The English Conference
The English
Conference is endowed by a gift from Professor Emerita of
English Lucyle Hook. Special topics are presented by visiting
scholars in courses that meet
for four weeks during each semester. The
intent of the lectures is to bring our students and faculty
the perspective of scholars of literature in English working
outside the College community.
To
be taken only for pass/fail. 1 point. Students must
attend all
lectures
in
order to receive credit for this course.
Current
English Conference Courses
3191x,
y.
The
English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship.
FALL 2008: (ENGL BC 3191x).
Criminals, Courts and Storytelling
This English
Conference will focus on the relationship between narrative and
the law by examining four eighteenth-century trials and the
narrative responses to the trials. Readings will include court
transcripts from the Old Bailey, such as those of the infamous
thief Jack
Sheppard, and
narrative responses such as John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and
Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
--Dr. Nancy E. Johnson. Tuesdays, October 28, and November
11, 18, and 25 from 6:10-8 p.m.
DEADLINE to register: 11/11/08.
About Prof. Johnson:
Nancy Johnson is an Associate Professor of
English and Deputy Chair at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches
eighteenth-century British literature and literary theory. She
has published a book on radical novels of the 1790s, The English
Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the
Contract (Palgrave, 2004), and she is currently working on a
scholarly edition of the court journals of Frances Burney for
Oxford University Press.
Return to top
Past
English Conference Courses
SPRING 2008: (ENGL BC 3191y).
Science as Literature: How We See the Universe
We usually read scientific writings, if we read
them at all, to find out what we know about nature. In
this series of four lectures we will read excerpts from some of
the most influential scientific writings in history to find out
how we think about nature. By paying close
attention to the literary qualities of the works, we will
consider the roles that both the individual and society play in
investigating nature, and how and why those roles have changed
over the ages. (Bonus: The lectures will also provide a
compact survey of the history of Western science.) Readings,
which will be supplied, will include excerpts from Aristotle,
Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein,
Heisenberg, Bohr, Crick and Watson, and other one-name wonders.
--R. Panek. Tuesdays, Feb. 19 and 26, March 4 and 11, from
6:10 to 8 p.m.
DEADLINE to register: 2/26/08.
About Prof. Panek:
Richard Panek is the author of two books about
the history and philosophy of science, The Invisible Century:
Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes
(Viking, 2004) and Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope
Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens (Viking, 1998). He
is now researching a third, Let There Be Dark: At the Dawn of
the Next Universe (Houghton Mifflin, c. 2010), based on an
article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine on dark
matter, dark energy, and the frontiers of cosmology. He has
written about science and culture for various sections of The
New York Times, as well as for Smithsonian,
Natural History, Discover, Esquire, Outside,
Astronomy, Seed, and many other magazines. He is a
2007 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York
Foundation for the Arts. He has also published short fiction,
for which he received a PEN Award in 1987. He has no background
in science, but he hopes that by combining the exploratory
sensibility of journalism with the storytelling techniques of
long-form narrative, he can illuminate and humanize science for
readers who, like himself before he began writing about the
subject ten years ago, would know little or nothing about it. He
taught creative writing at Barnard College during the fall 2007
semester, and he is on the permanent faculty of the Goddard
College MFA Writing program.
FALL
2007:
(ENGL BC 3191x)
Lectures on Holocaust Literature: "Forms
of Autobiography"
This series of
lectures will focus on the representation of the Holocaust in
forms of autobiography including Holocaust testimonies,
children’s diaries, journals, and selected memoirs. The course
will include discussion of the following works: oral histories
from Brana Gurewitsch’s Mothers, Sisters, Resisters and
from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at
Yale University; selected unknown children’s diaries; journal
entries from Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life;
and excerpts from two memoirs, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz
and After and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.
Selected short stories and poems also will be distributed.
Attention will be paid to forms of witnessing and to artistic
techniques used by different Holocaust writers to represent
their experiences. There also will be several films shown
including Night and Fog, the first Holocaust documentary,
and excerpts from Shoah and The Last Days.
--Dr. Jan Zlotnik
Schmidt. Thursdays, Nov. 1st, 8th, 15th, and 29th from
6:10-8 p.m.
About Dr. Schmidt:
Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY
Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at
SUNY New Paltz where she teaches courses in composition,
theories of writing, autobiography, creative writing, women’s
literature, and Holocaust studies. An expert in the field
of composition studies and writing across the curriculum, she
has given presentations and workshops at the local, regional,
and national level. Her poetry has been published in many
journals including Kansas Quarterly, Cream City Review,
Syracuse Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, Home Planet News,
and Phoebe. She has published two volumes of poetry --
We Speak in Tongues (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) and
She Had This Memory (The Edwin Mellin Press 2000); two
collections of autobiographical essays--Women/Writing/Teaching
(SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at
Midlife, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge
2000); and a multicultural, global literature anthology,
Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction (co-authored
with the late Dr. Carley Bogarad and Dr. Lynne Crockett), which
is about to go into a fourth edition. She has been
teaching both an undergraduate and graduate Holocaust literature
course in the Departments of Jewish Studies and English for
several years.
Spring 2007: (ENGL BC 3191y)
"Whitman and After: the First Person Singular"
Four lectures devoted to the first person voice in
literature and its special attraction for iconic American
authors as well as for contemporary writers. This series of
talks will cross genres, with individual sessions on poetry,
fiction and forms of nonfiction including memoir and the
personal essay. The first lecture will focus on Walt Whitman
(with a couple of nods to Emily Dickinson). The second lecture,
turning to fiction, will consider The Great Gatsby in
depth but will also look at Moby Dick and Huckleberry
Finn. The third and fourth lectures discuss forms of
nonfiction (literary journalism, the personal essay and other
autobiographical forms), perhaps the signature genres of
contemporary letters.--P.
Hampl.
Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A
Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech
heritage. This book and subsequent works, including
Virgin Time (1992) and I Could Tell You
Stories (finalist in General Nonfiction in the
National Book Critics Circle Awards 2000)
established her as an influential figure in the rise
of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years.
Blue
Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, a
meditation on the odalisque figure in Western art,
came out from Harcourt in fall 2006. It will be
followed next year by another memoir, The
Florist’s Daughter. Ms. Hampl is
Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished
Professor at the University of Minnesota where she
teaches creative writing. She is also on the
permanent faculty of The Prague Summer Program.
Fall 2006: "John Ruskin"
This course will examine selected writings of the great
Victorian sage, John Ruskin. We will pay special attention to
how Ruskin's thinking about aesthetics--in particular, why the
world looks the way it does--forced him to become an unwilling
social critic and the consequences of this radical reorientation
for Ruskin's writing, for social-reform movements of his day,
and for Ruskin personally.
--R.
Gurstein.
Spring 2006: (ENGL BC 3191y)
Stage Comedy
We will read four plays: Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being
Ernest; Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular; Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw; and Tom Stoppard's
The
Real Thing. We will have a double focus--the plays
themselves and the relevant theories of comedy and how they are
illustrated by the plays we’ve read.
--A. Kaufman. M Feb. 6, 13, 20, 27th
6:10-8 pm.
Click
here for a
book list.
Prof. Tony
Kaufman received his Ph.D. from Yale and taught for many
years at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. His
courses include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, and
Comedy in Theory and Practice. He has written on early
playwrights, Congreve, Behn, Wycherley, John Crowne, Thomas
Southerne, and such later writers as Thurber, Salinger, and
Barbara Pym.
Fall 2005: (ENGL BC 3191x)
Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lacan and Kleist
This course will examine some Kleistian works from
a psychoanalytical point of view. Kleist described how major
topics of psychoanalysis, such as unconscious, mirror stage,
transference, object a, the peculiar position of femininity,
Oedipe and others function. Kleist gives us an example how
psychoanalysis can borrow insights, sometimes even concepts, from
belletristic literature. Of course, this affinity does not exclude
a questioning about limits of comparability.
This
course will confront four psychoanalytic fundamental concepts
(mirror-stage; anxiety; transference; femininity) with some
Kleistian works, such as Amphitryon, Schroffenstein
Family, About The Gradual Formation of Thoughts in
Speaking, The Foundling, The Earthquake of Chili,
Käthchen von Heilbronn, and Penthesilea.--P.
Widmer. MW Oct. 10, 12,17, and 19th at 6:10-8:00 pm.
Peter Widmer is a practicing psychoanalyst in Zurich as well as the
founder and publisher of RISS. He has taught at the University of
Kyoto and at the University of Zurich.
Spring
2005:
Psychoanalysis and
Film.
Prof. Pierre-Gilles
Guéguen, France
The
artist always precedes the psycholanalyst according to the
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
This sentence holds true for great film makers and for
the characters they invent and insert in the narrative plot.
Many pictures teach us about the subject of speech and
language, and also about the symptom as a special mode of
jouissance which inscribes the subject in a social link, as
exemplified through the characters in the texture and the style
of the film. We
will draw from texts from Lacan to comment some extracts of the
following pictures: “A Woman Under the Influence,” “El
Habla Con Ella,” “The Hours,” “Fatal Attraction,”
“Taxi Driver,” “When Harry Met Sally,”
“Catch Me If You Can,” and “In the Bedroom.”
Prof. Pierre-Gilles
Guéguen, Ph.D.,
is President of the W.A.P. (World Association of
Psychoanalysis), member and former Director of L’École de la
Cause Freudienne (E.C.F.), manager and faculty member of the
Clinical Section, in France, faculty
member of the Department of Psychoanalysts, Paris VIII
University, and
author of numerous articles on Lacan. M
W 6:10-8 p.m., March 21, 23, 28, & 30.
Films discussed:
March 21: An
inquiry into passion and madness. Films: Fatal Attraction
and Bunuel’s El.
March 23: How bad obsession can be: the narcistic cage. Film:
As Good As It Gets.
March 28: Hysteria and unsatisfaction. Film: Reflections
in a Golden Eye.
March 30: The war between the sexes. Film: Adam’s Rib.
Readings:
Freud's Dora and The Ratman
Readings in Lacan’s Seminar III: Psychosis (To Be
Announced)
Books will be available at Labyrinth Bookstore
Fall
2004:
Writing Madness Psychoanalysis
Prof. Russell Grigg, Australia
The conference will provide the
framework for exploring the function of writing for psychotics
and the relationship of psychotics to writing. Authors discussed
will include Schreber and Joyce, Plath and Frame. Aspects of Aimée,
treated by Lacan, and the Papin sisters, discussed by Genet,
will be examined if time permits.
Pror.
Russell Grigg is a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne and the
Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis. He has translated
Lacan’s Seminar III: The Psychoses (Routledge, 1993) and Seminar
XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2005) and
is the author of numerous articles on Lacan and philosophy.
Spring 2004:
Boccaccio’s Decameron
and Renaissance Fiction.
Dr. Lorenzo Bartoli of the Autonomous University of Madrid
The Decameron, assembled
and probably written by Boccaccio around 1349-1351, but famously
set in Florence at the time of the Black Death which swept
across Europe from 1347 and savagely hit the city of the florin
in 1348, is the narrative work of the widest range in all of
Italian Literature. In fact, for the entire western
tradition, the Decameron stands as a landmark, as it
signals the advent of a new form and a new view of literature,
based upon contemporaneity and the bourgeois world, depicted in
its multiform reality of characters, geographies, existential
horizons, epistemological uncertainties.
Fall 2003: Girls and
Balls: Staking Our Claim
Professor Jane Leavy
For generations, men regarded
America’s games, and the written accounts of them, as an
entitlement, an inheritance to be passed from father to son.
Female interest in competitive athletics either ended at puberty
or was viewed as a mechanism for attracting the opposite sex.
The passage of Title IX legislation in 1972, requiring equal
funding for men’s and women’s collegiate sports, promoted
women’s competition as well as their entrance into the
competitive world of sports journalism. This course will compare
the fictional treatment of America’s pastime by male and
female novelists and examine how female reporters, outsiders to
the game, bring needed perspective to daily sports journalism.
Jane Leavy
(Barnard ’74) is an award winning former sports writer and
feature writer for the Washington Post and the author of Sandy
Koufax: a Lefty’s Legacy, and Squeeze
Play.
Bibliography:
Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
Excerpts to be handed out in class.
Steve Kluger, Last Days of Summer. Excerpts to be handed
out in class.
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Lagacy.
Jane Leavy, Squeeze Play.
Spring 2003:
Section 1.
How We Got to Where We Are: Christians, Jews, and Israel in Early Modern England
and America
Professor
Achsah Guibbory
This
course is a brief introduction to several aspects of the
complex topic of Christian/Jewish relations, and of the history
of the Christian relation to Israel. By
reading excerpts of writings from the period, we will examine
the habit of a number of seventeenth-century English people
to think of England as a “chosen nation,” as the new Israel;
and the parallel tendency among American puritans to think
of themselves as Israel and America as the promised land,
Canaan. (We see traces of this in the names of many towns
in Connecticut.) What
were the causes and implications of this kind of thinking? If
the English or Americans were Israel, what were the Jews? In
the middle of the seventeenth century, at the height of the
English identification with Israel, England considered the
question of whether to “readmit” the Jews, who had been expelled
from England since the end of the thirteenth century. We
will look at excerpts of some of the writings surrounding
the debate over Jewish readmission.
The
readings for this course will be available in a course packet
(since most of them are not available in modern editions). Many
of the texts are odd, interesting, different. I want to give
a wide sampling, though the selections themselves will be
short. Readings
may include: some brief selections from the Bible, a few
poems by George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, excerpts from
John Winthrop and another early American writer, from a
funeral sermon on James I (as Solomon), from Milton’s Areopagitica,
the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel’s account of Jews
among the American “Indians” and his petition for Jewish
readmission, protests against and defenses of readmission
(including Roger Williams), and a pamphlet by the Quaker
leader Margaret Fell (wife of George Fox) written to convert
the Jews to Christianity.
Learning
something about earlier ways in which Christians thought
about Israel and Jews might shed light on issues of intense
concern today.
The
readings, though short, may seem difficult at first, since
they are from an earlier period, but you will get used
to them. You
are expected to have read the selections before class,
and to come to class prepared to discuss and engage them,
to ask questions.
Spring 2003:
Section 2.
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell: Friendship
and Poetic Influence
Professor
Francesco Rognoni
Elizabeth
Bishop and Robert Lowell’s thirty-year-long friendship
is possibly the most interesting and rewarding American
literary connection of the second half of the twentieth
century. Though
these two great poets developed very different and original
poetics, their dialogue was unbroken and their extraordinary
outputs can be seen as complimentary. The course will focus
both on biographical and critical issues. Poems
and prose writings by Lowell and Bishop will be read in
the context of their mutual influence and in the larger
scenario of their times: questions of genre, gender, cultural
history, canon formation, and interpretation will be raised.
Bibliography:
Elizabeth
Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-79 (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1983). Required.
Robert
Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1977). Required.
Elizabeth
Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1994). Optional.
David
Kalstone, Becoming a Poet (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1989). Optional.
Fall 2002: Section 1
English Abroad: The Journey of Language
Professor Iain Chambers
English--as a language, literature, culture and identity--today
travels in the world without an obvious home or owner. The
historical, cultural and poetical consequences of this journey
will be examined in the following encounters:
1.
Europe’s darkness: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness,
Penguin Classics, 2000.
2.
No nation but the imagination: Derek Walcott, ’A Far Cry from
Africa’, ’Ruins of a Great House’, ’Sea Grapes’, ’The Schooner
Flight’, ’Map of the New World’, in D. Walcott, Collected
Poems, 1948-1984, Noonday Press, 1987.
3.
Native conditions: Tsitsi Dangaremba, Nervous Conditions,
Seattle, The Seal Press, 2002.
4.
Whose language, whose world?: ’The Edge of the World’, in I.
Chambers, Culture after Humanism, Routledge, London New
York, 2001, pp. 183-212.
Spring 2002:
Section 1.
911: When
Narratives Conflict
Arthur Kopit
Mr. Kopit is a playwright, author of "Wings" and
"Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung you in the Closet and I'm
Feeling so Sad."
Readings include many articles from the aftermath of 9/11, using
Robert Stone’s "911: When Narratives Collide" as a starting
point. Students should read Yeats’ "The Second Coming" and
be familiar with the film A Beautiful Mind and the
controversy involving its historical "accuracy." They
should be prepared to discuss the questions: "Does historical
accuracy matter in a film" and "What is historical accuracy?"
They should also be familiar with the recent controversy over
charges of plagiarism leveled against historians Stephen Ambrose
and Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as revelation that historian
Joseph Ellis "invented" a more dramatic past for himself.
They should be prepared to talk about the question: "When is
plagiarism not plagiarism?"
Spring 2002:
Section 2.
England Gone: Warning and Regret in the Poetry of Edward Thomas,
W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin.
Glyn Maxwell
Mr. Maxwell is Poetry Editor of The New
Republic and poet. He is the author of The Tale of
the Major’s Son, Out of the Rain, and Rest for the
Wicked.
Bibliography:
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward
Mendelson (Vintage International). Required.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed.
Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). Required.
Edward Thomas, Penguin Book of First World War
Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (Penguin). Required.
Louis MacNeice (poems will be distributed as
handouts). Required.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
(Oxford University Press). Highly Recommended.
Fall 2001:
Postcolonial London.
John McLeod
London has
become an important crucible where new forms of national and
transnational identity are being created by British-based
writers who may trace a connection with coutries with a history
of colonialism. The legacy and experience of specifically
post-war migrations to London, and the hybrid and diverse
communities created in their wake, have created new forms of
social and cultural activity. The classes will briefly
trace the emergence of a variable and exciting body of cultural
texts created by these ’new’ Londoners from the 1950s to the
present. Though engaging with a variety of literary
examples, classes will focus on three in particular: George
Lamming, The Emigrants (1954), Hanif Kureishi, The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith, White Teeth
(2000).
Spring 2001:
Caribbean Women's Writing.
Evelyn
O’Callaghan
Prof. O'Callaghan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at
the University of Barbados, West Indies. She is Jamaican
and Irish by birth, studied at the University in Jamaica, won a
scholarship to Oxford, and then, after her graduate studies,
returned to the Caribbean. Her specialty is Caribbean
Women’s writing, particularly the early colonial phase at the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Bibliography:
Jean Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jamaica
Kincaid, Annie John
Erna Brodber,
Jane and Louisa Will Soon come Home
Fall 2000:
Four Major New Voices in Contemporary American
Literature: Cormac McCarthy, Patricia Eakins, Mark Richard,
Richard Powers.
Beatrice Trotingnon of the University of Tours,
France.
Bibliography:
Cormac
McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1985.
Patricia
Eakins, The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father
and Mother, First and Last, 1999.
(New York University Prize for Fiction)
Mark Richard,
Fishboy, 1993.
Richard
Stone, The Gold Bug Variations, 1991.
Spring 2000:
Women Writers, Postcolonial Identities.
Celeste Schenck
Bibliography:
Michelle
Cliff, Abeng
Mariama Ba,
Such a Long Letter (Heinemann African Writers)
Nawal El
Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Arundhati
Roy, The God of Small Things
Ruth Ozeki,
My Year of Meat
Fall
1999:
Jacqueline Ollier
Fall
1985: History and Stories, Myths and Anti-Myths in contemporary
British Drama.
Riccardo Duranti, of the University of Rome
Bibliography:
John Arden,
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959). (In Plays: One.
Grove Press, 1978.)
Caryl
Churchill, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976).
Pluto Press, 1982. or Plays: One. Methuen, '85.
Edward Bond,
Early Morning (1968). (In Edward Bond, Plays:
One. Methuen, 1977.)
Dr. Lucyle
Hook, a Texan, was a
specialist in 17th-century English drama and held fellowships at
the Henry E. Huntington Library in California and at the Folger
Library in Washington. In 1954 she was visiting professor
at the Univeristy of Melbourne, and from 1956 to 1958 she was
Dean of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, lecturing
there and at universities throughout Asia. In addition to
many articles in her field, Miss Hook co-authored The
Research Manual. She retired from the Barnard English
Department as Professor Emerita in 1967.
Return to top |
