Fall 2007: English Lyric | Jane Austen | South Asian Lit
Spring 2008: Interwar Britain | Shakespeare | 1930s Photography

The Origins of the English Lyric
Instructor: Prof. David Hamilton

The premise of this course is that we can probe the origins of the English lyric by moving backward as if we were paring away layers of an onion. As so the course begins with Elizabethan stage songs, moves to sonnets of the same period, to ballads whose presumed origins are earlier still, then to late Middle English lyrics, and finally to Old English lyrics, concentrating on riddles and laments. We will read everything in the original except for the Old English, for which we will rely upon translations, although I will coach students in reading the lyric aloud in Old English so they may gain some sense of the stress patterning, alliteration, and overall sound.

The main written work of the course is imitative: a sheaf of a dozen poems: two songs, two sonnets, two ballads, two Middle English lyrics, two translations from whichever language they choose, and two Old English lyrics, one riddle and on lament. The premise is that working and reworking these imitations will teach students as much about the original models as any critical writing. A secondary assignment will be an annotated bibliography on lyrics and lyricism generally, its definitions9s) and special qualities as various scholars and writers have taught and written it. A third will be an essay of around 10pp. on a relatively recent poet’s adaptations of older lyric forms. Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Frost, Pound, Millay, Auden, Brooks, Wilbur and Creeley are among the likeliest possibilities, but student may make other choices. The main text of the course will be the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Area: Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture
Period: Early Literatures through the 17th Century

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Becoming Jane Austen
Instructor: Prof. Judith Pascoe

The premise for this class is inspired by the passage in Northanger Abbey in which Austen discusses the novel form with particular reference to the works of Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) and to Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801). Students will read novels which served as precursor texts for Austen's body of work, before reading or rereading four Austen novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. We will begin by reading Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and other (shorter) popular gothic novels before turning to Northanger Abbey. Austen's wit becomes much more apparent to students when they are familiar with her precursor texts. Subsequent pairings of late eighteenth-century novels with Austen's work will help us to analyze Austen's thematic preoccupations and stylistic innovations This class will embroil students in Austen's reading as they are reading Austen. We will think about Austen as a fan of particular writers, and also think about how Austen became the subject of ardent fandom (with the help of Deidre Lynch's Janeites).

In advance of writing a final 20-page seminar paper, each student will be asked to carry out assignments that teaches them how to handle several types of research: a survey of the critical literature on a particular novel, an excavation of the work's cultural/historical context, and a close analysis of the ideas of a theorist whose writings are directly or tangentially related to the paper's subject matter.

Area: Modern British Literature and Culture
Period: 18th and/or 19th Century Literature

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Religion, Secularism, and Violence
Instructor: Prof. Priya Kumar

In the past few decades, the Indian subcontinent has been witness to a tremendous escalation of right-wing religious movements and a corresponding intensification of Hindu-Muslim/Indian-Pakistani conflicts. Much post-independence South Asian literary writing has grappled with the contemporary reality of religious violence and ‘fundamentalist’ politics in the subcontinent. Through an examination of a range of literary narratives that address the issue of "tolerance" or peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, this course aims to open up a series of urgent contemporary questions on violence, memory and history: how does one begin to address violence in its most concrete, visceral and tactile forms? What might be the importance of survivor experience in thinking around violence and its traumatic aftermath? Do literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism and coexistence? How may we begin to attempt to articulate a relationship between literature, ethics, and politics? These are questions that are of relevance not just to those interested in postcolonial literatures or South Asian histories, but also to those seeking to address the dilemmas and predicaments of national belongings and their exclusions.

Responding to different moments of crisis including: the Partition of British India in 1947 into the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992, the literary works we will examine call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limitations of secular nationalist discourse, the ways in which notions of ‘Hindu,’ ‘Muslim’ and ‘Sikh’ – self and other – have been articulated at various historical junctures, the importance of minoritarian claims on national culture, women’s struggles against fundamentalism, and the terrifying consequences of communal violence. In so doing, they invite us to realms of pain and sorrow that are normally left outside the explanatory bounds of political discussions on secularism. For their final papers, students will be encouraged to develop an original argument that engages, at length, with one or more of these issues.

Readings are likely to include Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, and In an Antique Land, Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, Qurratulain Hyder's Sita Betrayed, Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column and selected short fiction (translated from Urdu) by Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Jamila Hashmi. We will also be watching some recent films on these topics and reading a range of theoretical materials.

Area: Transnational Literature and Postcolonial Studies
Period: 20th and/or 21st Century Literature

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Spring 2008

Britain Writes the Political: Literature and Politics between the World Wars
Instructor: Prof. Lara Trubowitz

This course examines the relationship between politics and literature in twentieth-century Britain, paying particular attention to the ways in which authors from the early 1900s through the late 1930s responded to the rise of political movements such as Fascism and to ongoing debates over the expansion and modernization of government programs. Authors we will discuss include Leonard and Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton as well as less canonical writers of detective fiction and war novels. We will also consider more generally the intersections between modernism and conspiracy literature, modernism's privileging of primitivism and ethnography, and the rise and circulation of hate literature during the inter-war period. Class requirements will include active participation in discussion, an in class presentation, peer editing, and a series of short (3-4 pg.) papers leading up to a final 20 page research paper with annotated bibliography.

Area: Modern British Literature and Culture
Period: 20th and/or 21st Century Literature

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Shakespeare's Multiple Texts
Instructor: Prof. Miriam Gilbert

Shakespeare’s plays exist in a series of texts: the actual text of the play, and how we know what that might be, especially when two versions (Quarto and Folio) exist; the text as a ground of literary interpretation; the text and its historical contexts; the performance-text; and the adaptation of the play into various other texts (certainly film, but also poems, plays, novels, short stories, that take off from the plays). With these various “texts” in mind, I propose looking at three plays (tragedy, comedy, history), each of which offers many issues for study and discussion.

With King Lear, the textual issue has produced some major scholarship, readily available in the Taylor and Warren collection (The Division of the Kingdom) and Steven Urkowitz’s Shakespeare’s Revision of King Lear. Because the scholarship lays out the problems—and the significance—of the textual choices so clearly, we will probably begin here and then move to the other plays and return to King Lear at the end. The adaptation issue may involve Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and certainly the great Russian film (1971, by Grigori Kozintsev, plus his book, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy) and the film adaptation by Kurosawa, Ran.

The Taming of the Shrew raises textual issues having to do with the play The Taming of A Shrew, and the relationship between the two, especially the question of what to do with the Christopher Sly material found in A Shrew but not The Shrew; it’s clearly a play that benefits from being read in conjunction with early modern texts focusing on female behavior; and it exists in several fascinating film versions, from the first full-length Hollywood feature film based on Shakespeare (the 1929 film with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford) to the opulent Zeffirelli production of 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, to the contemporary adaptation, 10 Things I Hate about You. There’s also a video of the 1976 ACT production which turns the play into a commedia dell’arte performance, to say nothing of a wrestling match.

Henry V also raises problems for the textual editor about quarto and folio texts, but is primarily interesting for the way in which it intersects with ideas about the role/responsibility of the king, and also ideas about “the just war.” We will consult Theodor Meron’s study, Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws; we will consider some of the major productions of the play in the 20th century (particularly the 1975 and 1984 productions at the RSC); and we will look at both the Olivier and Branagh films and their cultural contexts.

Assignments:
1. Annotated bibliography on a limited topic on one of the plays
2. Short paper on a performance-oriented topic with one of the plays.
3. Longer paper—student’s choice.

Area: Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture
Period: Early Literatures through the 17th Century

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Facts in Focus: The Documentary Impulse in the Poetry and Photography of the Thirties
Instructor: Prof. Dee Morris

Among the many reasons poetry of the 1930s tends to disappear from standard literary histories is that its model was not so much other poetry—English, American, lyric, modernist or high modernist—but prose and visual materials that could be considered documents, i.e., materials positioned as records of facts, events, or circumstances. Many of these poems appeared in newspapers side-by-side with news reports, editorials, photos, cartoons, maps, and advertisements. Amidst columns of discursive prose, promotional copy, and visual images, these poems ask to be read not as recollections in solitude but as interventions into the public sphere. Poems of the thirties regularly addressed such topics as industrial and mining scandals, labor policy, race relations, mass culture, consumerism, and the rise of Fascism. Poems modeled themselves on and/or incorporated ad copy, advice columns, and stock reports (Kenneth Fearing, Langston Hughes, Joseph Beecher); abstracts of legal proceedings and transcripts of congressional hearings (Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser); found materials such as accident reports and personal letters (Mike Gold’s “Workers Correspondence,” Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know”); and simulated news reportage (Hughes’s “Letter from Spain,” Joseph Kalar’s “Papermill”).

The most powerful model for the poetry of the document, however, was not popular writing but the “straight” photography that came to prominence in the newspapers, journals, government agencies, and museum exhibitions of the thirties. Replacing soft-focus art photography with a tradition they traced back to Matthew Brady’s Civil War photography, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Bernice Abbott aimed to capture the “thing itself.” Their canon is marked by a purity, severity, directness, and clarity that allowed William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists to veer sharply away from the strictures of high modernist aesthetics.

In this course we will read journalism, novels, memoirs, and poems, view photo essays and documentary films, and study the text-and-photography compilations that flourished in the thirties. Our aim will be to explore poetry’s role in the public debates on such topics as the causes and course of the Great Depression, the Scottsboro trials, the Spanish Civil War, and the industrial disaster at Gauley Bridge. We will ask how poems frame their topics, what they add to the “facts” they cite, and what claims they make on the “real.” What do the metaphor of the camera eye, the ideal of objectivity, and the discourse of the image reveal and occlude about poetry and photography? What are the strengths and limits of a poetry of fact?

In addition to poems by Hughes, Niedecker, Oppen, Pound, Rolfe, Rukeyser, Williams, Zukofsky, and others, we will read histories of the development of documentary in the 1930s, prose that draws on documentary traditions, and a number of compilations of text and photos. Possible texts include the following Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); Dos Passos, U.S.A. Trilogy (1930, 1932, 1936); Lange & Taylor, An American Exodus; Wright Morris, The Home Place; Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices; C. D. Wright and Deborah Luster ,Prisoners of Louisiana; and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Area: American Literature and Culture
Period: 20th and/or 21st Century Literature

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