Subjects Taught by Semester

Great works of fiction often take us to far-off places; they sometimes conduct us on journeys toward a deeper understanding of what’s right next door. We’ll read, discuss, and interpret a range of short and short-ish works: the reading list will be chosen from among such texts as Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey (excerpts), Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (excerpts), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Toni Morrison’s Jazz, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beckett’s How it Is, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Forster’s A Passage to India.

An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets. We will explore the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modernism in particular detail. Though the organization of the subject is chronological, our focus will be less on names and dates than on cultivating skills in careful reading and effective writing. Poets to be read may include Shakespeare, Sidney, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop. Special course-related events (readings, lectures, film screenings) will take place on selected evenings throughout the term. Regular classroom hours will be reduced in the weeks for which special events are scheduled.

Drama might be described as a game played with something sacred. It tells stories that go right to the heart of what people believe about themselves. And it is enacted in the moment, which means it has an added layer of interpretive mystery and playfulness, or “theatricality.” This introductory course will explore theater and theatricality across periods and cultures, through intensive engagement with performance texts. We will study and discuss plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure, and class members will also attend and review dramatic performances and have a chance to perform scenes on their own. In addition to modern and contemporary plays, readings will range from ancient Greece to Medieval England, Renaissance Spain and Classical Japan.

For a description of this course, please see the Department of Linguistics courses.

“Art of the Probable” addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, we will focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world. Readings may include work by Aristotle, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Darwin, H.G. Wells, Thomas Pynchon, and Tom Stoppard.

“Comedy, it seems, is never the gaiety of things: it is the groan made gay.” – Walter Kerr

“Comedy always comes second, late, after the fact,” as Walter Kerr suggests. This course is designed around analyzing what’s so funny and why is it that we laugh when we do. How is comedy characterized on the fictional page, the screen, and the stage? And what might the comic teach us about the self and culture(s), especially when we come to understand its patterns of transgression as confounding social norms through laughter? Tracking a history of comedy, we will traverse genres, periods, and cultures to reflect on various types of humor: satire, farce, slapstick, love, tragedy, parody, and screwball. Taking physical comedy as our central theme, this class investigates what happens to the body in the comic moment when it transforms into something physically superior or, dare I say, something physically inferior? Essentially, in this course, you will read for laughter.

In this half-term course, we will survey some of the larger-than-life heroes, femmes fatales, and exotic worlds that filled the pages of the best-selling genres of pulp fiction. The syllabus likely will range from detective stories to action to sci-fi, and from Victorian precursors to major pulp magazine stories of the early twentieth century, and onto media forms fundamentally influenced by pulp. Works may include fiction, comics, and films by: Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, John Huston, and Quentin Tarantino.

The “small wonders” of this class are short poems, songs, sonnets, odes, and others from a period famed for excellence in these short literary forms. The poetry produced in England in the years 1789-1820 revolutionized the themes and diction of poetry and substantially rethought the nature of poetic thinking. This subject will read ample selections of lyric writing from the major poets of English Romanticism, and will situate this poetry in relation to what William Wordsworth described as “the great national events” of his moment (the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, economic modernization, urbanization and industrialization, the early feminist and abolitionist movements, etc.). Our readings will attend more particularly to the invention of a formal literary language responsive to these contexts. Authors will include William Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron. The student who takes this subject can expect to gain an intimate familiarity with some of the most exhilarating, challenging, and beautiful short poems in the language.

Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel. The Frankenstein Project will examine in depth one of English literature’s most famous pieces of fiction, the tale of a brilliant scientist with overweening ambition and his misbegotten creation. The daughter of famous literary parents, both renowned philosophers and novelists, Mary Shelley was highly conversant with the intellectual debates of the day. This subject will explore some of the familial, literary, scientific, and political contexts of Shelley’s novel. We will read Frankenstein in its editions of 1818 and 1831, and will examine some of the afterlives, adaptations, and remixes of the novel in fiction and film, including H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.

Filmed Shakespeare began in 1899, with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing the death scene from King John followed by Sarah Bernhardt in the duel scene for the Paris Exposition of 1900. In the era of silent film, several hundred Shakespeare films were made: even without the spoken word, Shakespeare was popular in the new medium. The first half-century of sound included many of the most highly regarded Shakespeare films, among them—Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Henry V; Orson Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight; Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood; Polanski’s Macbeth; Kozintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear; and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Another extremely rich and varied period for Shakespeare on film began with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V in 1989 and includes such films as Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, Julie Taymor’s Titus, Zeffirelli and Almereyda’s Hamlet films, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Shakespeare in Love. This period has also seen an extraordinary growth of films as well as theatrical performances of Shakespeare in Asia and other regions of the world, including India (Maqbool, Omkara), East Asia (major work in theater now available by directors such as Ong Keng Sen, Yukio Ninagawa, the Ryutopia Company, Wu Hsing-kuo, and many others).

Once we sit down in a darkened theater, we only rarely get up and leave before the movie is over. By contrast, when we read a novel, we put it down when we reach our T stop, when it’s time for lunch, when we drift off to sleep. Yet, like filmmakers, novelists can take control of our experience over the duration of their work. This is even more true when a story isn’t being told the way we might expect it—when events appear out of order, when a narrator can’t be trusted, when one story interrupts another. We’ll examine pairs of novels and films united by similar narrative techniques across the twentieth century: unreliable narrators; montage; and more. Whether to make a social point or to get an emotional response, storytellers in both forms have developed an impressive arsenal of formal devices to manipulate our experience of their material. How can the appearance of a style or technique in one medium illuminate its use in another?

Authors will likely include Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Ngũgĩ, Woolf, and others; directors will likely include Coppola, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Lee, Welles, and others.

What does it mean to stage a play in a world where talk is cheap, and we are deluged with multimedia entertainments? Is “liveness” still special, and if so, what does it mean? We will consider the reasons playwrights still write drama, attending to the different possibilities that theater affords those whose voices are ignored or marginalized; those who want to challenge the dominant culture; and those who delight in the legacies of literary drama, community rituals, and language as an essential part of performed storytelling. Playwrights will include Tom Stoppard, Eugene Ionesco, Caryl Churchill, Anna Deveare Smith, Tony Kushner, Bertolt Brecht, and—of course—the master of failure, Sam Beckett. First and foremost, we will be considering and experiencing modern drama as performance art, mens et manus… and so much more.

The course consists of three units:

This class introduces students to a variety of works by contemporary women writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Emphasis is placed on determining to what extent each writer’s work and her literary style reflects her distinct cultural heritage and to what extent, if any, we can identify a voice that transcends national cultures. In our discussions, we examine the patterns of socialization of women in patriarchal cultures, how in the imaginary and real world we adapt or rebel, the relationship of the characters to love and work, the search for identity, and both the author’s and the character’s thoughts on sex roles, marriage, and politics. Includes novels, short stories, graphic novels, films and video-conference discussions with students in Cairo who are reading the same works.

How do eighty-three handwritten versions—each different from all the others and none written by the author himself—of a long, complicated, and apparently unfinished poem get synthesized into a single copy for people like us to read, study, and teach from? This seminar will use Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to study the methodology of textual editing and how it matters for—and can even become a form of—literary criticism. Students will read the vast majority of the Canterbury Tales (in Middle English) and become expert in the textual tradition of one of the most interesting Tales (Cook, Wife of Bath, Clerk, Squire, Franklin, Pardoner, Prioress, or Chaucer’s own Tale of Sir Thopas), culminating in a seminar paper that explores how the existence of a single literary work (abstract) across multiple discrete texts (material) creates practical challenges and interpretive opportunities.

FACT: “George Eliot” is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880).

FACT: Many people consider George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch the GREATEST NOVEL IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Come find out why!

In this class, we’ll read, discuss, and interpret Middlemarch and two of Eliot’s other great novels, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda.

Iron chefs & home cooks; molecular gastronomy & farm-to-table dining; grain-based & protein-based diets: a time traveler from the future would learn a lot about us from our cookbooks, blogs, and Food Network. When we visit the past through cookbooks, we find strange and quirky recipes, but we also learn about the worlds that produced them: about foodstuffs & technology; about religious beliefs and nutritional theories; about who wrote, read, and cooked; and about the gender dynamics of culinary writing.