2016-2017

This course will consider two (or in the spirit of openendedness) three novels by modern whatistheterm or postmodern or postpostmodern, openended novels—by writers, all of whom, to some extent, are artistic descendants of James Joyce. One of the novels will be Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This will be paired (?tripled?, so maybe a trigon not a couple) with the following: White Noise by Don DeLillo and Zazie Dans le Metro by Raymond Queneau. (There were other possibilities: Life: A User’s Manual by George Perec; Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon…). So like but then, the themes of the course will be: the postmodern (?postpostmodern?) dysfunctional family; ecodisaster; depression; prozac and its buddies; addiction and OCD; language: to proscribe (or prescribe) or not; the fear of death; and (natch) the problem of evil in a morally leveled ethical landscape. (B)

In this course we will revisit the so-called “Cold War consensus”—the apparent convergence in American literary, political, and intellectual thought on what one scholar terms “the central belief that the liberal, democratic, capitalist order of the United States represented a more open and humane society than that of the Communist states—in order to in order to assess the role of literature (and various scholarly accounts of that role) in creating or contesting that consensus. Our main texts will be a select group of novels, many of which were published within a few years of one another in the early 1950s, but we will also draw on a variety of other texts, either from that period or focused on it. (20th/21st)

This course is restricted to third-year Ph.D. English department students only. This course seeks to provide a setting in which graduate students, prior to their first formal teaching assignment at this institution, can explore some of the elements of classroom teaching of English. The course, for purposes of focus and with the recognition that not all our students will teach at the graduate level, is intended primarily as an introduction to teaching undergraduate English. While emphasizing the practical issues of classroom instruction, the class includes theoretical readings on pedagogy, which help the students to reflect on and speak to their practice. The course will provide significant opportunities in conceptualizing, designing, and running a college-level course in English: e.g., the opportunity to lead a mock-classroom discussion, to construct a sample syllabus, to grade a common paper.

What is effort? How might we describe the experience of expending effort? What ontological commitments subtend conceptions of effort? This seminar will examine the literary, philosophical, scientific, and theological implications of what Michel Henry calls “the being of effort” by focusing on early modernity, a period in which attempts to think through the meaning of effort were particularly fraught. Taking the multiple valences of the term conatus as our leading thread, we will situate poetry and prose by John Donne and John Milton (two writers deeply invested in what effort can and cannot accomplish) in two overlapping contexts that are not usually brought together. First, we will trace the significance of effort as vital self-preservation from the ancient Stoics, through the developing seventeenth-century sciences of life, to Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Anne Conway’s Principles. Second, we will examine the multiple ways that conatus or effort ramified in theological debates over the status of the will in works by Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and Arminius. We will also consider philosophical treatments of effort (as it relates both to vitality and the will) in the work of Maine de Biran, Bergson, Levinas, Jonas, and Arendt, among others. (Med/Ren)

For first-year English Ph.D. students only. This course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to advanced literary studies. Readings are drawn from four modes of inquiry that helped to produce our discipline and that continue to animate scholarship in the present – namely, philology, criticism, aesthetics, and genealogy. In addition, participants will complete several short assignments meant to familiarize them with common skills and practices of literary studies.

This seminar would explore topics and facilitate research projects in the very long Romantic period reaching back to the age of Sensibility and forward to the emergences of Victorian forms like the three decker novel and the dramatic monologue. Ripe for inclusion in such an overview would be the culture changing novels of Richardson and Sterne, the poetry of sentiment (Grat, Collins, Charlottes, Smith), antiquarian ballad collections, the feminization of the novel (Burney, Smith, Inchbald), the Gothic (Radcliffe, Shelley), various genre-transformations in Romanticism (the conversation poem, the personal eipc, the lyrical ballad), the national tale (Edgeworth and Morgan), the historical novel (Scott and Galt), the major reviews (Edinburgh, Blackwoods, Quarterly), the weeklies (Examiner, London Magazine), and the serialized fiction that leads to the early work of Dickens and Thackeray. The point would not only be to look at processes of transformation of literary styles, genres, and institutions, but to correlate changes on all three levels with attention to larger developments in publishing, readership, demographics, political movements, technology, and overarching structures of thought. (18th/19th)

Written in the wake of the Crimean War (1856) and the emancipation of the serfs (1861), Tolstoy's War and Peace represents Russia's most important national narrative. Tolstoy chooses to set his tale during the Napoleonic wars, the epoch commonly regarded as the moment of national awakening, which gave rise to major social and political transformations within the Russian society that were still underway at the time when Tolstoy wrote and published his epic. Reading War and Peace we not only learn a lot about Russian history and culture, but also have a rare chance to visit the writer's workshop and witness the creation of a completely original, organic work of art. It is a telling fact that Tolstoy's novel-epic-a unique hybrid of several different genres deliberately designed as a riposte to the typical West European novel - was never finalized, because after publishing this work in a serial form in a leading "thick journal" Tolstoy continued to return to War and Peace throughout the rest of his life. This course will focus on both the artistic and intellectual facets of War and Peace. This course is recommended for students interested in Russian and European literature, history and political science as well as those who are building a Fundamentals major. The course is open to all undergraduates and some graduate students (by consent). Reading, discussion and papers will be in English. Undergraduate: (B, G, H)

The phenomenon of anxiety emerged as one of the leading psychological disorders of the 20th and 21st centuries. Worrying ourselves into the realm of the pathological, we now have a requisite measure of anxiety for every prescribed stage of life. But why are we so anxious? Considering its prevalence in everyday life, the concept and theories of anxiety have been employed surprisingly seldom as a way into film, fiction, and art. In this course we examine the modern origin of contemporary discourses specific to anxiety and their unique manifestation in cultural artifacts. To understand the complex of anxiety in the so-called Western world, we rely on the theories of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Alenka Zupančič, fiction by Stoker, Schnitzler, Kafka, and Sebald, and film by Haneke, Kubrick, Ophuls, and Hitchcock. We will also have guest speakers from the fields of clinical psychiatry, geriatric medicine, philosophy, and comparative anthropology. (G, H)

TBD

This MA/BA-level course introduces students to globalization theory, with particular attention to readings that showcase the displacements and migrations that characterize the era of advanced global capitalism. Fleeing economic, social, and climatological collapse, migrants hardly find a second home; they become refugees without refuge. The limits on their flourishing extend far beyond the national borders that they cross in search of livable life. Wherever they go, they are discriminated and psychologically segregated by discourses of race nationalism, discourses in which migrations give rise to races. This course will focus on this process of migrant racialization—all the more pressing in light of current world events—with a curriculum that includes works by Weber, Simmel, Smohalla, Benedict Anderson, Anzaldúa, Appadurai, Brathwaite, Walter Benjamin, Celan, Derrida, Eggers, Ghosh, Le Guin, Glissant, Vine Deloria Jr., Woody Guthrie, Mbembe, Haraway, Tsing, Giddens, Negri and Hardt, Jason Moore, Bhabha, August Wilson, Sterling Brown, Big Bill Broonzy, Jacob Lawrence, Miguel Méndez, Mary Louise Pratt, Momaday, Silko, Canclini, Karen Tei Yamashita, Heise, Gikandi, Schmidt-Camacho, Fields and Fields, Bonilla-Silva, and Massey, in addition to film screenings and field exercises. Undergraduate: (H), Graduate: (20th/21st)