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  • ENGL W3391: Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Lyotard

    3.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    This course is an introduction to some key works by major French philosophers and literary critics. We will be covering selected works by Blanchot, Bataille, Lévinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, looking at the way these authors conceive of community, writing, death, the literary and its relation to philosophy, the question of style, sexual difference, and subjectivity. This course is open to those who do not read French (and therefore need to read works in translation) as well as those who are able to read in the original language. While this is a lecture course, students will be expected to participate actively in class discussion. No background required, although an appetite for dense theoretical works is essential. Requirements: Two papers, one presentation, and weekly responses.
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  • ShareENGL W3400 - African-American Literature I
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  • ENGL W3401: African-American Literature, 1940 to the present

    3.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    An introduction to African American literary and cultural studies. In this second part of the historical survey, we will focus our attention on the politics of representation in twentieth century African American literature from Richard Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), to John Edgar Wideman's seminal memoir, Brothers and Keepers (1984). How do we locate these texts within an appropriate historical and cultural context? What theories of representation best serve our needs as readers of race, gender, and class? Does it make sense to teach these works as a distinct literary tradition? Course requirements: mandatory class attendance and participation, two five-page essays, and final examination. Previous enrollment in Eng W3400X is not required.
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  • ENGL W3451: Imperialism and the Cryptographic Imagination

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    Prerequisites: Permission of Instructor. (Seminar). An examination of imperialism's use of codes, acrostics, maps, diagrams, and other forms of secret communication. The seminar will focus on how the culture of secrecy that accompanied imperial expansion defined the tools of literary imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While most studies of culture and imperialism examine the impact of colonial expansion on the geography of narrative forms, this seminar looks more closely at the language of indirection in English novels and traces metaphors and symbols to imperialism's culture of secrecy. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) with the subject heading "Imperialism 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. E-mail Professor Viswanathan (gv6@columbia.edu) by noon on april 11th with the subject heading "Imperialism and Cryptography 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.
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  • ENGL W3706: The Gothic

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The end of the eighteenth century saw the birth of the literary gothic, a subgenre of romance that registered a backlash against the prescriptive realism favored by critics earlier in the century. In addition to indulging flights of sensationalistic fancy, the gothic was also an outsider's genre, dramatizing the frightening nature of everyday life, of social institutions too often taken for granted: persecuting villains stand in for tyrannical husbands, and corrupt churches for patriarchal failure; transgressive desires reveal the stifling nature of traditional gender roles and heteronormative expectations. At the same time, the gothic confronts monsters from without, for the popularity of the genre mirrors the rise of the British Empire. This seminar will explore the origins and development of the gothic (1764-1820), as well as the ways in which eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers used gothic tropes to reflect on their society. In the eighteenth century, these authors will include, among others, the progenitors of the form, Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) and Clara Reeve (The Old English Baron), continuing through Anne Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk), as well as Jane Austen's satire on the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey. Early nineteenth-century texts will also include Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Undergraduate requirements: one short passage explication, to be revised, a brief final paper prospectus, and a final paper of approximately 10-12 pages. When available, an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm.
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  • ENGL W3707: George Eliot

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    We'll be especially interested in Eliot's conception of novelistic realism as a manifold intellectual project, at once aesthetic, psychological, and moral. Within that project, Eliot is particularly engaged by the search for value and belief in a secular era (tradition, the concept of vocation, an ideal of sympathetic understanding) and the complexities of social life, as it facilitates but more often resists personal autonomy. Her social psychology, which startled readers with its appeal to contemporary science, is keenly attentive to the forces of gender, class, race, and religion, but also to mechanisms that enforce communal norms, such as gossip and scandal. So why aren't her novels more often made into films? Requirements include a regular reading journal, two brief (4-page) essays, and a seminar paper. E-mail Professor Adams (jea2139@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "George Eliot 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.
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  • ENGL W3710: The Beat Generation

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). When available, an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm.
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  • ENGL W3711: Contagion: Early American Literature and the Republic of Medicine

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This seminar asks us to consider what a literary history of early America looks like if we pay as close attention to the bodies and pathogens that bound Native American, African, and European communities as we do to their writings. In doing so, we will inquire into the specific relations between immunology and theology, science and exploration, liberty and violence, all with an eye to theorizing the narrative forms and conventions that gave voice to American and Creole identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The class will necessarily be transatlantic and interdisciplinary in scope, so we will build a critical framework to guide our readings, while attending to the rigors and rewards of such work. We will read a range of texts, including exploration narratives, journals, diaries, pamphlets, poems, and novels focusing on continental North America and the Caribbean. Writers may include William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Cotton Mather, James Grainger, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Charles Brockden Brown, among others. E-mail Professor Silva (cs2889@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 11th, with the subject heading, "Contagion 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.
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  • ENGL W3714: Faulkner

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This seminar will be an overview of Faulkner's career, with an emphasis on his engagement with the American past. We'll read the landmarks: "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Absalom, Absalom!," "Light in August," and "Go Down, Moses." We'll also read others of his novels that are significantly historical in orientation, especially in regard to the Civil War ("The Unvanquished," for instance). There will be short papers, a longer research paper, and heavy emphasis on discussion. E-mail Professor Graham (taustingraham@gmail.com) by April 11th with the subject heading "Faulkner 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.
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  • ENGL W3730: America in the World: Melville to Pynchon

    4.00 Credits
    Columbia University in the City of New York

    This course traces a history of transnational American literature since the mid-nineteenth century. The syllabus includes Melville's portrayal of Pacific expeditions, the modernists' wandering poetics, literary conceptions of black internationalism and leftist internationalism in the interwar period, the Beats' engagement with global cultures during the early Cold War, and representations of U.S. foreign entanglements in contemporary American writers. Among other topics, our discussions will focus on corporeal and psychic reactions to foreign adventures, immigration, and travels under the condition of capitalist globalization. In other words, we'll examine how our writers reflect on the re-organization of the body in globalization, even as they seek to understand the shifting position of the U.S. in the world. Literary readings: Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, WEB DuBois's Dark Princess, Claude McKay's Banjo, William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The course will conclude with a foray into a small number of theoretical readings on the "biopolitics" of globalization. E-mail Professor Jin (wj2130@columbia.edu) by noon on April 11th with the subject heading "Melville/ Pynchon 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.
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