(Lecture). Humanism, Tudor poetry and prose, the Elizabethan lyric, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.

(Lecture). This course provides an introduction to the most productive half-century of English drama, from the building of London�s first purpose-built theatre in 1576 to the closing of the theatres in 1642. The course will focus on non-Shakespearean commercial drama, from playwrights including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Philip Massinger and James Shirley. We will also consider the so-called "closet drama," the realities of theatrical performance, and the theater�s encounter with print culture.

Prerequisites: Undergraduates should obtain the instructor's permission to register for this lecture.

(Lecture). An exploration of religious and erotic lyric sequences in England. After a look at their precedents in Ovid's Amores, Petrarch, Renaissance readings of the psalms, and samples (in English) of such French poets as DuBellay, Ronsard, and Lab�, and the Italian Stampa, we will focus on the Sidneys (Philip, Mary, and Robert), Daniel, Drayton, Spenser, Lodge, and Shakespeare with a glance at Anne Lok and a quick move forward to Mary Wroth. Matters to be considered include gender and the Petrarchan tradition, number symbolism, the translation of empire, imitatio, the relation of Eros to politics and subjectivity, crossovers between religious and amatory discourse, and the very concept of poetic sequence. CLEN G4121_001_2009_3">Tentative syllabus.

(Seminar). Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa took eighteenth-century readers by storm, and has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the century. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel Pamela and a few of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through Clarissa in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading;topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. etc. Note: This seminar is a joint undergraduate-graduate class. This spring, I will admit 8 undergraduates and a waiting list of 4 (if needed), reserving 6-8 spots for graduate students who may be interested; we will work out the final details of enrollment at the first seminar meeting in the fall semester. Application instructions: Email Professor Jenny Davidson (jmd204@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Clarissa." In your message. include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking this course.

(Lecture). At the end of the eighteenth century, Clara Reeve argued, in her literary-critical dialogue, The Progress of Romance(1785), that the �English� novel had a diverse and polyglot history, one that extended, geographically, as far as the East, and, temporally, to the ancient Heliodoran romance. Inspired by Reeve, as well as more recent scholars of the form, this course will explore the relationship between gender and genre by considering one major strand of the novel�s complex lineage, the �romance,� a �feminine� genre much-maligned by eighteenth-century critics who were eager to legitimate their own authorship, and anxious to shape the cultural discourse surrounding literary production. As we explore the novel�s debt to romance, including the immense popularity of the Gothic leading into the nineteenth century, we will consider contemporary criticism (Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Reeve), modern theories of the novel (Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Margaret Doody). Readings may include Haywood�s Love in Excess, Richardson�s Pamela, Fielding�s Joseph Andrews, and Matthew Lewis� The Monk. Undergraduates: There will be a take-home midterm, in-class final exam, and two papers (1 three-page assignment explicating a specific passage and a longer 6- to 7-page final paper) as well as sporadic quizzes.SYLLABUS.

(Lecture). An introduction to British literature in the age of Victoria (1837-1901). The world's most powerful nation (and first industrial society) was mesmerized by multi-volume novels of domestic life, lyrics of frustrated desire and religious crisis, and an explosion of critical writing wrestling with (among other things) new forms of social mobility and economic volatility, reconstructions of gender and sexuality, imperial power, and the fear of "decadence." We'll be especially interested in a host of formal innovations�"sage writing," the dramatic monologue, the "novel in verse," melodrama, the short story�as they represent the interplay of personal identity and social life. The main thread we'll follow through this maze will be the profound impact of industrialism on British life and literature, particularly as it informs the idea of "culture," which would become a central rationale for "English" as an academic discipline. Authors include Tennyson, Carlyle, Mill, Dickens, E. Gaskell, C. Bronte, R. Browning, E.B. Browning, Ruskin, George Eliot, Morris, Arnold, Pater, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilde. ENGL W3253_001_2009_3">Preliminary syllabus.

(Lecture).Hardy, Wilde, Shaw, Wells, Yeats, Woolf, Auden, and possibly others. Poetry, prose, drama.

(Seminar). Admittance by permission of Instructor. In this course, we will read and discuss the fiction, non-fiction, and acceptance speeches of the most recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writers to be examined, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl�zio (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006), Harold Pinter (2005), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), V. S. Naipaul (2001), Gao Xingjian (2000), and G�nter Grass (1999) record cultural shifts and social forces central to their societies as well as our civilization, addressing the world wars, immigration, postcolonialism, class inequities, gender oppression, and often, the fragility of identity. Although coming from vastly different backgrounds and countries, the recent Nobel laureates share a difficult and challenging view of human nature. We will analyze whether and how their art, potentially disturbing, challenges the traditional cultural understanding of narrative representation, evident in their experimentation with language and modes of representation. We will also explore the relationship between the authors� personal point of view and national concerns with global and universal themes and issues that they address. Finally, we will explore the tradition of prize-giving as a vehicle of literary canonization and the global recognition that Nobel brings to its winners. The assignments will include: a final essay, comprehensive take-home midterm exam, participation, and one short presentation for the writer of your choice from the list. Application instructions: E-mail Professor L. Kucukalic(lk2380@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Nobel Prize Winners." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Prerequisites: permission of the instructor.

(Seminar). We will read works by writers responding to decolonization as an invitation to rethink the shape of their societies. Ostensibly a gesture of resistance against imperial control, anti-colonialism also sparked debates about re-visioning gender relations, the place of minorities in the nation, religious difference and secularism, internationalism and models of world unity, among other issues. The course will explore, through fiction and historical accounts produced at the time of decolonization, the challenges of imagining a post-imperial society without reproducing the structures and subjectivities of the colonial state. Application directions: E-mail Professor G. Viswanathan (gv62105@columbia.edu) by noon, April 15, 2009, with the subject heading "Decolonizing Fictions." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

(Seminar). This seminar will engage in a close study of James Joyce's final work Finnegans Wake. After an introductory session, considering the structure of the book, and strategies for approaching it, we'll read it together in manageable pieces. Each week, students will be expected to bring to the seminar a short paper (300-400 words), reflecting on a particular passage (typically only a sentence or two) from the material read that week. They will present their responses, and this will serve as a basis for joint exploration and discussion. No texts other than Finnegans Wake itself will be assigned, but two secondary sources are recommended: John Bishop Joyce's Book of the Dark and Philip Kitcher Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their response papers, their contributions to discussion, and a final essay. Prerequisites: English 3230 (Joyce) or Permission of the Instructor. (It is important that those in the seminar have read Joyce's earlier works of prose fiction, particularly Ulysses, and have done so thoroughly.) This course is crosslisted with a seminar in Philosophy, and students who want to treat Joyce "philosophically" may enroll through the Philosophy number. Those whose primary concerns are with Literature should enroll under the English designation. Application instructions: E-mail Professor P. Kitcher (psk16@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "Finnegans Wake". ENGL W3940_001_2009_3">Syllabus.

(Lecture). Texts by writers from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, Dominica, and Jamaica. The impact of migration and transculturation on the texts, the articulation of new cultural subjects, the fostering of dialogue largely suppressed in the writers� home countries. Possible authors: Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, V.S. Naipaul, Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz, Edward Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, Oscar Hijuelos.

Although a geographically small area, the Caribbean has produced major social and revolutionary movements, and two globally influential revolutions: the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). It has also produced literature and poetic discourse that has sought to revolutionize through analysis and language. In this course, we will examine texts that reflect on revolution and/or attempt to revolutionize by writers and musicians such as Aim� C�saire, CLR James, Alejo Carpentier, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Cliff, V.S. Naipaul, Bob Marley, Carlos Varela, and Calle 13, among others. Syllabus.

(Lecture). This course will trace English fiction (and a few films) from the post-WWII era, with emphasis on close reading, exploring formal innovation as ethical strategy, the status of liberal humanism, epistemology and historical representation, the evolution of the Upstairs/Downstairs story, UK-US relations, and generational takes on bad boys and prigs. Writers will include: Graham Greene, John Osborne, Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, V.S. Naipaul, W.G. Sebald, and films by Carol Reed, Michael Apted, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, Mike Leigh, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Frears, and Powell and Pressburger. ENGL W4502_001_2009_3">Syllabus.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor

(Seminar). Instructor's permission required; limited to seniors, preference to those who have taken at least one course in 20th-century American culture, especially history, jazz, film, and literature. Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Ann Douglas (ad34@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, April 15, with the subject heading "The Beat Generation". In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

(Seminar). In this seminar we will trace the growing crisis over slavery and disunion as the United States moved toward war against itself. Readings include fiction, poetry, memoirs, political discourse, and journalism by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Jacobs, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, and Herman Melville. We will consider the perspectives of slaves and slavemasters, North and South, men and women, committed partisans and neutral observers-- in an effort to understand what was at stake in the rising discord during the decade that preceded the Civil War. Application instructions: Please stop by 415 Hamilton or visit American Studies website at www.columbia.edu/cu/amstudies for application form which is due by 5:00 P.M. on Monday, April 13.

(Lecture). An introduction to theories of gender and race (in conjunction with other social categories such as class, nation, and sexuality) as lenses for studying how people have used jazz to struggle over ideas that mattered to them.

(Lecture) Our topic for the semester will be the inner workings of sentences and paragraphs as they function in the novel. We will probably read only four novels in their entirety (most likely Austen's Emma, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Henry James' The Golden Bowl and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty); we will also read a handful of essays and short stories, but the rest of the texts we'll work with will for the most part be brief extracts that we read closely together in class as we pursue a series of questions about voice, person, etc. with the help of theorists including Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum and D. A. Miller. Short assignments will include creative as well as critical options.

(Lecture). Lecture, but with lots of class discussion. This course applies knowledge of the English language and its history to issues of both law and literature. There are two required books, both paperbacks: (1) Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin), and (2) The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker (Harper). There will be about half a dozen short written assignments: hands-on research efforts.

(Lecture). The Middle Ages introduced two durable ideals into the social life of western Europe. This course studies the development and interrelation of chivalry and romantic love, as these ideals are expounded in the literature of aristocratic courts in England and France. Readings include romances of Tristan and Lancelot, the Arthurian lays of Marie de France, and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Two seven-page papers on assigned topics, midterm, and final examination.

(Seminar). This course explores the coalescence of the genre of autobiography, beginning with Augustine�s Confessions and ending in the late Middle Ages, asking how autobiography straddles the line between fact and fiction, offering itself as documentary truth, while relying on literary tropes to achieve its narrative and expressive ends.

Application instructions: E-mail Professor Johnson (ebj2117@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "Autobiography seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, relevant courses taken, and previous experience with Middle and Early Modern English, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Note: an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm the first day of registration (November 16).

(Lecture). A study of lyric trends bridging 18th and 19th c. poetry and associated with discourses on the imagination in literary theory, aesthetic psychology, moral philosophy, experimental religion, and affective criticism. Poets include Watts, Finch, Gay, Swift, Thomson, Gray, the Wartons, Collins, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Overlapping topics of inquiry include rhetoric and form, certain characteristic schemes and tropes, and innovatively developed genres of mixed classical, biblical, and vernacular origin; concepts of "pure" poetry and original genius, poetical enthusiasm and melancholy, and the true poet's vocation; controversies of visual and visionary language; and the empirical and metaphysical taxonomies of novelty, sublimity, and beauty, especially as related to the poetics of the landscape, natural and urban; Recommended and required prose readings include selections from Longinus, Dennis, Addison, Shaftesbury, Young, Johnson, Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge.

(Lecture). Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Barchester Towers, Great Expectations, Middlemarch.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor

(Seminar). The "sensation" novels of Wilkie Collins, Henry James admiringly noted in 1865, "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors." This course aims to follow up on James's sense that English literature and society in the latter half of the nineteenth century had become newly preoccupied with secrecy, which nurtured habits of reading that we've come to call hermeneutics of suspicion. In this seminar we'll explore this preoccupation with secrecy and scandal in two major cultural developments, sensation fiction and the rise of aestheticism. Major authors will include Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Trollope, Pater, Stevenson, James, and Wilde. ENGL W3952_001_2010_1">Preliminary syllabus.

Application instructions: E-mail Professor Adams (jea2139@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "SECRECY & SCANDAL seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Note: an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm the first day of registration (November 16).

(Lecture). This course will survey the tumultuous scene of England - chiefly London -- in the 1890s, focusing on the most significant cultural, political, and social debates of the period. We will be concerned in particular with the fin-de-si�cle rhetorics of degeneration and the concomitant fascination with sensation and sensory experience. Topics to include: sexology and the criminalization of sex; monstrosity, racial science, and physiogamy; feminism and the New Woman; urban poverty, crime, and policing; spiritualism and psychic research; new technologies of visuality and communication; and the new imperialism. We will also study the significant aesthetic movements of the period, including Decadence, Aestheticism, and Pre-Raphaelitism. Writers will include: Grant Allen, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, Max Nordau, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats.

(Lecture). A survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels, this class will explore the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams's phrase "knowable communities," how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism? Readings include Balzac's P�re Goriot, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Austen's Persuasion, Dickens' Oliver Twist, Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Requirements: two writing assignments and two-in-class written exams; thorough and attentive reading and participation are also mandatory.

(Lecture). The near-contemporary fiction of the second half of the 20th century, sometimes described as postmodern, seeks like its predecessors to mesh the novelistic intimacies of life and love with some response to the world-historical events of its time: World War II, the Holocaust, the collapse of the European empires, and so on. Authors will include some of the following: Beckett, Salih, Calvino, Duras, Grass, Lessing, Kundera, Pynchon, Rushdie, Kincaid, and Ondaatje. Requirements: Regular attendance at lectures; two papers, 4-5 pages each, topics to be assigned (each paper worth 33% of grade); final exam (33% of grade).

(Lecture). This semester, we will explore the works of major poets of the second half of the twentieth century: later Eliot, later Williams, later Auden, Roethke, Olson, Hayden, Kunitz, Jarrell, Berryman, Thomas, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, Larkin, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Ashbery, Wright, Rich, Hill, Walcott, Heaney, and others, including more contemporary figures. We may also consider the contributions of non-Anglophone poets such as Lorca, Akhmatova, Levi, Montale, Neruda and Milosz. The work of this period is naturally informed in complex ways by troubling historical events such as World War II, the Holocaust, and the Stalinist Terror. We will also consider formalist, deconstructive, biographical, psychological, feminist, and other approaches to the material. In the process, we will debate the merits of terms and categories such as postmodernism, Confessional poetry, the Beats, the New York School, and postcolonial poetry.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

(Seminar). Critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, objects to such features as "a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) ... a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time." "A parody," he says, "would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. "To be or not to be"�ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since."

Wood is suggesting that large, multi-plotted, ambitious novels like Smith's are not realistic. One answer to him might go as follows: such novels are in fact trying to be realistic, but realistic at the global scale� realistic about a world in which much that happens in any one place is determined over the horizon, in some very different and distant place that the characters here may never visit or even know about and yet that the author does not have the luxury of ignoring. In short, they are attempting to follow E. M. Forster's advice, "only connect," and doing so in a new and strenuous way. This is the proposition that will guide the seminar.

Readings will include works by Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bola�o, Junot Diaz, and Orhan Pamuk, among others.

Requirements: 1) weekly reading journal, 1 to 2 pages double-spaced, on the novel to be discussed that day, hard copy submitted in class; 2) a paper of 10-12 pages, topic to be negotiated, due after the end of classes; 3) regular attendance and oral participation.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor

(Seminar). This course will examine contemporary American novels dealing with severe environmental pollution, catastrophe, and apocalypse.

(Lecture). This course explores melodrama, metadrama, epic, and lyric drama as theatrical forms designed to fill the void of meaning created by a suddenly godless universe in the nineteenth century. Readings embrace a wide variety of theatrical styles, predominantly from the twentieth century, and include works from diverse playwrights such as Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Susan Glaspell, Sam Shepard, Brecht, Genet, Mamet, Beckett, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill. Assignments include two short papers (5-7 pages), question sets on individual plays, regular attendance and classroom participation, and a comprehensive final exam.

(Lecture). This course is intended as the second half of the basic survey in African American literature. We will study the development of black writing since the Harlem Renaissance. Readings will include fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose by Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and others. We will read essays, poems, novels and short stories. Assignments include several unannounced quizzes, one eight page paper, and one take home final.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.

(Seminar). Novels, essays, and poetry by American writers, in the comic mode: Twain, James, Joel Chandler Harris, Faulkner, Sterling Brown, Ellison, others. What makes us laugh? What does our laughter conceal, what does it reveal? What's American about "American humor" and "comedy, American-style"? How do race and gender figure here?

Application instructions: E-mail Professor O'Meally (rgo1@columbia.edu with a cc to his assistant Yulanda Denoon ym189@columbia.edu) by noon on Wednesday, November 11, with the subject heading "American Humor seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Note: an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm the first day of registration (November 16).

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.

(Seminar). Toward the end of the 19th-century, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, who became known as the opener of Korea in 1882, enthusiastically declared that the Pacific was the "ocean bride of America." Shufeldt was not alone in his belief that what lies across the Pacific is crucial for the economic and cultural growth of the United States. Until very recently, the U.S.-Asia connections had been under-estimated, but they are frequently reflected and reflected upon in American literature, including both its "canonical" and "minority" components. This course offers a survey of this literary history, starting from the early twentieth-century. First, we will consider the ways in which Asia and Asians figure in the fiction of such canonical and popular writers as Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, and Alex Berenson, as well as a number of short poetic works. We will discuss these writers' fascination with the cultures and people of Asia--what is commonly known as "Orientalism"--in the contexts of various material and political factors (transnational labor migration, global capitalism, and the transnational cultural industry etc.). The second focus of the course is on literary works that interweave American and Asian histories and cultures, including, mainly, the novels of Agnes Smedley, WEB DuBois, Lin Yutang, Carlos Bulosan, and Alex Kuo. The course will end with theoretical readings since the early 1990s that seek to explain the implications, for both the U.S. and Asia, of seeing the Asia Pacific (or American Pacific) as an integrated region. ENGL W3925_001_2010_1">Reading list, requirements.

Application instructions: E-mail Professor Jin (wj2130@columbia.edu) by noon on Friday, November 13, with the subject heading "Transpacific Approaches to American Literature." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Note: an admit list will be posted at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/courses_ugsemadmit.htm the first day of registration (November 16).

(Lecture). This course surveys important prose narratives, poetry, and plays written by Asians in America, with a focus on works produced since 1970, in light of the history of U.S. racial formation, transpacific migration, and U.S.-Asian relations since the mid-nineteenth century.