ENGL BC 1201x and y First-Year English: Reinventing Literary History

[For more information, see course website ]. Close examination of texts and regular writing assignments in composition, designed to help students read critically and write effectively. Sections of the course are grouped in three clusters: I. Legacy of the Mediterranean; II. The Americas; III. Women and Culture. The first cluster features a curriculum of classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, the last two clusters feature curricula that explore the literary history of the Americas and the role of women in culture.
Prerequisites: Required for all first-year students. Enrollment restricted to Barnard. May not be taken for P/D/F. Consult department bulletin board for section times.
3 points

ENGL BC 1202x First-Year English: Reinventing Literary History

Close examination of texts and regular writing assignments in composition, designed to help students read critically and write effectively. Sections of the course are grouped in three clusters: I. Legacy of the Mediterranean; II. The Americas; III. Women and Culture. The first cluster features a curriculum of classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, the last two clusters feature curricula that explore the literary history of the Americas and the role of women in culture. Meets three times a week.
Prerequisites: Consult department bulletin board for section times.
3 points

ENGL BC 3101x The Writer's Process: A Seminar in the Teaching of Writing

Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring.
Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Does not count for major credit.
3 points

ENGL BC 3103x Essay Writing

English composition above the first-year level. Techniques of argument and effective expression. Weekly papers. Individual conferences. Some sections have a special focus, as described.
Prerequisites: Can count towards major.
3 points

ENGL BC 3104y Essay Writing

English composition above the first-year level. Techniques of argument and effective expression. Weekly papers. Individual conferences. Some sections have a special focus, as described.
Prerequisites: Can count towards major.
3 points

ENGL BC 3105x Fiction and Personal Narrative

Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.
3 points

ENGL BC 3106y Fiction and Personal Narrative

Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing.
3 points

ENGL BC 3107x Introduction to Fiction Writing

Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting.
3 points

ENGL BC 3108y Introduction to Fiction Writing

Practice in writing short stories and autobiographical narrative with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting.
3 points

ENGL BC 3110x and y Introduction to Poetry Writing

Varied assignments designed to confront the difficulties and explore the resources of language through imitation, allusion, free association, revision, and other techniques.
3 points

ENGL BC 3113x Introduction to Playwriting

A workshop to provoke and investigate dramatic writing.
3 points

ENGL BC 3114y Advanced Playwriting

Advanced workshop to facilitate the crafting of a dramatic play with a bent towards the full length form.
3 points

ENGL BC 3115x Story Writing I

Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story.
Prerequisites: Some experience in the writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged.
3 points

ENGL BC 3116y Story Writing II

Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story.
Prerequisites: Some experience in writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged.
3 points

ENGL BC 3117x or y Fiction Writing

Assignments designed to examine form and structure in fiction. Fall instructor: M. Swann; Spring instructor: M. Keane
Prerequisites: Previous experience or introductory class strongly recommended.
3 points

ENGL BC 3118y Advanced Poetry Writing

Weekly workshops designed to critique new poetry. Each participant works toward the development of a cohesive collection of poems. Short essays on traditional and contemporary poetry will also be required.
Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall semester in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3120x and y Creative Non-Fiction: Journalism

Explores how to apply a literary sensibility to such traditional forms of journalism as the personal essay, general essay, profile, and feature article.

CLEN W 4121x Renaissance in Europe: Sonnet Sequences

(Lecture) Key texts of 15th- and 16th-century humanism in their rhetorical and philosophical contexts, including works by Petrarch, Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Sidney, and Montaigne.

ENGL BC 3121x and y Public Speaking

Effective oral presentation in speeches, discussions, and interviews. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between active listening and extemporaneous speaking, well-organized writing and spontaneous remarks, rhetorical strategy and audience analysis, historical models and contemporary practice.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students.
3 points

ENGL BC 3123 Rhetorical Choices: the Theory and Practice of Public Speaking

Speaking involves a series of rhetorical choices regarding vocal presentation, argument construction, and physical affect that, whether made consciously or by default, project information about the identity of the speaker. In this course students will relate theory to practice: to learn principles of public speaking and speech criticism for the purpose of applying these principles as peer tutors in the Speaking Fellow Program.
3 points

ENTH BC 3136y Shakespeare in Performance

Shakespeare's plays as theatrical events. Differing performance spaces, acting traditions, directorial frames, theatre practices, performance theories, critical studies, cultural codes, and historical conventions promote differing modes of engagement with drama in performance. We will explore Shakespeare's plays in the context of actual and possible performance from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points

ENTH BC 3137y Restoration and 18th-Century Drama

Performance conventions, dramatic structures, and cultural contexts from 1660 to 1800. Playwrights include Wycherley, Etherege, Behn, Trotter, Centlivre, Dryden, Congreve, Farquhar, Gay, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. Sign up in English Department. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points

ENTH BC 3139y Modern American Drama and Performance

Modern American drama in the context of theatrical exploration and cultural contestation. Playwrights include Glaspell, O'Neill, Odets, Johnson, Hurston, Hansberry, Williams, and Hellman, Stein, Miller, and Fornes.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. $60 fee. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2009-2010.
4 points

ENTH BC 3140y Women and Theatre

Exploration of the impact of women in theatre history--with special emphasis on American theatre history--including how dramatic texts and theatre practice have reflected the ever-changing roles of women in society. Playwrights include Glaspell, Crothers, Grimke, Hellman, Finley, Hughes, Deavere Smith, and Vogel.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART). Not offered in 2009-2010.
4 points

ENTH BC 3144x Black Theatre

Exploration in Black Theatre, specifically African-American performance traditions, as an intervening agent in racial, cultural and national identity. African-American theater artists to be examined include Amiri Baraka, Kia Corthron, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Langston Huges, Georgia Douglas Jognson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrian Piper and August Wilson. (Also listed as AFRS 3144.)
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

ENTH BC 3145y Early American Drama and Performance: Staging a Nation

Competing constructions of American identity in the United States date back to the early republic when a newly emerging nation struggled with the questions: What makes an American American? What makes America America? From colonial times forward, the stage has served as a forum to air differing beliefs as well as medium to construct new beliefs about Nation, self and other. The texts we will read, from colonial times through WWI, explore diverse topics such as politics, Native American rights, slavery, labor unrest, gender roles, and a growing immigrant population.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
4 points

ENTH BC 3186x or y Modern Drama

Course traces the literary, theoretical, and historical development of drama from the 1850s onward, treating the plays of (among others) Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Soyinka, Churchill, and critical/theoretical texts by Nietzsche, Freud, Brecht, Artaud, Butler, and others.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). General Education Requirement: The Visual and Performing Arts (ART).
3 points

ENGL BC 3140x (Section 1) Seminars on Special Themes: Explorations of Black Literature: Early African-American Lit. 1760-1890

Poetry, prose, fiction, and nonfiction, with special attention to the slave narrative. Includes Wheatley, Douglass, and Jacobs, but emphasis will be on less familiar writers such as Brown, Harper, Walker, Wilson, and Forten. Works by some 18th-century precursors will also be considered.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3140y (Section 2) Seminars on Special Themes (SPRING '09): Enchanted Imagination

Romantic and post-Romantic fantasy that examines the transformative role of imagination in aesthetic and creative experience. Challenges accepted boundaries between the imagined and the real, and celebrates otherness and magicality in a disenchanted world. Authors include Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Shelley, Tennyson, Carroll, Tolkien, LeGuin, Garcia Marquez.
Prerequisites: Not offered in the 2009-10 academic year. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3140y (Section 3) Seminars on Special Themes: The American Cowboy and the Iconography of the West.

We will consider the image and role of the cowboy in fiction, social history, film, music, and art. Readings will include Cormac McCarthy's "The Border Trilogy" among other things. Limited to 14.
3 points

ENGL BC 3140x (Section 4) Seminars on Special Themes (FALL '08): Beastly Burdens: Representions of Animals in Literature and Culture

An examination of literary and historical representations and "uses" humans make of other animals ranging from those of companions to fragmented objects of metaphorical or literal consumption. Analysis of the apparent malleability of the animal body and consciousness in literature and in light of theoretical texts. Readings will include: Aesop, John Coetzee, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Grimm fairy tales, Franz Kafka, Yann Martel, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Peter Singer.

ENGL BC 3140y (Section 6) Seminars on Special Themes: Reading Barnard Writing

A century of American literature seen through the lens of works by women who were all Barnard undergraduates. Topics include Jewish immigration, the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, feminism, black pride, sexual liberation, the rise of ethnic American identity, the "downtown" scene of the 1980s, etc. Authors may include Antin, Millay, Hurston, Calisher, Chang, Jong, Shange, Gordon, Quindlen, Janowitz, Danticat, Lahiri, and others.

ENGL BC 3140y (Section 7) Seminars on Special Themes: Doubt, Death, and Desire in 17th-century Prose

Reading, from multiple perspectives, the great "metaphysical writers" on these big issues, including faith. John Donne's Devotions and selected Sermons; Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy(i.e., madness and depression); Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall, and Richard Crashaw's bizarre poems "St. Mary Magdalene or The Weeper" and "Hymn to St. Teresa" will be included.

ENGL BC 3140x (Section 8) Seminars on Special Themes: English Renaissance Women Writers

Despite popular conceptions insisting that the ideal Renaissance woman was silent, as well as chaste and obedient, many women in the early modern period (c. 1550-1800) defied such sentiments by writing, circulating and publishing their own literature. Under the influence of humanism, a generation of educated women arose who would become both the audience for and contributors to the great flowering of literature written in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. As we examine how these women addressed questions of love, marriage, age, race and class, we will also consider the roles women and ideas about gender played in the production of English literature. We will read from a range of literary (plays, poetry, and non-literary (cookbooks, broadside, midwifery books) texts.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25. Sign up on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall.
3 points

ENGL BC 3141x Major English Texts I

A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Autumn: Beowulf through Johnson. Guest lectures by members of the department.

ENGL BC 3142y Major English Texts II

A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Spring: Romantic poets through the present. Guest lectures by members of the department.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3143x Middle Fictions: Long Stories, Short Novels, Novellas

Discusssion of fictions between 60-150 pages in length. Authors include James, Joyce, Mann, Nabokov, Cather, Welty, West, Porter, Olsen, Trevor.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENWS BC 3144y Minority Women Writers in the United States

Literature of the 20th-century minority women writers in the United States, with emphasis on works by Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women. The historical and cultural as well as the literary framework.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

AFEN BC 3148y Literature of the Great Migration: 1916-1970

Explores, through fiction, poetry, essays, and film, the historical context and cultural content of the African American migration from the rural south to the urban cities of the north, with particular emphasis on New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.
3 points

ENGL BC 3149y Cultures of Colonialism: Palestine/Israel

The significance of colonial encounter, statehood, and dispossession in Palestinian and Israeli cultures from 1948 to the present, examined in a range of cultural forms: poetry, political tracts, cinema, fiction, memoirs, and travel writing. Authors include: Darwish, Grossman, Habibi, Khalifeh, Khleifi, Kanafani, Oz, Shabtai, Shalev, and Yehoshua.

ENGL BC 3154x or y Chaucer Before Canterbury

Chaucer's innovations with major medieval forms: lyric, the extraordinary dream visions, and the culmination of medieval romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Approaches through close analysis, and feminist and historicist interpretation. Background readings in medieval life and culture.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3155x Canterbury Tales

Chaucer as inheritor of late-antique and medieval conventions and founder of early modern literature and the fiction of character. Selections from related medieval texts.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3158y Medieval Literature: Literatures of medieval Britain

A survey of medieval literatures of the British Isles, and related European texts, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Although the course covers many genres and topics, the legends of King Arthur will be a connective thread. Medieval literature and the British Isles as colonized space. Literature before the invention of "England." The multi-ethnic and multilingual culture of the British Middle Ages. The challenge of texts originally accompanied by illustrations. Selfhood as more a social than a private entity. Two papers, mid-term, and take-home final.
Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Spring of the 2009-10 academic year. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

BC 3159-3160 - THE ENGLISH COLLOQUIUM PREFACE: Required of majors in the junior year. All sections of 3159 (fall semester) are on the Renaissance; all sections of 3160 (spring semester) are on the Enlightenment. Students may substitute 3 courses--from ENGL BC3154-BC3158, BC3163-BC3164, BC3165-BC3169, or ENTH V3136-V3137. Students may also take 1 colloquium and 2 substitutions. At least one of these courses must cover Medieval or Renaissance material; at least one material of the 17th or 18th Century. One of these will also count toward satisfying the "before 1900" requirement.

ENGL BC 3159x-BC3160y (Section 1) The English Colloquium: Imitation and Creation

New ideas of the mind's relation to the world. New perspectives, the emergence of new forms, experimentation with old forms, and the search for an appropriate style.
Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

ENGL BC 3159x-BC3160y (Section 2) The English Colloquium: Skepticism and Affirmation

The development of modern concepts of subjectivity and authority. The rise of art and the artist. Myth versus science. Knowledge versus experience. Humanism, Rationalism, Empiricism. The tension between belief and doubt. The exploration of limits and the limitless. Definition of the beautiful and the sublime.
Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

For Section 3: [Fall Syllabus] [Spring Syllabus]

ENGL BC 3159x-BC3160y (Section 3) The English Colloquium: Reason and Imagination

Humanism, reformation, and revolution: the possibilities of human knowledge; sources and strategies for secular and spiritual authority; the competing demands of idealism and experience.
Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

ENGL BC 3159x-BC3160y (Section 4) The English Colloquium: Order and Disorder

The tension, conflicts, and upheavals of an era in the arts, religion, politics, aesthetics, and society.
Corequisites: See "The English Colloquium Preface" above. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

ENGL BC 3163x Shakespeare I

A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.

ENGL BC 3164y Shakespeare II

Critical and historical introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3165x The Elizabethan Renaissance

Was offered in the Fall semester, 2008 Literature and culture during the reign of Elizabeth I. Topics include God, sex, love, colonization, wit, empire, the calendar, cosmology, and Elizabeth herself as writer and topic. Authors include P. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Mary Sidney Herbert.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3166y Seventeenth-century Prose and Poetry

Lyric poetry about love, sex, death, and God in Donne and others (e.g., Herbert, Lanyer, Wroth, Herrick, Marvell, Phillips). Prose about science, politics, religion, and philosophy (e.g., Bacon and Cavendish, Hobbes and early communists "The Levellers") in what has been called the "century of revolution."

Description for Fall, 2009:Seventeenth-century poetry and prose: Sex, love, and God in lyric poetry, John Donne to Rochester (1600-1678); politics and religion in prose of the English Revolution (1642-1660), including political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the female prophet Anna Trapnel, and the first communist, Winstanley.--Guibbory
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3167y Milton

Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and selections of Milton's earlier poetry and prose (defenses of free press, divorce, individual conscience, political and religious liberty) read within the context of religious, political, and cultural history, but with a sense of connection to present issues.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3169x Renaissance Drama: Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster

Renaissance English Drama: An examination of three major Renaissance dramatists who wrote in a wide range of genres and styles. The course will take account of larger developments in English drama in late Elizabethan and earlier Stuart times, and there will be nods in the direction of Shakespeare, but the focus will be on Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3171x The Novel and Psychoanalysis

The novel in its cultural context, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis. Reading selected novels from Austen to W.G. Sebald.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3173x 18th-Century Literature (1660-1820): Sex & Sensibility in the 18th-Century Novel

This course will examine the "rise" of the eighteenth-century British novel from its unruly and disreputable origins to its arrival as a respectable and accepted genre. Along the way we'll consider how the novel was affected by and effected changes in gender, sexuality, authorship, and political and social institutions. Readings to include Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, Cleland, Sterne, Wollstonecraft, and Austen.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3174x The Age of Johnson

Was offered in the Fall semester, 2008

The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their contemporaries in historic context; rise of the novel (Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne); poets from Pope to Blake and Wordsworth; women writers from Carter to Collier to Wollstonecraft; working class writers; topics include slavery and abolition in literature, the democratization of culture, and the transition to romanticism.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3176y The Romantic Era

Romantic writers in their intellectual, historical, and political context, with reference to contemporary movements in philosophy, music, and the plastic arts. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats. An emphasis on close reading of the poetry.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3177y Victorian Age in Literature: the Novel

Works by Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. While attending to form and style, we will focus on the relation of these fictional worlds to the historical and social realities of the period. Attention will be paid to how the novels reflect or challenge Victorian ideas about ambition, desire, sexuality, education, labor, domesticity, and global empire.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60. Sign-up with department.
3 points

ENGL BC 3178x Victorian Poetry and Criticism

Poetry, art, and aesthetics in an industrial society, with emphasis on the role of women as artists and objects. Poems by Tennyson, Arnold, Christina and D.G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Elizabeth and Robert Browning; criticism by Ruskin, Arnold, and Wilde; paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler; photographs by J.M. Cameron.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3179x American Literature to 1800

Early American histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels tell stories of pilgrimage and colonization; private piety and public life; the growth of national identity; Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; courtship and marriage; slavery and abolition. Writers include Bradford, Shepard, Bradstreet, Taylor, Rowlandson, Edwards, Wheatley, Franklin, Woolman, and Brown.
Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall of the 2009-10 academic year. General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3180y American Literature, 1800-1870

Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore the literary implications of American independence, the representation of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Irving, Emerson, Poe, Fuller, Thoreau, Douglass, Stowe, Jacobs, Whitman, and Dickinson.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3181y American Literature, 1871-1945

American literature in the context of cultural and historical change. Writers include Twain, James, DuBois, Wharton, Cather, Wister, Faulkner, Hurston.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3182y American Fiction

American fiction from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Writers include Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, Twain, James, Wharton, Faulkner, Wright.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3183y American Literature since 1945

American fiction, literary and cultural criticism since 1945. Topics include: the authorial and critical search for the great contemporary American novel, the particularity of "American" characters, genres, aesthetics, subjects, the effect of these debates on canon formation and the literary marketplace. Authors may include: Bellow, Ellison, Nabokov, Kerouac, Didion, Pynchon, Morrison, and Lahiri.
General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3184y House and Home in American Culture

Interdisciplinary examination of house, home, and family in American life from 1850 to the present. Attention to the interrelation between architectural design, ideologies of family, class identity, racial politics and gender formation. Historical sites include the plantation, the nomadic dwelling, the mansion, the tenement, the apartment, and the suburb.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3185y Modern British and American Poetry

Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments. Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion. Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O' Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3187y American Writers and Their Foreign Counterparts

Developments in modern fiction as seen in selected 19th- and 20th-century American, European, and English works by Flaubert, Dostoevsky, James, Proust, Gide, Woolf, Faulkner, and others.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3188x The Modern Novel

Examines formal changes in the novel from nineteenth-century realism to stream of consciousness, montage, and other modernist innovations. Contexts include World War I, technology, urbanization, nostalgia, sexuality and the family, mass culture, psychoanalysis, empire and colonialism. Representative works from authors such as James, Forster, West, Ford, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3189y Postmodernism

Examines literary forms emerging from the rubble of representation produced by the tyranny of progress (commodification, mass media, globalization) and the deconstruction of grand narratives. Works by Auster, Barnes, Barthelme, Coetzee, Pynchon, Reed, Robinson, Rushdie, and Stoppard.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3190y Global Literature in English

Selective survey of fiction from the ex-colonies, focusing on the colonial encounter, cultural and political decolonization, and belonging and migration in the age of postcolonial imperialism. Areas covered include Africa (Achebe, Aidoo, Armah, Ngugi); the Arab World (Mahfouz, Munif, Salih, Souief); South Asia (Mistry, Rushdie, Suleri); the Carribean (Kincaid); and New Zealand (Hulme).
General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL). General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
3 points

ENGL BC 3191x and y The English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship

Various topics presented by visiting scholars in courses that will meet for two to four weeks during each semester. Topics, instructors, and times will be announced by the department. Students must attend all classes to receive credit for this course. For more information, please consult the English Department's web page .
Prerequisites: To be taken only for P/F. Departmental sign-up required. Only registering for the course through eBear or SSOL will not ensure your enrollment.
1 point

ENGL BC 3193x and y Literary Criticism and Theory

Provides experience in the reading and analysis of literary texts and some knowledge of conspicuous works of literary criticism. Frequent short papers. Required of all majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring term even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take BC3193 in the autumn term.
Prerequisites: Registration in each section is limited. Departmental registration required.
4 points

ENGL BC 3194x (Section 1) Critical & Theoretical Perspectives on Literature: A History of Literary Theory & Criticism

What is literature? Does it tell the truth? What is its relation to the other arts? How do we judget it? How can we talk about it? Such questions form the matter of a conversation among philosophers, writers, and, latterly, "critics" that has gone on for two-and-a-half thousand years. Their responses both influence and reflect the literature contemporary with them. Readings from critics and theoreticians from the Classical world to the beginnings of poststructuralism, with attention to contemporaneous literature.
Prerequisites: Will be offered in the Fall of the 2009-2010 academic year.
3 points

ENGL BC 3194x (Section 2) Critical & Theoretical Perspectives on Literature: Literary Theory

Examines nineteenth century foundational texts (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche), landmarks of the twentieth century (Gramsci, Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, Jameson, Spillers, Said, Spivak, Anzaldua, Debray, Kelly, Rafael), the novels of Jose Rizal, and selected critical essays.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3194x (Section 3) Critical and Theoretical Perspectives on Literature: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature

Literary expression in the light of psychoanalytic thought. Psychoanalytic writings by Freud and Lacan; literary works from Shakespeare to the present.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3194x (Section 4) Critical and Theoretical Perspectives on Literature: Postmodern Texts and Theory

Literary and theoretical postmodern texts. Our focus will be the revolutionary redefinition of the image, word, pleasure, love, and the unconscious.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
4 points

ENGL BC 3194x (Section 5) Critical and Theoretical Perspectives on Literature: Marxist Literary Theory

Evolution of Marxist criticism from Marx to Jameson and Eagleton. Central questions: What is unique about Marxist cultural analysis? What are the different Marxist schools of criticism? Is there a future for Marxism? Issues considered: capitalism and culture, class analysis, commitment, modernism and postmodernism, commodification and alienation, and postcolonialism.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3195x Modernism

Modernist responses to cultural fragmentation and gender anxiety in the wake of psychoanalysis and world war. Works by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Stein, Hemingway, Toomer, H.D., Pound, Lawrence, Barnes, and other Anglo-American writers.

ENGL BC 3196x Home to Harlem: Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

Explores the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates surrounding the Harlem or New Negro literary renaissance, 1920-30s. Through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork, topics considered include: modernism, primitivism, patronage, passing and the problematics of creating a "racial" art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3198x Poetry Movements since the 1950's

Major poetry movements since the 1950's, including Beat Poetry, Confessional Poetry, the Black Arts Movement, Black Mountain, the Belfast group, and Language Poetry.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3199x Poetics.

Investigation of poetry and imagination in practice and theory in the work of lyric poets from the fourteenth century to the present. Selected prose and poetry by Petrarch, Herbert, Cowper, Blake, Keats, Clare, Dickinson, Baudelaire, the Modernists, Celan, and others.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT). Not offered in 2009-2010.
3 points

ENGL BC 3252x Contemporary Media Theory

Explores the transformation of social organization and consciousness by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze film and digital media, and explore political and media theory generated since the rise of the internet.

ENGL V 3260y The Victorian Age in Literature

The 19th century saw the birth of the social and psychological sciences, along with new representations of the self in everyday life. Works by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Darwin, Arnold, Mill, Ellis, and others.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
4 points

ENRE BC 3810x Literary Approaches to the Bible

Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature, combined with the more formal disciplines of biblical studies.
General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
4 points

ENGL BC 3992x Senior Postcolonial Literature Seminar: The Literature of the Middle Passage

Focusing on the literature of the Atlantic Slave Trade, this course culminates in a trip to Ghana. Texts from Africa, Britain, and the Americas, reflecting the historical impact of involuntary migration out of Africa, will include Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Du Bois, Conrad, Equiano, and Baldwin. Open to all seniors by application.
Not offered in 2009-2010.
4 points

PREFACE for 3996: All independent study projects require a completed form being filed with the English Department (417 Barnard Hall).

ENGL BC 3996x and y Special Project in Theatre, Writing, or Critical Interpretation

Senior majors who are concentrating in Theatre or Writing and have completed two courses in writing or three in theatre will normally take the Special Project in Theatre or Writing (BC3996 x or y) in combination with an additional course in their special field. This counts in place of one of the Senior Seminars. In certain cases, Independent Study (BC3999 - see below) may be substituted for the Special Project.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and chair required. In rare cases, with the permission of the chair, a special project in conjunction with a course may be taken by other English majors.
1 point

PREFACE FOR THE ENGLISH SENIOR SEMINARS:
Enrollment in 3997 and 3998 is limited to senior English majors (and film majors for the English/film section). Signing up is accomplished through a special tab in eBear.

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 1) Senior Seminars: City in Literature

London in the Nineteenth Century. How does urban experience provoke formal innovations, deformations, and fascination with the sensational, the grotesque, the mysterious? Special emphasis on the nighttime as a site of exploration and transgression. Works by Dickens, Engels, Mayhew, Doré, Whistler, Ruskin, Stevenson, Wilde, Doyle, and others.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 2) Senior Seminars: Late Victorian and Modern Drama

Drama in transition. Changing social structures and dramatic structures at the turn of the century. The relationship between convention and invention and the interface of text and performance in the plays of Pinero, Wilde, Shaw, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Robins, and others.

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 3) Senior Seminars: Poets & their Correspondence (FALL '08 & FALL '09)

How do poets' letters inform our understanding of their poetry? From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, poets have used their intimate correspondence to "baffle absence," as Coleridge remarked. This course will examine the ways several masters of the letter (including Cowper, Keats, Dickinson, Eliot, Bishop, and Lowell, among others) shaped their prose to convey spontaneity in paradoxically artful ways, illuminating their major work as poets and making the private letter a literary form in its own right.

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 4) Senior Seminars: Reading and Writing Women in Colonial America

In April 1645, John Winthrop lamented the sorry state of Ann Yale Hopkins, "who was fallne into a sadd infirmytye, the losse of her vnderstandinge & reason . . . by occasion of her giving her selfe wholly to readinge & writing, & had written many bookes." This course considers colonial women as authors and as readers, sampling a variety of genres (court transcripts, confessions, poetry, autobiographies, captivity narratives, novels, and commonplace books) and exploring topics including theology, marriage, scribal publication, and the American Revolution. We will read texts by women writers, including Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, and Hannah Foster, as well as texts that reveal women's reading and publication practices, such as accounts of Anne Hutchinson and Milcah Martha Moore's Book.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 5) Senior Seminars: Monsters, Machines, Cyborgs: toward a History of Technology

Artistic and literary responses to technological change that transformed the idea of what it means to be human, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Shelley's Frankenstein, from La Mettrie's Man-Machine to Ridley Scott's Alien.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3997x (Section 6) Senior Seminars: Political Love

A philosophical exploration of notions of 'political love' from Aristotle's happiness to Martin Luther King's agape. In what way is love the foundation of human community, and what is a revolutionary conception of love today?
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 1) Senior Seminars: Studies in Literature: The Concept of Happiness

Interdisciplinary examination of the idea of happiness from Aristotle to the present. Short readings in a variety of literary and other texts.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 2) Senior Seminars: Film: The Man in the Crowd/The Woman of the Streets

Explores theories and representations of the crowd, mass behavior and ideas about the individual in the period between the two World Wars. Looking mostly at fiction and film from the U.S. and Germany between 1918 -.1939, the course centers on representations of Berlin and New York. Films by Lang, Ruttmann, Rosselini, Wenders, Von Sternberg, Vidor, Chaplin, Sheeler and Strand, Engel, Berkeley and others.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 3) Senior Seminars: The American Sublime

"The empty spirit / In vacant space": gothicism, transcendentalism, and postmodern rapture. Traces of the sublime in the American literary landscape, featuring Brown, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, Reed, Pynchon, Robinson, and Harding.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 4) Senior Seminars: Sexuality & Spirituality

The first half of the course is grounded in readings from Bible, Augustine, Petrarch and Donne, but students may then explore the relation and intersection between sexuality, sin, and spirituality up into the present, and cross-culturally.

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 5) Senior Seminars: The Making & Unmaking of the Poetic Canon

This seminar reviews the emergence of poetry anthologies from the 18th century to the present, while sampling a wide variety of lyric poetry (Neoclassical and Romantic to Modernist and Contemporary) and re-examining such issues as what it is we value in poetry and how we might reinvent the "canon" we have inherited. Students will create their own anthologies and have the option to do editorial or critical projects for their final submissions.

ENGL BC 3998y (Section 6) Senior Seminars: Late Shakespeare: Visions and Revisions

Shakespeare's last plays as both experimental and revisionary. Topics will include aesthetics, philosophy, politics, sexuality, and gender, as well as 20th-century criticism's reconstruction of these final plays. Probable texts: Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Prerequisites: Sign up through special tab in eBear. Enrollment limited to seniors.
4 points

PREFACE for 3999: All independent study projects require a completed form being filed with the English Department (417 Barnard Hall).

ENGL BC 3999x and y Independent Study

Senior majors who wish to substitute Independent Study for one of the two required senior seminars should consult the chair. Permission is given rarely and only to students who present a clear and well-defined topic of study, who have a department sponsor, and who submit their proposals well in advance of the semester in which they will register. There is no independent study for screenwriting or film production.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor and Department Chair.
4 points

CLEN W 4122y Renaissance in Europe II: Figuring Eros

How did Renaissance writers imagine Eros? What obstacles does he meet? How does he relate to other kinds of love? To loss and to wit? Readings include Plato, Ovid, and Petrarch for background, then Stampa, Ariosto, Rabelais, Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Rabelais, Wyatt, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne.--A. Prescott
3 points

CLEN G 4205x 17th-Century Literature and Culture: Religious Difference and the English Revolution

Explores the intertwining of religion, politics, and literature during the seventeenth century, focusing on the English Revolution (1640-1660). What was the role of religion, and the nature of religious differences in post-reformation England? Beginning with brief selections from Herbert's The Temple but focusing on writings by religio-political radicals and self-proclaimed prophets such as Gerrard Winstanley and Anna Trapnel but especially Milton (e.g., probably Areopaglitica, Paradise Regained), we will consider the proliferation of religious divisions and sectarian options, anti-Catholicism, the question of Jewish readmission, and the relation between religion and "nation."

ENGL W 4502x British Literature, 1950 to the Present

This course will trace English fiction (and a few films) from the center and from the margins, from the post-WWII era to contemporary social and narratological preoccupations. Writers will include: Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, V.S. Naipaul, John Osborne, W.G. Sebald, and films by Carol Reed, Michael Apted, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Frears.