This course provides a general introduction to graduate study in English. Together we will review the making and unmaking of “English” as a discipline, focusing in particular on the rise of professional literary criticism and its relationship to continental philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. Course materials will include a range of theoretical and critical writing about the following key topics: language, literature, culture, aesthetics, political economy, racial formation, gender, sexuality, nation, empire, and the university.

Required texts will be available on-line.

Catalog Description: Literary criticism and theory from Kant's Critique of Judgment to the mid-twentieth century and the work of Northrop Frye.

Gift, Sacrifice and the Rites of Literary Exchange: Coleridge and Wordsworth

The literary relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth constitutes a unique episode in literary history and has been the object of great fascination among critics and biographers, particularly in recent years. As Thomas McFarland accurately states, Coleridge and Wordsworth “not only pervasively influenced one another; they did so in a way that challenges ordinary methods of assessment.” Indeed, it is hard to bring to mind two other writers whose literary careers changed so dramatically under each other’s influence and who appropriated each other’s identity to such an extent that one critic thinks it plausible to regard their poetry as a single work, constituted by two interdependent voices (Paul Magnuson). The myth that Wordsworth was the great poet of nature, as demonstrated by “Tintern Abbey,” and Coleridge was the great poet of the supernatural, as evinced by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” obfuscates the fact that prior to meeting Coleridge, Wordsworth’s primary interest was in Gothic supernaturalism and victims of social injustice with no model of the mind’s relationship with nature in sight, whereas Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry. During their collaboration of the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge began to explore the nightmarish effects of supernaturalism on the psyche, though, ironically enough, just at the time when Wordsworth, under Coleridge’s influence, lost interest in the subject. Such moments of merging and separation are particularly instructive, showing the extent to which Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s literary careers were shaped by what each took to be the identity of the other, often misconceived through the distorting lens of self-projections.
In this course we shall study the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of gift and sacrifice, a richly suggestive model that will shed new light on this remarkably intimate and conflicted friendship and will offer the opportunity of investigating a new theory of literary influence based on the dialectic of contractual exchange.
We will begin with a close examination of Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of the gift and the
response to it by Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu, Lewis Hyde, Georg Simmel and Jacques Derrida, followed by an analysis of theories of sacrifice, as proposed by
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Robertson Smith, Sigmund Freud, Rene Girard and Georges
Bataille. Among other topics we will focus on: the principle of over-reciprocation in the gift,
the incommensurability between originary and return gifts; the erasure of the distinction between donors and receivers in gift exchange, and conversely, between sacrificer, victim, priest and deity in sacrifice; the role of intermediaries in sacrifice and the gift, i.e. the sacrificial victim and the person through whom the gift passes; the recuperative nature of gift and sacrifice; and the function of misrecognition in both economies. In the second half of the course, we will study the successive phases of Coleridge’s literary exchange with Wordsworth, from an early period when they regarded their productions as “one work” in the spirit of gift exchange, to progressive alienation and rivalry.
Requirements: two brief (2-3 pp.) response papers on theories of gift and sacrifice; a final paper on Coleridge and Wordsworth (10 -15 pp.). Texts: The Logic of the Gift, ed. Alan D. Schrift; Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings; Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (Norton); Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton). Additional articles and excerpts from books will be provided in photocopy.

The Role of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This course will be based on the premise that transgression—the ostensibly illegitimate crossing of a boundary—is a two-way activity. Whether entailing the invasion of--or the overflow from within—ostensible boundaries and horizons, the case studies we’ll explore situate the transgressive act as inevitably relative to a specific socio-cultural context. As Thoreau puts it, “it depends on how you are yarded.” In the nineteenth-century US, one is “yarded” (quite porously, as it turns out) within (or outside of) what we might term a white, Protestant, bourgeois circumference endlessly subject to contestation, invasion, or leakages. No doubt in a radically heterogeneous society of truly free exchange and reciprocal respect, much of what occurs in the nineteenth-century US as linguistic, aesthetic and moral transgression would assume a much different character. To call such activity transgressive is to acknowledge (if scarcely to accredit the legitimacy of) hegemonic limits and taboos. A supplementary issue in this course, however, will be whether some modes which seem transgressive from one perspective escape that label from another. To what degree does a text like “Bartleby” introduce a massively altered mode of measure into the status quo, in the light of which values are radically altered, the horizon of the normative potentially changes, and transgressive behavior potentially undermines the very framework of assumption in which it is seen as such.

Let me emphasize that, although it addresses a specific theme, this course is meant to cover a wide spectrum of nineteenth-century U.S. authors, and to study nineteenth-century cultural conditions in sufficient depth to provide students with a solid introduction to this historical period, contestatory, complex and variegated as this “period” no doubt is. Linkages back at least as far British Romanticism, and forward at least as far as postmodernism, will be encouraged. Background theorists will include Raymond Williams on hegemony, Bakhtin and Geoffrey Harpham on the grotesque, Mary Douglas on filth, dirt, and waste, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the meaning of transgression from the medieval fair down through the Victorian horror of and yet fascination with the body, Witold Gombrowicz on the aesthetic subversion of mediating codes and norms, and Virgil Nemoinanu on theory of the secondary, with perhaps a bit of Foucault and a smidgeon of Freud. Primary readings will range across a spectrum nineteenth-century American texts; these will include readings in Poe, Frederick Douglass, Whittier, Clement Moore, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

537 Fall Seminar: Special Topics in American Studies: Sexuality and Citizenship
Kate Cummings

This seminar rests on three premises: first, the reproduction of the nation-state is inextricably bound up with the production and regulation of sexualities; second, historic changes wrought by capitalism extend to and depend upon transformations of sexualities in whose construction the human sciences, law, literature, film and other disciplines participate; third, sexuality is embodied in race, gender, class, age, and other social specificities. These three understandings orient an interdisciplinary investigation of both hegemonic narratives which predicate national belonging on not being (identified as) a “sexual pervert” or “degenerate” and on counter-narratives, which affirm queer desires, imagine queer alliances and work to identify the linkages between normative sexual regimes and regulatory apparatuses of capitialism, imperialism, racism and masculinism in which sexuality is enmeshed.
Three historical moments structure our examination of sexuality and citizenship. The first spans the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The nation is reconstructed at the expense of African Americans; restrictive immigration laws target Asians and Southeastern Europeans; the U.S. becomes an imperial power; capitalism transforms social relations and the landscape; America is “remasculinized”; the homosexual emerges as a pathological being and the heterosexual as his healthy/normal opposite; experts and their populist purveyors warn that the survival of “our race” depends on reproducing a vigorous, native-born Anglo-American stock through scientific selection, on the one hand, and on the other hand eliminating, sterilizing or segregating African Americans, recent immigrants, whites who cannot or will not be integrated into the circuits of capitalism, and homosexuals/inverts, all of whom are classed as “perverts”; critical histories of sexuality, race and nation and modern literary works queer this nationalist narrative. The second historical moment stretches from the cold war into the civil rights era. Baldwin’s Another Country and shorter texts are in dialogue with liberal narratives which (re)identify sexual and political dissent with each other and both with unAmericanism, which locate the source of homosexuality and communism outside the West and masculinity in the Orient and domestic “momism,” which fetishize the African American man and Asian woman, and which offer various solutions to “the Negro problem.” The final moment is our own. The central text is Yamashita’s The Tropic of Orange, in which a coalition of U.S. racial minorities, undocumented immigrants, sexual deviants, and the homeless take on U.S. imperial history.

A background in critical theory is strongly recommended; prior reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. I and Butler’s Gender Trouble is mandatory. All students should be prepared to discuss Foucault on the first day, and in September I will email the class a set of questions to guide our conversation about his genealogy. Eight short critiques of assigned texts, a conference length (7-8 page) final paper, and group presentation on one of the seminar’s topics are required.

James Joyce’s Ulysses

This course, designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, will be devoted to an intensive reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. The primary goal is simply to get a handle on Joyce’s sprawling modernist novel, but we’ll also survey some recent critical approaches to the text. Coursework will include weekly quizzes, a group project and presentation on one specific critical approach, and an 8-10 page final paper. Previous Joyce experience useful, but not required; doing an initial reading of the first few chapters prior to the first class is strongly encouraged.

Required Texts:

James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (Vintage, ISBN: 978-0-394-743127)
Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge, ISBN: 978-0-415-13858-1); 3rd. Ed.
Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Dalkey Archive, ISBN:978-1-56478-428-5)

Recommended Texts:

Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (U of California P, ISBN: 978-0-520-253971)

English 550: The Rhetoric of Fiction Revisited

This course takes its title from Wayne Booth’s groundbreaking study of narration, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Distinguishing between narrator and implied author, Booth examines how novels use various types of narration (e.g. reliable/unreliable, personal/impersonal) rhetorically, to shape readers’ interpretations. We will take as our premise for the course Booth’s argument that novels teach their readers how to read them largely through the rhetorical effects of narration.
To test and refine this premise, we will apply it to four classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, each of which constitutes a milestone in the genre’s development: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. We will place these novels in conversation with a range of critical studies of narration including, among others, Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader; Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”; Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions; and Nicholas Paige Before Fiction. As we move From Defoe’s and Richardson’s uses of found documents and fictional editors to Stowe’s highly politicized sentimentalism and Henry James’s almost affectless use of free indirect discourse, we will gain a sense of how the novel’s development as a genre depended in part on changing beliefs about the moral and aesthetic purposes of narration.
This course will be particularly useful for students who are interested in narrative theory and the history of the novel, but it requires no prior background in these areas. Course requirements will include two short (3pp) critical summaries and a final conference-length paper.

The "Culture" of the Social Sciences

The course will introduce students to the debates about the status of 'culture' and especially cultural methods within the social sciences, especially as those debates pertain to knowledge about racial, sexual, gender, and class inequalities. We'll then explore varying methods developed by current scholars in the humanities to engage the social sciences and to intervene into the consolidation of social scientific knowledges about inequality. The course's point of departure will be both Kant's "Conflict of Faculties" written in the moment of the birth of the German university and the Gulberkian Commission's "Open the Social Sciences" written at the end of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the globalization of the U.S. university, which took as its model in the early twentieth century the German university that Kant presciently addressed.

English 567 A and B:

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career.
(Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

Course reader available on e-reserve.

English 567 A and B:

This seminar serves as an introduction to pedagogical theory (primarily through the field of rhetoric and composition) for new Teaching Assistants. The course begins with an overview of current debates within rhetoric and composition about the teaching of writing, and then turns to readings and discussions that explore some of the theories and practices that guide various aspects of the teaching of writing. In the process of examining various pedagogical theories that guide the study and teaching of writing, we will make every effort to help you understand the “why” behind the “what we do” and “how we do it” when we teach writing. To this end, we will ask you to participate in some workshops in class and to undertake a series of shorter assignments that will give you an opportunity to reflect critically and build on the work you are doing as a teacher. By the end of the course, we will ask you to submit a final teaching portfolio in which you revisit the work you have done in the course, reflecting on its cumulative effect, and begin to develop a teaching philosophy which will guide you and which you can build on over the course of your tenure as a teacher and scholar, both with us here in the English Department and in the rest of your career.
(Restricted to English department Teaching Assistants.)

Course reader available on e-reserve.

Translation in Translingual/Transnational Narratives: Politics, Theory, and Practice

This seminar examines some crucial interconnections between burgeoning scholarship in postcolonial theory, applied linguistics, and translation studies on language contact and the politics and problematics of translation across difference. The seminar prepares participants to explore new perspectives on translation and writing as practices of creation in what Mary Louis Pratt has so aptly called the ‘contact zone.’ The point of departure for this seminar is that all interpretive and communicative acts are acts of critical translation, in that the very medium that makes textual transactions possible—language itself (and English in particular)—is already and always in translation.

Building on the various theories and approaches to personal writing, language, and translation, we will be conducting close readings of a collection of narratives of crossing language and cultural borders by voices that cannot be identified as belonging to one specific nation and using one specific language/language variety. More particularly, we will explore how these writers compose translingual and transnational experiences while (re)shaping content, conventions, structure, linguistic choices, stylistic patterns, and theoretical positions.

English 570 is a credit/no credit course in which students sharpen their understanding of the technical, interpersonal, and practical elements involved in effective ESOL teaching. The course involves daily language teaching, weekly observation of other language classrooms, a video teaching demonstration, and seminar discussion. There are weekly writing assignments and a final project. No required texts. Only open to MATESOL students.

This course covers the basic syntactic structures of English. Students develop a working knowledge of those grammatical structures most crucial in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. They also practice relating and applying the structures studied to classroom situations (i.e., student errors, student questions, lesson planning, adapting textbooks, etc.). There is a strong focus on grammar in use as students analyze authentic discourse and design teaching materials that emphasize form, meaning, and use of grammar. Coursework includes grammar quizzes, analysis projects, class presentations, materials development, and daily homework.

We will be using 'The Teacher's Grammar of English,' by Ron Cowan, and 'How to Teach Grammar,' by Scott Thornbury.