslavement, coloniality, and diaspora. These interventions deeply transformed not only New York but multiple other contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Europe, and a broad range of movements including anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer. To better understand the impact of Caribbean radical figures and thought in New York and beyond, we will examine texts from a broad range of writers and thinkers, including Jesús Colón, Julia de Burgos, Hubert Harrison, Alexis June Jordan, Audre Lorde, José Martí, Malcolm X, Manuel Ramos Otero, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Arthur Schomburg

ENTA UN3708 Reenactment and Performance in 20th ＆ 21st Centuries. 4.00 points.

Has reenactment, or the practice of “restaging a historical or biographical event” reached an end? While the idea of historically replicating a past event is quite passé, reenactment is everywhere from verbatim theatrical tribunals to biopics. This class will ask critical questions regarding reenactment as a performance act that crosses temporal, cultural, and discipline-specific boundaries and polarities. Investigating reenactment’s dynamics, potentials, and failures, we will examine battle reenactments, international theatrical tribunals, Indigenous performance, visits to nuclear disaster sites, autobiographical performance, and method actors. The final project will give the option of developing a research essay or crafting a creative portfolio. No prerequisites

CLEN GU4575 Source Texts of Postcolonial Vision. 4.00 points.

We will read texts by Memmi, Du Bois, Marguerite Duras and North African feminists to create a gendered and class-sensitive sense of the origins of postcolonial thinking. We will draw a definition of postcolonial hope before the actual emergence of postcolonial nation-states. A 1-page response to the text to be read will be required the previous day. No midterm paper. The final paper will be an oral presentation in a colloquium. ICLS students will be expected to read Memmi in French. No incompletes. Admission by interview. 20％ participation, 20％ papers, 60％ presentation. Seminar Instructions: Interviews will be in August. Email Deeva Gupta dg3242@columbia.edu, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gcs4@columbia.edu and Tomi Haxhi th2666@columbia.edu with the subject heading "Source Texts of Postcolonial Vision." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course

ENGL UN3675 Transpacific Personalities: The Personal Essay and Immigrant History in Asian American Literature. 4.00 points.

Since the 1974 publication of the first anthology of Asian American writing, Aiiieeeee!, the field of Asian American Studies has been pulled in two different directions, simultaneously trying to articulate a coherent identity of, and place for, Asian American subjects while also articulating this coherence in relation to immigrant labor and history. This introductory course will survey the way this tension, between personal coherence and collective historical experience, formally characterizes Asian American media and literature since the 1970s, in which the form of the personal essay is critically expanded and brought into conflict with the racialized history of Asian American immigrant experience. Beginning with Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1994) and Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005), this course will furnish students with an understanding of both the successive exclusion acts applied to different waves of East and Southeast Asian immigration to the United States, as well as the ways these exclusion acts produced, and were produced by, expanding forms of anti-Asian American racism. This framework of economic policy and racial form will then be used as a lens to investigate prominent texts across the Asian American canon (as well as outside of this canon) by authors such as Frank Chin, MaxineHong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Theresa Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Wilfrido Nolledo, and Elaine Castillo

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

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

ENGL UN3336 SHAKESPEARE II. 3.00 points.

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

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

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

ENGL UN3262 English Literature 1500-1600. 3 points.

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

ENGL UN3343 WOMEN IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA CULTRE. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3728 American Transcendentalism. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3933 Jane Austen. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL GU4400 Romanticism. 3.00 points.

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

CLEN GU4822 19th Century European Novel. 3 points.

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

ENGL GU4622 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3042 Ulysses. 4.00 points.

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

ENTA UN3970 MAJOR 20TH CENTURY PLAYWRIGHTS. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
The course will trace the 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

CLEN GU4771 The Literary History of Atrocity. 3.00 points.

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

CLEN GU4201 POETRY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3757 The Lost Generation. 4.00 points.

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

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

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

CLEN GU4550 NARRATIVE AND HUMAN RIGHTS. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3269 BRITISH LITERATURE 1900-1950. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL GU4605 AMERICAN LITERATURE-POST 1945. 3.00 points.

AMST UN3931 Topics in American Studies. 4 points.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section descriptions

ENGL UN3851 INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3710 The Beat Generation. 4 points.

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

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

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

ENGL UN3394 HOW WRITERS THINK. 4.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3756 LITERARY NONFICTION. 4.00 points.

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

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

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

ENGL GU4938 HISTORY OF HORROR. 3.00 points.

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

ENGL UN3879 Global Adaptations of Shakespeare. 4.00 points.

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

CLEN UN3720 Plato the Rhetorician. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Instructor's permission

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

CLEN UN3455 Pacifism and the Apocalyptic Imagination. 4.00 points.

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

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

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

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

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