Fall 2023
Fall 2023
Fall 2023
350: 641 |
George Eliot |
350: 645 |
Archives of American Literature |
350: 605 |
Gender, Sex, Self in 18C England |
350: 505 |
How to Read a Poem |
350: 598 |
Encountering the Other in World Lit |
350: 589 350: 642 |
Race & Transnational Performance in Americas Theory and Practice of Victorian Fiction |
350: 512 | Texts/Images/Worlds: Performance and Performativity Across Media |
Fall 2023 - Graduate Course Schedule
Time | Course No. | Course Name | Instructor | Dist. Req | Room | Index |
Monday
|
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9:00 | ---------- | Article Writing Workshop | Luciano, D. | ---------- | MU 302 | --------- |
12:10 | 350:641 | George Eliot | Yousef, N. | A4 | MU 207 | 15001 |
3:50 | 350:505 | How to Read a Poem | Grogan, K. | A5, B | MU 207 | 14994 |
Tuesday
|
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10:20 | 350:645 | Archives of American Literature | McGill, M. | A4, B, D | MU 207 | 15003 |
2:00 | --------- | Dissertation Writing Workshop | Festa, L. | --------- | MU 302 | --------- |
2:00 | 350:512 | Texts/Images/Worlds: Performance and Performativity Across Media Cross-Listed w/ Art History 082:592 |
Montez, R. | B | VH 001 | 20176 |
Wednesday
|
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12:10 | 350:605 | Sex, Autonomy, and Agency in 18th C Britain | Zitin, A. | A3 | MU 207 | 15000 |
3:50 | 350:642 | Theory and Practice of Victorian Fiction | Price, L. | A4, B | MU 207 | 15002 |
Thursday
|
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10:20 | 350:598 | Encountering the Other in World Lit | Mangharam, M. | A5, C | MU 207 | 14998 |
2:00 | 350:589 | Race & Transnational Performance in the Americas | Owens, I. | B, C | MU 207 | 14997 |
350:641 - George Eliot
Index # 15001
Distribution Requirement: A4
Time: Monday - 12:10 p.m.
Location: MU 207
George Eliot
This course will center on a close and attentive reading of all the principal novels of George Eliot, along with some of her shorter fiction, and essays. Such an immersion will allow us to address consistency and variation in conceptual and formal concerns across her career, and the evolution of her distinctive novelistic idiom. Central issues explored in the fiction include the complex dynamics of agency, contingency, and material circumstance, the tensions between spiritual striving and worldly ambition, the disruption of integrated selfhood, the convergences and divergences of science and art. We will grapple with the extraordinary engagement with disparate intellectual fields in her writing (art history, philology, biology, physics, economics, religion), and give special attention to the role of philosophical psychology in her work. The ethical implications of Eliot's realism (especially the challenges of attention, sympathy, and recognition) feature in contemporary approaches to aesthetics, affect, and attunement in literary studies. Reading of Eliot will be supplemented by important recent critical work on nineteenth century fiction and culture, (eg. Amanda Anderson, Pearl Brilmyer, Rae Greiner, David Kurnick, and Andrew Miller).
350:645 - Archives of American Literature
Index # 15003
Distribution Requirement: A4, B, D
Time: Tuesday - 10:20 a.m.
Location: MU 207
Archives of American Literature
Electronic media have changed radically how knowledge is classified, stored, and retrieved, and have helped detach the idea of the archive from its traditional identification with the place in which records are stored. This course will examine theories of the archive with an eye to how changing ideas about classification, storage, documents, and evidence might be brought to bear on Americanist literary studies. What kinds of challenges have the phonograph, radio, film, performance, and electronic media posed to manuscript- and print-based ideas of the archive? What are the implications of curated on-line collections and digital databases such as EEBO, ECCO, and Evans (Early American Imprints) for the study of literature? How has the very notion of the non-archivable – the ephemeral, the unrecordable, the wastefully repetitive, shaped our conception of the archive?
Theoretical texts will include works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, Michel De Certeau, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Lorraine Daston, Diana Taylor, Antoinette Burton, and Ann Stoler. We will also read recent criticism, including work by Saidiya Hartman, Kelly Wisecup, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, that creatively reimagines what one might do with the traces of subjects and creative practices that have been omitted from or subordinated within knowledge-systems.
As part of our study of new media archives, the class will spend some time engaging with the general theoretical aims of the Black Bibliography Project and exploring BBP data models for describing books, serials, dust jackets, and non-print media. I hope to coordinate this unit with a class being taught concurrently by Jacqueline Goldsby at Yale, including a trip to the Schomburg Library.
Students will complete a few short exercises, including site visits, a sustained engagement with a digital archive, exploration of Black Bibliography Project data, and a longer paper that takes up an archive (broadly defined) that shifts the way we think about a topic in literary and cultural studies.
Students are encouraged to use their work in this class not only to read deeply in theories of the archive but also to explore primary sources that might be of use to them in their dissertations.
350:605 - Sex, Autonomy, and Agency in 18th C Britain
Index # 15000
Distribution Requirement: A3
Time: Wednesday - 12:10 p.m.
Location: MU 207
Gender, Sex, Self in 18C England
This course explores the emergence of two linked phenomena: the development, in theory, of the liberal subject as a rational, self-governing individual and the literary negotiation of intimate violence in eighteenth-century Britain. How are ideas of bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination linked with the cultural understanding of gender identity and its expression in this period? Central to our investigation will be Samuel Richardson’s monumental novel Clarissa—yes, we will read all of it—which will lay the conceptual groundwork for our investigations. Some topics we will address might include representations of psychology and other “interior” states; consent in political and feminist theory; race, gender, and personhood in the context and aftermath of Atlantic-world slavery; reproductive choice and reproductive justice; sex work; and asexuality and other queer and utopian forms of resistance to a patriarchal sex/gender system. Readings will be drawn from works by the following authors and critics: Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Susan Choi, Miriam Toews, Hortense Spillers, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Frances Ferguson, Wendy Brown, Saidiya Hartman, Charles W. Mills, Sandra Macpherson, Wendy Warren, Jennifer L. Morgan, Janet Halley, Amia Srinivasan, Wendy Lee, Lisabeth During, Nancy Yousef, and Greta LaFleur.
350:505 - How to Read a Poem
Index # 14994
Distribution Requirement: A5, B
Time: Monday - 3:50 p.m.
Location: MU 207
How to Read a Poem
What is unique about reading poetry, and what methods can we bring to it? What is the value of reading poems today? Appropriate for students from all periods, students who have studied poetry in detail before and students who have read very little poetry, this course offers the knowledge and skills to read, enjoy, teach, and write about poetry. We will immerse ourselves in the formal elements of reading poetry. Students will gain a grounding in meter and rhythm, sound patterning, rhyme, voice, and both received poetic forms and radical, rule-breaking experimental writing. Confident in our knowledge of poetics, we will then think historically, with seminars on the cultures of print, media, distribution, and canon formation; and we will think politically, with sessions on form and politics; identity, collectivity, and the lyric speaker; and poetry, protest, and social justice.
This course is taught by multiple faculty members with diverse areas of expertise across periods. Expect to roam widely in literary history, from John Donne to Jos Charles, Tennyson to Terrance Hayes, from ghazals and haibun to concrete poems and internet poetry, dramatic monologues to contemporary spoken word. Students who have never studied poetry in depth should expect to walk away with the tools they need to read, teach, and write about poetry; students who have already studied some poetry or intend to focus on poetry will have their knowledge and skills revived and enriched.
Assessment will include participation in class discussion and regular short, informal writing exercises throughout the course. We will conclude the semester with an all-class conference, when students will present a conference-length paper and gain feedback from their colleagues for revision and final submission.