This course (together with the companion seminar ENGL W3011) is a requirement for the English Major and Concentration. It should be taken by the end of the sophomore year. Fulfillment of this requirement will be a factor in admission to seminars and to some lectures.

ENGL W3001y Literary Texts, Critical Methods Lecture (Gray) T 9:10-10:25am 4 pts. Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3001 must also register for one of the sections of ENGL W3011 Literary Texts, Critical Methods. This course is intended to introduce students to the study of literature. Students will read works from the three major literary modes (lyric, drama, and narrative), drawn from the medieval period to the present day. They will learn the interpretative techniques required by each. They will also learn how to write scholarly papers on literature, as well as how to integrate secondary sources into their own critical writing.

ENGL W3011y Literary Texts, Critical Methods Seminar 4 pts. Corequisites: Students who register for ENGL W3011 must also register for ENGL W3001 Literary Texts, Critical Methods lecture. This seminar, led by an advanced graduate student in the English doctoral program, accompanies the faculty lecture ENGL 3001. Through discussion of specific works and through written exercises, the class will elaborate upon the topics taken up in the weekly lecture, training students in techniques of close reading and textual explication appropriate to the genres introduced in the lecture, and providing guided practice in literary-critical writing.

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ENGL W3034y Chaucer and his Contemporaries (Crane) TR 1:10-2:25pm, 3 pts. (Lecture). Chaucer’s creative genius poses a challenge for reading his works alongside those of his artistic community. Chaucer’s predilections for irony, genre mixing, point of view narration, suspended endings, and associational forms ranging from parliament to story-telling contest make him more accessible for readers today than are many medieval writers. Our course will counter the advantages Chaucer has over his contemporaries by paying close attention to their peculiarly medieval kinds of coherence, didactic practices, poetic strategies, and world views. Their differences from Chaucer, which come across to us as making them more “medieval” than Chaucer, diminish with familiarity and their contributions to Chaucer’s work become more available for discussion. Defining Chaucer’s artistic community to include writers whose works influenced Chaucer’s as well as writers whose lifetimes overlapped with his, the syllabus will include selections from, for example, the Romance of the Rose, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the Lais of Marie de France, Petrarch’s letters, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  Course requirements: midterm and final examinations; two 7-page papers.

ENGL W4791y Visionary Dramas and Dramatic Visions in the Late Middle Ages (Johnson)  TR 2:40-3:55pm (Lecture). This class is designed to interrogate the genre-boundary that has traditionally separated visionary writings from dramatic ones in the study of English medieval literature. Although this separation has long existed in scholarship, it is deeply problematic, and produces an understanding of the relationship between private devotion and publically performed religious ritual that is untenable, and does considerable violence to our understanding of the medieval imagination. As we will see, notionally “private” visionary writings and notionally “public” dramatic writings have a great deal in common, not just in terms of their overt content, but also in terms of their formal construction, their poetic devices, their favorite rhetorical maneuvers, and their articulated relationship with history and English literature. The works we will read this term are all phenomenally strange, many of them extremely difficult because of their unfamiliarity.  For this reason, we will divide the semester into three sections: the first will deal with the famous medieval cycle dramas, which narrate events from the New Testament.  The second section will transition to examine three important visionary texts that were written between 1370 and 1430, contemporaneous with the efflorescence of dramatic composition and performance in England.  The final section of class will turn to examine the so-called “morality plays,” which emerge just slightly after the cycle dramas and after the visionary works we will have read.  Since these works are linguistically challenging, we will sometimes—but not always—be working with translations.  

ENGL W4091y Insular Vernacular Paleography (Baswell) MW 9:10-10:50am (Lecture) This class is designed to introduce graduate students (and some advanced undergraduates) to the paleography of English vernacular manuscripts written during the period ca. 700 -1500, with brief excursions into Latin and into French as it was written on the Continent.  Students interested in a broader introduction to Latin and the national hands of the Continent should also consider taking Dr. Dutschke’s Latin Paleography course, which is planned to be offered in alternate years to Prof. Baswell’s. The purpose of the course is fourfold: (1) to teach students how to make informed judgments with regard to the place and date of origin, (2) to provide instruction and practice in the accurate reading and transcription of medieval scripts, (3) to learn and use the basic vocabulary of the description of scripts, and (4) to examine the manuscript book as a product of the changing society that produced it and, thus, as a primary source for the study of that society and its culture. In order to localize manuscripts in time and place it is necessary to examine aspects of the written page besides the script, such as the material on which it is written, its layout and ruling, the decoration and illustration of the text, the provenance, and binding.  It is also necessary to examine the process of manuscript production itself, whether institutional, commercial, or personal. The history of book production and of decoration and illumination are thus considered part of the study of paleography, as is the history of patronage and that of libraries; the German term Handschriftenkunde well describes the subject.  Manuscripts are among the most numerous and most reliable surviving witnesses to medieval social and intellectual change, and they will be examined as such. To become proficient in the study of manuscripts it is necessary to look at manuscripts, as well as to read about them.  The more time you are able to spend looking at manuscripts critically, in the manuals and in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the greater will be your first-hand experience and hence your reliable knowledge.

ENGL W3338y Shakespeare: Text, Performance, Film (Peters) T 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Romeo and Juliet via Shakespeare, Franco Zeffirelli, and Baz Luhrmann.  King Lear via Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard.  The Tempest via Derek Jarman, and Peter Greenaway.  Henry IV via Orson Welles, and Gus Van Sant (etc.)  Shakespeare in performance, film, and other media from the 16th century to the 21st. Focusing on six plays, we’ll develop tools for the close reading of scene, image, action, expression, and camera work. The premise of the course is that textual interpretation (reading sources, rhetoric, narrative structure, character, symbolic subtext) is inseparable from performance interpretation, and that both are deepened by an understanding of literary and performance history.  Discussion supplemented by workshop-type exercises (theatre history, reviewing, adaptation, staging scenes, etc.) Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Peters ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Shakespeare seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W4263y English Literature 1600-1660 (Murray) MW 4:10-5:25pm (Lecture). Poetry and prose from the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, through the civil wars and Cromwellian commonwealth, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We will consider the linked revolutions in English politics, religion, science, philosophy, and social and erotic relations, and will ask how these cultural transformations influenced literary form. Authors will include James I, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, as well as various Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and perhaps a Muggletonian or two.

ENGL W3950y Satire and Sensibility (Giordani) M 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). British verse, novels, and critical prose from early and mid-18th century with a view to the satirical and the sentimental as related and complementary dispositions, variously nuanced in the elicitation of scorn and pathos, but reflecting in the main a tragicomic outlook of literary consequence. Our reading, then, of poetry and fiction—diversely savage, good-natured, hilarious, and exquisite in derision of vice and folly—shall run the gamut of satiric modalities, from invective to irony, which, bristling at the social frontiers of liberty and faith, wit and learning, commerce and luxury, sex and marriage, melancholy and imagination, also targets, and often with charming self-deprecation, the literary disposition itself. In that vein we shall examine aesthetic, religious, and philosophical perspectives that came to bear in the satirist's skillful tacking of blame and praise; likewise, we shall examine stylistic and formal innovations that emerged in adaptations of classical and biblical models to contemporary circumstances. Further, we shall observe, in some novels, an aspect of the satirical and the sentimental combined, which obtains not only in the rhetorical artistry and excess of characters' speeches, but in the way that lyric is incorporated into the fiction, and where characters themselves compose, recite, or criticize poetry. Critical and philosophical writings of the period include, among others, essays by Dryden, Shaftesbury, and Addison. Verse genres include ode, epistle, georgic, elegy, hybrids and mock emulations: Finch, Swift, Pope, Gay, Montagu, Gray, Goldsmith, and others. Our novels and fictional prose include Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Johnson's Rasselas, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Giordani ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Satire seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3956y Ordinary Romanticism (Nersessian) T 2:10-4:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). "Difficile est proprie communia dicere"- it is difficult to talk about what is common in one's own way. So Byron begins his epic poem, Don Juan, by reminding us of the difficulty of talking about the common in a unique and original manner. In this seminar, we will take Byron's claim as the starting point of our own inquiry into Romantic ordinariness, and into the possibility of representing life through literary form before the dawn of the so-called "high realism" of the later nineteenth century. Drawing largely on poetic materials, as well as some examples of non-fiction prose, we will construct an archive of everyday experience in the Romantic period, which we will consider as a moment of rupture into the previous political, affective, and phenomenological contents of "the common." Our readings will include not only historical but also conceptual materials that will help us approach such questions as the relationship between revolution and trauma, the literary forms of anxiety, the aesthetics of realism, and the extraordinary everyday of war, imperialism, and globalization. Works by Byron, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, the Wordsworths, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and William Hazlitt; supplementary readings in Marx, Freud, Cavell, contemporary sociology and post-colonial studies. Application instructions: E-mail Professor Nersessian ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading "Ordinary Romanticism." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3301y Clarissa (Davidson) M 11:00am-12:50pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar). Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa took eighteenth-century readers by storm, and has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the century. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel Pamela and a few of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through Clarissa in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading; topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. etc. Note: This seminar is a joint undergraduate-graduate class. This fall, I will admit 10 undergraduates and a waiting list of 2 (if needed), reserving 6-8 spots for graduate students who may be interested; we will work out the final details of enrollment at the first seminar meeting in the spring semester. Application instructions: Email Professor Jenny Davidson ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16, with the subject heading "Clarissa." In your message: include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking this course.

CLEN W4722y European Drama and Spectacle, and Visual Culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries: Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism and the Modern Self (Peters) TR 10:35-11:50am (Lecture). The invention of the modern self and the modern culture of spectacle in relation to (and in agonistic struggle with) the political and social upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries.  European theatre, performance, and visual culture (revolutionary street theatre, the fairground, boulevard, and puppet show, the birth of the circus and the zoo, the rise of celebrity culture, the rise of advertising, automatons, panoramas, and other forms of proto-cinema, opera, commedia dell’arte, melodrama, romantic spectacle, the social problem play, etc.) as the backdrop for thinking about revolution as performance, the human and the animal, acting and being, nature and nurture, passion and reason, the body and disembodied imagination, the real and the virtual, the commodity and the inalienable self (etc.), from the Enlightenment and the age of revolution, through the industrial revolution, to the brink of modernism.  Texts include visual images, contemporary documents, and films, as well as English, French, Italian, and German plays and operas: those that were the most influential for modern drama (Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Wagner, Ibsen, Shaw, etc.); and those that best capture the culture of popular spectacle during the period.  Please note: this class may appear to be listed as full, but it is not capped, so if you are interested, please come to the first session.

ENGL W4801y History of the Novel I (Davidson) MW 2:40-3:55 pm 3 pts. (Lecture) When people talk about the “rise” of the novel, where do they imagine it rose from and to? We will read some of eighteenth-century Britain's major canonical fictions alongside short critical selections that provide vocabularies for talking about the techniques of realism and the connections between literature, history and culture; other topics for discussion include identity, sex, families, politics— in short, all the good stuff.

ENGL W3802y The History of the English Novel II (J. Adams)  MW 1:10-2:25pm 3 pts. (Lecture). A survey of works by major English novelists from Austen to Hardy, emphasizing the great variety of style and narrative form gathered under the concept of "realism." As these authors represent the interplay of individual consciousness and social norms (class, gender, marriage, family), they explore tensions generated by new possibilities of social mobility and self-determination within the most dynamic economic order the world had yet seen. We'll be especially interested in the novel's preoccupation with domestic life, and the perpetual reshaping of the "marriage plot" in the nineteenth century. In a nutshell: love and money. Austen, Mansfield Park; Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; Trollope, Barchester Towers; Hardy, Jude the Obscure.

ENGL W3962y Nineteenth Century Novel: Austen, Bronte, Gaskell (Cohen)  R 11:00 am-12:50pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell map much of the terrain for English nineteenth-century narrative. Writing within the tradition of the novel of education, these daughters of Protestant clergymen fashion a fictional discourse posed to explore the liabilities and liberties of a narrative realism that privileges the marriage plot, psychological portraiture, and vocation. Reading these books in two sets of triads (country versus city: Mansfield Park, Villette, North and South; and the Governess's Story: Emma, Jane Eyre, Wives and Daughters), we will trace how these authors simultaneous invent and resist ideas about privacy, property, duty, subversion, gender identity and realism itself. The last few weeks will culminate in a reading of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as a powerful response to this literary heritage. Requirements: short midterm paper, long final paper, weekly response pages. Application instructions: E-mail Professor M. Cohen ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th with the subject heading "Austen, Bronte, Gaskell seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3959y Dickens and the Victorian City (Freeland) W 2:10-4:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permisssion of the instructor. (Seminar). In the nineteenth century, Britain became the world's first predominantly urban society, and the city became a contested space of anonymity and surveillance; isolation and contamination; sexual license and danger; self-help and mob mentality; ambition and lassitude. Charles Dickens, the era's best-selling and most critically acclaimed author, played a key role in analyzing, shaping and transmitting the new experience of urban life. From our vantage point in the most important urban space of the twenty-first century, we'll read texts covering the range of Dickens's career (Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities), focusing on the ways in which Dickens treats the city itself as his most important character. We will also read some other nineteenth-century "facts" and "fictions" of city life (including Poe, Baudelaire, Charlotte Mew, Mayhew, Engels, Georg Simmel), and nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of urbanization and the public sphere. Throughout, we will explore the impact of the city on narrative form, paying special attention to readings of Dickensian dispersal and overview; satire and allegory; and realism.

Application instructions: E-mail Professor Freeland ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th with the subject heading "Dickens seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

20th CENTURY

ENGL W3269y British Literature, 1900-1950 (Cole)  TR 1:10-2:25pm 3 pts. (Lecture). In this course, we will consider the problem of modernity as expressed in a range of works, primarily fiction and poetry, written by British authors in the first half of the twentieth century. Topics include: historical change and trauma; gender and sexuality; empire, colonization, and the development of post-colonial voices; class and social mobility; memory; consumerism and mass culture; and the large-scale devastation of war. Authors include: Wilde, Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, Orwell, Rhys, and a selection of writings from the First World War.

CLEN W3938y Literature as property (Slaughter) T 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. (Seminar). Recent theories of “World Literature” have revived the figure of a “literary marketplace” to explain the workings of a global literary system—a system that favors some authors, genres, styles, themes, plots, settings, etc. to the disadvantage of others. These neoliberal models of “World Literature” tend to treat the economic idea of literary production as simply a metaphor for free-market authorial and aesthetic competition; and yet, there are real material implications: according to the UN Development Programme, more than 97% of the world’s intellectual property is held by the (post-)industrialized countries of the Global North.  This course takes the problem of a “literary market” literally—looking at the history of the idea and the functions of literature as a commodity. Most of the literary texts we’ll read come from the postcolonial or Third World, where questions about the development of culture have consistently been intertwined with questions about the development of human and natural resources—and where problems with the ownership of ideas have been acutely inflected by the historical forces of the slave trade, colonialism, neoimperialism, and globalization. Thus, we’ll also look at the underside of a global cultural and economic system by examining the place of plagiarism, parody, piracy, fraud, trafficking and other illicit textual activities in the creation and circulation of world literature. In addition to novels in which property issues are at stake (at the levels of both form and theme), we will read theories of property and commodities, the public good and the intellectual commons. Among other things, we will examine the relations between literature and other commodities and resources; and we will study how forms of literary expression are commodified as intellectual and cultural property—in terms of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and corporate secrets as well as in terms of heritage, patrimony, and “minority culture.”  Likely literary authors include: Chris Abani (Nigeria/U.S.), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Caryl Phillips (England-St. Kitts), Salman Rushdie (India), Yambo Ouologuem (Mali), Alice Randall (U.S.), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), B. Wongar (Australia), Kathy Acker (U.S.), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Yann Martell (Canada), Tahar ben Jelloun (Morocco-France), Bessie Head (Botswana-South Africa), Spider Robinson (U.S.-Canada). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Slaughter ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "World Literature seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENTA W3970y 20th-century Playwrights: Ibsen and Pinter (Quigley)  W 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts.  Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). The course will trace the pattern of the evolving theatrical careers of Henrik Ibsen and Harold Pinter, exploring the nature of and relationships among key features of their emerging aesthetics. Thematic and theatrical exploration involve positioning the plays in the context of the trajectories of modernism and postmodernism and examining, in that context, the emblematic use of stage sets and tableaux; the intense scrutiny of families, friendships, and disruptive intruders; the experiments with temporality, multi-linearity, and split staging; the issues raised by performance and the implied playhouse; and the plays’ potential as instruments of cultural intervention. Two papers are required, 5-7 pages and 10-12 pages, with weekly brief responses, and a class presentation. Readings include major plays of both writers and key statements on modernism and postmodernism.  Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Quigley ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th with the subject heading, “Ibsen and Pinter seminar.”  In your message include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3829y Modern British Fiction (Massimilla) M 6:10-8:30pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. (Seminar). In this course, we will read profoundly influential works of British novelists who -- partly through their interactions with one another and partly through their confrontation with political and intellectual upheaval -- managed to define what we mean by modernist fiction. In what respects did the formal and thematic innovations of certain modernists constitute a break with prior practices? How can we make sense of these new practices? We will also consider works by those who either were looked upon dismissively by the major modernists or who themselves resisted what they saw to be the modernist agenda. Themes will include colonialism, empire, myth, urbanization, war, sexuality and gender, psychology, narrative and linguistic experimentation, epistemic uncertainty and theories of the novel. We will also explore the usefulness of the term "modernist" and ask whether we must discriminate among a variety of  "modernisms." Authors will likely include: Wilde, Conrad, H.G. Wells, Bennett, James, Ford, Lawrence, Mansfield, Forster, Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and Joyce (Ulysses). Application instructions: E-mail Professor Massimilla ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading,"Modern British Fiction." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W4503y 20th Century Poetry: Race, Gender, Poetic Form (Golston) TR 2:40-3:55pm 3pts. (Lecture). Intersections between discourses of race and gender physiology and the rhetoric of poetic form. Poets to include  Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Stein, H. D., Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Williams, Langston Hughes, Zukofsky?read against contemporary texts from various scientific and humanistic disciplines, including psychology, physiology, musicology, dance theory, philosophy, and poetics.

ENGL W3710y The Beat Generation (Douglas) W 6:10-8:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor (Seminar).  Limited to seniors, preference to those who have taken at least one course in 20th-century American culture, especially history, jazz, film, and literature. Surveys the work of the Beats and other artists connected to the Beat movement. Readings include works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, and Joyce Johnson, as well as background material in the post-World War II era, films with James Dean and Marlon Brando, and the music of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Douglas ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Beat Generation seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

THEORY & SPECIAL TOPICS

ENGL W3970y Irish Prose (Toibin)  T 2:10-4:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Toibin ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Irish prose seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

CLEN W3851y The Literature of Lost Lands (Viswanathan) T 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.  (Seminar). While now often relegated to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost lands inspired a form of “occult ethnography.” Novels such as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) drew on the popular fascination with buried land-masses to re-imagine alternative narratives in which imperial nations would be colonized by a new race of people rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. Occult ethnography both drew on and subverted evolutionary models of development by showing “lost” people, in some instances, to have reached the highest perfection possible, both in technological capability and human potential. In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, and technology. The course also aims to understand the writing of history by asking what is included in mainstream accounts and what is left out. Readings include works by Plato, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H.P. Blavatsky, Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, James Hilton, and José Saramago. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Viswanathan ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Lost Lands seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

ENGL W3980y Cyberculture/Popular Culture (Silver) T 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor (Seminar). This course will use a wide range of print texts and films to explore the intersections of cyberculture, popular culture, and postmodern critique.  Taking as our starting point the questions how or whether the new media have changed our understanding of poular culture, we will look at genres such as cyberpunk, hyperfiction, fan fiction, computer games and their narrative off-shoots (graphic novels; machinima) as well as novels and films that illustrate the process of remediation: the cycling of different media through one another.  Topics include the representations and cultural meanings of the cyborg, the prevalence of techno-orientalism, the creative potential of transformative play and transformative works, and the role of the internet in the creation of a new form of "folk" culture.  Texts will include fictions by William Gibson, James Triptree Jr., Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Lev Grossman; films such as Blade Runner, Ghost in the shell, The Matrix, Run Lola Run; and essays by Bruce Sterling, Donna Haraway, Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Scott Bukatman, Wendy Chun, among others. Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Silver ([email protected]) by noon on Wednesday, November 16th, with the subject heading, "Cyberculture seminar." In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

OF RELATED INTEREST

AMST W3931y 006 The Languages of America (McWhorter) T 4:10-6:00pm 4 pts. (Seminar). The United States, often thought of as a nation where since its origins all foreign languages spoken by immigrants have withered away upon exposure to English, has actually always harbored a complex mixture of languages and dialects. This course will examine the history of language in America, including the robust role of German in colonial times and beyond (once as commonly heard in America as Spanish); creole languages such as Gullah, Louisiana Creole French and Hawaiian Pidgin English; Black English including its history and present; Native American languages and modern efforts to preserve them; and the history of Asian languages in modern America, including Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Hmong. The course also serves, in ancillary fashion, as an introduction to the variety among languages of the world and to a scientific perspective on human language.