3191x, y.  The English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship 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.  Enrollment requires signing a sign up sheet in the English Department. Merely adding it to your program will not reserve a space for you.  For details, read our procedure instructions for departmental sign-ups.  For descriptions of lecture series given before the current academic year, go to Past English Conferences below.

Current Offerings

FALL 2010: (ENGL BC 3191x): WORDS AND MUSIC
—Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky
The course will focus, on the one hand, on the way composers and songwriters have responded to words and, on the other, on the way authors have tried to describe music in words. We will study the creative method of musicians ranging from John Dowland and Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega. Among the authors discussed will be Thomas Campion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Hanslick, George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Ricks, Susan Youens, and Anthony DeCurtis. Special guests will speak and perform. No knowledge of musical notation is needed.

Tuesdays 4:10-6:00 on October 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th. Enrollment limited to 60, sign-up required, 4th floor Barnard Hall. The last day to register for the class is October 12th.

About the professors:
Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky coauthored the award-winning biography Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere. Erik Ryding earned his PhD at Columbia University; a revision of his dissertation was published as In Harmony Framed. He taught English at Barnard College for seven years and was later senior editor of publications at Carnegie Hall. Rebecca Pechefsky earned her BA at Barnard and her MPhil at the CUNY Graduate Center. A freelance harpsichordist, Ms. Pechefsky has made numerous recordings and is a founding member of the trio Brooklyn Baroque. Both Ryding and Pechefsky have written program notes for various musical organizations.

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Past English Conferences:

Spring 2010: (ENGL BC 3191y) Torture: a short course
--Isabel Fonseca
‘Torture is a barbarity that has no place in a modern democracy.’   True or false?

Abu Ghraib dispelled the restful assumption that torture is the purview of violent sects, rogue police and distant authoritarian regimes.  In fact, since human-rights monitoring began in the Seventies (along with specific bans on use of torture), and since the disappearance of many of the world’s dictatorships, the use of torture by governments has continued apace.  What is the history and what are the facts?   And what, furthermore, do psychologists, historians, and novelists have to tell us about those facts?  What is the meaning of torture?  Is it always wrong?   Does torture ever work?

Over four class periods, we will consider changing attitudes and practice -- from maximally gory public spectacle to covert and unmarked interrogation -- and try to make sense of the intractable and almost inconceivable violence committed, most often, in the name of security.

Texts will include Kafka's In the Penal Colony, exerpts from Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and George Orwell's 1984, along with readings from Human Rights Watch's collection: Torture, Does it Make Us Safer?

Mondays, 4:10-6 pm, January 25th & February 1st, 8th, and 15th.   Deadline to register is February 1st.  Sign-up required, 4th floor Barnard Hall.

About Prof. Fonseca:
Isabel Fonseca was a Religion major at Barnard College (’84).  She went on to study Philosophy and Politics at Oxford University and was an editor at the Times Literary Supplement in London before she left to write her study of Roma life and culture, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, which became an international bestseller, published in twenty countries.  In 2008, Alfred A Knopf published her novel, Attachment.

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FALL 2009: (ENGL BC 3191x) Dante in English
--Massimo Bacigalupo (Professor of American Literature, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy)
Dante’s poetry has been widely influential since the fifteenth century and is still much read, translated and imitated in Britain, Ireland and the U.S.A. Using two recent anthologies, Dante in English (Penguin Classics), and The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses (Farrar)), this course will include a reading in English translation of some of the best known episodes of The Divine Comedy, a comparison of styles and interpretations, a discussion of the questions of translation and adaptation, and a survey of some of the critical and poetical responses Dante has elicited, from Chaucer and Keats to T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. We will try to discover why Dante’s vision has spoken to so many writers at different times and what it can tell us today of the culture we live in.

Wednesdays, 6:10-8 pm, September 30th & October 7th, 14th, 21st. Deadline to register is October 7th.   Sign-up required, 4th floor Barnard Hall.

About Prof. Bacigalupo:
Massimo Bacigalupo received his M.A. from the University of Rome and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research has centered on American and British Romanticism and Modernism. He is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Department at the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy. He is a Member of  the  Ligurian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the former President of AISNA, the American Studies Association of Italy.

He is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), Grotta Byron (2001), and the editor of many scholarly volumes, most recently Ezra Pound, Language and Persona (2008),  Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World (2006), and America and the Mediterranean (2003).  His essays are included in Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic (Palgrave, 2008), T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition   (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006), The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (OUP, 2002), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999), etc.  He has contributed to The Yale Review, The Modern Language Review, American Literary Scholarship, Journal of Modern Literature, Paideuma, The Paris Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Notes & Queries, etc.  In 2003 he was awarded Italy’s National Translation Prize for his translations of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, and many others.  This is the third time that he is teaching The English Conference at Barnard.  In 1992 his course was called  "Romantics and Modernists"; in 1995 his subject was "Love & Power in Shakespeare and Hemingway."

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SPRING 2009: Poets Listening to Poets
--Judith Scherer Herz, Professor of English, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).
Donne and Milton will provide starting points for an exploration of some of the different ways in which poets listening to poets gets played out in literary history.   We’ll begin with a scan of a variety of Donne texts watching him think, speak, and perform the self in his writing.  Then we’ll explore some 20th and 21st century poets as they discover, appropriate, and speak with and through that voice.  We’ll end with Paul Muldoon’s “Sillyhow Stride,” which literally speaks Donne insofar as a good portion of its words are Donne’s.  However, that poem is at least in part a pastoral elegy and underlying it is Milton’s “Lycidas.”  With “Lycidas” in hand, we’ll glance back at the origins of pastoral elegy in Theocritus and Virgil and then follow, with Orpheus as our guide, the transformations of that mode in modern and contemporary poetry from Auden to Czeslaw Milosz, all the while listening to the poets as they listen.

Judith S. Herz received her B. A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Rochester.  Her current research centers on the ways in which Donne enters the poetic vocabulary, the imagination, the sound system, of contemporary poets.  A book chapter on time and narrative instability in Milton’s Paradise Lost is also in progress and she continues to work on Bloomsbury, especially the writing of Forster and Leonard Woolf.  Although she started out as a medievalist with a dissertation on Chaucer, she has moved since then into the seventeenth century and the early twentieth.  She has been President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) and of the John Donne Society.

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FALL 2008: Criminals, Courts and Storytelling
--Dr. Nancy E. Johnson.
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.

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.

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SPRING 2008: Science as Literature: How We See the Universe
--R. Panek
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.

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.

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FALL 2007: Lectures on Holocaust Literature: “Forms of Autobiography”
--Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
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 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.

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SPRING 2007: Whitman and After: the First Person Singular
--P. Hampl
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.

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.

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FALL 2006: "John Ruskin"
--R. Gurstein.
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.

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SPRING 2006: Stage Comedy
--A. Kaufman.
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.

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.

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FALL 2005: (ENGL BC 3191x) Psychoanalysis and Literature: Lacan and Kleist
--P. Widmer.
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.

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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SPRING 2003: Section 1.
How We Got to Where We Are: Christians, Jews, & Israel in Early Modern England & 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.

Prof. Guibbory is now a member of the Barnard English faculty.

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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

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FALL 2002: 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.

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SPRING 2002: Section 1.
911: When Narratives Conflict
--Arthur Kopit
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 level Joseph Ellis "invented" a more dramatic past for himself.  They should be prepared to talk about the question: "When is plagiarism not plagiarism?"

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."

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Spring 2002: Section 2.
England Gone: Warning & Regret in the Poetry of Edward Thomas, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, & 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

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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 & Mother, First & Last, 1999.
(New York University Prize for Fiction)
Mark Richard, Fishboy, 1993.
Richard Stone, The Gold Bug Variations, 1991.

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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 Thing
Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meat

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1995: Love & Power in Shakespeare and Hemingway
--Massimo Bacigalupo ( see above)

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1992: Romantics and Modernists
--Massimo Bacigalupo ( see above)

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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.)

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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.

page last updated 4/19/10