Department of English
Fall 2015 Graduate Course Descriptions
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-03.01 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."
Class 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 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?
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 and Psychoanalysis. Instructor R. Khanna, Wed 12:00-2:30
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
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.
890S.03. Modernism & the Recovery of Tradition: T. S. Eliot’s Spiritual Poetics, Instructor T. Pfau, Monday
6:15-8:45 110 Gray
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.
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)
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.
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.