English and Comparative Literature

This course will not offer an intensive study of the writings of Karl Marx. It’s a course in the theory of culture which emphasizes what Marxism has and has not contributed to that theory and what a better cultural theory might require. After laying out some basic propositions of Marxist thought and some issues and challenges associated with them when applied to the study of culture, it proposes to develop conceptual coordinates which will enable students to make sense of recent cultural analysis both inside and outside the Marxist orbit, including competing theories of global capitalism and financial crisis. What are the models of the world which are implicitly appealed to by critics interpreting cultural objects and practices and advocating more or less drastic social change?  What sorts of cultural interpretation do such models authorize?  What are the problematic interfaces between Marxism and other discourses of social justice, like environmentalism, and the models of interpretation to which they appeal?

Prerequisites: Instructors 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 Aristoles Rhetoric, the rhetorical manual of Platos 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.

(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.

In the later 20th century, Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation underwent a significant critical revaluation. No longer viewed as merely the “Master of Suspense,” he—and his work—became central objects of poststructuralist thought,  embraced not only by film theorists but by world-renowned philosophers and critical theorists. This is a course on both Hitchcock’s films and 20th- and 21st-century critical theory. In conjunction with the films, we will read key texts by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Freud, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Rancière, Tzvetan Todorov, Slavoj Žižek (and others). We will develop skills in close cinematic analysis and the parsing of theoretical texts, while exploring keywords in literary, media, and performance theory (narrative, apparatus, ideology, dispositif, subject, performativity, affect, gaze, fetish, frame, screen, theatricality, etc.).

CLEN 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate Comparative Literature lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

This course helps students whose first language is not English develop their academic writing skills. The course covers essay structure, rhetoric, grammatical accuracy, paraphrasing, citing sources, critical thinking, and editing/revising work.

The course is thematic: you will explore different topics and themes (current affairs, social issues, etc.) by reading, listening, and discussing material, and then write essays about that material. The instructors will provide extensive feedback to help you edit and revise your own writing.

This course helps students whose first language is not English develop their academic writing skills. The course covers essay structure, rhetoric, grammatical accuracy, paraphrasing, citing sources, critical thinking, and editing/revising work.

The course is thematic: you will explore different topics and themes (current affairs, social issues, etc.) by reading, listening, and discussing material, and then write essays about that material. The instructors will provide extensive feedback to help you edit and revise your own writing.

This course helps students whose first language is not English develop their academic writing skills. The course covers essay structure, rhetoric, grammatical accuracy, paraphrasing, citing sources, critical thinking, and editing/revising work.

The course is thematic: you will explore different topics and themes (current affairs, social issues, etc.) by reading, listening, and discussing material, and then write essays about that material. The instructors will provide extensive feedback to help you edit and revise your own writing.

This course helps students whose first language is not English develop their academic writing skills. The course covers essay structure, rhetoric, grammatical accuracy, paraphrasing, citing sources, critical thinking, and editing/revising work.

The course is thematic: you will explore different topics and themes (current affairs, social issues, etc.) by reading, listening, and discussing material, and then write essays about that material. The instructors will provide extensive feedback to help you edit and revise your own writing.

This course helps students whose first language is not English develop their academic writing skills. The course covers essay structure, rhetoric, grammatical accuracy, paraphrasing, citing sources, critical thinking, and editing/revising work.

The course is thematic: you will explore different topics and themes (current affairs, social issues, etc.) by reading, listening, and discussing material, and then write essays about that material. The instructors will provide extensive feedback to help you edit and revise your own writing.

Over the centuries, readers have been drawn to accounts of “true” crime—violent narratives involving real people and real events. And yet, as with any literary object, the notion of “truth” is always unstable—stories and their tellings are always shaped by the motivations, values, and choices of those who tell them, often with an eye toward the audience that will consume them. Whether constructed in order to moralize, to enforce or critique social or political ideologies, or purely to sell copies, “true
crime” is a literary genre that reveals attitudes about gender, race, and class; that illustrates—and sometimes calls into question—cultural norms and mores; that calls on readers to reflect on their own morbid curiosity and assumptions and fears. In this class we will engage with a diverse selection of literary texts—spanning from the Middle Ages to the present day and from a range of genres, including pamphlets, plays, novels, and more—as well as contemporary films, a tv series, and a
podcast. Through close reading and critical analysis, we will examine the evolution of the “true crime” genre and the cultural and societal contexts that shape the portrayal of crime for popular consumption. We will explore the ways in which texts and authors sensationalize, moralize, and convey the complexities of crime. We will analyze point of view: who’s telling the story, whom we sympathize with, and what insights we get into the minds of those committing crimes as well as those who fall prey to them. We will consider justice and policing— the role played by the law and its enforcers in shaping narratives about crime and punishment, right and wrong. Finally, we will reflect on the ethical implications of representing real-life crimes in literature, and how “true crime” narratives shape social perceptions, fears, prejudices, and notions of justice and morality.

(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.

This history of children’s literary narrative begins with the observation that the stories read and heard by children exercise immeasurable imaginative power. Socially, ethically, culturally, psychologically, even politically, much of who we are as adults –what makes us cry and what makes us laugh-- began in the first stories that absorbed us and gave us so much pleasure. Beginning with fairytales and folktales from across the globe, we will explore coming-of-age stories, domestic fiction designed to educate girls, adventure romance marketed to boys (and to men who thought of themselves as boys) and fantasy. We will look at how children’s literature explores questions of heroism, gender difference, disability, perspective, community, and resilience. We will consider narrative strategies such as setting, voice, and plot as well as the role of historical context, illustration and media adaptation. While our discussions will focus on fictional primary sources, we will also consider scholarship that helps see this material through a variety of theoretical perspectives. Readings may include fairytale selections from Europe, Asia, and Africa; Alcott’s Little Women and its American afterlife in Gerwig’s film; Stevenson’s Treasure Island and pirate narrative; Collodi’s and Disney’s Pinocchio; Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and quest romance; Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; and a selection of illustrated picture books.  

As a survey of Asian American literature, this course examines recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The course has four learning objectives.

First, by the end of the term, you should be able to recognize and explain key aspects of Asian North American cultural and literary representations across the twentieth century.

We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. We’ll examine how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines.

The second section turns to how Asian North American authors use innovative creative strategies to resist cycles of love and fear, especially in the wake of war and conflict in Asia and alongside the rise of the model minority.

The final section examines intimacy, communities, and crisis in forms of migration, diaspora, and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the global refugee crisis to more recent developments in the wake of COVID-19.

Second, you will interpret literary strategies (what literary scholars call “formal strategies”) and their connection to the text’s argument.

A central claim for this course is that cultural productions make debatable claims and arguments, and that one of the ways they do so is through form (such as the brevity of a poetic line and its layout, different narrators or points of view in a novel, or a drama that moves back and forth in time). How do these authors use literature to respond to, critique, or revise cultural representations of Asia and Asians in America? You will learn how to unpack the argument of text, or, more precisely, what you define as the argument of each work. What cultural issue or problem does the text identify? Why? What is its argument regarding this issue? How does the work support this argument? Does it offer any solutions? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

To that end, we will consider all of these texts might be responding to, commenting on, and even working against dominant cultural assumptions of their time and in ours. Although we will read the texts in rough chronological order, at times, we will break chronology to examine the texts in comparative, thematic clusters.

Third, you will create original and informed analyses of literary works and fine-tune and evaluate your critical reading and writing skills.

You’ll have the opportunity to practice analysis in multiple ways. In your assignments and assessments for the course, you will a) formulate your own arguments about the texts, b) support these arguments with evidence and analysis and c) situate your analyses amid relevant historical and cultural contexts.

Finally, you will reflect upon a) connections between course material and the contemporary world and b) the potential of humanities studies as a method of community and social engagement.

Ideally, you will leave this course with tools and strategies that you will be able to use beyond the boundaries of a course in literary study: thinking critically, analyzing evidence carefully, developing original and creative opinions and arguments, and communicating effectively.

How exhausting is it, really, always rooting for the antihero? Not very, our cultural and social landscape would suggest. From films to novels, popstars to political figures, contemporary culture marvels more and more at the misfits, the flawed, the scheming, the petty, the brats. Traditional heroic qualities are no longer necessary to appeal to audiences fascinated with the likes of Tony Soprano or Olivia Pope, the Punisher or Hannah Horvath. But is the antihero a product of the golden age of television? A result of our modern, revisionist impulse to reconsider the villains of our childhood? 

This course will explore the complex and evolving figure of the antihero from its origins in the literary canon—in, for instance, Greek tragedy and the picaresque novel—to its prominence in modern fiction, film, and television. In parallel, we will explore how the antihero functions within broader socio-political contexts—whether as a critique of institutional power, a commentary on individualism and alienation, or a reflection of our anxieties about a world in which morality is no longer absolute.

Key questions will include: What does it mean to be anti-heroic in the modern world? How does the antihero challenge the distinction between protagonist and antagonist? How do marginalized voices shape and redefine antiheroic figures? What is it about figures who live on the boundary between law and lawlessness—the cowboy, the vigilante, the rebel—that so appeals to us? 

       Why does literature affect us as it does, why might you want to understand its history, strategies, and meaning, and how exactly do you go about that? This course won’t give you the answer, because there is no single answer. It will instead point the way toward the multitude of possible answers, giving you a variety of critical tools for exploring these questions, and deepening your powers as a thinker, reader, and writer.
            The course consists of weekly lectures by department faculty members (ENGL 2000) and small weekly seminars with advanced doctoral candidates (ENGL 2001). The lectures will introduce you to texts from across literary history and in various genres (poetry, drama, prose narrative, etc.), giving you an opportunity to learn from and get to know our renowned faculty members. The intimate seminar setting will give you an opportunity to delve further into these texts and techniques, debate their meaning with one another and an expert guide, and engage in exercises that advance your critical writing and interpretive skills, putting into practice what you’ve learned. You will encounter the wide variety of critical approaches taken by our faculty, your seminar leader, and the discipline at large, while learning to expand upon these approaches and make them your own.
            The course is required for English majors and minors (who should take it as early as possible in their Columbia careers), but it is for everyone: advanced students of literature or those new to literary study; committed majors or those still exploring; anyone seeking the excitement and immersion this course offers.
            (Note: Students who register for ENGL UN2000 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL UN2001.)

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.   

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.   

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.   

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.   

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.   

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.

This course examines twentieth-century literature, film, and music in order to explore the many and complex ways that beauty, power, and bodily identity co-articulate experiences that lie beyond the ordinary. Reading novels, essays, and poetry alongside musical interludes, we will think about bodies, power, and beauty together. This class explores the wide beyond, the other side of the everyday, the hum of being that can be discerned only in certain musical performances, the terror and pleasure that course through certain works of fiction, and the fragmented self that fails to cohere in extraordinary acts of memoir. From these pieces and unfinished conversations, we intend to collaboratively develop fresh insights on the nature of beauty and identity under increasingly draconian and profit-driven forms of knowledge and power.

This course (essentially identical to the lecture course on Virginia Woolf that I have taught frequently over the past fifteen years) will focus on six novels and one non-fictional book by Virginia Woolf. It will explore multiple questions that are essential to literary study, e.g.: What does it mean to study a single author’s work in chronological sequence, finding both consistency and change? How does an author’s work change over the course of her career in response to larger historical and cultural changes? How does an author decide the course of her career in response to critical responses at the time? In addition, the course will also focus in detail on the inner logic and coherence of each of the books on the syllabus.

When we speak of genre in film and literature, the word summons images of fantasy, science-fiction, westerns, and horror. But, in theatre, genre instead suggests tragedy and comedy, or narrative tropes like the living room drama and the revenge play. Why this disconnect? Why is it, when compared to other mediums, plays with dragons, spaceships, cowboys, and haunted houses seem so few and far between? In this course, we will explore how theatre’s medium-specific mode of staging genre, while perhaps rare, in fact stands as a unique and invaluable tool for laying bare and deconstructing the tropes and politics of genre, complicating expectations in a way often shunned, but essential for understanding the cultural structures underpinning castles, cyborgs, and six-shooters. We will attend to fantasy, science-fiction, westerns, and horror across media, focusing on theatre as a means of disrupting our understanding of both genre and theatre, coming to our own new understanding of each as inextricably twined.

Arguably the most consequential decade of the postwar era, the 1960s saw American poetry become a site of radical experiment and political contestation, as longstanding assumptions of white male-dominated culture were placed under unprecedented pressure. This course traces that upheaval across movements—Beat, Black Mountain, Black Arts, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance. Poets to be studied include Allen Ginsberg, Russell Atkins, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Frank O'Hara, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, N.H. Pritchard, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, John Ashbery, Diane di Prima, and Jayne Cortez. We will attend to questions of form—breath, the page, sound, performance, and the boundary between poetry and music—within the historical contexts of the Civil Rights, Black Power, feminist, gay liberation, and environmental movements.

The English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship is a two to four-week course each semester on a special topic presented by a visiting scholar. The series was endowed by a gift from Professor Emerita of English Lucyle Hook to bring our students and faculty the perspective of scholars of literature in English working outside the College community. It can only be taken for pass/fail for 1 point. Students must attend all four class sessions and write a final paper in order to receive credit for this course.To see the dates/times that The English Conference will meet this semester, the current course description, and the biography of the visiting scholar, please visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/english-conference.

Enrollment limited to Barnard students. Application process and permission of instructor required: https://writing.barnard.edu/become-writing-fellow. Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring. The Writer’s Process is only open to those who applied to and were accepted into the Writing Fellows Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major.

Enrollment limited to Barnard students. Application process and permission of instructor required: https://writing.barnard.edu/become-writing-fellow. Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring. The Writer’s Process is only open to those who applied to and were accepted into the Writing Fellows Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major.

Academic Writing Intensive is a small, intensive writing course for Barnard students in their second or third year who would benefit from extra writing support. Students attend a weekly seminar, work closely with the instructor on each writing assignment, and meet with an attached Writing Fellow every other week. Readings and assignments focus on transferable writing, revision, and critical thinking skills students can apply to any discipline. Students from across the disciplines are welcome. This course is only offered P/D/F. To be considered for the course, please send a recent writing sample to vcondill@barnard.edu, ideally from your First-Year Writing or First-Year Seminar course, or any other writing-intensive humanities or social sciences course at Barnard (no lab reports please).

NOTE: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class.

Fall 2022 course description: Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays. 

Summer 2022 course description: The Art of the Essay is a writing workshop designed to help you contribute meaningfully in public discourse about the issues that matter most to you. You will write three types of essays in this class, all of which will center personal experience as valuable evidence of larger phenomena or patterns. Your essays will build in complexity, as you introduce more types of sources into conversation about your topics as the semester goes on. You will hone your skills of observing, describing, questioning, analyzing, and persuading. You will be challenged to confront complications and to craft nuanced explorations of your topics. We will also regularly read and discuss the work of contemporary published essayists, identifying key writerly moves that you may adapt as you attempt your own essays.  You will have many opportunities throughout the semester to brainstorm ideas, receive feedback from me and your peers, and develop and revise your drafts. At the end of the semester, you will choose a publication to which to submit or pitch one or more of your essays.

NOTE: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class.

Fall 2022 course description: Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays. 

Summer 2022 course description: The Art of the Essay is a writing workshop designed to help you contribute meaningfully in public discourse about the issues that matter most to you. You will write three types of essays in this class, all of which will center personal experience as valuable evidence of larger phenomena or patterns. Your essays will build in complexity, as you introduce more types of sources into conversation about your topics as the semester goes on. You will hone your skills of observing, describing, questioning, analyzing, and persuading. You will be challenged to confront complications and to craft nuanced explorations of your topics. We will also regularly read and discuss the work of contemporary published essayists, identifying key writerly moves that you may adapt as you attempt your own essays.  You will have many opportunities throughout the semester to brainstorm ideas, receive feedback from me and your peers, and develop and revise your drafts. At the end of the semester, you will choose a publication to which to submit or pitch one or more of your essays.

NOTE: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class.

Fall 2022 course description: Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays. 

Summer 2022 course description: The Art of the Essay is a writing workshop designed to help you contribute meaningfully in public discourse about the issues that matter most to you. You will write three types of essays in this class, all of which will center personal experience as valuable evidence of larger phenomena or patterns. Your essays will build in complexity, as you introduce more types of sources into conversation about your topics as the semester goes on. You will hone your skills of observing, describing, questioning, analyzing, and persuading. You will be challenged to confront complications and to craft nuanced explorations of your topics. We will also regularly read and discuss the work of contemporary published essayists, identifying key writerly moves that you may adapt as you attempt your own essays.  You will have many opportunities throughout the semester to brainstorm ideas, receive feedback from me and your peers, and develop and revise your drafts. At the end of the semester, you will choose a publication to which to submit or pitch one or more of your essays.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses.

Spring 2026:

Section 1, taught by Angel Nafis: Poetry Belongs With Us As legend Lucille Clifton said, “poetry began when somebody walked out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem.” In this class we will be demystifying the fundamentals of writing poetry by sharpening our most natural sonic and narrative instincts. We will use these instincts to guide our insights as we explore and practice specific craft elements and structural gestures—from the Ode, Elegy, and Sonnet, to Ekphrasis and Erasure. We’ll study the work of contemporary luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Kaveh Akbar, Sharon Olds, Jenny Xie, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, and more; using their example to inspire us on how best to understand and command the poetic line. Class time will include weekly writing prompts and share-outs. Come prepared to take risks and foster curiosity.

 

Section 2, taught by Miranda Field: This class approaches poetry as a practice energized as much by playful provocation as by engagement with urgent issues of the day. In-class writing and weekly prompts designed to provoke creative ingenuity will keep you writing, ensuring everyone has new poems to workshop regularly. A list of quotes headed “What is This Thing Called Poetry?” starts the class off with a discussion intended to open our minds and challenge pre-conceived notions on the topic. This will be followed by other, more focused questions and propositions, providing discussion topics for each class: How do artifice and raw reality intertwine in a poem’s making? In what ways can poems deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world we share? How do we, as poets, unlock the full potential of our chosen medium, language? What do we mean by “voice” in a poem, and when and how does “voice” emerge? Required readings are central to our work together, and specified titles and volumes must be acquired by the third week of the semester. Supplemental material will be provided as handouts and distributed in class.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses.

Spring 2026:

Section 1, taught by Angel Nafis: Poetry Belongs With Us As legend Lucille Clifton said, “poetry began when somebody walked out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem.” In this class we will be demystifying the fundamentals of writing poetry by sharpening our most natural sonic and narrative instincts. We will use these instincts to guide our insights as we explore and practice specific craft elements and structural gestures—from the Ode, Elegy, and Sonnet, to Ekphrasis and Erasure. We’ll study the work of contemporary luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Kaveh Akbar, Sharon Olds, Jenny Xie, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, and more; using their example to inspire us on how best to understand and command the poetic line. Class time will include weekly writing prompts and share-outs. Come prepared to take risks and foster curiosity.

 

Section 2, taught by Miranda Field: This class approaches poetry as a practice energized as much by playful provocation as by engagement with urgent issues of the day. In-class writing and weekly prompts designed to provoke creative ingenuity will keep you writing, ensuring everyone has new poems to workshop regularly. A list of quotes headed “What is This Thing Called Poetry?” starts the class off with a discussion intended to open our minds and challenge pre-conceived notions on the topic. This will be followed by other, more focused questions and propositions, providing discussion topics for each class: How do artifice and raw reality intertwine in a poem’s making? In what ways can poems deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world we share? How do we, as poets, unlock the full potential of our chosen medium, language? What do we mean by “voice” in a poem, and when and how does “voice” emerge? Required readings are central to our work together, and specified titles and volumes must be acquired by the third week of the semester. Supplemental material will be provided as handouts and distributed in class.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses.

What is the difference between a play and a film? No two playwrights will have the same response, but all must address the question. This is a class that revels in that distinction, encouraging students to explore the idiosyncrasy, strangeness, and power of the form. For half the semester, students will be writing in response to prompts that are designed to teach fundamental principles of the form. In addition to writing their own work, every week students will choose two plays from a collection of 150 to read and comment briefly on. During the second half of the semester, students develop a longer work, to be submitted as either a completed one act or a partial draft with notes for a full-length work. Classes are spent reading and discussing students’ work. No previous experience in playwriting is necessary.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. A workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story.

Story Writing I is an advanced workshop in prose writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction is required. Students will share at least two pieces of their own work with the class over the course of the semester. In addition, each week we will read and analyze a variety of published short stories with an eye for craft and writerly decisions that might be applied to our own work. Exercises and in-depth workshop letters will push students to think more deeply about their own choices and the many layers that make up their work. Conference hours to be arranged.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. 

Section 1 (taught by Sarah Wang in Spring 2026) Narrative Strategies: This course will explore the different ways that stories can be told. How a story is written is as important as what a story is about. Is there a turn at the end that changes everything you thought you knew? Is the narrator speaking from inside experience, reportage from the front lines of another world? How can the epistolary form be utilized to effect? Students will workshop their own stories, participate in four in-class generative writing sessions, and read weekly short stories demonstrating various strategies for style, voice, setting, dialogue, form, and point of view. Particular focus will be placed on writing from the margins and writing as an act of bearing witness.

Section 2 (taught by Gina Apostol in Spring 2026): This course will focus particularly on crafting the literary technique of point of view in fiction. Students will craft work with this question in mind: in what ways are art and ethics combined in the crafting of point of view? Students will practice writing from different narration modes: third person limited and omniscient, free indirect discourse, first person, and so on. They will consider the ethics of point of view by reading short stories, among them stories from Borges’s Labyrinths, John Keene’s Counternarratives, and Angela Carter’s Saints and Strangers. Some theoretical matters will include: postcoloniality in narration; identity in narration; ‘queering’ history; and critical race thought. Students will write three different pieces with the crafting of point of view in mind. Students will workshop each other’s pieces as well as discuss the texts in relation to their practice of the art of fiction.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. 

Section 1 (taught by Sarah Wang in Spring 2026) Narrative Strategies: This course will explore the different ways that stories can be told. How a story is written is as important as what a story is about. Is there a turn at the end that changes everything you thought you knew? Is the narrator speaking from inside experience, reportage from the front lines of another world? How can the epistolary form be utilized to effect? Students will workshop their own stories, participate in four in-class generative writing sessions, and read weekly short stories demonstrating various strategies for style, voice, setting, dialogue, form, and point of view. Particular focus will be placed on writing from the margins and writing as an act of bearing witness.

Section 2 (taught by Gina Apostol in Spring 2026): This course will focus particularly on crafting the literary technique of point of view in fiction. Students will craft work with this question in mind: in what ways are art and ethics combined in the crafting of point of view? Students will practice writing from different narration modes: third person limited and omniscient, free indirect discourse, first person, and so on. They will consider the ethics of point of view by reading short stories, among them stories from Borges’s Labyrinths, John Keene’s Counternarratives, and Angela Carter’s Saints and Strangers. Some theoretical matters will include: postcoloniality in narration; identity in narration; ‘queering’ history; and critical race thought. Students will write three different pieces with the crafting of point of view in mind. Students will workshop each other’s pieces as well as discuss the texts in relation to their practice of the art of fiction.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. 

What drives the music of a poem? How does one create rhythm and song? In what ways do chunks of language sort and arrange the perception of our readers? The purpose of this advanced poetry workshop is to closely study syntax, or in the words of Ellen Bryant Voigt, “the order of the words in each human utterance.” To further build upon our technical foundation as writers, we will also engage in other elements of craft, such as deep imagery, grammatical moods, tone, and poetic closure. We will be reading a variety of poets, including Etel Adnan, Rita Dove, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, John Murrillo, Choi Seungja, and Yuki Tanaka. Be prepared to generate new material independently for peer workshops where you will gain valuable feedback and constructive criticism. 

Apart from challenging your poetics on a technical level, I expect you to come to class with a strong desire to create meaning out of your daily lives, your personal or collective histories, and the futures that you are actively imagining. Your openness and willingness to grow as a human, poet, and critical thinker are fundamental to fostering a kind and supportive community in the classroom. Not only will you be writing poems, you will also learn to translate your soul’s language and help others do the same.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. 

What drives the music of a poem? How does one create rhythm and song? In what ways do chunks of language sort and arrange the perception of our readers? The purpose of this advanced poetry workshop is to closely study syntax, or in the words of Ellen Bryant Voigt, “the order of the words in each human utterance.” To further build upon our technical foundation as writers, we will also engage in other elements of craft, such as deep imagery, grammatical moods, tone, and poetic closure. We will be reading a variety of poets, including Etel Adnan, Rita Dove, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, John Murrillo, Choi Seungja, and Yuki Tanaka. Be prepared to generate new material independently for peer workshops where you will gain valuable feedback and constructive criticism. 

Apart from challenging your poetics on a technical level, I expect you to come to class with a strong desire to create meaning out of your daily lives, your personal or collective histories, and the futures that you are actively imagining. Your openness and willingness to grow as a human, poet, and critical thinker are fundamental to fostering a kind and supportive community in the classroom. Not only will you be writing poems, you will also learn to translate your soul’s language and help others do the same.

Open only to undergraduates. 

This course will introduce you to principles of effective public speaking and debate, and provide practical opportunities to use these principles in structured speaking situations. You will craft and deliver speeches, engage in debates and panel discussions, analyze historical and contemporary speakers, and reflect on your own speeches and those of your classmates. You will explore and practice different rhetorical strategies with an emphasis on information, persuasion and argumentation. For each speaking assignment, you will go through the speech-making process, from audience analysis, purpose and organization, to considerations of style and delivery. The key criteria in this course are content, organization, and adaptation to the audience and purpose. While this is primarily a performance course, you will be expected to participate extensively as a listener and critic, as well as a speaker.

Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Application process and instructor permission required: https://speaking.barnard.edu/become-speaking-fellow. Speaking involves a series of rhetorical choices regarding vocal presentation, argument construction, and physical affect that, whether made consciously or by default, project information about the identity of the speaker. In this course students will relate theory to practice: to learn principles of public speaking and speech criticism for the purpose of applying these principles as peer tutors in the Speaking Fellow Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major.

This entertaining and edifying lecture-not-unmixed-with conversation course will
consider the icon of the American cowboy, with its signature embrace of
masculinity, stoicism, elegiac music, and identification with nature. We will read
Cormac McCarthy’s dazzling Border Trilogy and other works that emerge from
this icon, watch a curated series of cowboy movies, and write critical essays.

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses.

Spring 2026: Drawing Cartoons and Comics

In this class, New Yorker cartoonist and graphic novelist Liana Finck will teach you the basics of making single-panel cartoons, writing and drawing comics, and generally expressing yourself in a mixture of words and pictures. You will learn to diagram your problems, craft jokes, and tell stories visually. You’ll get an overview of useful materials, programs and machines, and how to use all these things with a light enough touch that you can still focus on your art. You will get comfortable with processes for generating ideas and editing your work. We will read some graphic novels, look at lots of cartoons, and dip a toe into the history of colloquial visual storytelling. You will finish the semester with a large body of small-scale work, one serious longer piece, and a better understanding of your voice and what you have to say. My hope is that you’ll leave the class confident in your ability to work visually, and with a regular practice if you want one. 

Narrative competence is a crucial dimension of health-care delivery; this includes the capacity to attend and respond to stories of illness and the narrative skills to
reflect critically on the scene of care and its contexts.

Narrative Medicine explores and builds the clinical applications of literary knowledge. The objectives of this foundations course include furthering close reading skills and exploring theories of self-telling and relationality. At the center of this project is the medical encounter. To help clinicians fulfill their "receiving" duties more effectively, we will turn to narrative theory, autobiography theory, psychoanalytic theory, trauma scholarship and witnessing literature. Classwork integrates didactic and experiential methodologies to develop a heightenedawareness of self and others, and to build a practical set of narrative competencies.

Readings will include works by Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Lucy Grealy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler, Arthur Frank, Paul Ricoeur, Jonathan Shay and Jens Brockmeier.

This class is:

• An introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and a chance to read through them all, slowly and carefully
• An introduction to the way that Shakespeare’s mind worked, and to what he did with words
• An introduction to the sonnet as a form, up to the present moment
• A chance to explore how and why we read, and the difference that the pace of our reading makes
• An opportunity to practice paying a particular kind of extended attention, and to explore what it does to our minds and our memories when we spend time with a body of poems over a series of weeks

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others.

A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeares comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163: Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164: Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order.

 

This course surveys American literature written before 1800. While we will devote some attention to the literary traditions that preceded British colonization, most of our readings will be of texts written in English between 1620 and 1800. These texts--histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels--illuminate the complexity of this period of American culture. They tell stories of pilgrimage, colonization, and genocide; private piety and public life; manuscript and print publication; the growth of national identity (political, cultural, and literary); Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; race and gender; slavery and the beginnings of a movement towards its abolition. We will consider, as we read, the ways that these stories overlap and interconnect, and the ways that they shape texts of different periods and genres.

This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy.

In the wake of World War II, the so-called American Century rises out of the ashes of fascism, haunted by the specter of bombs blurring the boundary between victory and defeat. An ideological civil war ensues, punctuated by literary resistance to grand narratives and their discontents. Authors include Ellison, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Bishop, Pynchon, Robinson, Merrill, Morrison, Didion, and Wallace.

Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.

Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies.  Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.

Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies.  Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.

Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies.  Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.

Open to all students.This course teaches clear writing and provides exposure to a range of interpretative strategies.  Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester.

In this course, we will trace the complex category of imitation from its ancient roots to some of its modern theoretical and literary manifestations. Interpreted differently by different thinkers, imitation can refer to the problem of art’s imitation of things in the world (e.g., your portrait looks like you), art’s imitation of other artistic works (e.g., your portrait looks like a Rembrandt), people’s imitation or even mimicry of one another (who does she think she is?). The latter form of imitation raises the most overtly socio-political questions, whether by replicating social power structures in order to “pass” in a potentially hostile environment or by subverting these same structures through mimicking, outwitting, critiquing, or mocking them. At its core, the category of imitation focuses our attention on what is so central to artmaking that it almost eludes our notice: the question of resemblance. Put in its simplest form: What are we doing (philosophically, artistically, socially) when we make one thing resemble another?

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this class we will explore the process of healing from trauma through the art of storytelling. We will ground ourselves in the writing of Latina authors whose work demonstrates the resistance from erasure in the United States. The goal of the class is to understand the connection between trauma and healing, through storytelling and creative writing. Moreover, we will develop three pieces of creative non-fiction that will encompass this relationship over the three different lenses of place, person and personal experience.

 

This course encompasses themes of race, ethnicity, mass incarceration, and immigration in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will consider the roles of journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives in shaping public policy and attitudes towards lives behind bars. Guest speakers will also provide personal experiences to help reframe our own narratives and perspectives on these issues. The course’s primary goal is to challenge the process of how stories of race, immigration, and mass incarceration are written, by developing scholarly pieces.

Sophomore standing required. Attend first class for instructor permission. Registering for the course only through Student Planning or SSOL will NOT ensure your enrollment. Explores the transformation of sociality, consciousness and geo-politics by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze audio-visual analog and digital media, and explore political theory and media theory written since the rise of the internet. Final projects on contemporary media forms.

The course looks at poets, writing in the twentieth century and after, whose work is concerned with liberation from colonial rule and, subsequently, with the formation of a post-colonial literary voice. Poetry in the period of decolonization deals with issues of national, racial, class and gender identity, place and displacement, and freedom from linguistic and political oppression. We will read, among others, poets from the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East such as Tagore, Iqbal, Faiz and Darwish; two leading poets of négritude, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, in relation to movements in Caribbean, African, and American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present (Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Nicolas Guillén); Latin American poets including Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Nicanor Parra; and English-language poets including W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and voices of more contemporary movements in poetry including the Beat, feminist, LGBTQ, indigenous, and "Black Lives Matter" movements. Using theory and historical background, we will look at the work of each poet comparatively in the context of international development and political change. The course offers a critical approach to globalization through literature; since decolonization has touched so much of the world, we are open to works from other literatures that students propose. Though class discussions will be in English, students are encouraged, to the greatest extent possible, to read the poetry in the original language. Please email me as needed for further information.

What was New York City like before the skyscrapers and yellow cabs with which we associate it today? This class explores the long history of New York City and its surroundings through the literatures of the many peoples who have called it home over the centuries. We will read Lenape creation stories, eyewitness accounts of Henry Hudson’s voyage, colonial pamphlets about the earliest slave revolts in North America, and literary fiction and poetry by lifelong New Yorkers including Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. We will follow Dutch explorers and traders in Manahatta, investigate the seedy underworld of blackmail and brothels in the Bowery, survey the financial revolution that turned Wall Street into a center of global capitalism, and get a glimpse of the Gilded Age in the opulent novels of manners that take us from Grand Central to Greenwich Village. To make good use of our city, students will write dispatches from various locations in New York City, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, that look for traces of the past in the present.

In this course we will read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays alongside the sources he used to compose them. We will take a deliberately wide generic perspective when it comes to these sources, reading biographies, histories, prose fiction, and poetry. Our basic aim will be to immerse ourselves in the texts Shakespeare read and responded to as he wrote his plays. Our more ambitious aim will be to gain a more precise understanding of how Shakespeare honed the nature and function of his drama in relation to and against his largely non-dramatic sources of inspiration. Questions we will consider include: What is a source? What is an adaptation? What is a play? What is a play by Shakespeare?

This course will examine films and a few memoirs that center on family narratives, family cultures, cultural legacies and customs inherited through generations, generational dynamics, childhood memory, and ideas of home as a utopian/dystopian and oneiric space.   Explorations of memory, imagination and childhood make-believe will interface with readings in psychoanalysis, attachment theory, phenomenology and in the social history of this polymorphous institution.  Authors will include Gaston Bachelard, Alison Bechdel, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Doty, Vivian Gornick, Lorraine Hansberry, Maggie Nelson and D.W. Winnicott; and films by Sean Baker, Alfonso Cuaron, Greta Gerwig, Lance Hammer, Barry Jenkins, Jennifer Kent, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinart, Lucretia Martel, Mike Mills, Sarah Polley, Charlotte Wells, Andrei Zvyagintsev and others.

Seminar application instructions: Email Professor Spiegel (mls37@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Family in Film & Memoir Seminar." In your message, include your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken. All students are automatically placed on a waitlist, from which the instructor will in due course admit students as spaces become available.

The title of this course suggests that there are literatures across the “globe” written in English, and that we will study them. But this statement rests on a series of assumptions: the a priori existence of a globe with latitudes, longitudes, and borders; a singular category of “literature” produced in different geographical locations across the globe; and finally, that these literatures are written in English. During the course of the semester, we will investigate and (occasionally overturn) all three of these assumptions. 

In order to do so, we will read across different literary genres (short stories and novels, plays, poetry, and essays), while also reading texts that move between these genres or defy them altogether. We will read texts that were originally written in English, as well as texts that have been translated into English, and we will learn and discuss the term “global anglophone” along with the ways in which this term has been challenged. During our collective readings and discussions, we will map the locations that arise in each text and the locations out of which these texts arise. We will study the relationship between literature, translation, and mapping, and we will learn and discuss the concept of planetary thinking and writing as an alternative to border and global thinking.

This course explores how New York City didn't just host the American comics industry—it shaped what comics looked like, how they were sold, and what stories they told. We'll trace how the city's newspapers, newsstands, subway cars, tenement buildings, and even its crime waves left their mark on the page. We'll move chronologically from the 1890s to today, looking at moments when the city and the comics it produced were tightly linked: early newspaper strips born in the era of “yellow journalism”; the Golden Age publishers clustered in Midtown offices; the censorship battles of the 1950s; underground cartoonists working out of East Village apartments in the ’60s and ’70s; and the rise of graphic novels in bookstores and museums. Along the way, we'll ask: Why did superhero comics look the way they did? How did economic pressures shape page layout? What happens when the same city produces both blockbuster superhero titles and experimental art magazines?

Readings range from early Sunday pages (the Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay) through Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Frank Miller’s Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, to Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, Ben Katchor’s urban wanderings, Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons, and contemporary mainstream works like Hawkeye’s “Pizza Dog” issue. Famously, Eisner drew on his Bronx childhood to create A Contract with God, while Miller’s work channels the gritty, anxious New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But we’ll look at the full range of what the city made possible, from newspaper syndicates to underground comix to today’s independent publishers.

You’ll learn to read comics closely by analyzing how panel grids, gutters, shadows, and perspectives work and by connecting those choices to the real-world conditions in which they were made. Optional Saturday field trips include Newspaper Row/City Hall Park (early press and Sunday pages), an East Village Underground walk (East Village Other/Gothic Blimp Works sites), and a visit to the Society of Illustrators/MoCCA (exhibition and archives orientation).

Course assignments combine analytical writing, archival engagement, and original digital scholarship. In addition to two short close-reading essays, there is a final project that takes the form of either a Digital Exhibit or an Interactive Map, through which you use digital humanities tools to analyze how New York City’s physical geography, infrastructure, and cultural ecosystems shaped the American comics industry. Both formats require work with archival sources, metadata creation, and close formal analysis of comics, and all projects are accompanied by a short reflective essay that synthesizes research findings, site-specific or curatorial decisions, and close reading while critically assessing how the chosen digital tools shape historical interpretation.

From the finishing school to the convent to the women’s college, spaces of female education have long fascinated writers. More than just academic spaces, these are also unique worlds of friendship and exclusion, desire and alienation, community and social fracture, conformity and transgression. In this course, we will explore how women’s education has been imagined in novels, poetry, and film from the early modern period to the present. Beginning with competing visions of women’s education in early feminist and anti-feminist thought, we’ll go on to explore how imaginative writers from the nineteenth century to the present have envisioned the girls’ school as both a literary and a social space. What kinds of cultural fantasies attach to these spaces, and what narratives and social relationships do they enable? How are differences of class, race, sexuality, and religion negotiated within them? Do girls’ schools offer a world apart from society, or do they recreate and intensify outside social dynamics within their walls? Our exploration will take us across genres and media, including the Bildungsroman, the detective novel, the narrative poem, and the horror film. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Fleur Jaeggy, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Sayers, Muriel Spark, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others. 

From its origins, and to the present, marriage has been transactional, arranged, and rarely concerned with the desires or interests of the wife. In the eighteenth-century, and especially through the genre of the novel, women began to insist on right to choose their spouse, and the possibility of marrying for love. Perversely, it is at this point that the descriptions of some of the most disastrous and repressive marriages enter literature, and in the twentieth century film. If “the course of true love never did run smooth” this seminar follows its path, investigating the shifts and transformations of marriage. While the focus of the seminar will be on women, we will also consider men, same-sex marriage, questions of marriage and race in the United States, and marriage in China.

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.

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.

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.”

 

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.

“In Italy, literary fiction has long been considered a man’s game.” So began a
2019 New York Times article discussing the growing international attention being
paid to Italian women writers, particuarly on the heels of Elena Ferrante’s
phenomenal global success. This course will center the female voice and
subjectivity in the Italian literary tradition, with a focus on celebrated prose writers
active from the early twentieth century to the present. Some, recently republished
and reconsidered for the Italian market, have also been re-translated and re-
introduced to a wider English readership. We will trace the reception of female
authors within the Italian critical establishment and abroad, and the role
translation might play in broadening and amplifying their reputation and reach.
We will focus on one author per week, paying special attention to themes of
resistance, rebellion, and self-fashioning. All readings will be in English.

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a concentration in creative writing.

This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets. This means students will discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. We will focus on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. We will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments and class lectures. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

“Nature” is one of the weirdest words in the English language—it can refer to human trait (“it is in her nature”), a nonhuman environment (“we walked in nature”), a divine power (“mother nature”), or a biological process (“nature calls”). Despite—and indeed, because of—these ambiguities, nature has played pivotal roles in the territory that has come to be known as the United States. In various guises, nature has inspired pilgrims, pioneers, and tourists. At the same time, nature has staged struggles between settlers and Natives, whites and racialized peoples, upper classes and working classes. In this seminar, we will learn how nature has brought us together and torn us apart. By engaging with a variety of media—from colonial-era captivity narratives to nineteenth-century abolitionist texts to contemporary Kumeyaay poetry—we will recover conflicting ideas of nature. And by reading in the environmental humanities—including history, anthropology, and literary criticism—we will discover how these ideas have impacted all-too-human identities and more-than-human entities. While our inquiries will take us from prehistory to the present, they will converge on the future: now that we are destroying our ecosystems, extinguishing our fellow species, and altering our atmosphere, is there still such a thing as nature? During the semester, we will navigate this tricky terrain both collectively and individually, with each undergraduate completing a four-to five-page theoretical essay, a fourteen- or fifteen-page research essay, and a natural history mini-exhibit, and with each graduate student preparing a presentation for our end-of-semester conference that they then revise as a seminar paper and/or repurpose by organizing a panel for a national conference.

Overview: This class will carefully and searchingly read Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein as well as her 1831 revision, using those two texts as the seeds for a much larger investigation about what the Frankenstein paradigm brought to later American literary and cinematic culture. We’ll look at how Mary Shelley developed the genre of science fiction from nothing, wrote the first recognizable book of horror in the English cannon, pioneering literary philosophical writing in the absence of a clear hero, and used her novel as a mechanism for thinking about reproductive violence, domestic abuse, and the social problem of male loneliness. From there, we’ll examine the Frankenfilms of the 20th and 21st century—many of which are excellent, but many of which are downright offensive—to think about what Shelley’s literary and philosophical paradigm contributed to Anglo-American cinematic discourse about patriarchy, power, sex, class, God, reproduction, fascism, and feminism.

 

This course asks a simple question: what kind of action (political, social, instrumental) can a novel take? In the seminar, we will consider the tradition of protest fiction— or what we might call Books that Change the World— taking stock of how the novel has embraced the overt aim of creating change. Our goal as a class will be to set our own terms for what a protest novel is, was, should be, or might be, and to consider both the reach and limitations of this tradition. The terrain is broad, covering works from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with a center of gravity in the early-mid 20th century, and engaging a range of topics on which novels have sought to make change.

The course is organized thematically and chronologically, with works (mostly English language) from the U.S., England, Ireland, Canada, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Each week we will read a novel, occasionally paired with other materials, such as visual works, other literary materials, theoretical readings, etc. Themes to which these activist works are geared include: slavery and abolition; working conditions; sexuality, gender and patriarchy; war, peace, and revolution; race and racism; incarceration; and environmental crisis. This is a discussion seminar, and each student is expected to participate in every class meeting.

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.

(Lecture). This lecture course is intended as the first half of the basic survey in African-American literature. By conducting close readings of selected song lyrics, slave narratives, fiction, poetry, and autobiography, we will focus on major writers in the context of cultural history. In so doing, we will explore the development of the African- American literary tradition. Writers include, but are not limited to, Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Jacobs, Harper, Dunbar, Chestnutt, Washington, Du Bois, and Larsen. Course requirements: class attendance, an in-class midterm exam, a five-page paper, and a final exam.

The class is an intensive reading of the prose and poetry of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Higginson 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.

Prerequisites: Departments permission. This course (required for all first-year graduate students in the English Department) introduces students to scholarly methodologies in the study of literature and culture. The Masters Seminar operates in tandem with the Masters Colloquium [ENGL G5005], and requires short writing assignments over the course of the semester and extensive in-class participation. There are two sections of this course.

Prerequisites: Departments permission. This course (required for all first-year graduate students in the English Department) introduces students to scholarly methodologies in the study of literature and culture. The Masters Seminar operates in tandem with the Masters Colloquium [ENGL G5005], and requires short writing assignments over the course of the semester and extensive in-class participation. There are two sections of this course.

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.

How do dancers, poets, and novelists use the resources of their genres to imagine new forms of embodiment and belonging? This graduate seminar brings together recent work in the fields of modernism, dance, and diaspora studies to explore the relationship between theories of movement, space, and dwelling in the literature and drama of global modernity. We will study representations of modern dance in literary works, as well as performances by modern dancers and choreographers, to consider the reciprocity and continuity of forms long associated with expressivity and social change. At the same time, we will chart how such texts become invested in strategic withholding and inexpression, or what performance scholar Tina Post has called “deadpan” aesthetics. Can there be a kind of revelation in concealment—or, conversely, a concealment in the guise of outward projection? At the level of form, how might we understand phenomena that seem to cross disciplinary lines, such as choreographic narration, kinaesthetic empathy, self-talk as social dress rehearsal, or theatrically-populated interior monologue? And how might these insights be brought to bear on the embodied and psychic experience of diaspora, that conundrum of enforced movement that can so often feel like stuckness-in-place?

In this seminar we will take as our topic the long poem and the worlds, exterior and interior, that it both perceives and creates. Following some initial conceptual work to pin down the genre (if that’s the right word for it) as it developed before modernism, the heart of the course comes in the close study of three main examples in their entirety: The Seasons by James Thomson, The Task by William Cowper, and The Prelude by William Wordsworth. These major English poems, which date to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are all about growth, and they are in truth really, really long. They just keep growing and growing. They push, you might say, against their finitude. We will confront their too-much-ness and figure out how to think and feel about it, but also how to work with it, how to ride it. From week to week we will ask how the expansiveness of these authors relates on the one hand to their smaller-scale poetic techniques and on the other to their grand social, environmental, philosophical, and spiritual ambitions. The sheer energy these works demand of their readers can (this is the gamble of the long poem) make experiencing them deeply meaningful. In their own time they became tremendously influential models, radically reshaping what poetry could do and be, and they still have much to teach critical readers and creative writers today. Interspersed among the main examples on the schedule will be a few other (shorter!) poems from the same period. Along the way, although our focus will stay on primary texts, we will sample several different works of exemplary criticism. And we will end our semester with a glance ahead to the twentieth-century long poem. Active contributions (in and out of class) to discussion, a short paper, and (of course) a long paper make up the required coursework.

 

This seminar will address the major works of Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), Margaret Cavendish (1623-73), and Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81). There are many differences between the three writers: one was a royalist, one a republican and one something in between; one was largely indifferent to religion and the other two were devoted Protestants; two were active in print, one only in manuscript; two were skilled linguists, and one only read English (or so she claimed). Yet they also had a surprising amount in common: all three were actively involved in the central political conflicts of their time and suffered losses, imprisonment, harassment, and/or exile because of their political views; two (Cavendish and Hutchinson) wrote accounts and defenses of (their positions in) the English civil wars (and contributed to political thought and historiography more broadly); two (also Cavendish and Hutchinson) were actively engaged with and contributed to debates in natural philosophy; and all three were astonishingly original, and creative writers of literary, philosophical and polemical texts. Students will discuss many aspects of these three writers’ work, including the books they read as well as those they wrote; the genres to which they were committed (and in which they innovated); the household, local, national and international contexts in which they worked and in which their work was received; and their interlocutors and critics. While the three authors will be the explicit focus of the class, we will also discuss the idea of “the woman writer” - one which deserves our skepticism.

This proseminar, which meets alternate weeks for the full academic year, is required for third-year PhD students in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The seminar will help you prepare for orals, develop your dissertation ideas, expand your research skills, produce articles for publication, and generally extend your professional skills. While we will read some practical “how to” literature and models, the focus will be on writing, workshopping material, and discussing process (time-management, organization, etc). Both out-of-class assignments and in-class writing exercises should serve to extend your ideas—or shake them loose—and bring you closer to a dissertation that represents your vision, makes others want to read your work, and reminds you why you care. By the end of the year, you will have a polished dissertation prospectus and should have submitted at least one article for publication (or have one close-to-ready for submission). Above all, the seminar offers a supportive community, an opportunity to try out ideas (cooked or still raw), and encouragement from your fellow scholar-writer-thinkers as you progress toward your orals and dissertation.

The work of Sylvia Wynter presents readers with a multi-disciplinary corpus, spanning plays, critical essays, interviews, a novel, poetry, and dance. In addition to her overarching critique of the idea of “Man”, Wynter’s work invites us to rethink disciplinarity, genre, and how critical practice is defined. If we take seriously the creative component of Wynter’s work, the generative capacity and urgency of poesis, how then might we envision the contours and stakes of a “literary method” in the context of her work?  By what means might we read her work, the kind of knowledge it produces by means of the literary, and the alternatives it offers us for thinking through the question of literary method? What, in short, does reading literature do? Does it reproduce complicity with or challenge the kinds of structures Wynter critiques?

Beginning with her essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’” this seminar takes seriously the question of normative forces at work under the rubric of aesthetics to better understand elements at work (poetics, performatives, epistemologies, concepts) and the philosophic, anthropo-centric, ecologic, and racialized topographies that appear. The seminar is divided into three parts: the aesthetic, the performative, and the poetic.

Above all, this course aims to generate readings of Wynter’s work and its complex attentions to multiple threads and tensions that constitute and animate modern knowledge.

Anyone who pursues a career as a college faculty member will teach writing—either formally, in a writing class, or informally, as we work with students who are new to our disciplines. However, many graduate students in the humanities have received no substantive training in the burgeoning field of writing studies. In English, career opportunities in writing studies have outpaced other field areas. The MLA’s 2016-2017 jobs list reported that 851 positions were advertised in English, 10% fewer than the previous year. Of those jobs, 217 were in writing studies, 187 were in British literature, and 172 were in American literature. Given that writing studies positions are also advertised elsewhere, the gap is likely larger. This seminar will explore key debates in writing studies research and teaching methodologies, program development, and disciplinary and institutional status. Writing studies is the newest name for “rhetoric and composition,” a field which declared its existence in the mid-1960s, and draws its praxes and theories from classical rhetoric, applied linguistics, cognitive and developmental psychology, literary criticism, civic education, creative writing, and progressive pedagogy. Scholarship in writing studies since the 1960s has sought to deepen our understanding of how transactions work among writers, readers, and texts. Writing studies prompts us to track how standards for “good” or “appropriate” academic writing change over time, and how the teaching of writing responds to social, political, institutional, and disciplinary forces. The readings in this course will help us to articulate our own philosophies of writing and shape approaches to pedagogy in our own fields. Topis will include the following: how writers develop; intellectual practices that foster community among learners; the ethics and politics of textual transactions, including assessment; students’ rights to their own language; literacy acquisition across media; working in transnational and translingual spaces; genre and rhetorical theory; fostering knowledge and skills transfer; the impact of intersectionality on pedagogy and program design; and labor justice. We will read works by foundational writing studies scholars including John Dewey, Wayne Booth, bell hooks, Victor Villaneuva, Jr. A. Suresh Canagarajah, and the current president of the Modern Language Association, Anne Ruggles Gere. Participants will have the opportunity to ask how writing studies can deepen the understanding of writing in our fields, regardless of discipline. Reciprocally, we will ask how writing studies might be enriched by current thinking and methodologies from other fields. These explorations will help participants who apply for writing studies or writing-intensive positions.

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

ENGL 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate English lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

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.