CoursesSenior Seminars

This course will explore the Beat phenomenon in its historical and cultural moment and will locate Beat literature in the tradition of American Romantic writing. We will concentrate on works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, paying some attention to other figures like Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose lives and works in some way confront and contest the pedestrian values of 1950s America (and after). We will also investigate the aesthetic principles that the Beats appropriated from diverse modernist and contemporary sources – Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Bebop – in order to ratify their own contrivances of spontaneity. And finally, we will consider predecessors (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller) and inheritors (e.g., Ken Kesey, Sam Shepard, Hunter S. Thompson) whose works illuminate the achievement, or fried shoes, of the Beats.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This seminar focuses on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), works the author has described as a trilogy. Spanning a century, Beloved represents African American life during and immediately after slavery, Jazz is set during the 1920s Jazz Age, and Paradise during the ambiguous, transitional decade of the 1970s. We also read Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), her 2008 novel A Mercy and her final novel, 2015’s God Help the Child, along with selected critical essays.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This course engages with theories of negative affects such as ugly feelings, depression, melancholia, rage, and dysphoria in feminist and queer theoretical texts, as well as in contemporary literature and poetry. We will press back upon the notion that such negative affects are merely antisocial, apolitical, apathetic, and irrational. Instead, we will take seriously the critical, political, and aesthetic possibilities in feeling, as personal but political too, as both individual and structural, as that which shapes psychic and social life. We will consider how feeling down, feeling backward, feeling out of time and out of place provide nonidentitarian, nonessentialist ways of understanding and moving through categories of racial, sexual, gender difference, which scholars and writers alike have used in a range of works.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

The seminar will read selections from the classic texts of British law, from Fortescue in the fifteenth century to Blackstone in the eighteenth. We will explore a variety of topics: contract, oaths, the jury system, rape, murder, equity, suicide, censorship, inheritance. The readings tend to be long and hard—and therefore wonderful preparation for law school (especially since 90% of modern American law is rooted in the English common law)—although we will also read some utterly electrifying trial narratives. Although the course has obvious relevance for prospective law students, it should also be of great value for those intending to do graduate work in English history or literature. . . . I strongly recommend reading J.H. Baker’s Introduction to English Legal History over spring break. There will be weekly short papers on the readings, but no exams.

During the medieval period, drama had not yet become a profession, yet all over Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, plays and spectacles were a crucial part of social life. Liturgical dramas and mystery cycles, cautionary allegories, and festive interludes were seasonally performed, often at great expense and with elaborate props, costumes and stage effects. For two hundred years the Corpus Christi cycles were staged yearly by guilds of merchants and artisans, counterposing artisanal, mercantile, clerical, and popular interests. At the same time, there were no institutionalized theaters with invisible walls to separate the actors from the audience, but rather mobile stagings that could take the itinerary of Christ’s life or the shape of human history and lay it like a web over an entire city.

This class explores the beginnings of English drama with attention to recent developments in gender studies, performance theory, and cultural studies. Beginning with continental liturgical and twelfth-century church drama, centering on the English Corpus Christi cycles, the saint’s and morality plays, and pursuing its line through the Reformation and the beginnings of the English professional theater, this course explores the way medieval society performed itself at some of its most contested cultural intersections.

We will explore the following questions:What does premodern, pre-fourth-wall, nonrealistic drama offer to modernist, postcolonial, surrealist recaptures and detournements of drama as social and cognitive intervention? What are the most profitable theoretical approaches to a drama that predates realism and falls between the abstractions of allegory on the one hand and the absorptions of individual psychology on the other? How do the plays negotiate the relationships between the material objects and bodies upon the stage, the historical and biblical narratives they embody, the verities they signify, and the conflicting social urgencies of their audiences. What civic spaces are realigned by these itinerant dramaturgies? What institutional orthodoxies are perplexed by the scandalous spectacle of Christ’s theatrically wounded body or Mary’s virginal, pregnant body? How can a theater be both popular and sacramental? How were the plays materially produced, and with what itineraries, stage-machines, censorships? How does the distinction between theater and performance break down when audiences went not only to watch but to participate? How did sixteenth-century humanism, the English reformation and the gradual professionalization of the theater affect the many forms of medieval drama and what continuities can we trace into subsequent periods?

The primary anthology, David Bevington’s Medieval Drama, is very approachable in terms of language: Latin, French, and German plays have facing page translations, and the Middle English ones are very well glossed. I’ve used this anthology for years with undergraduates.

Secondary texts may include: Herbert Blau, Richard Schechner, Sarah Beckwith, Theresa Coletti, Michael Pearson, and Richard D. McCall.

 

Requirements: 2 conference length papers, OR a draft and a longer term paper, OR a term project with both creative and analytical components (such as a performance and a debrief): (60%); short weekly response papers (25%); class presentation (singly or in a group).(15%).

This course will explore the Beat phenomenon in its historical and cultural moment and will locate Beat literature in the tradition of American Romantic writing. We will concentrate on works by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, paying some attention to other figures like Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose lives and works in some way confront and contest the pedestrian values of 1950s America (and after). We will also investigate the aesthetic principles that the Beats appropriated from diverse modernist and contemporary sources – Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Bebop – in order to ratify their own contrivances of spontaneity. And finally, we will consider predecessors (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller) and inheritors (e.g., Ken Kesey, Sam Shepard, Hunter S. Thompson) whose works illuminate the achievement, or fried shoes, of the Beats.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

The unlikely story of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, has fascinated scholars and general readers alike—how could it be that not one or two but three authors whose works would live on after their untimely deaths could emerge from a single family in an isolated Yorkshire village? Indeed, the legend of the Brontës is always in danger of eclipsing the works themselves. In this capstone seminar, we will read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). We will consider these novels in their social, historical, and artistic contexts, examining each through a variety of critical lenses, and will discuss how the mystique of the Brontë family story and its r/Romantic backdrop has shaped our expectations as 21^st-century readers of these novels.

This seminar focuses on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), works the author has described as a trilogy. Spanning a century, Beloved represents African American life during and immediately after slavery, Jazz is set during the 1920s Jazz Age, and Paradise during the ambiguous, transitional decade of the 1970s. We also read Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970), her 2008 novel A Mercy and her final novel, 2015’s God Help the Child, along with selected critical essays.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.

This course engages with theories of negative affects such as ugly feelings, depression, melancholia, rage, and dysphoria in feminist and queer theoretical texts, as well as in contemporary literature and poetry. We will press back upon the notion that such negative affects are merely antisocial, apolitical, apathetic, and irrational. Instead, we will take seriously the critical, political, and aesthetic possibilities in feeling, as personal but political too, as both individual and structural, as that which shapes psychic and social life. We will consider how feeling down, feeling backward, feeling out of time and out of place provide nonidentitarian, nonessentialist ways of understanding and moving through categories of racial, sexual, gender difference, which scholars and writers alike have used in a range of works.

 

Reserved for American Literature & Culture seniors only on first pass. Open to English seniors on second pass.