FALL 2008 Courses
Courses with a T after the title fulfill the departmental Theory requirement.
ENGL 90013
Graduate Fiction Workshop
William O’Rourke
W 3:00–5:30
A prose, chiefly fiction, writing workshop for students in the graduate Creative Writing Program. Any other students seeking admission should look to ENGL 40011. Emphasis on broadening technical and thematic range and on revision. Some collateral reading.
ENGL 90038
Graduate Poetry Workshop
John Wilkinson
W 6:00–8:30 pm
This workshop aims for participants to produce better poems, according to their developing judgment. The institution of the Poetry Workshop recognizes that development in creativity and in judgment are inseparable; therefore the responses of members will be considered as carefully as their poetic texts. Group members are expected to contribute by circulating their own poems (always regarded as work in progress) and by participating in discussion. Participation will also involve attendance at select poetry readings on campus, to be followed by discussion during workshop sessions.
During the first half of the program, at the start of each workshop a participant will present a poem which has been important to his/her poetic development and deliver a short talk explaining how and why. During the second half of the program, at the start of the workshop there will be a discussion of an assigned poem from the course pack.
The mid-semester assignment is to produce a statement or manifesto. There is no minimum or maximum length, and style can be anywhere between personal and theoretical. The assignment asks participants to articulate the nature of their commitment to writing poetry, to situate their poetry within the range of poetic practice, and to consider its relationship to other literary forms. There are two end-of-semester assignments. One is to produce a portfolio of original poetry. Prospective participants will be working on this assignment already, knowingly or not. The other is to produce a 3,000–5,000-word response paper on any published poem or group of poems, focusing on what it means for the poems participants are writing now and/or wish to write in the future.
ENGL 90101
Introduction to Graduate Studies
Jesse Lander
MW 9:30–10:45
The purpose of this course is to help prepare all entering graduate students in the English Department for graduate-level work in literary studies. We will address practical
matters having to do with research, teaching, and paper writing, as well as more general
issues concerning current issues and problems in literary studies. This course is required for all entering PhD students and is strongly recommended for entering MA students.
ENGL 90110
English for Non- Native Speakers
Noreen Deane-Moran
Section 1, MW 11:45–1:00
Section 2, MW 4:30–5:45
This is a class/workshop designed for the non-native speaker in a teaching, research, discussion, living situation. Primarily, this course is designed to improve the spoken English of non-native speakers, at the intermediate level, with a specific goal of increasing communication skills for teaching, research, and discussion purposes. Mastery of English pronunciation, spelling, idiomatic expression, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and sentence structure will be the focus. Emphasis will be placed on learning to command clear and accurate spoken English for the purpose of classroom instruction and participation. To this end, we will stress phonology, stress placement, intonation, juncture, accent, tempo, general pronunciation, linguistic posture and poise (kinesics), conversational diction, presentation of material, handling questions, and other matters of instruction related to language arts. Active and continued verbal participation will be required. There will be some quizzes and worksheet assignments in and out of class, as well as some oral presentations. The main textbook will be Clifford Prator and Betty Wallace Robinett, Manual of American English Pronunciation, 4th ed. (Thomson Custom Publishing). An additional recommended text is J. N. Hook, Two-Word Verbs in English (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc). Both are available in the Bookstore.
ENGL 90119
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts
Tom Hall
TR 3:30–4:45
This is a seminar on the manuscripts and book culture of Anglo-Saxon England. Our main goals will be to acquaint ourselves with the fundamental tools for studying Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and their contents, to examine the history of early English book production and acquisition, and to consider the role of the book in early English intellectual history. This is not a paleography course, but since we will be making an effort to read from lots of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, in Latin and Old English, to sharpen our reading skills, some attention will inevitably be given to the practical aspects of discerning scripts. This is also not a course on editing literary texts, but you will nevertheless gain some experience transcribing and editing texts in Latin and Old English.
In the first half of the course, we will undertake a broad survey of early English libraries and scriptoria guided by Lapidge’s The Anglo-Saxon Library, emphasizing the transmission of Latin and Old English texts, the fates of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts on the Continent, the curriculum of study in early English schools, the formation of the Cotton and Parker libraries, varieties of literacy and reading practices, and books by and for women. The second half of the course will then narrow in to focus on five monuments of Anglo-Saxon manuscript production (the Codex Amiatinus, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Benedictional of St Æthelwold, Junius 11, and the Cotton-Corpus Legendary) as well as some lesser-known hagiographic libelli, concluding with an overview of manuscript production in the early Anglo-Norman period, with an emphasis on Salisbury. Students will make abundant use of the rich manuscript resources of the Medieval Institute. Requirements include regular attendance and participation, two sets of transcriptions and editions of brief texts in Latin and Old English, a critical review of a monograph or manuscript catalogue, a report on the state of scholarship on a manuscript, and a seminar paper. There will be no midterm or final exam.
ENGL 90140
Proust
Maud Ellmann
W 6:00–8:30 pm
This course provides an opportunity to engage with one of the most captivating novels in world literature, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which has exercised a profound influence on modern writing and thought. We will explore Proust’s reinvention of the novel in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion, and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider Proust’s powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries. Despite its acerbity, the Search is one of the funniest, most charming novels ever written; it is also one of the most unbearably beautiful. We will be reading the novel in Scott Moncrieff’s revised English translation, using the 2003 Modern Library Edition. Some knowledge of French is desirable but not required. We will start at the beginning of the novel and try to reach the conclusion by the end of the semester. There will also be an opportunity to read some of the remarkable criticism inspired by Proust’s novel. Written requirements: weekly 1–2-page response papers and a final 20-page paper.
ENGL 90187 / LIT 73963
Marxism, Religion, and Utopia (T)
Christopher Kendrick
R 6:30–9:15 pm
Classical Marxism originated as an agnostic and anti-utopian movement and problematic, yet classical and subsequent Marxisms have had much to say about, and to do with, religious and utopian visions. The course will focus on modern, especially Marxist theories of religion and utopia, and on the relations between them. We will read a mix of theoretical works (Marx, Durkheim, Charles Taylor) and literary texts (Thomas More, Leguin, Premchand), the latter especially for their theories of religion and utopia.
ENGL 90242 / LIT 73929
Literature and Life
Pietro Boitani
M 6:15–9:00 pm
The course aims at establishing links between literature and the central problems of human life. If literature does not speak to the living, then it is worth absolutely nothing. There will be four main themes, organized as an itinerary or progression from one to the other: Death, Wonder and Knowledge, Com-passion, Recognition and Rebirth. Death is the problem of each single human being; the pursuit of knowledge is one way of removing or overcoming death; com-passion is a way of adding personal feeling to knowledge of the other in the flesh; recognition (knowledge of the other in the flesh) can lead to rebirth and possibly resurrection. These themes will be studied by means of literary (and philosophical) texts in a comparative manner.
ENGL 90243
Middle English Drama
Katherine Zieman
MW 1:30–2:45
This course will survey the extant canon of both “religious” and “secular” dramatic texts — primarily those from the fourteenth century up to the the establishment of the professional theaters in the sixteenth century in England, though we will also attend to antecedent practices in liturgy and civic spectacle. In addition to this survey, the course will also provide an introduction to primary source material in the Records of Early English Drama to allow us to investigate dramatic performance in historical context and will examine some of the more recent critical trends in scholarship by Carol Symes, Sarah Beckwith, and Ruth Nissé, among others, who have examined the definition and role of “drama” in medieval culture more broadly. Assignments will include a few short papers and presentations and one larger research project.
ENGL 90244 / LIT 73928
Literary Criticism from Aristotle to Jakobson (T)
Vittorio Hösle
TR 9:30–10:45
This course will render the students familiar with some basic texts from two millennia. We will begin with Aristotle’s Poetics, discuss Horace’s Ars poetica and Longinus’s On the Sublime. The medieval period will be represented by a work by Dante. A special focus will lie on the creation of modern literary criticism in German idealism, but we will also discuss post-idealistic works (including Nietzsche) and end with Roman Jakobson’s groundbreaking structuralist approach to the nature of poetic language.
ENGL 90249
Spenser and the Epic Romance
Tom Roche
MW 4:30–5:45
In the more than forty years that I have been teaching Spenser at Princeton, I have become more and more convinced that one cannot teach him without teaching Virgil, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso as well. One can do without almost all of Malory; the Faerie Queene makes a single cameo appearance. Therefore the first three weeks of this seminar are devoted to the achievement of Virgil in creating Aeneas, the founder of Rome. As the Middle Ages wear on, other heroes arrive, in particular, the Roland of the Chanson de Roland, that great epic of France. Sometime in the fifteenth century Roland crosses the Alps and takes on a new life and name — Orlando — and becomes the hero of two of the most important romance epics of Italian literature: Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. We will end this Italian sojourn reading Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, his epic on the First Crusade. The rest of the term will be devoted to how Spenser converted this Italian material to his English purposes.
ENGL 90260
Nature Poetry and Ecocriticism (T)
Prof. John Sitter
TR 5:00–6:15
Consideration of poetic constructions of Nature (an idea of order or totality) and nature (the unbuilt environment) in English and American poetry from the late Renaissance to today. Poets studied will include some of the following: Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Charlotte Smith, Erasmus Darwin, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, G. M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, Ted Hughes, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Pattiann Rogers. Decisions regarding some of these poets will be made taking into account the fields of the students who enroll.
We will be concerned with changing ideas of nature and natural aesthetics (as Adorno remarked, “Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical”) and with how poetry grounded in pastoral and agricultural traditions moves beyond the garden and comes to include mountains, then wilderness, and, lately, the idea of an ecosystem. We will try to understand continuities as well as differences (e.g., the relation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worldviews embodied in natural theology or “physicotheology” to contemporary ecotheology and “deep ecology”). Ecocritical readings will include recent works on several of the poets we study and sections of more general ecologically oriented works by Jonathan Bate (The Song of the Earth, 2000), Lawrence Buell (Writing for an Endangered World, 2001), Dana Phillips (The Truth of Ecology, 2003), and others. We will also discuss some foundational texts — --such as Heidegger’s essays on poetry, place, and dwelling-- — and sections of recent philosophical interventions, such as Kate Soper’s What Is Nature? (1995) and Bruno Latour’s The Politics of Nature (2004). Requirements will include several short papers, one or two reports, and a term paper.
ENGL 90310
The Iidea of the Llocal in Nnineteenth-Century British Literature
Sara Maurer
MW 1:30–2:45
In Great Britain, the rise of modern abstractions — uniform measurements of time and space, standardized print culture, and the universal equivalent of money — brought with it the corollary idea of the local — that space whose intimacy and particularity transcends easy translation. In the nineteenth century this notion of the local was by turns romanticized as transcendent, vilified as backwards, cultivated as a space safe from rapid change, gendered as female, and used by minority cultures as a site of resistance. Paying particular attention to the anomalous relationship of England to the Celtic regions of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, this course will explore the uses and literary forms of the local, with an eye toward understanding Great Britain’s imagination of itself in a global context. In addition to exploring cultural formations of the local — the Ordnance Surveys of Great Britain and Ireland, the Welsh Blue Book Controversy of 1847 — we will read texts by William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, William Cobbett, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, William Carleton, and Margaret Oliphant. Readings will also include current scholarship on place and identity.
ENGL 90908
Reading Readings: Poetics of the Lyric from William Empson to Mutlu Konuk Blasing
John Wilkinson
MW 3:00–4:15
This seminar reads lyric poetry through influential readings of poems by scholars and poets from the beginnings of modern “close reading” in the 1920s to the present, discussing ideological and poetic challenges to close reading practice. While most readings are drawn from English language poetry and Anglo-American criticism, theories of lyric developed by Adorno and Heidegger will also receive attention.
Close reading was institutionalized in the academy as the supposedly ideologically neutral “practical criticism” (UK) and New Criticism (US), and subsequently has been challenged, ironically enough, for its blindness — to history, to class struggle, to gender, to race, and to precisely what is not present in the scrutinized text. But these challenges remain dependent on close reading to provide a misreading they can arraign, and to give edge to their revised readings. This seminar will look at developments in close reading, and will test close reading in engagement with the poetic repertoire on which it was developed, and with more recent lyric performances which seem to frustrate its ambitions.
This seminar will exercise students in researching and presenting influential poetics of reading from Oscar Wilde to Mutlu Konuk Blasing, and in intense reading of poetic texts from Shakespeare to J. H. Prynne. As a graduate seminar, this will be a collective enterprise at heart, even if instruction cannot be wholly resisted. By the end participants should find themselves more confident and less anxious to dominate in their relationships with lyric poems. Course requirements are weekly brief response papers; one substantial presentation; a final paper based on research and close reading; and regular participation.
ENGL 90912
Contemporary Conceptual Literature
Steve Tomasula
TR 12:30–1:45
Anyone who looks beyond best-seller lists quickly sees that there’s a wild west of writing out there where anything goes. In fact, judging by the variety of contemporary writing practices and materials, the use of language as an art medium seems to parallel visual art where the mainstream is conceptual and can just as easily be video as it can be made of tennis shoes or DNA. In this class we will be reading works that tend to expand the definition of literature rather than close it down to accepted conventions: fiction, poems, electronic and other hybrids whose authors have adopted much of the idioms, rhetorical strategies, or styles of earlier conceptual, modern, and postmodern work, either self-consciously or not, as they engage with contemporary thought, and social formations, even as they move further from ideas of originality, the oppositional stance of the avant-garde, and other assumptions that informed earlier writing. Variously called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, postmodern, innovative, extreme, alternative, e-, anti-, or new literature, our readings will include works from the collaborative flash poems of Heavy Industry, to the visual-text hybrids of Johanna Drucker, to the reworking of pulp “Nurse Betty” novels by Stacey Levine. Tentative reading list: The People of Paper (by Salvador Plascencia); Electronic Literature Collection <http://collection.eliterature.org/1/> (Katherine Hayles, et al., eds.); Love in a Dead Language (Lee Siegel); Frances Johnson (Stacey Levine); Wittgenstein’s Mistress (David Markson); City of Glass (Paul Auster); Notable American Women (Ben Marcus); Altmann’s Tongue (Brian Evenson); The Jirí Chronicles (Debra Di Blasi); Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century (Patrik Ourednik); The Blue Guide to Indiana (Michael Martone). Course pack of short fiction and poetry. Course requirements: two short papers, one long, short quizzes, midterm, final.
ENGL 90920
Theatrical Realism
Susan Harris
MW 11:45–1:00
Ever since realism became the dominant mode of the nineteenth-century stage, most avant-garde movements in Western drama have defined themselves against it. But what exactly is realism? Where did it come from, and how does it change? How are spectators persuaded to "recognize" certain conventions, strategies, or content as realistic ˜and then to reject those conventions and accept new ones? Is realism inherently conservative, ˜as many of its critics argue, ˜or does it contain the revolutionary potential that realist playwrights so often claim for it? Now that once-radical antirealist techniques have been adopted by commercial theaters, does realism still exist? And how is the practice of realism on the modern or contemporary stage related to changing conceptions of human nature, human behavior, human society, or the “real world”? This course will investigate the practice and the theory of realism in English-language theater from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Alongside the plays and criticism of the leading British, Irish, and American realists, we will read the critiques of realism that have emerged in contemporary critical theory. We will situate our study of realism in its historical, political, and economic contexts, and we will also look at the acting and production techniques that made realism possible. Playwrights may include but are not necessarily limited to: George Bernard Shaw, T. C. Murray, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, Teresa Deevy, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, Brian Friel, Lillian Helmann, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, David Mamet, Conor Macpherson, Tony Kushner. Students will produce one conference-length (10--page) paper and one seminar-length (20–25 page) paper and will be responsible for at least one in-class presentation.
ENGL 92004
Practicum: Preparing for the Profession
David Thomas
Time TBA
This course is for students entering the job market in Fall 2008. There will be group meetings and also individualized sessions, all geared to the cycle of the MLA interview season. Workshops focus consecutively on application letters, vitas, teaching and research statements, assembling a dossier of recommendations, choosing writing samples, and preparing for MLA interviews, including mock interviews held in December immediately after the end of classes but before final exam week.
ENGL 92011
Practicum: Literary Publishing
Steve Tomasula
Time TBA
For students in the MFA program: a series of workshops on submitting manuscripts for publication, finding an agent, and applying for jobs in the academy and in publishing. Informational sessions will be followed by workshops in which students will have their submission letters, vitas, and job application letters reviewed. The sessions will be arranged at a time convenient to all the participants.