English 358:253 Introduction to Crime Fiction
Spring 2023, Mondays and Thursdays, 10:20–11:40, Frelinghuysen B1
Syllabus (pdf)
This course introduces the study of mysteries and detective stories. Crime fiction has been the most popular of all fiction genres for at least the last century, while never fully attaining the honorific status of literature. To study crime fiction is thus not only to study how writers have imagined justice, the law, violence, and social order, but also to study the shifting boundaries between what is supposedly mere entertainment and what is supposedly literary art. Students will learn how to analyze a genre both in its own terms and in terms of social and historical developments. We will be doggedly serious about pulpy shoot-em-ups. We will study both genre landmarks and now-forgotten texts, ranging across American, British, and postcolonial Anglophone writers. Students are not expected to guess who did it before the end.
This course fulfills the AHp Core Curriculum Requirement.
English 359:201 Principles of Literary Study
Co-taught with Teresa Ramoni
Spring 2023, Mondays and Thursdays, 12:10–1:30, Frelinghuysen A4
Syllabus (pdf)
This course is an introduction to the discipline of English literary studies, focusing on ways to answer the fundamental questions academic readers ask about poems, short stories, and novels: How is it put together? What meanings does it convey? What effects does it achieve? How does it relate to the cultures and societies in which it is read? Learning to answer these questions about a variety of poems, short stories, and novels, students sharpen their skills as readers, writers, and thinkers.
The breadth of literature in English is represented by highly selective introductions to two broad genres, poetry and prose fiction, spanning works from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Students develop a strong foundation in formal analysis, learning to identify and analyze the components of verse and narrative—rhyme, meter, stanza; plot, character, point of view—as well as significant aspects of literary language in general. But formal analysis matters only in connection with arguments about what texts mean; in discussion and in written assignments, students practice presenting literary interpretations systematically and convincingly.
This course is required for the English major and minor and fulfills the AHp and WCd SAS Core Curriculum goals.
English 359:207 Data and Culture
Co-taught with Professor Meredith McGill
Fall 2022, Mondays and Thursdays, 10:20–11:40, AB 4450
Syllabus (pdf)
Syllabus bibliography (pdf)
Course dataset blog
The digitization of wide swaths of the print record has opened up new challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. This course introduces students to some of the key techniques used by humanities scholars to organize, manipulate, and analyze digital sources—attending both to longstanding scholarly institutions and practices that shape our understanding of digital texts (critical editions, brick-and-mortar archives, and quantitative methods within social, political, and cultural history) and to new methods for studying texts, cultural geography, and relations between and among producers and consumers of culture.
Students who complete this course will develop facility in the use of digital tools for the representation, curation, and analysis of digital text. In each case, however, we will place these relatively new tools within a longer history of humanistic inquiry and will ask: what insights can these tools provide, and what questions (and texts) do they marginalize or occlude? Our aim throughout is to examine how digitization and data science have changed the questions that humanists can ask of their sources. What does it mean to think of culture as data? What new histories do these tools and methods help us uncover? In what ways has digitization helped and hindered the ability of humanities disciplines such as history, literary studies, and art history to provide an understanding of the past that can speak to urgent questions in the present moment?
This course is designed to meet the CCO-2 and AHp Core Curriculum goals.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Fall 2022, Mondays and Thursdays, 12:10–1:30, Frelinghuysen B5
Syllabus (pdf)
What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise and decline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction; Anand, the committed Indian leftist, adopts very different perspectives from Hurston, the supreme Harlem Renaissance novelist. This course is a study in what is and is not shared in the fiction of these four writers and others of their era. Students will learn to analyze the forms and themes of exemplary fictions of the early twentieth century and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration. Readings include case studies in literary modernism (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner), detective fiction (Dorothy Sayers, Hammett), Harlem Renaissance fiction (Jean Toomer, Hurston), and Indian writing in English (Rabindranath Tagore, Anand).
English 350:596 Author, Reader, Field
Fall 2021, Thursday, 9:00–12:00, Murray 207
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
The sociological study of literary practices—reading, writing, and circulation—has become one of the most important areas of new work in literary studies. This approach analyzes the production and circulation of literature in terms of larger systems of relations among authors, readers, and institutions, challenging literary study’s commitment to the expert “reading” of singular texts as the major route to literary-historical understanding. It suggests shifting attention from Ulysses to the system that makes Ulysses an extraordinarily valued object; from individual “global modernist” innovators to the institutions that designate and celebrate world literature; from “close reading” to the unequal distribution of variant forms of literacy—and so on.
This course takes an extended literary-modernist period as a case study for such approaches, considering three major problems in turn: the author as an agent in the literary field; the institutional forms of world literature; and the emergence of stratified reading publics. Though the course aims to introduce sociological method as a portable approach to many literatures and historical eras, we must ask whether modernism is a privileged object for such approaches, having given rise to the conditions that make them possible in the first place. The most important sociological theory of literature, that of Pierre Bourdieu, is at the same time a theory of modernism; yet we will question whether this special relation to modernism may be a limitation, and, if so, consider how the study of literature in society might overcome it. Our readings in literary-sociological scholarship will emphasize Bourdieu and those influenced by him, but we will also pay attention to sociological currents in computational literary studies and recent developments in Anglo-American sociology.
This course satisfies the A5 coursework distribution requirement.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Spring 2021, Mondays and Thursdays, 9:50–11:10, Somewhere in Cyberspace
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise and decline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction; Anand, the committed Indian leftist, adopts very different perspectives from Hurston, the supreme Harlem Renaissance novelist. This course is a study in what is and is not shared in the fiction of these four writers and others of their era. Students will learn to analyze the forms and themes of exemplary fictions of the early twentieth century and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration. Readings include case studies in literary modernism, detective fiction, Harlem Renaissance fiction, and Indian writing in English.
English 359:201:10 Principles of Literary Study
Spring 2021, Mondays and Thursdays, 12–1:20, Somewhere in Cyberspace
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course is an introduction to the discipline of English literary studies, focusing on ways to answer the fundamental questions academic readers ask about poems, short stories, and novels: How is it put together? What meanings does it convey, overtly or surreptitiously? What effects does it achieve? How does it relate to the concerns of the cultures and societies in which it is read?
The breadth of literature in English is represented by highly selective introductions to two broad genres, poetry and prose fiction, spanning works from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Students develop a strong foundation in formal analysis, learning to identify and analyze the components of verse and narrative—rhyme, meter, stanza; plot, character, point of view—as well as significant aspects of literary language in general. But formal analysis matters only in connection with arguments about what texts mean; in discussion and in written assignments, students practice the techniques of presenting literary interpretations systematically and convincingly. Students also consider some of the central issues in contemporary literary study, including the relation between literature and history, the cognitive foundations of fiction, the status of genre, and the significance of English as a global literary language.
This course is required for the English major and minor and fulfills the AHp and WCd SAS Core Curriculum goals.
English 350:654 Science Fiction and Cultural Capital
Fall 2020, Thursdays, 9:50, Somewhere in Cyberspace
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
First christened in the lowly milieu of the pulpwood magazine, the genre of science fiction has lately approached the highest precincts of literary prestige, with novelists who have written science-fictional texts winning the Nobel Prize (Lessing, Ishiguro) and SF authors achieving the hardbound solidity of Library of America publication (Dick, Le Guin). But SF’s status is far more complex than this image of upward trajectory implies: it is at once a highbrow niche, a nerdy subculture, and a genre of mass-market transmedia entertainment. This course studies key moments in the history of print SF’s evolving status, aiming to shed some light on the history of literary status itself over the last century.
The course does not expect students to be or become SF specialists. It emphasizes the broad theoretical and literary-historical themes raised by the study of science fiction: genre, prestige, canons, readerships, media. The course challenges simplistic understandings of “the canon” and of the opposition between high and low culture as they play out across the last century. Against the widely current idea that the evaluation of texts in an academic context is the same as the social privileging or exclusion of authorial identities, we consider the science-fiction genre’s relation to the variant forms of cultural capital which shape social destinies in our modernity, from everyday print literacy, to technical expertise, to “omnivorous” cultural fluency. All of these forms of status-conferring knowledge or display, reproduced and transmitted in distinctive institutional settings, are of special consequence to the shape of SF.
In addition to making a highly selective survey of the last century of (mostly US) science fiction, the course emphasizes the methodological challenge of incorporating questions of circulation and reception into literary history. The final paper assignment requires attention to these issues as well as to more familiar questions of literary interpretation.
This course satisfies the A5 coursework distribution requirement.
English 350:596 Literary Modernism and Literary Modernity
Spring 2020, Tuesdays, 9:50, Murray 207
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course is a US-focused case study in modernism in the context of the broader transformation of print and literacy in the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time an American-dominated modernism was thought to cover nearly everything of interest in (early) twentieth-century literature, but scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the limitations of this approach, which ignores or devalues a wide range of literary production that does not resemble classic modernism. In order to grasp the effects of the structural transformations that affected reading and writing broadly in the period, this course proposes that modernism and its many non-modernist others are best studied as joint products of an expanding, fragmenting, and polarizing literary field. To give our inquiry some heuristic limits, we accept a US national frame, bearing in mind as we read individual writers that really, universally, literary relations stop nowhere. The course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course gives a selective overview of American modernism up to 1940. The second half of the course is a series of rapid introductions to a few key US literary tendencies contemporary with but distinct from modernism: the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and several genres of commercial fiction. Needless to say we cannot cover the field in its totality, but our goal is to articulate some of the themes, transformations, and interpretive problems that an expansive literary history of the twentieth century encounters.
Readings include both primary texts and scholarship throughout the semester. The primary texts are to be studied with particular attention to the era’s distinctive print media (little magazines, pulps and slicks, experimental anthologies, and so on). The selection of secondary readings gives rather short shrift to classic modernist scholarship in order to emphasize more recent approaches to the broader field.
This course satisfies the A5 and D coursework distribution requirements.
English 358:358 Early 20th-Century Fiction
Fall 2019, Mondays and Thursdays, 9:50–11:10, Scott 201
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise and decline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction; Anand, the committed Indian leftist, adopts very different perspectives from Hurston, the supreme Harlem Renaissance novelist. This course is a study in what is and is not shared in the fiction of these four writers and others of their era. Students will learn to analyze the forms and themes of exemplary fictions of the early twentieth century and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration.
Readings include case studies in literary modernism (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner), detective fiction (Dorothy Sayers, Hammett), Harlem Renaissance fiction (Jean Toomer, Hurston), and Indian writing in English (Anand, Narayan). Students can expect a weekly average of 150 pp. of reading, often challenging, always worthwhile. A major aim of the course is to practice reading widely and well. Every class period will include both lecture and discussion. The major writing assignments are two papers and a take-home final.
English 359:202 Principles of Literary Study: Prose
Fall 2019, Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:10–2:30, Scott 205
Co-taught with Caleb DeLorme.
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
Why do we read fiction? How does fiction work? What can the study of fiction tell us about non-fiction, or about writing in general? This course introduces the ways the modern discipline of English studies addresses these questions. Students develop a strong foundation in the formal analysis of narrative prose, learning to identify and analyze the components of narrative, including genre, plot, character, point of view, and narrative voice. But formal analysis matters only in connection with arguments about what texts mean; in discussion and in written assignments, we practice the techniques of presenting literary interpretations systematically and convincingly. Students also consider some of the central issues in contemporary literary study, including the relation between fiction and history, the cognitive foundations of fiction, and the status of genre.
It is a luxury of the introductory course that readings can be chosen from across the history of prose literature in English. Selections include writings by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Phaswane Mpe, together with scholarship on these figures and some material on the theory of narrative. The major assignments are two short papers and in-class midterm and final exams.
English 359:202 Principles of Literary Study: Prose
Spring 2018, Mondays and Thursdays, 9:50–11:10, Scott 102
Co-taught with Jacob Romanow.
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
Why do we read fiction? How does fiction work? This course introduces students to the ways the modern discipline of English studies addresses these questions. Students develop a strong foundation in the formal analysis of fiction, learning to identify and analyze the components of narrative, including genre, plot, character, point of view, and narrative voice. But formal analysis matters only in connection with arguments about the meanings of fiction; in discussion and in written assignments, we practice the techniques of presenting literary interpretations systematically and convincingly. Students also consider some of the central issues in contemporary literary study, including the relation between fiction and history, the cognitive foundations of fiction, and the status of genre.
It is a luxury of the introductory course that readings can be chosen from across the history of fiction in English. Selections include writings by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, together with scholarship on these major figures and some material on the theory of narrative. Major assignments: two short papers, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
This course is required of English majors but open to all. It satisfies the AHp and WCd Core requirements.
English 350:603 Twentieth-Century Genre: The Case of the Detective
Fall 2017, Mondays, 9:50 a.m.
Syllabus (pdf)
Detective fiction, probably the single most-read and best-selling category of fiction across the whole of the last century, nonetheless occupies a marginal place in standard literary-historical accounts. The literary history of the twentieth century has instead usually been told as the story of modernism and its aftermath: this story, focusing on exceptional innovations, the dilemmas of literary art, and responses to “modernity,” has little to say about developments in commercial genres. But as the modernist framework has come to seem increasingly limited as a way to grasp the changing literary field as a whole, the significance of popular literature emerges as one of the major open problems of literary scholarship.
The aim of this course is to see what twentieth-century literature looks like—and how we are to study it—if we take the proliferating formulas of detective fiction, rather than the singular modernist work, as the paradigm. We consider the difference it makes to address some major literary-historical questions—the high-low divide, the process of formal change, the shifting media ecology, the representation of identity, the possibilities of literary politics, the scope of “world literature,” and, yes, the effects of modernity—through this commercial yet intellectualized genre. And, finally, we ask what methods are most adequate to this phenomenon, seeking to complement literary interpretation with other possibilities from book history and the sociology of culture.
This course does not intend to produce graduate-level Baker Street Irregulars but to raise significant twentieth-centuryist questions that can be brought to bear on many writers and many genres. I lay special emphasis on the fact that I can never figure out the culprit in advance and don’t really want to anyway.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Fall 2017, Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:50–4:10, Scott 119 (M) and 106 (W)
Syllabus (pdf)
This course is a study of novels and stories in English from 1890 to 1950, a period of extraordinary variety and expansion in fiction—and of upheaval in society at large: wars, depressions, migrations, mass social movements. Fiction does not simply respond to these upheavals; it participates in them, whether through political advocacy, artistic transformation, or even, at times, a willful refusal to engage. The course traces four transformations in fiction:
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Elevating fiction in literary modernism: Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner;
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Specializing popular literature in detective fiction: Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett;
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Globalizing literary English in India: Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan;
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Challenging racial convention in the U.S.: Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston.
Students can expect a weekly average of 150 pp. of reading, often challenging, always worthwhile. A major aim of the course is to practice reading widely and well. Every class period will include lecture and both small- and large-group discussion. The major writing assignments consist of two papers and a take-home final.
English 359:202:H1 Honors Principles of Literary Study: Prose
Spring 2017, Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:10–2:30, HC-N106
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course provides an intensive introduction to the skills and concepts of the study of fiction, focusing on the novel in English since 1800. Students will learn to move beyond talking about what happens in a story or what a text says to making interpretive arguments about how texts work and what their meanings are. Class sessions and assignments concentrate on identifying and interpreting the formal components of fiction, including genre, plot, character, point of view, and narrative voice, as they are found in English-language fictions by writers from Jane Austen to Toni Morrison. The course also introduces key critical debates about the novel and history, narrative and cognition, and the status of genre, preparing students to contribute to the scholarly conversation about literature.
As an Honors section, this course will require substantial reading in both primary and secondary texts every week. Class meetings will be in seminar format. The major assignments are three short papers and a final exam. In addition, brief exercises will help to develop the skills needed to write effective papers.
Both majors and non-majors are welcome. Principles of Literary Study is required for the English major. It also fulfills the AHp and WCd Core Curriculum requirements.
English 358:214 Introduction to Twentieth-Century Literature
Spring 2017, Mondays and Wednesdays, 4:30–5:50, Murray 208
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course introduces students to the pleasures and challenges of studying the literature of the twentieth century. Twentieth-century literature in English is a global phenomenon; this course explores some of the ways fiction, poetry, and drama speak to a world in which distant people and places are brought into contact with one another by world-spanning media and communications systems, large-scale migration, catastrophic war, and the rise and fall, and rise, of empires. Rather than attempt a survey, we read intensively in a selection of writers, paying particular attention to four themes in turn: inner life amidst social division; the poetics of multiple voices; the possibilities of reduction and minimalism; and the politics of the historical imagination. Readings may include: fiction by James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and others; poetry by T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, A.K. Ramanujan, and others; drama by Samuel Beckett; and selected essays by and about these writers. Brief writing exercises will lead up to each assigned paper. This course is especially open to non-majors and first-years, and it fulfills the AHp Core requirement.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Fall 2016, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:10–2:30, Murray 115
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course is a study of novels and stories in English from 1890 to 1950, a period marked by rapid social change and an unprecedented expansion and diversification in literary culture. The course emphasizes the social significance of literary style, the changing uses of genres like the coming-of-age novel, the transformation of English into a global literary language, and the struggle to define literary modernity. We will read fictions from the U.S., England, Ireland, and India; avant-garde writing aimed at a self-consciously élite audience and genre fiction shooting for bestseller status; novels that document social and political conflict and novels that reject documentation altogether; texts with a global horizon and texts with a scrupulously local purview. Readings may include works by Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Djuna Barnes. Each class period is mixed lecture and discussion. Requirements: regular informal writing, two papers, final exam.
English 358:437 Science Fiction in Print from Pulp to the Present
Fall 2016, Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:30–12:50, Scott 221
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
Today, most people probably think of science fiction in terms of big-budget movies and TV series. But science fiction began in print, and it continues to flourish in novels and stories. This seminar is a study of science-fiction writing, with special attention to the changing status of the genre and the medium of print, from H.G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor. SF has promised cheap thrills in inexpensive pulp magazines, and it has aspired to seriousness in between hard covers; it has been the literature of proudly distinctive, and sometimes politically radical, subcultures, yet it has also sought to break into the literary mainstream; and it has increasingly had to compete with visual media, unless it tries to collaborate in transmedia productions. In addition to print sources, we will make significant use of digitized archival materials. The course culminates with a research paper about science-fiction texts of students’ own choice.
English 350:509 Literary Data: Some Approaches
Spring 2015 Graduate Seminar. Thursdays, 1:10–4:10 p.m., Murray 305.
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
My retrospective essay on the course
In the last ten years, the strange quasi-disciplinary formation known as DH or Digital Humanities has renewed the struggle over methods in literary studies. Analyses of digitized texts using computer-assisted techniques promise to transform the kinds of evidence, the methods of interpretation, and the modes of argument which matter to literary scholarship. Data is now a subject of energetic debate in literary studies: what constitutes literary data, and how should it be analyzed and interpreted? How might aggregation and quantification produce new knowledge in literary scholarship? What methods are most appropriate for grappling with the enormous, and enormously messy, world of digitized literary texts and data about literature?
This course pursues two aims in parallel: to engage with the history and current practice of literary data analysis, and to introduce the foundational skills of literary data analysis in the R programming language. Class time will be divided between seminar and practical instruction. The seminar discussions trace theoretical debates about literary data from structuralism and scientific bibliography, to experiments in computational stylistics, to contemporary scholarly controversies in and around DH. The practicum surveys the fundamentals of programming and data manipulation, with an introduction to selected numerical techniques and data visualizations. Short homework exercises supplement the in-class instruction, with an emphasis on handling actual literary data of various kinds.
No special technical expertise of any kind is expected; instruction begins from first principles. However, the work of programming does require willingness to experiment, patience in the face of frustration, and the nerve to ask for help as often as needed.
English 359:202 Principles of Literary Study: Prose
Spring 2015, Tuesdays, 2:50–4:10 p.m., Murray 210; Wednesday recitations.
was 350:220
Course website
Syllabus
This course provides an introduction to the study of narrative, and, while geared to potential English majors, it is suitable for any student interested in learning how fiction works. Focusing on the novel in English since 1800, we will learn to identify and interpret the components of fiction: plot, genre, character, point of view, and narrative voice. We’ll also join important critical debates about the novel and history, narrative and cognition, and the status of genre. The course is in lecture-discussion format. Recitation sections will be taught by two outstanding English department graduate students, Miranda McLeod and William Welty.
This course fulfills the AHp and WCD School of Arts and Sciences Core requirements.
English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
Fall 2014, Mondays and Thursdays, 11:30–12:50, Scott 216
was 350:355
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
This course is a study of novels and stories drawn from literature in English from the 1890–1950 period. Its goal is to understand fiction’s many ways of being modern in a period marked by rapid changes in social life. The course emphasizes the social significance of literary style, the changing uses of genres like the coming-of-age novel, and the transformation of English into a global literary language. Texts include novels or stories by Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and Djuna Barnes. Though the enormous breadth of the production of fiction in English in this period makes any comprehensive survey inconceivable, the readings are chosen to indicate the range of that production. This range—this diversity, in all senses: stylistic, thematic, generic, cultural, geographic, socioeconomic—is the most important fact about the fiction of this period. We will read fictions from the U.S., England, Ireland, and India; we will read avant-garde writing aimed at a self-consciously élite audience and genre fiction shooting for bestseller status; novels that document social and political conflict and novels that reject documentation altogether; texts with a global horizon and texts with a scrupulously local purview. Each class period is mixed lecture and discussion. Requirements: regular informal writing, two papers, final exam.
English 359:410 Seminar in Literary Theory: The Social Construction of Literature
Fall 2014, Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:10–2:30, Murray 112
was 353:491
Syllabus (pdf)
Course website
Where does literature come from? Many discussions about literature proceed as if this question hardly matters: the text, say the teachers and the critics, is there, and we only need to read it closely enough to discover its meaning. But who put the text there, who said that it was literature, and who is this “we” who is doing the reading? Once we ask these questions, we have begun to think of “literature” as a social construction. The goal of the course is to enrich the way we think about literature by understanding the arguments in literary studies’ debates, from the early twentieth century to present, about the relationship between literature and society. Central themes of the course include: literary form and the rejection of social context; literature as socially oppositional force; literature and political power, especially the power of the European empires; the debate over the literary canon and the role of educational institutions; and sociological theories of the literary field. The readings in this course are challenging but highly rewarding. Seminar discussion concentrates on patient engagement with theorists including John Crowe Ransom, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Poovey, John Guillory, and Pascale Casanova. We also work with the theories in literary case studies, which may include poetry by Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop; short stories by James Joyce and R. K. Narayan; an exploration of the history of Rutgers course catalogues; and an analysis of literary prizes. Requirements: active class participation, regular informal writing, two short papers, and a medium-length term paper, which will be submitted in both draft and final forms.
Note to prospective students: the syllabus will be forthcoming over the summer. In the meantime, I welcome e-mails with questions of any kind. This course fulfills two major requirements for the English major, the seminar requirement and the theory requirement, and you can use this course to fulfill both requirements at once. It also fulfills the WCr SAS Core requirement.
English 350:220 Principles of Literary Study: Fiction
Spring 2014, Mondays and Thursdays, 9:50–11:10, Scott 203
Syllabus
Required of all prospective English majors; should be taken in the sophomore year. A study of prose narrative with emphasis on the short story and the novel. Attention to strategies of close reading, contextualization, and a range of contemporary critical approaches. Attendance is expected and required.
English 350:437 Seminar: Nobel Prize Winners
Spring 2014, Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:10–2:30, Murray 204
Syllabus
This seminar explores Global Anglophone fiction since 1900 through the lens of the Nobel Prize. Surveying a selection of the fiction-writers in English who have won the prize, from Rudyard Kipling (1907) to Alice Munro (2013), the course traces the development of a fascinating, sometimes delightfully bizarre canon of prose-narrative world literature in English. This development tells us as much about the changing definitions of “world literature”—and the changing situation of the Anglophone novel within world literature—as it does about individual writers and their choices. We will pay significant attention to individual novels and stories, but also to the paraphernalia of the prize, including Nobel lectures, medals, and outraged press commentary. Major themes: writing from, against, and after empire; the idea of the “universal”; realist and experimental forms; popularity and difficulty; and the politics of the world stage. Readings: Nobel-laureate fiction in English by writers from five continents, including Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, William Faulkner, Patrick White, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, and Alice Munro; some selections from scholarship on world-literary institutions. Requirements: (1) a short paper before midterm; (2) a final research project, to be developed over the term through exercises, a brief oral presentation, and a partial draft, and then revised into a paper of 16–20 pages.
English 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I
Fall 2013, Monday and Thursday, Period 3, Scott 207
Syllabus
This course is a study of novels and stories drawn from the English-language literatures of the 1890–1950 period. The goal of the course is to understand fiction’s many ways of being modern in a period marked by rapid changes in social life. The course especially emphasizes the social significance of literary style, the changing uses of genres like the coming-of-age novel, and the transformation of English into a global literary language. Texts may include novels or stories by Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Djuna Barnes. The format of the course will be mixed lecture and discussion. Assignments: regular informal writing, two papers, take-home final.
English 351:335 Science Fiction
Fall 2013, Monday and Thursday, Period 2, Scott 214
Syllabus
This course is a study in the history of science fiction from its nineteenth-century precursors to the present. The course pays special attention to the oscillations of the genre’s status, from respectable work of the imagination (“speculative fiction”) to despised escapist entertainment (“pulp”) and back, before becoming a spectrum of subgenres (cyberpunk, weird, “literary,” etc.). The interpretation of science fiction texts is thus set within the history of science fiction readers, publishers, and writers, from the earliest SF pulps to massive “convergence culture” science fiction that straddles books, film, TV, and internet fandom. Readings may include SF (or pre-SF) by Wells, Rokeya, Stapledon, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Asimov, Pohl and Kornbluth, Dick, Le Guin, Delany, Butler, Gibson, and Ghosh. Some readings in relevant scholarship and tvtropes.org. The course format is mixed lecture and discussion. Three papers, regular informal writing.
English 350:596 Author, Reader, Field
Literary Sociologies of Modernism and the Twentieth Century
Spring 2013, Thursday, 1:10 p.m., Murray 207
Syllabus (pdf)
The sociological study of literary practices—reading, writing, and circulation—has become one of the most important areas of new work in the last decade of literary studies. Though such approaches have ranged widely, recent work in this vein has been particularly interested in modernism. Indeed, the most important sociological theory of literature, that of Pierre Bourdieu, is nothing other than a theory of modernism. This course proposes to explore the conjunction of sociological method and modernist literature as more than a coincidence. We will read key recent works in literary sociology, but we will also return to imaginative writings of the early twentieth century to see how they demand, and sometimes anticipate, an analysis in terms of institutions, organizations, hierarchies of power and status, symbolic interactions, classes, and fields of relation. The aim of the course is not primarily to offer a “reading” of modernism in terms of “social” themes but to facilitate students’ own sociologically-informed work on literature. The so-called “modernist period” is only a case study, and we will reflect on the ways in which the prominence of modernism in literary-sociological work—particularly in the Bourdieuean tradition—may be a limitation. Reading beyond canonical modernism, we will challenge and extend literary sociology’s treatment of nation, race, cultural capital, and readership.
English 350:220 Principles of Literary Study: Fiction
Spring 2013, Monday and Thursday, 9:50 a.m.–11:10 a.m., Scott 203
Syllabus
Required of all prospective English majors; should be taken in the sophomore year. A study of prose narrative with emphasis on the short story and the novel. Attention to strategies of close reading, contextualization, and a range of contemporary critical approaches. Attendance is expected and required.
English 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I
Fall 2012, Monday and Thursday, Period 3, Murray 213
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
This course is a study of novels and stories drawn from the English-language literatures of the first half of the twentieth century. The goal of the course is to understand the many ways of being modern that the fiction of this period pursued, learning why “modernity” and “modernism” are powerful but problematic conceptual frames for approaching this epoch of literary history. Our readings will be clustered around five overlapping themes: the celebration of the aesthetic, race in global context, small- and large-scale violence, the social real, and cosmopolitan culture. Texts may include novels or stories by Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, and Djuna Barnes. The format of the course will be mixed lecture and discussion. Assignments: regular informal writing, two papers, take-home final.
English 350:437 Popular Reading
Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945
Fall 2012, Monday and Thursday, Period 2, Scott 102
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
This course explores a key period in the history of pleasure reading and genre writing in English: the first half of the twentieth century. By 1900, more books were being published and more people were reading for entertainment than ever before, on both sides of the Atlantic. What did people read? This seminar looks at the beginnings of genres that rose to popularity around 1900 and continue to flourish today, even if they aren’t always classified as “literature”: mystery, romance, thriller, science fiction. We will also read some examples of popular poetry and of a more respectable novelistic genre that was nonetheless too popular for the most advanced taste: the realist novel. We will pay special attention to gender among readers and writers; developments in publishing; sincerity and self-consciousness; sex and violence; the question of realism and the fantastic; the fictions of social class; the impact of war; and the varieties of prose style. This reading-intensive seminar will culminate in a research paper.
Literary Foundations II
Eugene Lang College, The New School, Spring 2012
MW 12:00–1:40 p.m. (LLST2002D) and MW 2:00-3:40 p.m. (LLST2002E)
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
The second half of a two-semester introductory sequence for students in Literature and Writing, this course introduces key texts of literary culture from the seventeenth century to the present, focusing on Britain but including important texts from the United States and Germany as well. Its chief aim is to develop the skills of analyzing and interpreting individual literary texts intensively. Such intensive analysis develops in tandem with the critical ability to find resonances and kinships among texts: hence the course provides a broad (and necessarily highly selective) overview of four centuries of literary history, emphasizing developments in genres, forms, themes, and cultural and social contexts. Study of writings by Donne, Milton, Swift, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dickinson, Douglass, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, and Kafka. Seminar topics include modernity and its monsters, fictionality and authenticity, the novel among the genres, the changing meanings of “literature,” and the intersections of race, gender, and empire.
Writing Seminar. Coming of Age: Selves, Writers, Societies
Gallatin School, NYU, FIRST-UG383, Fall 2011
MW 12:30–1:45 p.m. 7 E. 12th St., Rm. LL 27
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
This writing seminar explores the inescapably social process of growing up. How can people both become who they want to be and participate fully in society? What do personal development and socio-economic development have to do with one another? How do coming-of-age fictions from Jane Austen to Kazuo Ishiguro reflect on questions of identity, belonging, sexuality, growth, modernization, and citizenship? These questions will be the occasion for intensive work on students’ own intellectual development as writers and readers. Three shorter essay assignments—selecting and interpreting textual evidence, responding to a theory, and incorporating a personal motive—build up to the culminating literary-critical paper on the coming-of-age novel. Social-scientific accounts of the development of persons and societies will provide context and counterpoint to the literary works. Readings include works by Jane Austen, James Joyce, and Anne Carson; scholarly essays in sociology, psychology, and literary studies.
The Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Stanford University, English 156a, Winter Quarter 2011, MW 1:15-3:05, 160-329.
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
Intensive study of one of the greatest and most challenging twentieth-century poets, Wallace Stevens, from his early, playful lyrics to his monumental meditative sequences of the 1940s and 1950s. We will spend time learning and luxuriating in Stevens’s language, but we will also pay critical attention to biographical and historical contexts. Topics include: modernism 1910-1955, abstraction, literary politics in the 1930s, poetry and war, the late-Romantic lyric, philosophical poetry, the sequence form, poetic sound, humor, “late style.” We conclude with a survey of Stevens’s influence on later poets. There is no formal prerequisite, but English 160 (Poetry and Poetics) is strongly recommended.
Everything But Modernism: Low to Middling Genres
Stanford University, English 154b, Autumn Quarter 2010, MW 3:15–5:05, 160-317.
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
Since the era of modernism (1890-1940), we have learned to distinguish sharply between “high” literature, serious and advanced, and low or middlebrow literature. Exciting as the high culture of modernism is, what about all the other kinds of imaginative writing people read for pleasure? Reading American and British works 1900-1940, this seminar explores the ancestry of the ever-popular but still-stigmatized realm of “genre” writing. Genres include: mystery, romance, thriller, scifi, war poetry, and the realist novel. Knowledge of modernism not required.
Prizewinners: Anglophone Novelists and the Nobel Prize, 1991–2007
Stanford University, English 153d, Spring Quarter 2010, MW 3:15–5:05, 160-319.
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
An experiment in examining the global phenomenon of the late-twentieth-century novel in English through the most naive possible lens: the Nobel Prize in Literature. We read works by the five English-language novelists to win the Nobel since the Cold War: Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Doris Lessing. Topics include: “world literature,” postcolonial writing and race, realism and novelistic form, the relation to American and British canons, and the sociology and politics of the Nobel. The main objective, however, will be to explore what kind of reading the prize itself invites by grouping these writers together.
Expats and Cosmopolitan Fiction, 1900–1940
Stanford University, English 154, Autumn Quarter 2009, MW 1:15–3:05, 60-118.
Course Webpage
Printable Syllabus (pdf)
If there is an international republic of letters, those writers who leave their home countries, becoming expatriates or exiles, are among the prime candidates for citizenship. But what is the relationship between writers’ cosmopolitan lifestyles and their writings? Do those writings participate in other kinds of internationalism—cultural or political? Or do they bespeak a longing for home? Do these texts give form to rootlessness or global vision, nostalgia or adventure? This seminar studies these questions in the fiction of the golden era of expatriates and exiles, 1900-1940, with a special emphasis on historical contexts from the founding of Cosmopolitan magazine to the Great Depression. Readings include novels or stories by writers from the United States (Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes), England (E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood), Ireland (James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen), and Jamaica (Claude McKay).