Department of English
Fall 2015 Course Descriptions
89S.01. Jewish-American Literature: Old Worlds, and New. Instructor J. Ruderman, TuTh 3:05-4:20
It has been said that the hyphen in "Jewish-American" is "the cutting edge of a sharp sensibility." In this seminar,
through the lenses of fiction and film, we will trace the realities and challenges of being Jewish in this country from
the late 1880s to the present. We will explore such topics as the immigrant experience, assimilation and
acculturation, anti-Semitism, politics and economics, the influence of Yiddish on American life and art, the
evolution of the "Jewish mother" stereotype, various modes of practicing Judaism, relationships between Jews and
other minority groups, the role of Israel in American-Jewish identity, and more. We will examine the continuities
and differences between the first generation of Jewish-American fiction writers and succeeding generations, in terms
of themes and techniques. Above all, we will read and discuss some very good literature. Authors to be studied
include, but are not limited to, the household names of Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Joseph
Heller, along with such less well-known writers of the past as Henry Roth, Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and
Anzia Yezierska, and finally some representatives of the "new breed" of Jewish-American authors, like Jonathan
Safran Foer, Dara Horn, and Nathan Englander. You don't have to be Jewish to take this course!
90S.01. The Harlem Renaissance and Its Afterparties. Instructor: M. Magloire. MW 4:40-5:55
When Harlem was in vogue during the 1920s and 1930s, millions of dreamers, thrill-seekers, and wanderers flocked
to the same few blocks of New York City. Following the blare of jazz bands and the shuffle and stomp of dancer’s
feet, Americans of all races came to Harlem in order to experiment in living more freely and joyfully. The
constellation of publications, performances, and encounters labeled the “Harlem Renaissance” as not just a historical
time period, however. In this class, we will approach the Harlem Renaissance as an artistic movement unbounded in
space and time, echoing beyond 1920s Harlem into the dancehalls of Paris, into late-night/early-morning restaurants
serving chicken and waffles, and into the aesthetic visions of musicians like of Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe. Far
from being the sole legacy of writers and intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois and Alain Locke, this tumultuous period
in African American history was also crafted by a vibrant cast of poets, chorus girls, blues singers, students,
heiresses, teachers, dancers, cooks, and nurses.
In order to fully appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of the Harlem Renaissance, we will grapple with music and
visual culture as well as literary texts. In other words, this is a multimedia course! Students will be asked to consider
the ways in which film, music, dance, and literature conceptualize race in America. Together, we will use these
various modes of artistic production to question the distinctions between spontaneity and performance, between
music and literature, and between the Black arts of the present and the Black arts of the past. Students will be
responsible for two 4-6 page close readings, and a final project entitled “Afterparties of the Harlem Renaissance” in
which they will connect the work of a Harlem Renaissance artist with the work of a contemporary artist.
Possible texts include:
Cane by Jean Toomer
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Selected poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson.
Soundtrack by: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Fats
Waller, Billie Holiday, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Outkast, Gnarls Barkley, Beyoncé, and
others.
Films: The Great Gatsby, Princess Tam-Tam, Stormy Weather.
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90S.02. When the Earth Speaks: Voicing the Landscape in American Literature. Instrutor P. Morgan, WF
8:30-9:45
Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Floods. Mudslides. When it comes to crustal convulsions, the American landscape is
never silent. Indeed, physical earthquakes often allow American writers to reflect on the intellectual, social, and
political “earthquakes” coursing through American culture. The major premise of our class is that a landscape
description is never just a straightforward, “objective” translation from image to text. Rather, our narratives of the
land are filtered through multiple and contradictory cultural lenses, revealing conceptions of beauty, science,
nationality, gender, race, and class.
We will read geologically-inflected novels, poems, paintings, and maps by well-known and obscure nineteenthcentury American writers, including such pairings as Herman Melville and paleontology, Henry David Thoreau and
geomorphology, and Washington Irving and geologic time. Although the first description of a geological disaster in
American fiction didn’t occur (arguably) until 1832 (James K. Paulding’s Westward Ho!), American writers had
been describing the landscape for centuries. We will closely analyze the way Earth gets interpolated into narrative
in both its tectonically convulsive and seemingly placid states. Melville’s Great American Novel will be our
constant bedrock throughout the semester, through which we’ll read eruptions of poems and short stories by some of
America’s greatest writers. Through an in-class viewing of a film—such as director Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the
Southern Wild (2012)—we’ll also explore how Earth’s “voice” has changed in comparison to the present geologic
moment, in which we are more acutely experiencing Earth history’s sixth mass extinction. Primary texts may
include, among others: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851); Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819); Edgar
Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908); Sherman Alexie, The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993); and poems by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Assignments
may include: active reading and class participation; weekly blog posts in our classroom forum; two longer essays (57 pages), and one creative project and presentation in which you describe the 21st-century American landscape
using an artistic form of your choosing (painting, photographic collage, short story, poem, website, etc.). NO
EXAMS.
90S.03. Creatures, Aliens and Cyborgs. Instructor M. Omelsky, WF 8:30-9:45
In 1957, the acclaimed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a curious book, calling it “a handbook of the
strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination.” The Book of Imaginary Beings is a
catalogue of the freakish beings that populate classic world literature, from the Cyclopes in The Odyssey to the
mutant humans in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
In this course, we’ll take Borges’ quirky investigation seriously. We’ll read and watch a range of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, paying close attention to the
otherworldly nonhumans we encounter. We’ll ask what these imagined beings tell us about the cultures and
historical moments that produced them. We’ll see how important philosophical questions emerge from these
creatures to challenge the way we conceive of gender, race, ecology, and what it means to be human. Our task will
be to bring these curious beings to life through close reading to better understand the world we inhabit with them.
Readings will be selected from: Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Octavia Butler, Dawn; H.G. Wells, War of the
Worlds; Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Lauren Beukes, Zoo City; H.P. Lovecraft, selected
stories; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s
Progress; Franz Kafka, selected stories.
Films and TV shows will be selected from: Metropolis (1927); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); Planet of the
Apes (1968); Superman (1978); Blade Runner (1982); The X Files, selected episodes (1993-2002), Black Mirror,
selected episodes (2011-2015).
Requirements: regular participation, weekly response papers, two short essays (4-6 pages), no exams.
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90S.04. Who’s Gotta Have It?! The Politics of Spike Lee. Instructor I. Durham, WF 4:40-5:55
To say that Spike Lee does not elicit a certain kind of love-hate duality in his own ethnic community and
outside of it would be an understatement. Since he burst onto the film scene in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It, this
black film director has been praised for his intentions to enlighten dominant culture to that of African-Americans, as
well as crucified for the limiting portrayals of the very culture he greenlights. But what is quite interesting about
Lee’s cultural reception is his work’s classification as “art”. With “art” being such a loaded term, a reasonable leap
would be to question what properties are necessary in order to give way to such a characterization.
Often when compared to other directors, conversations about said “art” are reducible to the problematic
language of “highbrow” and “lowbrow”, ideas which themselves have gone through the cultural machine only to be
transformed into notions of “high art” and “low art”. Such a duality in (post)modern times actually reads as rather
odd, riffing on certain structures of classism, 1 even unto theories of brain size and racial inferiority. 2 That being said,
is such a duality valid? Is Spike Lee’s work “art” or something like it? Has he evolved as a filmmaker or is he still
trying to, through his films, do the right thing? Is his status as “the auteur laureate of African-American cinema”
simply a matter of luck (he entered the business at the “right” moment), a critique of Hollywood’s exclusion of
African-America in totality (directing, acting, producing, specific narratives of/for/by the population), or a cop-out
in that other black film directors have joined Lee’s ranks yet have remained unable to garner and/or maintain mass
appeal? This is why we must inquire: who’s gotta have it? In other words, can we view Malcolm X and examine
sexuality using excerpts from Manning Marable’s magisterial text Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention or can we see
motifs of the religious in School Daze? Though we should not discount incorporating obvious themes for some of
the films, we should equally desire to “read” some of the films against the reel.
Using primary sources—Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader, and Spike Lee: Interviews—and
secondary sources, there will be three 3-5pp papers, as well as class participation and attendance, as the major
graded aspects of the course.
110S.01. Intro to Creative Writing. Instructor C. Fox
This course is designed to give students an opportunity to practice and explore three genres of creative
writingfiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Part of the class will be devoted to peer critique of student work
("workshopping"), and part to discussions of craft and close reading of published essays, stories, and poems. There
will be weekly writing assignments--both creative and critical--and students will submit a final portfolio of finished
creative work.
NOTE: Gateway courses with the same course numbers may not be repeated for credit.
182S.01. Reading Historically. the poetic legacy of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Instructor K. Psomiades, MW
3:05-4:20
This is a course not just about Paradise Lost itself, but about the ways in which Milton’s poem has been read and rewritten by poets and novelists who came after him. In addition to Milton, we’ll be reading the poetry of William
Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Tennyson,
Christina Rossetti, Frost, Eliot, and others. We’ll also read perhaps the most popular contemporary version of this
story, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which is very much in the tradition of Romantic revisions of Milton’s
story.
In addition to honing your skills in reading and writing about poetry, this course should give you a sense of some
central concerns of British poetry in the 19 th and 20th centuries.
Weekly response papers, three 5-7 page papers, active participation in discussion.
1
See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
2
The Atlantic, 16 August 2011. http://theatlantic.tumblr.com/post/8997841122/tarnoff-a-phrenologicalchart-mapping-the.
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182S.02. Reading Historically: Corruption. Instructor J. Werlin, MW 1:25-2:40
The English Department is delighted to welcome Dr. Julianne Werlin as our new colleague in Early Modern
literature (Area I). Dr. Werlin comes to us with a great deal of experience teaching Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell,
Sidney and Bacon, utopian literature and the literature of war. She received a BA from the University of Chicago
and a PhD from Princeton University, and she has taught at USC and the Central European University in
Budapest. Her teaching interests include Renaissance literature, utopian fiction, the Scientific Revolution, literature
and warfare and early modern women’s writing. In Fall 2015, she will be teaching “John Milton: Violence and
Truth,” and “Reading Historically: Corruption.”
In 2015, there are innumerable campaigns to eliminate corruption across the globe, yet the influence of money on
politics has never been more apparent. This course examines the history of the mutual entanglement of politics and
economics, power and money, through considering the problem of political corruption. Relying on a careful,
historically-grounded examination of literary texts, we will consider how scenes of corruption allowed writers to
imagine political and economic forces in the period that saw the emergence of capitalist markets and modern nation
states. At the same time, we will consider what these writings tell us about the function of literature within early
modern and modern society. Can literature expose corruption? Or is it simply a product of the social, political, and
economic structures it critiques? In order to discuss these questions, we will read plays, verse satires, and novels
beside historical accounts taken from journals, newspapers, and government documents from the seventeenth to
nineteenth centuries. Throughout the semester, we will also consider parallels between the problem of corruption in
early modern society and in contemporary states. Major texts will include Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Ben
Jonson’s Sejanus, satires by Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, and Lord Byron, and novels by Henry Fielding and
Anthony Trollope.
184S.02. Sex, Death, and Money: An Introduction to Literary Genre. Instructor M. Malouf, WF 11:45-1:00
In this course we will read and discuss literature that in various and difficult and fascinating ways take up these
topics, all or in part. We’ll read John Donne, Shakespeare, Henry James, Tennessee Williams—to name a few. And
you will write responses to the readings along the way. But I am more interested in your being prepared to discuss
whatever we read than in covering too wide a range of texts: that is, I will give you time to think and to talk about
what I ask you to read before moving on to the next piece of literature. In addition to short written responses, I’ll
require one longer (4-5pp) piece of creative non-fiction. Class participation is a must. Required texts: Shakespeare,
Othello, Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Strunk and White, The Elements of
Style.
I will give you a syllabus when we meet, but it would be a good idea to read the Henry James novel over the
summer, if at all possible.
184S.03. Readings in Genre: Literature and Freedom. Instructor R. Mitchell, MW 10:05-11:20
In this course, we will use the tools of literary analysis to consider the ways in which literature—primarily, but not
exclusively, novels—helps us to understand the nature of freedom in in our lives. We will consider the
understanding of freedom—and its contrary, constraint—in a wide variety of texts, focusing especially on those that
emphasize an inborn constraint (e.g., divine fate, original sin, heredity, race, and genetic inheritance). We will begin
with Sophocles’s classic drama Oedipus the King, and then consider a number of other classics in additional genres,
including selections from John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and novels such as Émile Zola’s The Human Beast, Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Alongside these literary
texts, we will consider short selections from philosophers who have reflected on the nature of freedom (e.g.,
Aristotle and Kant), and—equally important—a number of reflections on literary genre and form. Our primary goal
will be to consider the different ways in which literature, in both its content and form, is able to reflect on the
question of what “freedom” is and how it can (and cannot) be instantiated in a human life; to this end, we will reflect
at length on a number of key literary terms, such as “character,” “chorus,” “genre,” “plot,” “realism,” “naturalism,”
“tragedy,” etc. Course assignments will include short daily homework assignments, two 5-8 page papers, and a
concluding comprehensive take-home exercise.
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184S.04. Instructor T. Ferraro, TuTh 1:25-2:40
WAR AND WORSHIP, WINE AND WOMEN
(POETRY, COLOR, AND LINE)
--Fall 2015
Prof. Tom Ferraro
--A Seminar for Sophomores
(Mostly)
Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for color and line, and its taste for war
and worship, wine and women.
Henry Adams (1904)
Why read when there is so much else to do? What is there in a novel, a poem, an essay to hold our
imagination captive? to make us smarter, wiser, more artful and more courageous? to bring us closer to each other,
to the world at large, to the wonder and the terror and the majesty? How are we to know "it" when we see it; get
there when we're not; speak of it when we are? And how are we to take the next step--to the point where bearing
witness becomes a form of making present? embodying, a form of propagating? critical analysis, a form of
collective self-interrogation?
These questions are the biggies--the overarching, meta-issues of deeply engaged, bloody demanding,
fiercely intelligent, achingly beautiful reading.
Nice to contemplate, for sure. But, speaking practically, how to begin?
I will gather for us some of the best stuff I know, American Romantic texts especially, treating those
matters of nearly universal interest: "war and worship, wine and women" (and, if I might add, "work"): the kind of
texts worth reading again and again. We will take character to heart, query idea and plot, describe the sound and
sight and feel of the language. We'll ask each text to tutor us on how it wishes, in particular, to be read. And we'll
work methodically on our game: 1) reading aloud, to catch the tone and the drama of the words on the page, even in
expository prose, experiencing form as content; 2) cross-interrogating between part and whole, whole and part (a
given phrase vs. its sentence or paragraph, a given passage vs. the text, the text-at-hand vs. the texts-so-far); and 3)
cultivating self-reflexivity, in which what is going on in a text is seen to be at stake in how, separately and together,
we discuss it. The ultimate goal is to be able to inhabit a text in its own terms, so intimately that it lives in us; to
analyze it so cogently that it, in effect, analyzes us.
190S-1.01. Neuroscience and Fiction. Instructor P. Stillman, WF 3:05-4:20
“How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of
infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos?”
--V.S. Ramachandran
In this quote, the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran asks the same question as many contemporary
novelists, though he goes about answering it with very different tools. As novel readers, we might well say that
Ramachandran makes a protagonist of the brain itself—never mind the fact that only an embodied brain can do the
things he claims. That observation raises an interesting pair of questions that we’ll explore together in this course:
what can the study of fiction tell us about the understanding of personhood we get from neuroscience, and what can
neuroscience tell us about the fictional protagonists that we identify with as people? In class we’ll read scientific
texts and novels side by side to see what connections and parallels emerge. Students will be asked compare
scientific accounts of how the brain works with the actions, decisions and experiences of fictional characters. Are
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characters guided by deliberation or impulse, internal fantasies or external sensations? From there we’ll figure out
how different models of consciousness entail different possibilities for free will, sympathy, and personal identity,
and we’ll consider the various ethical and political implications that follow. The neuroscience reading-list will
consist of highly popular work by authors like Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio, and other relevant media like the
Radiolab podcast. Fiction may include modernists like Woolf or Joyce, sci-fi like Phillip K. Dick or Octavia Butler,
and contemporary fiction by authors like Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell and Cormac McCarthy.
Together we’ll see how neuroscience can give us new ways to read fiction, and by studying fiction we’ll get better at
seeing how neuroscience tells stories of its own.
209S. The Mind and Language. Instructor J. Tetel Andresen, MW 10:05-11:20. CTM
Duke in NY – contact Duke in NY regarding this course.
210SA. Writing for Publication.
211S.01. Digital Writing. Instructor C. Shuman, Tues. 3:05-5:35 Creative Writing
In Digital Writing, students will create, revise, and polish work in a number of genres, including blogs, websites,
online reviews, and flash nonfiction. Readings (some selected by the professor, some by students) will include
examples of all four genres to provide background, inspiration, and ideas. Discussions and workshops will explore
the practical, aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and ethical issues involved in writing online. No previous creative
writing experience or technological expertise is required for this course.
220S.01. Intro to Poetry Writing. Instructor: D. Pope, Thurs. 3:05-5:35 Creative Writing
Freshmen and Sophomores
Poet Allen Ginsburg wrote, “Poetry is that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the
private world public.” And poetry is made not just from what you think, but what you experience, remember,
wonder, feel, imagine. This course covers the fundamentals of taking the loose materials for a poem through the
stages of shaping these into a finished form where they are ready to “make the private world public.” The course
also covers a wide range of reading in contemporary poetry. It requires a commitment to writing, willingness to
experiment, and a readiness for the unexpected.
221S.01. Intro to the Writing of Fiction, Instructor M. Malouf, WF 1:25-2:40
Just for Grown-Ups: Writing the Short Story
Inspired by the course titled Just for Kids, this one will take us into reading and writing stories that pay
attention to the bewildering choices that adults make,
or fail to make; to the losses that accrue (bye-bye childhood) for better and worse;
to romantic entanglements that re-write the fairy-tale ending, that nonetheless leave us in a satisfying state of
wonder.
Your contributions to class discussion are a must. You’ll be writing something that exercises your
imagination for nearly every class, as well as
keeping a “reader’s journal.” There will be two longer stories assigned—one before the mid-term, the other near the
end of the semester. You do not have to purchase a textbook for this course (though I recommend that you own a
copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style). I will give you a detailed syllabus when we meet.
222S.01. Intro to the Writing of Creative N-F. Instructor D. Carozza, MW 4:40-5:55
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Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth
or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of
chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and
the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth
of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for
here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
From Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
What comes to mind when you think about great sports writing? Long form or short? Fiction or non-fiction?
Reportage and recap or social commentary and the exposé? Whether you’re interested in becoming a beat writer
who chronicles the season of a particular team, a sports reporter who covers a bit of everything, an investigative
journalist who watches over sports culture, or a critic who examines what sports can teach us about class, race,
gender, or economics, the first step is to understand the conventions of the genre. The second is to think about what
makes the best sports writing provocative.
In this class we will explore different features of sports writing by reading some of the best models and producing
some of our own. We will consider not only conventional ‘sports writing,’ but also other kinds of writing that will
help us stretch our understanding of the genre and of sports themselves. Our discussion will work across different
media to think about how sports narratives are shaped in broadcasting, film, photography, and sound. We’ll dig into
what makes these narratives compelling, and what we might learn from them that we can apply to our own writing
and thinking—not just about sports, but about issues bigger than anything that happens on the field or court.
You’ll write weekly response papers that will allow you to reflect on the pieces we read and try your hand at
different styles of writing. These assignments will lead to a longer writing project, your final assignment for the
class, which will help you develop your own voice as a writer or sports commentator. You’ll have your own choice
of topic, from chronicling the season of a Duke sports team to writing a proposal for the next popular “30 for 30”
ESPN production. Throughout the class we will stop to reflect on the craft of writing, reexamining our own work in
addition to analyzing that of others.
This class is open to all. Come if you’re a sports fan, come if you’re a writer, and especially come if you don’t think
of yourself as either. We’ll do our best, collectively, to change that.
222S.02. People, Places, Things. Instructor C. Shuman, Thurs. 3:05-5:35
Our focus will be on the essay as we explore nonfiction genres such as the character study, the review, the memoir,
travel and nature writing. Over the course of the semester, students will write short creative exercises leading
through workshops and revision to the production of three longer essays. Along the way, we will read and discuss
selected examples of published nonfiction to help us develop techniques for creating our own. No previous creative
writing experience is required for this course.
235. Shakespeare: Shakespeare on Love. Instructor S. Beckwith, MW 3:05-4:20, Area I
Shakespeare wrote three plays which featured lovers in their titles: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and
Anthony of Cleopatra. Other plays, such as Much Ado About Nothing are dominated by the witty, disdainful lovers,
Beatrice and Benedick, and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream features a long night of wild partner-swapping before
the four lovers sort themselves out in the comic ending—all in time for a nuptial feast. His work as a whole shows a
consistent preoccupation with love (between women and men, men and men, women and women, fathers and
children, mothers and sons, clowns and dogs) and with what, after Martha Nussbaum, I call love’s knowledge. Love
licenses and motivates his astonishing trouser role heroines (Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalynde in As You Like It)
who talk their way to husbands, but the inability to speak love motivates the plot of arguably Shakespeare’s greatest
tragedy, King Lear, and virtually defines the pre-occupations of the Roman plays with their stifled women and
heroic, emotionally constipated warriors. Taking shape as forgiveness, it informs the transformed emotional and
verbal landscape of the “late plays.” In other words Shakespeare is deeply interested in the expressive resources of
love, how they are stopped up, interrupted, how made available to those who are gripped by love in myriad but
highly specific forms. His plays explore the way I which love leads to transformed perceptions of the world and the
lover all at once. Love carries an extraordinary philosophical burden in Shakespeare’s plays: the renewal of the
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world depends on it. We will look at some of the versions of love in his culture, and some of the ways, from Plato
to Hegel that love and self-consciousness have been talked about, and we will see how Shakespeare’s plays
constitute a sustained dramatic investigation of the nature of love.
We will read and think hard about a range of highly experimental plays in the Shakespeare canon and we will ask
why this is so. By the end of the class we will put together a selection of Shake-scenes that explore Shakespearean
love.
By the first class, please read Love’s Labours Lost in The Riverside Shakespeare, which you will need to purchase.
247. Victorian Literature. Instructor K. Psomiades, MW 11:45-1:00, Area II
This is a multi-genre survey of Victorian literature that includes poetry, non-fiction prose, and fiction. We’ll be
using the Victorian Volume of the Norton anthology for poetry and non-fiction prose, supplemented when necessary
with other reading. We’ll be reading only two novels, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and H Rider Haggard’s She.
This course does not overlap significantly with Victorian Poetry or Victorian Novel—it should give you a sense of
historical developments in the period and some of the central concerns of Victorian culture as well as a knowledge
of literary developments during the period.
Weekly response papers, three 5-7 page papers, attendance and class participation.
271. Classics of American Literature, 1915-1960. Instructor V. Strandberg, MW 1:25-2:40, Area III
This course in modern American literature will begin with the major figures of the 1920s and will move through the
decades up to 1960. Most of the course will be devoted to novels, but we shall also look carefully at TS Eliot, the
most influential poet of his time, while giving such attention as our time permits to his contemporaries: Robert Frost,
Wallace Stevens, William Carolos Williams, and Hart Crane. Although our primary interest will be to understand
and appreciate the specific works we study, we shall also consider the larger cultural and intellectual context
relevant to each writer. Assignments: In addition to the poets already mentioned, this course will study works by
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright or Toni Morrison, and John
Updike. Exams: Three hour-long exams and a terminal quiz. There will be NO 3-hour final.
Term papers: One term paper, about 6-8 pages.
Grade to be based on: exams 75%, term paper 25 %.
Duke in NY English classes – contact Duke in NY for information.
310A.01. The Business of Art and Media. Instructor M. Torgovnick
312A.01. Arts in NY: Thematic Approach
313A.01. Internship in NY
320S.02. Int. Workshop in Writing of Poetry. Instructor J. Donahue, Wed 3:20-5:50. Contact Prof. Donahue
for more information.
331S. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Instructor D. Aers. TuTh 10:05-11:20, Area I
Conditions of Admission
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None, except a commitment to reading some long, demanding and fascinating poems with careful attention,
including reading Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales before the first
meeting.
Synopsis
This course centers on a close reading of Chaucer’s great poem about love, sexuality, and politics, Troilus and
Criseyde, together with a close reading of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s writing engages with an extraordinarily
wide range of issues in an extraordinary diversity of forms. It offers a fascinating series of meditations on human
identities, loves, and communities.
Before the first class you should read Chaucer’s early dream vision poem, the Book of the Duchess, along
with the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (all found in The Riverside Chaucer, the edition we will use for
this course. Please come prepared on the first day with questions and interests that have emerged for you in this
initial reading.
Besides reading Chaucer, it would be a great help to read the first part of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of
the Altars (2nd edition, Yale UP paperback, 2005), a brilliant introduction to medieval Christianity (this text is
optional to purchase for the course but will be available in the university bookstore).

Set Text (Required)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wadsworth Chaucer, ed. Benson (ISBN-13: 978-1133316282)
Term papers and grades
Because this is a seminar attendance and participation are mandatory. Unwarranted absences will result in failing
the course. The grade comes from two essays (8-10 pages) which must be submitted by the given deadline to count.
There will be no exams.
Note on class format & use of electronics
Laptops and other electronic devices are not to be used in class. A seminar is a dialogic form of learning, very
different to a lecture class. In my experience, laptops act as an impediment to the kinds of attention and
communication I consider essential to a flourishing seminar. Also, since we will have more than enough to chew on
already, please refrain from eating during class.
336. Shakespeare before 1600. Instructor J. Porter, TuTh 1:25-1:25-2:40, Area I
This course immerses us in the first half of the career of the world’s peerless writer. The class will watch the
playwright take his early steps with the lurid self-indulgence of Titus Andronicus, before outdistancing his rival
Marlowe and finding his stride in the lyric plays Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and his first complete masterpiece A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then in three history plays we will watch him engage questions of legitimacy of
government, and of personal loyalty, in the friendship and rivalry between Prince Hal, and the great bewitching
personality of Falstaff. Then the class will follow Shakespeare as he stretches the genre of comedy—in The
Merchant of Venice with its scrutiny of racism and nascent capitalism, in Much Ado about Nothing with Beatrice
and Benedick’s flirtation by insult, and in As You Like It where Shakespeare’s protofeminism flowers in the beloved
Rosalind when, disguised as the boy Ganymede, she pretends to be herself. Finally, with Shakespeare as the
preeminent dramatist in London, we will see him take on a major turning point in the history of western culture, in
Julius Caesar. The class will learn about major currents in contemporary Shakespeare study—“intertextual,
feminist, queer, and cultural study”—and powerful new resources including machine-searchable archives of
Shakespeare’s own works and also of the texts he himself read and used. As time permits, we will watch and
discuss clips of the plays in question.
338S. Milton: Violence and Truth. Instructor J. Werlin, MW 10:05-11:20, Area I
The English Department is delighted to welcome Dr. Julianne Werlin as our new colleague in Early Modern
literature (Area I). Dr. Werlin comes to us with a great deal of experience teaching Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell,
Sidney and Bacon, utopian literature and the literature of war. She received a BA from the University of Chicago
and a PhD from Princeton University, and she has taught at USC and the Central European University in
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Budapest. Her teaching interests include Renaissance literature, utopian fiction, the Scientific Revolution, literature
and warfare and early modern women’s writing. In Fall 2015, she will be teaching “John Milton: Violence and
Truth,” and “Reading Historically: Corruption.”
The poet John Milton lived through a bloody civil war that concluded with the execution of England’s king – an
action he enthusiastically endorsed – and the establishment of a radical government. He watched with excitement as
new theories of science reshaped European perceptions of everything from the cosmos to grains of dust. And he
participated in the passionate and often violent religious debates that raged across early modern Europe. This course
will consider Milton’s poetry and prose within the context of political, philosophical and religious revolutions.
Placing particular emphasis on his great epic Paradise Lost and his tragedy Samson Agonistes, we will examine the
evolution of his poetic style in relation to his historical experience. Throughout the semester we will also consider
whether truth claims – religious, scientific, or political – can license violent actions, as well as the role of literature
in investigating and disseminating truth. In order to do so, we will draw on contemporary philosophy of religion,
politics, and aesthetics, as well as Milton’s own descriptions of his beliefs.
344.01. 18th Century British Novel. Instructor S. Aravamudan, TuTh 1:25-2:40, Area II
371S. Studies in American Literature, WWI-WWII: Romancing the Sublime. Instructor T. Ferraro, TuTh
10:05-11:20, Area III
Have you ever been experienced? Glad, to the brink of fear. Intimate, to the wellspring of oracularity.
Suspicious, to the onset of the suspension of disbelief. In this seminar we will pursue the American Romantic
Sublime in all of its paradoxical, overdetermined materiality (symbolic because visceral, mystical because sensual,
incarnate because fallen) as well as its stylistic, genre-bending variety (shorter and longer fiction, lyric poetry and
pop lyric, discursive prose, even a dance clip or two), from its pre-Civil War inception through late 19th-century and
high modernist exemplars to a couple of favored texts 150 years later.
Yes, we will read certain classics: Emerson's essays, Melville's stories, and Dickinson's poems, close-up
and close-on, in ways undreamt by your AP English exams. But we'll also take up Wallace Stevens' "The Snow
Man" and his "The Emperor of Ice Cream." We'll take up Langston Hughes's "Song for a Dark Girl" ("Way Down
South in Dixie/ Break the heart of me/ They hung my black young lover/ To a Crossroads Tree") and his "Jazzonia"
("In a Harlem cabaret/ Six long-headed jazzers play/ A dancing girl whose eyes are bold/ Lifts high a dress of silken
Gold"); Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and "Summertime"; Oscar Brown Jr.'s "Bid'em In" and "But I was Cool."
We will ponder what really has the Tin Man scared, the Olympic team so pumped. And we'll find ourselves in the
throes--or not!--of a nun-in-training with an out-there infatuation with Christ (Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy); an
embedded journalist's mind-blowing, word-making dissent into jungle fire (Michael Herr's Dispatches); and the
uncanny machinations of a lady telegraphist, our original word-processing prole (Henry James's In the Cage).
No prerequisites beyond basics: curiosity, passion, élan--by which I mean you will need to hold in check
the pre-emptive moralizing, passive-aggressive censoring, and just plain bad arithmetic of pre-professionalism. Of
course, American Romanticism is the original "meta" discourse, so expect special returns, Emersonian style, to those
of you who bring philosophical reflexion and self-knowing reflexivity even to the most concrete of experiences-who think, that is, because you feel.
372S. Modern American Poetry. Instructor V. Strandberg, TuTh 1:25-2:40, Area III
Beginning with the two greatest poets of the 19th century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, our syllabus
will move on to such 20th century figures as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams. We will conclude with poets of the later twentieth century, including such diverse figures as Allen
Ginsburg, Amiri Baraka, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks. The first half of the course will focus on materials of
the instructor’s choice; the latter half will feature student presentations on poets of their own choosing (major or
minor). Two hour exams and two term papers, 5-7 pages. No three-hour final exam.
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Duke in NY – contact program for more information.
390A.01. The Architecture. Instructor A. Jozefacka
390A.01. Sonic New York. Instructor A. Kelley
Using sound, music, and representations of sonic experiences of New York City from history to the
present, students will process Manhattan's culture and history from a fresh, synesthetic perspective.
Recordings of cityscapes will be compared with and contrasted against major works of music, art, and
media connected to the Duke in New York academic experience.
390S-1.01. William Carlos Williams. Instructor N. Mackey, MW 3:05-4:20, Area III
A study of the major works of poetry and prose by William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell
(1920) to Paterson (1963), with particular attention to formal innovation, linguistic change
and cultural diagnosis.
390S-1.02. Emily Dickinson. Instructor J. Donahue, WF 1:25-2:40 Area II
The adultery, betrayal, homoeroticism, tragic death and contested estate would make “The Dickinsons of
Amherst,” were it ever a series, a hit, at least on PBS. Then there’s the central figure, Emily Dickinson, who was,
there’s no polite way to put this, the greatest lyric poet in the English language. This course is an answer to her own
question: Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? To do so, we will read through her extraordinary Collected Poems,
some of her letters, and works that influenced her, and that she influenced. We will explore her confrontations with
such matters as love, death, belief, the fate of the soul, in those sharp small poems, by turns witty and grave, that
aspire to the condition of lightning.
390S-7.01. The Articulate Executive. Instructor J. Tetel Andresen, MW 11:45-1:00 pm, CTM
The Articulate Executive was designed with two ideas in mind:


The study of rhetoric and/or public speaking is long gone from the curriculum; this lack means that training
in oral communication is likely absent in most undergraduates’ educational backgrounds.
The critique of the long-term Western bias in favor of the oral over the written begun by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s now looks prescient in light of the fact that undergraduates today
are masters of texting and posting but not necessarily adept at live conversation.
Social media has the power to popularize or demonize certain ideas and things, but its power is limited. Social media
cannot defuse a dangerous situation on the street, give a persuasive political speech, coach a team to victory,
convince investors to put their money in a start-up company, motivate a work force to higher productivity, or close a
deal. Only individuals in live communication can affect the real-life, real-time behavior of other people. In other
words, effective oral communication is the key to success in a wide array of professions. It is also the key to great
leadership.
In the first third of course, we will analyze oral communication in different types of workplaces and professions. We
will study effective communication in: police work, politics; coaching team sports; entrepreneurship; the
corporation; and salesmanship.
In the second third of the course, we will take up broad topics that crosscut different types of workplaces and
professions. These topics include gender and the workplace, the challenges of women in positions of leadership in
corporations and in politics, as well as social psychological issues such as body language, neuro-marketing, and
behavioral economics.
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In the last third of the course, we will focus on scenarios developed by the course instructor, many based on the
work of researchers such as Suzette Elgin, David McRaney, Deborah Tannen, George Thompson, and Granville
Toogood. We will exercise: the 8-second drill, the elevator speech, the 18-minute wall, conflict resolution,
politeness strategies, and curiosities of social psychology such as the Benjamin Franklin Effect (how asking an
enemy for a favor can turn a hater into a fan).
Course Requirements. The focus on oral communication is balanced with strong written work. Students will write 4to-5-page biweekly reflections on the readings, which go through peer review and review by the professor. These
will be rewritten and incorporated into three papers. The final writing project of 15-to-20 pages draws upon these
assignments.
390S-7.02. Jewish-American Literature: Old Worlds, and New. Instructor J. Ruderman, TuTh 3:05-4:20,
Area III
It has been said that the hyphen in "Jewish-American" is "the cutting edge of a sharp sensibility." In this seminar,
through the lenses of fiction and film, we will trace the realities and challenges of being Jewish in this country from
the late 1880s to the present. We will explore such topics as the immigrant experience, assimilation and
acculturation, anti-Semitism, politics and economics, the influence of Yiddish on American life and art, the
evolution of the "Jewish mother" stereotype, various modes of practicing Judaism, relationships between Jews and
other minority groups, the role of Israel in American-Jewish identity, and more. We will examine the continuities
and differences between the first generation of Jewish-American fiction writers and succeeding generations, in terms
of themes and techniques. Above all, we will read and discuss some very good literature. Authors to be studied
include, but are not limited to, the household names of Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Joseph
Heller, along with such less well-known writers of the past as Henry Roth, Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and
Anzia Yezierska, and finally some representatives of the "new breed" of Jewish-American authors, like Jonathan
Safran Foer, Dara Horn, and Nathan Englander. You don't have to be Jewish to take this course!
395.01. Language and Society. Instructor D. Baran, WF 10:05-11:20, CTM
This course examines language as a social practice, focusing on different aspects of its role in social life. The topics
we will address include: language and social identity, such as ethnicity, social class, age, and gender; variation in
language, including dialects, accents, and registers; multilingualism and language contact; new languages such as
pidgins and creoles; language, culture, and intercultural communication; language and ideology; language in
education and in the media. Through the discussion of these topics and homework including reading and small
research projects, students are introduced to key concepts, theories, and methods in sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology.
396S. Language in Immigrant America, Instructor D. Baran WF 11:45-1:00, CTM
This course examines the crucial role of language in the story of the immigrant xperience in America -- a story
marked by searching for a path between assimilation and preserving one¿s home culture. Learning English,
speaking with a foreign accent, choosing which language to use at home, bridging cultures by creating new ways
of speaking such as code-switching or ethnic varieties of English, responding to political challenges -- the
controversial bilingual education programs, the US English movement -- have all shaped the making and
remaking of immigrant identities. In this course, we will explore these issues by drawing on case studies in
linguistic anthropology, on personal stories such as autobiographies and memoirs, and on public debates
surrounding language and immigration. We will also consider the discursive construction of 'the immigrant' in the
media, in literature, and in ethnographic interviews to see how these discourses produce racial, ethnic, and
linguistic hierarchies. As part of the course, students will also carry out ethnographic fieldwork with local
immigrant communities.
421S. Advanced Fiction Writing. Instructor J. Porter Wed 3:05-5:35 Creative Writing
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This seminar will follow the workshop format, devoting most of class time to intensive discussion of fiction written
by members of the class. Along the way, we will pause to discuss voice, setting, character, genre, and other
touchstones of the art and craft of fiction, and we will also discuss and explore in exercises farther-ranging matters
including promise and postponed fulfillment, and negotiating the reader's consciousness. We will also cover the nuts
and bolts of submitting fiction for publication. Students will complete a minimum of thirty pages of publishable
fiction, and should plan not to miss class.
540S.01. Restoration 18th Century Literature. Instructor C. Sussman, TH 4:40-7:10, Area II
Eighteenth-Century Literature: Mobility and Settlement
The years between 1650 and 1834 were an era of mass migration: from country to city, from Africa to the Americas,
and from old world to new. Paradoxically, the same period also came to value settlement ever more highly, as
witnessed by the Settlement Acts associated with the Poor Laws, the increasing emphasis on “home” and
“nativeness,” and the turn towards settler colonialism. This course will examine a number of intertwined issues
associated with mobility and settlement, including: exile, emigration, poor relief, the invention of “home,”
transatlantic slavery, circum-Atlantic mobility, cosmopolitanism, and settler colonialism. We also consider how
these historical contexts intersected with the histories of various genres, including the novel, the epic, travel
literature and the lyric. Texts may include: Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels, Joseph Andrews, and Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative, as well as works by Margaret Cavendish, George Farquhar, Samuel Johnson, Frances Brooke,
Oliver Goldsmith, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and Walter Scott.
590S-3.01. Auditory Cultures: Sound and Double Consciousness. Instructor T. Jaji, Tues. 4:40-7:10
The English Department is delighted to welcome Dr. Tsitsi Jaji to our department as an
Associate Research Professor. Dr. Jaji comes to us with a great deal of experience teaching
global black literatures, cinema, and music. She received a BA from Oberlin College and a PhD
from Cornell University, and she taught for seven years at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr.
Jaji's courses explore African American, African and Caribbean expressive cultures and
exchanges among them and other parts of the African diaspora, and her research often focuses on
representations of sound, music and listening, and engages feminist methods and theory. In Fall
2015, she will be teaching a course entitled "Auditory Cultures: Sound and Double
Consciousness."
Course Description: W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 using musical
incipits from the sorrow songs to begin each chapter, laying a template for theorizing the lived
experience of race in the U.S. in sonic terms. In the next decades writers continued to foreground
sound in debates about the link between cultural forms and identity, and particularly the uses of
the vernacular. For scholars like James W. Johnson, Alain Locke, and Zora Neale Hurston
anthologizing and interpreting African American cultural production involved tracing auditory
forms of music, sermons, and folklore alongside literature. This class will take their approach as
a starting point, to examine the role of sound in primary works by key figures working around
and across the Black Atlantic from 1890-1939, with some context before and after this period.
Authors studied will include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sol Plaatje, John and Nokutela Dube,
Langston Hughes, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Nicolás Guillén, Claude McKay, and Leon Gontran
Damas along with composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price, and performers Paul
Robeson, Marian Anderson, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. These primary texts will be read
in conversation with theoretical works that foreground auditory sensibilities by thinkers
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including Theodor Adorno, Jacques Attali, Josh Kun, Angela Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin and
others. We will also draw on recent special issues of American Quarterly (September 2011) and
Social Text (Spring 2010) devoted to sound.
822S.01. Writing is Thinking. Instructor T. Moi, Tues. 10:20-12:50
Writing is a fundamental part of academic life. This course aims to teach graduate students at any level, from firstyear students to dissertation writers, how to write well and with enjoyment, and how to make writing a part of their
daily life as creative intellectuals. The course starts from the premise that writing is thinking: that we develop our
own thoughts in the act of trying to express them, and that the more we learn to use writing at every stage of our
work, the more we increase the range and depth of our thinking, and the more likely it is that we will get our writing
published. On this view, writing is always rewriting. Revision is integral to the process of writing.
We will investigate questions such as: What is the difference between taking the usual reading notes, and taking the
kind of notes that will help us as writers? How can we integrate writing in our research? How can we read academic
prose not just as consumers of ideas, but as writers?
What is the difference (if any) between good academic writing and good non-fiction writing? Do academic writers
need to care about the shape and structure of their sentences, or paragraphs? What is “voice”? How do we take the
audience’s needs into account?
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The course will cover the art of the footnote. We will learn to cut our own texts. We will discuss how best to use
quotations, and consider the differences between different academic genres: what is the difference between a
seminar paper and a published article? An MLA panel paper and a full-scale invited talk? Do we write differently if
an article is to be published in a journal or in a book (anthology)? How do we respond to feedback?
We’ll begin by considering one writing handbook: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about Writing.
Other writing handbooks will be introduced as necessary.
As we move on, we will work closely with selected examples of academic prose by, say, Roland Barthes and Susan
Sontag. We will constitute a sample library of excellent academic writing, based on suggestions from English and
Literature faculty, and on the students’ own interests. In the same way, we will also gather a small library of phrases
and moves to avoid.
We will also consider the politics of difficult academic writing, by reading some of the essays collected in Culler
and Lamb, eds. Just Being Difficult (2003).
The course will be writing intensive. I hope to use a high tech classroom that lets us draft and revise together,
onscreen, in real time.
Assignments: Weekly writing assignments of various kinds; one final paper, to be developed in the course of the
class.
890S.02. Desconstruction/Psy. Theory. Instructor R. Khanna, Wed 12:00-2:30
Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis
To learn about the relationship of deconstruction and psychoanalysis is to learn about literary theory in the second
half of the twentieth century. Some may understand the two terms to stand in for two or three names: Derrida and
Lacan, and perhaps Freud. This course will discuss those thinkers and their contribution to literary and related
theories, but it will also attend to the thinkers they analyze to shape their arguments.
Derrida and Lacan famously debated Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” in a way that was going
to define the distinction between them and some of the central disagreements of structuralism and deconstruction.
Barbara Johnson would bring in a feminist question that would mediate between the two and go on to produce
something distinct from either. The nature of the epistolary more generally was foregrounded in Derrida’s The
Postcard in which Derrida dwells on the nature of speculation—a kind of theorizing—which is debated in relation to
Freud and his manner of reading and analyzing literature, dreams, and words. Both psychoanalysis and
deconstruction debated the status of the law of the father partly through the figure of Oedipus. In addition, Derrida
articulated his relationship to psychoanalysis at times against Foucault’s monumental History of Madness. He
formed a reading of Hamlet with reference to psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, and Karl Marx’s The German
Ideology. Derrida produced a brilliant work of queer theory avant la lettre in Glas when he read Hegel on Antigone
next to Jean Genet through the lens of the Freudian concept of disavowal. Lacan too read that same text of Hegel
and Antigone, this time with Kant through Sade, to develop an ethics of psychoanalysis through the death drive.
Luce Irigaray, in a feminist deconstructive reading of Lacan, would lose her place in Lacan’s school of
psychoanalysis. Lee Edelman’s queer theory will be articulated through Lacan, Paul de Man, and Barbara Johnson.
And in the postcolonial theories of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Robert Young, there is a analysis with and
against psychoanalysis and deconstruction in ways that brings their relationship into focus, variously through
history, through biography, through scattered speculations on value, and through the question of genre.
Readings will thus include a large array of texts from twentieth century literary and related theory, for example
Sophocles, The Oedipus Plays, Shakespeare, Hamlet, Kafka’s The Trial, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics,
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Derrida’s The Postcard, Glas, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Foucault’s History
of Madness, Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other/Woman, Hegel on Antigone from
The Phenomenology of Spirit, Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Robert Young, White Mythologies, Barbara
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Johnson, The Critical Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, and essays from all of the above, Spivak, Bhabha,
Edelman, Alan Bass, Peggy Kamuf, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Louis Althusser, Shoshana Felman, and from the journal
The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis.
XTIANTHE 890.01 AND English 890S.03
890S.03. Modernism & the Recovery of Tradition: T. S. Eliot’s Spiritual Poetics, Instructor T. Pfau, Monday
6:15-8:45 110 Gray
Note: Seniors may take this course – however review the Trinity requirements for the process of approval.
This course will also be listed through Divinity as well.
A quintessential representative of Anglo-European Modernism, T. S. Eliot gradually veered away from the aesthetic
programs and default secularism of his modernist peers (Pound, Woolf, Russell, et al.) and, after 1930, finds him
writing poetry and prose within a far more expansive, pan-European and emphatically religious context. Having
converted (in 1927) to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot after 1930 becomes consumed with reimagining political and
religious community and with discovering and retrieving potentialities within the English language suitable for that
purpose. As he charts his asymptotic trajectory vis-à-vis the liberal-secular-naturalist creeds held by most of his
contemporaries, Eliot shows himself profoundly concerned with how his poetic and essayistic voices are informed
by, and in turn respond to, a long and rich tradition of poetic, intellectual, and religious writing.
In focusing, after 1927, on the deep affinities between poetry as a form of contemplation and Anglo-Catholic
religious thought and ritual, Eliot increasingly distances himself from virtually all literary, philosophical, and
theological movements, schools, and charismatic individuals of his time. Thus he demurs at the home-spun
mythology of Yeats as “but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply the
fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying patient may utter his last words” (After
Strange Gods). Likewise, he rejects any straightforward humanist proposals for remedying the deracinated and
despairing character of modern life, such as I. A. Richards invocation of poetry as a buffer against modern
dissociation and despair. Dismissing such humanist palliatives as but “a religious rear-guard action,” Eliot sees no
point in trying “to preserve emotions without the beliefs with which their history has been involved” (“The Use of
Poetry”).
Yet what most distinguishes Eliot’s fusion of poetic and religious contemplation is his singularly capacious and
dynamic understanding of tradition. It informs and organizes Eliot’s astonishing range of reading and his deeply
considered and subtly embedded allusions to a vast and eclectic array of precursor texts, a modification of his earlier
montage-technique in The Waste Land and, in his time, almost without parallel (with the exception of Joyce). Of
supreme importance among Eliot’s literary precursors is Dante, whose insistent presence and profoundly enabling
role within the evolution of Eliot’s literary persona will be an enduring concern for us. Other voices and genres
significantly bearing on Eliot’s literary formation include medieval mystery plays; Julian of Norwich; the Anglican
Divines of the seventeenth century; the metaphysical poets, particularly Donne and Herbert; the French Symbolists,
to name but the most prominent cases.
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With the ongoing publication of Eliot’s complete prose writings, we are at long last also in possession of Eliot’s
wide-ranging engagement of issues and debates in theology, philosophy, literature, and social thought. Our seminar
will draw on a number of Eliot’s prose writings in relation to his canonical poetry, both of which we shall put in
conversation with some of his most valued poetic precursors. Overall, the course will be divided into three sections:
Part I will explore a number of Eliot’s essays and his early, high-Modernist poetry and from 1914-1922,
culminating in The Waste Land. Part II will focus on Eliot’s concept of “tradition” and his increasingly wideranging engagement of poetic and religious interlocutors (Dante, Bramhall, Pascal, the Metaphysical Poets) during
the years 1922-1935. Part III will mainly explore writings between 1935 and 1945. Here we will focus on Eliot’s
contemplative poetry and poetic drama (Murder in the Cathedral), his critique of contemporary secular culture
(After Strange Gods; The Idea of a Christian Society; Notes toward a Definition of Culture, et al.). Our discussion
will conclude with a careful reading of Four Quartets (1936-1943), the last section of which (“Little Gidding,”
1943) we will read in close conjunction with Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love.
Requirements:
1) Advance reading: Dante, Divine Comedy (Mandelbaum or Hollander translation); read at least the opening
ten cantos of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. – Strongly recommended, Russell Kirk’s, Eliot and his
Age.
2) In-class presentation: a 15-20 min. presentation of one of Eliot’s prose pieces or a work of secondary
literature.
3) A research paper (approx.. 7,500-8,000 words), due by the beginning of Finals Week.
Secondary Literature
(some selections of which will be part of our syllabus)
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. (London, 1984)
Asher, Kenneth T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995)
Bottum, Joseph, "What T. S. Eliot Almost Believed", First Things 55 (August/September 1995): 25-30.
Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984)
Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. In Prehistories of the Future, ed.
Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press. (1995).
Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. (1987)
Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: the Poet T. S. Eliot (2000)
Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998)
Hughes, Glenn. A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri Press,
2011)
Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, U.K.,1995)
Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. (New York, 1969)
Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. The Pennsylvania State University
Press. 2005.
Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford University Press (2006).
Ricks, Christopher.T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. (1988).
Robinson, Ian "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001)
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Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. (1975)
Spurr, Barry, Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity, The Lutterworth Press (2009)
Divinity Course:
XTIANTHE 790.01. Writing the Trinity: St. Thomas Aquinas to Julian of Norwich. Instructor D. Aers,
Thurs. 2:30-5:00, Location: 050L
Synopsis
In his commentary on the Pater Noster St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that we should attend to the way in which
doctrine is bound up with the forms of language in which it is immersed (“Notandum autem, quod ex modo loquendi
datur nobis doctrina”). Probably few modern theologians would foreground this observation in their practice.
Indeed, it might seem more at home in the discourses of a literary critic. Be that as it may, St. Thomas’s remark
seems to me central to the study of theology, its resources and history. Given this view it should be no surprise that
his gnomic utterance will guide the approaches favored in this seminar. While these approaches certainly explore
“doctrine” they do not do so in the manner of systematic theology or of the conventional history of ideas,
disciplinary forms of course alien to the writers we study in this course. As the title of the course should evoke, we
will be exploring some ways of “writing the Trinity” in the later Middle Ages. The “modus loquendi” will be
approached as intrinsic to the “doctrina” and, appropriately enough, we will be studying very different kinds of
writing done in very different contexts.
We will begin with an exploration of St Thomas Aquinas’s discourse on the Trinity in the Summa
Theologiae. Late medieval theological writing is a practice shaped by universities and all theologians writing in
Latin were trained by commenting not only on Holy Scripture but also by commenting on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard (themselves now available in a four-volume translation by Giulio Silano, volume one including the
account of the Trinity). So the contexts and modes of St. Thomas’s writing are strikingly different to St Augustine’s
however Augustinian his theology may often be. From the later thirteenth-century Dominican theologian we will
move to England in the later fourteenth century and the study of the greatest Christian poem in English: Langland’s
Piers Plowman (read here in its final version, the C version). Here we encounter an extraordinary complex,
dialectical work in which theology, ecclesiology, liturgy, politics, vision and prayer are inextricably bound together.
We will read the whole poem with attention but concentrate on the contexts and ways in which Langland writes
about the Trinity. We must read the whole poem to discover the relations between different “modi loquendi” and
different “doctrina.” And here we will also concentrate on allegory both in exegesis of Scripture and in Langland’s
own writing. (For those who have never read Piers Plowman I strongly suggest you first read it in the modern
translation cited below and then get to grips with the Middle English edition also cited below). During the last few
weeks of the course, after reading Langland’s Piers Plowman, we will concentrate on the dazzling work of the
profoundly trinitarian contemplative, Julian of Norwich, a younger contemporary of Langland who, in my view, had
read Langland.
Before the first class, you should read Summa Th. I.13 and I.27-43 and come prepared with questions and
observations for discussion; people who have not read Piers Plowman should also read it in translation over the long
vacation.
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Note on class format & expectations and grading
This class is a seminar so attendance and participation are mandatory. Laptops (and other electronic devices) are not
to be used in class. A seminar is a dialogic form of learning, very different to a lecture class. In my experience,
laptops act as an impediment to the kinds of attention and communication I consider essential to a flourishing
seminar.
The grade will come from one essay of not more than 25 pages to be handed in during or before the final
class.
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