2018-2019

Science fiction is often mistaken for a variety of futurism, extrapolating what lies ahead. This class will consider what kind of relationship science fiction might have to the future other than prediction, anticipation, optimism or pessimism. How might science fiction enable thinking or imaging futures in modes other than those available to liberalism (progress, reproduction, generation) or neoliberalism (speculation, anticipation, investment)? This class asks how science fiction constitutes its horizons, where and how difference emerges in utopias, and what it might be to live in a future that isn’t ours. Readings may include SF works by Delany, Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Robinson, Banks, Ryman, Jones; theoretical and critical readings by Bloch, Jameson, Suvin, Munoz, Murphy, and others.

Given our present-day concerns about political climates and ecological consciousness, this course returns to the eighteenth century to analyze how writers interpreted climate and ecology back then. In the context of agricultural, industrial, and political revolutions, this class will explore how writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Clare understood both political and ecological climates like colonialism, women’s rights, class revolutions, and natural history. (Fiction, Poetry, 1650-1830, Theory)

Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time. Simplified by history as a witch, a poet and a mistress, the details of the lives of Tituba, Phillis and Sally resists these epithets. This course will ask why and how they remain present in the written record today, and what this teaches us about the formation of literary and historical canons. (Fiction, 1650-1830)

A study of Milton's major writings in lyric, epic, tragedy, and political prose, with emphasis upon his evolving sense of his poetic vocation and career in relation to his vision of literary, political, and cosmic history. Graduate students will be expected to do additional secondary reading. (Pre-1650, 1650-1830, Poetry), (Med/Ren)

In this course, we will read and translate Beowulf from Old English, attending closely to language, paleography, and textual cruxes. We also will examine the history of scholarship on the poem and a variety of approaches to its interpretation, guided by student interest. Over the course of the term, each student will produce a piece original scholarly research that engages with the poem and its critical tradition. (Pre-1650, Poetry); (Med/Ren) This course is the second in a two quarter Medieval Research sequence.

This course will consider the representation of mental illness in a wide range of films, beginning with silent classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Page of Madness. The course will ask the question, what does madness bring to cinema, and vice versa? in the three main genres that have dealt with this subject, documentary, narrative, and experimental film. The emphasis will be on films that consider both the mad individual, and the doctor or institution that claims to understand and cure mental disorders. The engagement of film theory with the nature of dreams, hallucinations, and delusions will be examined alongside experiments with psychological manipulation aided by the cinematic apparatus (e.g., Parallax View; A Clockwork Orange). Films to be studied include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shock Corridor, The Snake Pit, Spellbound, Now Voyager, The Devils, Persona, The Manchurian Candidate, Marat/Sade, Titicut Follies, Asylum, David and Lisa, A Beautiful Mind, and Shutter Island.

This class focuses on the remarkable affordance of writing known as free indirect style, which occurs when deixis comes unstuck from enunciation and narration shifts its referential center from the situation of utterance (the norm for spoken language) to the coordinates of a focalized entity. We will become expert in the analysis of free indirect style by investigating two of its important and sustained deployments in English prose. One is paradigmatic: Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1815. The second, rather less so: the Book of Margery Kempe, completed in 1438. The aims of the course are twofold. First, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret free indirect style by reading scholarship by linguists, philosophers, narratologists, and literary critics and by testing these ideas with analyses of our own. Readings include Benveniste, Jakobson, Fillmore, Goffman, Bakhtin, Hamburger, Genette, Banfield, Bal, Fludernik, Margolin, Cohn, Ferguson, and numerous scholars of Austen. Second, we will experiment with how to interpret the historicity of free indirect style by considering a much earlier example of what is debatably the same technique, in the Book of Margery Kempe. We will continue our close textual analyses, while turning our attention squarely to questions of historicization. Theoretical queries into authorship, gender, other minds, the interface of orality and writing, and the periodization of literary history run throughout the course.

This course focuses on a set of closely related texts by Freud and Lacan, as a path into some topics in psychoanalytic theory that have been important to recent work in literary and cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and philosophy. Among these topics will be the nature of the psychoanalytic symptom, and its relation to the unconscious and representation; the enigma of sexuality, and the development of a radical account of desire and the drive; the critique of ego psychology; and Freud and Lacan’s revisionary accounts of practical normativity. We will be reading these texts less for a set of positions or theories than for their engagement with a set of interlocking problems and the direction or drive of the thinking. Our focus will be on reading closely and making out arguments both explicit and implicit. (20th/21st)

The Age of Obscenity: Sex, Speech and Censorship in the Long 19th Century Straddling the line between art and non‐art, protected speech and prohibited conduct, moral pollution and expressive liberty, the obscene is notoriously difficult to define coherently. Yet at the present moment, when the concept of free expression and the critique of censorship have largely been coopted by reactionary politics and deployed as ideological bludgeons, it has become more urgent than ever to confront that definitional difficulty, and to reexamine the modern formation of the obscenity concept in the context of the 19th and early 20th century literary works which first put it to the test as a legal, moral, sexual, and aesthetic category, among them: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Zola's La Terre; D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de Mal; Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballades; and Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights. Additionally, we will read in legal history as well as the archive of parliamentary and court transcripts, in order to become conversant with the development of modern obscenity law. At the same time, our investigation will engage with more recent accounts of the obscene within cultural, legal and especially feminist theory, such as Catharine MacKinnon's polemical anti‐pornographic writings, Bruno Latour's writings on iconoclasm, and Foucault's work in the history of sexuality. (18th/19th)

Required for students in their 2nd year of the English Ph.D. program. In this class, we will perform substantial revisions of a previous seminar paper.