Tuesday, March 27
ENGL 769 01: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Paul Fry
T 9.25-11.15 LC 319
READING: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; some late poems published in his Sibyllene Leaves, 1817.
ENGL 537 01: The Gawain Poet
Jessica Brantley
T 1.30-3.20 LC 319
READING: Chism, “Alliterative Romance,” in Alliterative Revivals (2002), 14-40.
Chism, “Heady Diversions,” in AlliterativeRevivals (2002), 66-110.
Ingham, “’In Contrayez Straunge’,” inSovereign Fantasies (2001), 107-36.
Ng and Hodges, “St. George, Islam, and Regional Audiences,” SAC (2010).
Wednesday, March 28
ENGL 941 01/AFAM751: James Baldwin and the Politics of Form
Jacqueline Goldsby
W 9.25-11.15 WALL81 201
READING: Baldwin, Just Above My Head (1978)
___., “Sonny’s Blues” (1964)
Scott, James Baldwin’s Later Fiction, Chap. 4
Reid-Pharr, “Alas, Poor Jimmy” (2007)
Student Presenters: Jordan Rogers
ENGL 810 01/ENGL412: Victorian Poetry
Leslie Brisman
MW 11.35-12.50 HGS 221
READING: Maud: A Monodrama (309)
ENGL 851 01/AMST886/CPLT635: American Literature: Genres, Media, Webs
Wai Chee Dimock
W 1.30-3.20 LC 319
READING: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Benjamin Widiss, “Fit and Surfeit in As I Lay Dying,” Novel (Fall 2007), 99-120
William Faulkner on the Web: http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html
ENGL 845 01/AMST654/AFAM423/AFAM743/ENGL306/AMST384: American Artists and the African American Book
Robert Stepto
W 1.30-3.20 WALL81 201
3/28: session at the Haas Arts Library. We will discuss some of the books that were on display last year when the Embodied exhibit was up at the Yale Art Gallery.
ENGL 608 01: Shakespeare and the Early Modern Theatrical Event
Brian Walsh
W 3.30-5.20 LC 319
READING: Coriolanus
Joseph Roach, “Changeling Proteus: Rhetoric and the Passions in the Seventeenth Century,” from The Player’s Passion
Eve Rachele Sanders, “The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus”
Thursday, March 29
ENGL 672 01/CPLT672: Milton
David Quint
Th 10.30-12.20 LC 319
READING: Paradise Lost 9-10
Patricia Parker’s Inescapable Romance
Mary Nyquist, “Reading the Fall”
ENGL 953 01/AMST682/DRAM376: The American Avant-Garde
Marc Robinson
Th 10.00-11.50 PK205 202
READING:
ENGL 954 01/ENGL446/WGSS754/WGSS426: Virginia Woolf
Margaret Homans
TTh 11.35-12.50 LC 318
READING: Moments of Being, “A Sketch of the Past” (1939-40)
ENGL 501 01/LING501: Beowulf and the Northern Heroic Tradition
Roberta Frank
Th 1.30-3.20 LC 319
READING: Klaeber’s Beowulf, ed. R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008), lines 2201-25
English Graduate Seminars: Spring 2012
ENGL 501b/LING 501b, Beowulf and the Northern Heroic Tradition. Roberta Frank. Th 1:30-3:20 [Med]
A close reading of the poem Beowulf, with some attention to shorter heroic poems.
ENGL 537b, The Gawain Poet. Jessica Brantley. T 1:30-3:20 [Med]
This course offers a contextual study of four of the greatest (and most enigmatic) Middle English poems—Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At its center is British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, the single medieval book that contains them all. In addition to reading the poems closely in their manuscript context, we will examine associated artworks, from the twelve illustrations in the Cotton MS that perhaps constitute a medieval reading of the poems, to St. Erkenwald, a poem preserved elsewhere that some argue was written by the same author. Finally, we will think about the modern reception of the poems through a serious engagement with scholarly debate surrounding them, and also through comparative work with translations.
ENGL 608b, Shakespeare and the Early Modern Theatrical Event. Brian Walsh. W 3:30-5:20 [EM]
This class will contextualize the plays of Shakespeare as products of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater industry. We will survey the conditions in which the plays were presented, with attention to playhouses, playing companies, audiences, props, lighting, acting techniques, and the full range of activities—music, dance, and other—that accompanied dramatic shows on a day to day basis. We will examine how the form of the early modern theatrical event shaped the content that Shakespeare scrutinized in his plays, content such as politics, religion, gender and sexuality, romantic and erotic longing, Englishness, and historical consciousness. Course readings will include period documents about the theater as well as a range of current work in theater history and performance theory. As a course focused on the dynamics of the live theater event, we will necessarily discuss the problem of analyzing performance—a transient form—from a historical distance. We will therefore also consider recent trends in book history that emphasize the textuality of printed plays, and test the possibilities for performance oriented-criticism that is, perforce, mediated through texts. Likely plays to be studied include Two Gentleman of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus, Henry VIII, The Tempest.
ENGL 672b, Milton. David Quint. Th 10:30-12:20 [EM]
A study of Milton and some of his controversial prose. We investigate the relation of the poetry to his historical contexts, focusing on the literary, religious, social and political forces that shaped Milton’s verse.
ENGL 802b, Victorian Prose and the Uses of Life Writing. Linda Peterson. T 3:30-5:20 [18/19]
A study of seminal 19th-century autobiographies and biographies, along with other prose that uses life writing as a form of history, argument or example. Authors and texts include Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, Of Heroes and Hero-Worship), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Harriet Martineau (Autobiography), Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte Brontë), John Stuart Mill (Autobiography), John Ruskin (Praeterita, Sesame and Lilies), and Walter Pater (Studies in the History of the Renaissance).
ENGL 810b, Victorian Poetry. Leslie Brisman. MW 11:35-12:50 [18/19]
The major Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, in the context of the Romanticism they inherit and transform. Significant attention to Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and some attention to Swinburne, the Rossettis, and Morris. In 2012, the course will meet together with the senior seminar in Victorian Poetry, English 412b either once or twice a week, depending on the graduate enrollment. If few are interested, we will regularly meet MW all together, possibly supplementing this with a few Friday sessions. If there are a half dozen or more interested graduate students, we could meet with the undergraduates on Mondays and regularly as a separate group on Fridays. In either case, graduate students will each be responsible for researching and presenting on one of the minor poets such as Arnold, Hopkins, Houseman, Meynell.
ENGL 845bu/AFAM 743bu /AMST 654bu, American Artists and the African American Book. Robert Stepto. W 1:30–3:20 [20/21]
The visual art, decoration, and illustration of African American books (prose and poetry) since 1900. Topics include book art of the Harlem Renaissance (with special attention to Aaron Douglas and Charles Cullen), art imported to book production (e.g., Archibald Motley’s paintings used as book art), children’s books (e.g., I Saw Your Face by Kwame Dawes with drawings by Tom Feelings; Ntozake Shange’s Ellington Was Not a Street, illus. by Kadir Nelson), photography and literature (e.g., Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Cabin and Field, with Hampton Institute photographs; Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices). The seminar includes sessions at Beinecke Library and encourages research projects in the Beinecke’s holdings, especially the James Weldon Johnson collection.
ENGL 851b/AMST 886b/CPLT 635b, American Literature: Genres, Media, Webs. Wai Chee Dimock. W 1:30-3:20 [18/19 or 20/21 w/permission]
A survey of American literature as a multi-generic and cross-media field. The course will address some of these questions: the movement from the linguistic medium to image, music, and theater; genealogies between poetry and prose; adaptations and rewritings from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first; the translational dynamics between the local and the global. We’ll read Moby-Dick along with Agha Shahid Ali’s poems, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, and Frank Stella’s mixed-media installations; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and the songs of Kurt Weill, Vaughan Williams, and Ned Rorem; Henry James’s The Golden Bowl with the Merchant Ivory film; and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Faulkner’s Light in August and As I Lay Dying with Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Red Letter Plays and Getting Mother’s Body.
ENGL 905b, Modern Pastoral. Susan Chambers. M 1:30-3:20 [20/21]
A study of modern poetry, and modernist culture in general, considered through the lens of the immediate pre-war period in England, when radical young men in walking boots took the train from London to remote corners of the countryside in order to cultivate a pastoral fantasy of “real England.”
In the first years of the twentieth century, modernism was in the crucible. On one hand were the Georgians, who are now often dismissed as a tepid hangover from Romanticism, but who considered themselves a daring avant-garde in revolt against the Industrial Revolution. On the other were the men and women whom we think of now as the true pioneers of modernism, including Ezra Pound, who so despised the first collection of Georgian poetry that he challenged the founder of the movement, Lascelles Abercrombie, to a duel.
What elements of the pre-war pastoral mode, with its emphasis on the bucolic, the traditional, the formal, and the modest, went forward into the modern period, and what was left behind? How do these literary values take their place alongside that other version of modernism that prioritizes the urban, the experimental, the formally free, and the audacious? Units may include: Georgian Poetry, Edwardian Fiction, Frost in England, Yeats and Folklore, Imagism and its Legacy, The Poetry of the Great War, Post-War Escapism, Hardy to Larkin.
ENGL 941b/AFAM 751b, James Baldwin and the Politics of Form. Jacqueline Goldsby. W 9:25-11:15 [20/21]
Critics largely agree that James Baldwin’s early works–the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country (1962) together with the essay collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1959), and The Fire Next Time (1963)–represent his “best,” most trenchant writing, given their decisive interventions into the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the literary developments of those mid-20th century decades. For instance, Baldwin the essayist undisputedly belongs to the ranks of the “New York Intellectuals” and “New Journalists. Indeed, precisely because his first novels were hotly debated as exemplary rebukes to the “protest fiction” he railed against himself, Baldwin challenged the racial mores of “middlebrow” reading on both sides of the color line during the post-WWII/pre-Civil Rights years.
In comparison, however, Baldwin’s “late” fiction–the novels published after 1965: Tell Me How Long the Train Has Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1972), and Just above My Head (1979)–have been scorned for their “bitterness” and “lack of narrative control.” At apparent odds with both the Black Arts Movement and the “literature of exhaustion” of the 1970s, these works have been maligned for being “apolitical,” “depraved” (i.e., unabashedly queer), and “sprawling.” Put another way, these are problem texts because of their formlessness. How to account for this supposed “break” in Baldwin’s literary powers? Indeed, do the late novels’ “failures” comprise such a “fall” at all? Might there be instead a deep logic to these works, an experimental drive that demands we interrogate what defines the novel’s form as such– and “Black” novels’ form, at that?
To explore these questions, we will survey this range of Baldwin’s writings, along with his essays on what he called “the creative process.” We will frame those discussions with secondary readings on narratology, reader-response theory, and affective theory (e.g., Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes, Lauren Berlant); ethical criticism and race (e.g., Theodor Adorno, Wayne Booth, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Rancière, Paul Gilroy); queer theory (e.g., Robert Reid-Pharr, Kathryn Bond Stockton); mid-20th century liberalism and race (e.g., Michael Dawson, Chantal Mouffe).
ENGL 948bu/AFAM 588bu/AMST 710bu, Autobiography in America. Robert Stepto. M 1:30–3:20 [20/21]
At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the “American Renaissance” to the present. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation.
ENGL 953b/AMST 682b/DRAM 376b, The American Avant-Garde. Marc Robinson. Th 10:00-11:50 [20/21]
Topics include the Living Theater, Happenings, Cunningham/Cage, Open Theater, Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, Bread and Puppet Theater, Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Theater of the Ridiculous, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and the Wooster Group.
ENGL 954bu, Virginia Woolf. Margaret Homans. TTh 11:35-12:50 [20/21]
A study of the major novels and other writings by Virginia Woolf, with additional readings in twentieth-century culture and politics and in Woolf biography and criticism. Focus on Woolf’s responses and contributions to literary and political movements of her day and on the contemporary and recent reception of her work.
ENGL 995b, Directed Reading.
Designed to help fill gaps in students’ programs when there are corresponding gaps in the department’s offerings. By arrangement with faculty and with the approval of the DGS.
Tentative Course Offerings for 2012-2013
ENGL 500a/LING 500a, Introduction to Old English Language and Literature. Roberta Frank.
ENGL 501b/LING 501b, Beowulf and the Northern Heroic Tradition. Roberta Frank.
ENGL 533b, Medieval Drama. Jessica Brantley.
ENGL 534a, Piers Plowman. Ian Cornelius.
ENGL 546b, Chaucer. Alastair Minnis.
ENGL 561b, Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. John Rogers.
ENGL 577a, Renaissance Poetry. David Quint.
ENGL 601a, Shakespeare and Collaboration. David Scott Kastan.
ENGL 606b, History and Historical Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Lawrence Manley.
ENGL 681a/CPLT 681a, The Mock-Heroic Moment: Milton to Eliot. Claude Rawson.
ENGL 721a, Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution. David Bromwich.
ENGL 725b/WGSS 771b, The Eighteenth-Century Novel. Jill Campbell.
ENGL 807a, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Stefanie Markovits.
ENGL 810b, Victorian Poetry. Leslie Brisman.
ENGL 829a, Late Victorian Poetry and Prose. Linda Peterson.
ENGL 831b, Character, Things, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
ENGL 843b, Trans-Atlantic Eighteenth Century. Michael Warner.
ENGL 845bU/AFAM 743bU/AMST 654bU, American Artists and the African American Book. Robert Stepto.
ENGL 846b/CPLT 539b, American Literature: Regional, National, Global. Wai Chee Dimock.
ENGL 911a/CPLT 884a, James Joyce and Early Modernism. Pericles Lewis.
ENGL 916a/CPLT 856a, Imperial and Anti-Imperial Epic. Joe Cleary.
ENGL 942a/AFAM 807a, African American Literary Criticism and Theory. Jacqueline Goldsby.
ENGL 948bU/AFAM 588bU/AMST 710bU, Autobiography in America. Robert Stepto.
ENGL 962b/CPLT 914b, Drama, Performance, Mass Culture. Joseph Roach.
ENGL 977b/CPLT 680b, Literary Studies and the Critique of Power. Caleb Smith.
ENGL 979b, Aesthetic Theory. Sam See.
ENGL 985a, Meaning and Affect in Literature and Film. Paul Grimstad.
ENGL 990a, The Teaching of English.
ENGL 995a/b, Directed Reading.