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    English 289m. Who Cares about Modernism?: Literary Studies and the Problem of Periodization

    Instructor: Beth Blum
    Day & Time: Thursday 9:45-11:45am 
    Course Website
    This graduate seminar uses modernism as a test case for debates regarding the merits and limits of literary periodization. Though our focus is modernism, we will be engaging with examples of similar debates from other periods, such as challenges to the medieval/ Renaissance divide, calls for “presentist Shakespeare,” the manifesto of the Victorian v21 collective, and discussions regarding the utility of labelling contemporary literature as “post-45.” We will examine the contingencies and controversies of modernism’s fraught self-formation, reading detractors including Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Edith Wharton, as well as figureheads such as Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce. 

    Primary texts are designed to partly overlap with the generals list and may include: Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and more. Secondary readings to include: Eric Hayot, Rita Felski, Paul Saint-Amour, Fredric Jameson, Kenneth Burke, Susan Stanford Friedman, René Wellek, Gerald Graff, Ted Underwood, David James and Urmila Seshagiri, Wai Chee Dimock.

    English 224sr. Shakespeare and Racial Justice

    Instructor: Marjorie Garber
    Day & Time: Tuesday 9:45-11:45am
    Course Website
    One of the most powerful effects of Shakespeare’s plays is the uncanny way they both reflect and anticipate the concerns of readers and audiences over time. The plays that address questions of racial justice and injustice seem strikingly pertinent now, just as they have at other key moments from the early modern period to the present.

    Working with the play-texts, with literary criticism and theory, and with stage history and material culture, this graduate seminar will examine issues of race, justice, performance and resistance as manifested in Shakespearean drama, both historically and in our own time. Plays to be considered include Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Our concerns will be with language and character and with a range of theoretical perspectives, as well as with thematic issues and facets of race, including color, religion, humoral theory, and the idea of the stranger. Participants will be invited and encouraged to address both the plays and ongoing current events, reading them together—or against one another—as theatre, criticism, and critique.

    Note: Graduate seminar with limited enrollment, admission by permission of instructor. Priority given to FAS Ph.D. students in English, American Studies, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies. All other FAS Ph.D. applicants should indicate their familiarity with Shakespeare. If space in the seminar permits, applications will be considered from English department senior concentrators who have already taken at least one semester of Shakespeare at Harvard.

    English 241nf. "It Is and Is Not a Novel": Narrative Fiction before the Nineteenth Century

    Instructor: Deidre Lynch
    Day & Time: Friday 9:45-11:45am 
    Course Website

    When, in 1792, one Charlotte Palmer published a work of fiction entitled It Is and Is Not a Novel, her choice of title, both teasing and fence-sitting, suggested a long history of generic fluidity. It also suggested that by the end of the eighteenth century this history was drawing to a close, as if the moment had arrived when it could be viewed through the lens of a certain playful self-consciousness. Our work this semester will be devoted to the record of remarkable narrative experiment preceding this moment of generic consolidation: preceding the moment, which arrived later than we might think, when a disparate range of fictions—including many calling themselves “histories”--could be categorized retroactively as examples of “the” novel and treated as “imaginative literature.”

    Early modern writing does a remarkable job of testing our twenty-first-century expectations about literary kinds and our twenty-first-century convictions about how those kinds relate respectively to probability, knowledge, evidence, fact, and believability. We find factually-based biographies that draw unabashedly on the conventions of the heroic romance; we find travel narratives that are part allegory, part scientific discourse; and, most interestingly for our purposes, we find fictions that claim to report the truth. 

    These early fictions’ documentary pretenses, their affinities for matters of fact and transcripts of real life, will be one recurrent concern for this seminar. The overlap between the novelist and the juror in a legal trial (both of whom, according to Ian Watt, take a “circumstantial view of life”) will be another. Throughout the semester we’ll probe Bakhtin’s suggestion that the moment of the novel coincides with that moment when Europe is thrust out of its cultural isolation and enters into relations with the entire globe--a suggestion that helps us see why questions about empire, colonial domination, racialization and chattel slavery loom so large in this writing. And one additional question that is likely to inform our discussions goes like this: why are the secret truths of female sexuality (white and black) so often the referent of early realism? 

    Note: Graduate students who wish to obtain 200-level credit should be auditors in English 141 rather than enrolling in it officially.

    English 278x. Twentieth-Century Texts

    Instructor: Louis Menand
    Day & Time: Monday 9:45-11:45am 
    Course Website
    A reading course of works important for understanding twentieth-century literary and intellectual history. Some of the works will be drawn from the Generals list, and half will be chosen by the instructor and half by the class. The goals are 1) familiarize ourselves with 20th century works “everyone” is expected to know something about; 2) practice for a very common instructional situation: having to get up a new text and introduce class discussion about it in a week.

    English 200d. Advanced Topics in Old English: The Riddle Tradition

    Instructor: Daniel Donoghue
    Day & Time: TBD | Location: TBD
    Course Website

    For students who have a reading knowledge of Old English, this seminar will build upon that competence and offer new directions to pursue. How do we define a riddle? What’s the difference between it and other kinds of enigmatic discourse? The genre of riddles opens up questions concerning the relation between language and reality, human perception, and the construction of meaning.

    English 219t. Gender, War, Writing, Rhetoric, and Reading: Troilus and Criseyde from Late Medieval to Early Modern

    Instructor: James Simpson
    Day & Time: Mondays 3-5pm
    Course Website

    The material of this course consists of the following exceptionally rich late medieval and early modern Trojan materials: Chaucer’s House of Fame; Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; Lydgate’s Troy Book (Book 2); Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid; and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. We will be guided into these materials by the inter-related topics listed in the course title. Wherever possible and appropriate, we will absorb the publication conditions and media of these texts and/or performances.

    English 279. Modern and Contemporary Poets

    Instructor: Stephanie Burt
    Day & Time: Wednesdays 12-2pm
    Course Website

    Major poets and poems from T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore almost to the present day: we may also read, among others, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bernadette Mayer, J F Herrera, James Merrill, C. D. Wright, and Terrance Hayes. Appropriate both for students who know some of these poets well, and for those relatively new to the study of poems.

    AFRAMER 215x. Black Literary Avant-Gardes

    Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
    Wednesday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: Barker 114

    In his classic manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes declared that his generation of artists and poets—upstarts coming of age in the roaring twenties—was determined to build what he called “temples for tomorrow.” How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies and in African American Literature over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the one we inherit from Poggioli (1968). By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore all of these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, without neglecting important formations in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

    English 360. Teaching the Humanities with New Media: A Poetry in America Practicum

    Instructor: Elisa New
    Day & Time: TBA 
    Course Website
    Humanists of the 21st century are looking at a changed professional landscape.  Major shifts in higher education, and in the college and university job market for humanists, predate the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic has brought these shifts into starker relief--even as it has revealed new opportunities for humanists in the fields of digital learning and educational media production, K-12 education, higher education administration, education policy, and more.  

    Teaching the Humanities with New Media: A Poetry in America Practicum will enable students to experience some of these newer career opportunities by “embedding” as teaching staff (G4+) or Research and Pedagogy Associates (G1-G3) in Poetry in America: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop, a for-credit course being offered to high-school students--most of them from Title I and Title I-eligible schools--across the US and around the world.  This fall’s practicum will provide students an opportunity to gain exposure to, and to build skills in, the world of online education, broadly defined. Poetry of the City (POTC) is offered in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab and with Arizona State University.  The course will be offered under auspices of ASU’s online high school, ASU Digital Prep Digital.

    Students enrolled in the practicum will have official titled roles within the ASU course that may provide them useful credentials for the future.  

    Visit poetryinamerica.org to learn more about Poetry in America and its programs.  To learn more about Poetry in America’s work with high-school learners, read this piece from Harvard Magazine.

    This practicum is open to G1-G3 students in FAS seeking course credit, and to G4 students and above seeking paid teaching work. GSE students in any of the Master’s or PhD programs are welcome to apply, as well as undergraduates planning to pursue teaching careers

    Note: This workshop will be graded as SAT/UNSAT and will count as a graduate course, though not toward the ten seminar requirement.

    English 228c. Milton and the Art of Criticism

    Instructor: Gordon Teskey
    Monday, 12:00-2:00pm | Location: Barker 269
    Course site

    A survey of Milton’s English poetry as a basis for discussing problems in the art of criticism. First, is criticism an art? Is literary criticism a practical or a theoretical enterprise? Does criticism combine philosophy and history while remaining separate from each (as Aristotle thought)? In what ways can criticism draw illuminating connections between a poet’s work and a poet’s life? What kind of attention can criticism pay to language, meter, genre, and literary history? Above all, what is the relation of criticism to the political and of the political to the aesthetic? Milton criticism over three centuries provides a unique archive for considering how criticism has been practiced over time. We follow the development from classic criticism (Marvell, Johnson, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Blake, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Arnold, Raleigh) to modern ones (Woolf, Eliot, Lewis, Empson, Frye, Schwartz, Quint, Greenblatt, Nyquist, Jameson, Wilburn, Mohamed, Lewalski, Vendler).

    AFRAMER 232. The Ethnic Avant-Garde

    Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
    Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 211
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between minority writers and the Soviet Union. How can this model apply to other minority vanguardist literatures? What is or what was the avant-garde? How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the ones we inherit from Renato Poggioli (1968) and Peter Bürger (1984) in their accounts of the historical formation of European vanguards. By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This is a graduate seminar and will typically only admit graduate students; undergraduate students may apply for special permission in writing but admittance will be strictly limited. 

    English 226s. Renaissance Ego-Documents

    Instructor: Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Koerner
    Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: Sackler 521
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    Jakob Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance invented the self has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the representation of personal identity first in Italy in the 14th century and then throughout the rest of Europe. This course will consider several of the writers whose self-representations have long drawn critical attention– More, Elizabeth I, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton – but now accompanied by such figures as Mary Sidney, George Gascoigne, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Carew, Francis Bacon, Anne Clifford, and   Margaret Cavendish.  The English examples will be set alongside key figures in the European Renaissance:  Petrarch in Italy, Montaigne in France, and Cervantes in Spain.    Students will be encouraged not only to reach out to a broad range of geographical possibilities but also to cast a wide cultural net (so as to include, for example, Osman of Timisoara or Glickl of Hameln).  As represented in such works as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Michel de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun, inquisitorial inquiries and witchcraft testimonies will also fall within the range of ego-documents that we will investigate.  The seminar will be coordinated with a related course in the Art History Department taught by Professor Joseph Koerner, so that textual representations of the self will be set alongside a wide array of comparable representations in the visual arts.  A central question will be the relationship between words and pictures in the fashioning of identity.... Read more about English 226s. Renaissance Ego-Documents

    English 231. Divine Comedies: Graduate Seminar

    Instructor: Nicholas Watson
    Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    A study of a series of visionary works written between the thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, including Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, John of Morigny's Book of Flowers, Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies. We read these works as contrasting products of a particular (and time-limited) conception of the imagination as an instrument of human perception and its affordances and dangers as this conception meets ancient traditions of writing about the validity or otherwise of dreams and of spiritual, or perhaps corporeal, descents into hell and/or ascents to heaven. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of "orthodoxy" and "discretion of spirits" during a period when both were fiercely contested. We also consider visionary writing as a precursor of the concept of the "fictional" and of the novel, with particular reference to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz.

    Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Please contact Prof. Watson before classes begin if you would like to take the course.

    English 264x. Sensation and Moral Action in Thomas Hardy

    Instructor: Elaine Scarry
    Thursday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    Approaches Hardy's novels, stories, and narrative poems through the language of the senses (hearing, vision, touch) and through moral agency (philosophic essays on "luck'' and "action'').

    Open to upper-level undergraduates with permission of instructor.

    English 295li. Literary Institutions: The Archive

    Instructor: Kelly Mee Rich
    Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: Barker 269
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    This course addresses the role of the archive in literary and cultural studies. It examines the debates, theories, and methods that emerge in relation to archival research, particularly around issues of memory, recovery, access, materiality, and the relationship between research and researcher. The syllabus includes units on power and history, bodies and affect, reading along or against the grain, photography and mediation, colonial archives, the Black Atlantic, and human rights. Assignments are designed to encourage students to a) consider the influence of archival encounters in their specific field and/or discipline; b) develop relationships with local archives and greater orientation in such literary institutions; and c) reflect on how the archive might bear on their approach to literary study. This seminar is open to all graduate students in the arts and humanities.

    English 229s. Edmund Spenser and the Art of Theory

    Instructor: Gordon Teskey
    Monday, 3:45-5:45 pm | Location: TBD
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    A seminar on the poetry of Spenser and the practice of theory. In contrast to Milton, Spenser thinks as he writes and also lets the poem think for him. He does not think with poetry but through it. One consequence is that the kind of poem he writes—an allegory—invites us to think along with it as well, in our own terms. In the seminar, we will attend to the tensions in Spenser’s imagination between personal expression, social and political structure, and cosmic order. Alongside the poems, especially "The Faerie Queene", we will read some major works of literary theorists from the postwar period to the present day.

    English 296r. Repetition

    Instructor: Derek Miller
    Tuesday, 9:45-11:45 am | Location: TBD
    Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
    Course Site

    This course considers the relationship between art and repetition. We will go beyond the repetition of content—sequels; adaptations—to explore repetition as artistic form (such as the sonnet or a musical theme and variations) and repetition as an essential practice for producing (editing and revising) and consuming art. We will investigate the varieties of repetition in the arts and consider how a general theory of art and repetition helps us better understand art as a human practice. Examples include literature, theater, music, and visual art, but students are expected to pursue their own interests in course assignments.

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